From the very beginning of its existence, post-Soviet Ukraine experienced a significant shortage of historical heroes who helped legitimize the “independent” one. The need for them was felt the stronger, the more clearly Ukrainian nationalists demonstrated militant Russophobia. Since the history of the Little Russian and Novorossiysk lands for centuries was a part of the history of the Russian state and, accordingly, politicians, culture, art of Little Russia and Novorossia actually belonged to the "Russian world", the search for heroic persons was noticeably complicated.
Understandably, the pantheon of Ukrainian heroes included nationalist figures of the first half of the twentieth century, such as Mikhail Hrushevsky, Simon Petlyura, Stepan Bandera or Roman Shukhevych. But this seemed not enough. Moreover, for a significant part of the citizens of post-Soviet Ukraine, brought up in Russian and Soviet culture, Petliura or Bandera were viewed more as enemies than as heroes. It was very difficult to make an average Donetsk resident, whose grandfather or great-grandfather fought with Bandera in the Western region, to believe in Bandera, a national hero. In southeastern Ukraine, nationalist parties like Svoboda were not popular, but local residents actively voted for the Communists or the Party of Regions.
In this context, the nationalists found one very noticeable and heroic personality from among the inhabitants of Eastern Ukraine, who at least somehow could be drawn to the ideology of independence. We are talking about Nestor Ivanovich Makhno. Yes, no matter how surprising it sounds, but it is Makhno - the principal enemy of any state - that modern Ukrainian nationalists have written among the other national heroes of the "independent" one. The exploitation of the image of Makhno by nationalists began in the 1990s, since in eastern Ukraine only Makhno was a major historical figure who actually fought both against the Bolshevik regime and against supporters of the revival of the Russian imperial statehood from among the "whites". At the same time, the ideological views of Makhno himself were ignored or altered in a spirit beneficial to the Ukrainian nationalists.
As you know, Nestor Ivanovich Makhno was born on October 26 (November 7), 1888 in the village of Gulyaypole, Alexandrovsky district, Yekaterinoslav province. Now it is a city in the Zaporozhye region. This amazing man, who graduated from only a two-year elementary school, managed to become one of the key commanders of the Civil War in the Little Russian lands and one of the recognized leaders of the anarchist movement.
Nestor Makhno learned anarchist ideology in his early youth, becoming a member of the group of communist anarchists operating in the village of Gulyaypole (the Union of Free Farmers). This union of rural radical youth, at the origins of which stood Alexander Semenyuta and Voldemar Antoni (son of Czech colonists), was guided by the anarcho-communist ideas of Peter Kropotkin and, like many similar groups and circles during the first revolution of 1905-1908, considered its the duty to carry out an armed struggle against the autocracy - by means of attacks on police officers, expropriation of property, etc.
Having received a death sentence for the murder of an official of the military department, which was replaced by indefinite penal servitude due to the young age of the defendant, Nestor Makhno had every chance to disappear in the dungeons if the February Revolution had not happened. After nine years in prison, Nestor returned to his native Gulyaypole, where in a matter of months he became the de facto leader of the local revolutionary movement, which in 1919 finally took shape in the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine (Makhnovists).
To retell the entire history of the Makhnovist movement is a rather painstaking task and, moreover, done by people who are much more competent in this - Nestor Makhno himself and participants in the insurrectionary movement Pyotr Arshinov, Viktor Belash and Vsevolod Volin, whose books have been published in Russian and are available to the average reader in electronic and printed form. Therefore, let us dwell in more detail on the question of interest to us in the context of this article. We are talking about Makhno's attitude to Ukrainian nationalism.
The first experience of communication between Makhno and his associates with Ukrainian nationalists refers to the initial stage of the Gulyaypole insurrectionary movement in 1917-1918. During this period, the territory of modern Ukraine was largely occupied by Austro-Hungarian and German troops. With their support, a puppet government of Hetman Skoropadsky, who was sitting in Kiev (as everything is familiar!), Was formed.
Pavel Petrovich Skoropadsky, a former lieutenant general of the Russian imperial army, who commanded an army corps, turned out to be an ordinary traitor to the state in which he made a military career. Having gone over to the side of the invaders, he briefly headed the "Ukrainian state" as hetman. But he could not enlist the support of even more ideological Ukrainian nationalists, who, at least, hoped for a genuine "independence", as a result of which the "state" was replaced by the Ukrainian People's Republic. The hetman himself ingloriously died in 1945 under the bombs of the Anglo-American aviation, while by that time in German exile.
Nestor Makhno, who returned from hard labor, rallied the remnants of the Gulyaypole anarchists around him and quickly gained authority among the local peasants. The first, with whom Makhno began to wage an armed struggle, was precisely the hetman "warta" (guard), which actually played the role of policemen under the Austro-Hungarian and German occupiers. Together with the Bolshevik detachments of Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, the Makhnovists managed to defeat the Haidamaks of the Sovereign Rada in Aleksandrovka and actually take control of the district.
However, the history of the armed confrontation between the Makhnovists and Ukrainian nationalists did not end with the resistance to the hetmanate. A much larger part of it in terms of time and scale falls on the struggle against the Petliurists. Recall that after the February Revolution of 1917, Ukrainian nationalists, who had previously developed not without the direct participation of Austria-Hungary, interested in constructing Ukrainian identity as an opposition to the Russian state, on the wave of general destabilization of the situation in the former Russian Empire, came to power in Kiev, proclaiming creation of the Ukrainian People's Republic.
At the head of the Central Rada was Mikhail Hrushevsky, the author of the concept of "Ukrainians". Then the Rada was replaced by the "power" of the pro-German hetman Skoropadsky, and it, in turn, was replaced by the Directory of the Ukrainian People's Republic. The directors of the Directory were successively Vladimir Vinnichenko and Simon Petliura. With the name of the latter, in the eyes of the majority of the population, Ukrainian nationalism is associated with the years of the Civil War.
It is noteworthy that the anarchists of Nestor Makhno, who, due to ideological convictions, opposed any state and therefore had a negative attitude towards the Bolshevik Soviet Russia, from the very beginning took an anti-Petliura position. Since the territory of Yekaterinoslav region, after the withdrawal of Austro-Hungarian and German troops in 1918, was formally part of the Ukrainian People's Republic, the anarchist insurrectionary movement immediately assumed an anti-nationalist character and was aimed at liberating Gulyaypole and surrounding lands from the power of the Petliura Directory.
Moreover, Makhno even entered into an alliance with the Bolshevik Yekaterinoslav City Committee of the CP (b) U against the Directory and took part in the short-term capture of Yekaterinoslav, which lasted from December 27 to December 31, 1918. However, the Petliurists then managed to drive Makhno's troops out of the city and the anarchists with heavy losses retreated to Gulyaypole, which was not under the control of the Petliurists. Subsequently, Makhno fought with both the Reds and the Whites, but his attitude to Ukrainian nationalism was sharply negative all his life.
Makhno regarded the Petliura Directory as a much greater enemy than the Bolsheviks. First of all, due to the peculiarities of the ideology that Petliura's comrades tried to plant throughout the territory of modern Ukraine. From the very beginning, the ideas of Ukrainian nationalism, formulated in the Western region and partially assimilated in the Kiev region and Poltava region, did not spread in New Russia.
For the local population, of which Nestor Makhno himself was a prominent representative, Ukrainian nationalism remained an ideology alien both ethnocultural and political terms. Makhno also did not welcome the anti-Semitism characteristic of the Petliurites. Because, as a representative of anarchism, he considered himself a convinced internationalist and had in his immediate environment a significant number of Jews - anarchists (a typical example is the legendary "Leva Zadov" Zinkovsky, who led the Makhnovist counterintelligence).
In post-Soviet Ukraine, as we noted at the beginning of the article, the image of Nestor Makhno was adopted by nationalists. In 1998 even the “Gulyaypole” Society of Nestor Makhno appeared, created by A. Ermak, one of the leaders of the Ukrainian Republican Party “Sobor”. In Gulyaypole, festivals and meetings of Ukrainian nationalist parties began to be held, which, by the way, outrage many people who accidentally get there, who go to events in honor of Nestor Makhno, but find themselves in Gulyaypole in the company of notorious Ukrainian nationalists and even neo-Nazis. Thus, at many ceremonial events dedicated to the Makhnovist movement, the nationalists who organize them prohibit the use of the Russian language. And this is taking into account that the dad himself spoke "surzhik", and practically did not know the Ukrainian language, which is now accepted as the state language. By the way, the book of memoirs by Nestor Makhno is written in Russian.
The history of the Makhnovshchina is presented as one of the episodes in the general history of the "national liberation struggle of the Ukrainian people for the creation of an independent Ukraine." They are trying to place the personality of Makhno, a consistent opponent of Ukrainian nationalism, next to Petliura or Bandera in the pantheon of the pillars of Ukrainian "independence". Still, it is in the East of Ukraine that the exploitation of Makhno's image as a Ukrainian nationalist can contribute to the gradual “Ukrainization” of local youth, inspired by the historical exploits of the old man.
The re-exploitation of Makhno's image as a Ukrainian nationalist falls on the very last period and is associated with the need for ideological legitimation of the Maidan, which led to the overthrow of the political system of Ukraine that existed before 2014. In this context, the Makhnovshchina appears as a sufficiently convincing evidence of the freedom-loving Ukrainian people, their resistance to Russian statehood. In Ukraine, there is even such an organization as "Autonomous Opir" (Autonomous Resistance), which in fact represents Ukrainian nationalists who actively use left-radical, including anarchist, phraseology. The Anarchist Hundred, according to the media and the Ukrainian anarchists themselves, were also active on the barricades of the Kiev Maidan. True, there is no information about the participation of the anarchists who have imbued their sympathies with nationalism in the destruction of the civilian population of Novorossia.
When trying to turn Makhno into one of the icons of modern Ukrainian nationalism, the current neo-Petliurists and neobanderists forget, or rather deliberately ignore, several key points:
1. Makhnovshchina is a movement of Little Russia and Novorossia, which has neither ethnocultural nor historical relation to "Western" nationalism. Immigrants from Western Ukraine, if present among the Makhnovists, were in incomparably small proportion even to Jews, Germans and Greeks.
2. Makhnovshchina is a movement that had an ideological basis of anarchism of the Kropotkin kind, and therefore is internationalist in nature. The peasant character of the Makhnovist movement does not give modern history rewriters the right to pass off anarchists-internationalists as Ukrainian nationalists.
3. The main enemy of the Makhnovshchina throughout its history was precisely the Ukrainian nationalists, whether they were the troops of Hetman Skoropadsky or the Petliurists. Nestor Makhno was irreconcilable towards Ukrainian nationalists.
4. Both historians and representatives of most modern anarchist organizations, including the Union of Anarchists of Ukraine and the Revolutionary Confederation of Anarcho-Syndicalists operating in Ukraine, do not recognize Makhno as a Ukrainian nationalist and are critical of the attempts of modern ideological followers of his enemy Petliura to "sew" dad to Ukrainian nationalism.
Thus, the personality of Nestor Makhno, for all its contradictions, can in no way be regarded as one of the key figures of Ukrainian nationalism. When we see attempts to pass off Nestor Makhno as a Ukrainian nationalist, we are faced only with political engagement, distortion of facts and manipulation of public opinion on the part of interested Ukrainian historians, journalists and public figures.
