Who Was Makhno and What Did He Stand For?¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter presents a Marxist critique of the Ukrainian anarchist Nestor Makhno, arguing that his movement was not a genuine expression of working-class revolution but a petty-bourgeois peasant phenomenon that ultimately served reactionary ends. The author contends that anarchist hagiography, which counterposes Makhno to the Bolsheviks as a true champion of workers and peasants, ignores the class composition and political trajectory of the Makhnovite army.
The core argument is that Makhno’s base was not the proletariat but the peasantry, specifically its prosperous, property-owning layers. This class basis dictated an unstable political line, oscillating between revolution and counterrevolution depending on circumstances. During the German occupation and the threat from General Denikin, Makhno fought alongside the Red Army because poor peasants, defending their land, formed three-quarters of his forces. Once Denikin was destroyed and the threat of landowner restoration removed, class divisions within the village sharpened. The kulaks (rich peasants), interested in free trade in grain, turned against Soviet power, while poor peasants abandoned Makhno. By 1920, his army had become a kulak force, and he resorted to burning villages and machine-gunning inhabitants who refused to join him.
The chapter uses specific evidence to puncture the anarchist myth of Makhno’s commitment to freedom. In his army, only lower commanders were elected; senior commanders were appointed by Makhno personally. After capturing Yekaterinoslav, he imposed a levy of 50 million rubles. He executed Bolshevik commander M. L. Polonsky and his wife without trial, refusing workers’ demands for a public hearing and threatening execution to those who requested the release of arrested Bolsheviks. At the Aleksandrovsk congress, Makhno attacked workers as “swine, scoundrels, parasites.” The author cites the anarchist Baron, a member of the “Nabat” secretariat, who stated it was “better to disappear in a Soviet prison, than to vegetate in these notorious anarchical conditions,” and notes that the all-Ukrainian Conference of “Nabat” recognised Makhno had ceased to be an anarchist.
The chapter draws on the historical context of the Russian Civil War and the class dynamics of the Ukrainian countryside, where kulaks constituted 20% of the economy. Theoretically, it invokes Marx’s argument that socialism requires a mature material base and cannot be built on a class of small proprietors doomed by capitalism. The state, the author insists, cannot be abolished by will but will wither away only when the material conditions that produced it disappear, making the dictatorship of the proletariat a necessary transitional stage.
The polemic is directed squarely at anarchist mythology, which is accused of substituting subjective desire for material analysis. The chapter concludes that anarchism, despite its revolutionary aura, is a reactionary idealist current that inevitably leads to opportunism, and that Makhno’s “anarcho-communism” was merely ideological cover for a kulak volunteer army.