Nestor Makhno
Nestor Makhno is typically portrayed as a loony idealist who fucked-shit-up then ran away. But in actuality he created the system that supporters of Socialism were buying into as opposed to using it to create a perversion. The most heroic character out of the Russian Civil War.
Nestor Ivanovich Makhno was the leader of revolutionary anarchism, a fierce relentless fighter known for both his cruelty and his acute sense of justice.
His name is the fourth on the list of the people awarded by the Order of The Red Flag, one of the highest Soviet honors, but it is also covered with a thick layer of black ink. In Soviet history books Makhno was an indisputable evil. To this day he is still a figure who stirs hot social debate.
Nestor Makhno (or Mikhno, or Mikhnevich) was born in the village of Gulyay Pole in the Ekaterinoslav Region in 1888 into the family of a very poor coachman. He was the youngest of five siblings. There’s a legend that the clothes of the priest baptizing young Nestor caught fire, which popular superstition said was a clear sign that a great troublemaker had been born. In the paperwork his father wrote that the boy was born in 1889 – a little trick that was often used to postpone early conscription, which later saved Nestor’s life.
Makhno’s father died early. “Five of us, orphaned brothers, one smaller than the other, were left in the hands of our poor mother, who had nothing in the world. I dimly remember my early childhood, deprived of the usual child’s games and fun, marred by the horrible need and poverty our family had to endure, until the boys grew up enough to earn their living,” Makhno later wrote in his memoirs.
At the age of eight the boy entered a parochial school where he spent four years. One year he fell in love with skating – so much so that he took his books in the morning but never made it to school, spending all day at the skating rink. For weeks he didn’t show up for classes. Once in early spring while skating he broke through the thin ice and almost drowned. His mother was furious when she learned about his “studies” and beat the boy with a knotted piece of string so hard he could not sit for several days; as a result, he became a very diligent student. In the winter Nestor went to school, in the summer he found a job with local landowners herding sheep and cattle. After parochial school he became an apprentice to a carpenter.
At the age of 16 Nestor joined a local amateur drama and theater studio, which served as a cover for a revolutionary organization called “The Union of Poor Bread Growers.” To “ensure social justice” this group of young people robbed – they said “expropriated” – local rich men and distributed the loot among the local poor in the best Robin Hood tradition. In 1906 the group of young anarchists was arrested, but since no proof was found, young Nestor was let go. The following year people were killed during an attack, some of them deliberately. Nestor Makhno, presumably, did not kill anyone, but as a part of the gang he was convicted to death by hanging, and only his forged papers stating that he was underage made the court commute the sentence to ten years in prison.
Makhno spent six years in Butyrskaya prison in Moscow, most of the time cuffed for bad behavior. He used the time for self-education, reading many books, both Russian classics and contemporary authors. He also started writing poems. In prison he met the mastermind of the Russian anarchist movement of the time – Pert Arshinov (Marin), and received a totally different type of education – an ideological one. During his imprisonment Makhno spent many days in a damp cell that caused the onset of tuberculosis. His lungs were so bad that one of them was amputated by a jail doctor. On 2 March 1917 both Makhno and Arshinov were freed by the February Revolution.
Nestor returned home and married a peasant girl, Nastya Vasetskaya, whom he had corresponded with while in jail. They had a son who died in infancy, which ruined the marriage and they separated. Later he married again, and had a daughter – the women survived Nestor and both were sent to a concentration camp in Nazi Germany during World War II, then to a Soviet labor camp, and only freed after Stalin’s death.
Makhno was well remembered in his native village as a man of revolutionary ideas and exceptional leadership skills and was instantly elected to five (!) different posts upon his return, including the Head of Peasants’ Union. Then he became the First Head of the Soviet of Workers and Peasants’ Deputies, and after the Kornilov mutiny was defeated, he was named the Chief Officer of the Committee For Saving the Revolution. In October 1917 Makhno signed the decree of the Soviet on the nationalization of all the land in the region, which was to be redistributed among the peasants.
After the “shameful” (as Makhno called it) Brest Treaty, Ukraine was granted to Germany and Nestor went to Moscow, which he later described as the “capital of revolution on paper.” There he met Vladimir Lenin, Yakov Sverdlov and Feliks Dzerzhinsky. What Makhno saw on his way to Moscow and then back to his native land with a clear order to start a civil war there, made him doubt the October Revolution ideals. He saw the “dictatorship of the proletariat” as an attempt to split the people rather than unite them. “There are no parties… there are only bunches of charlatans who for the sake of personal profit and extreme sensations… destroy the working people,” he later wrote in his diaries.
Makhno was able to travel back to Gulyay Pole under the forged ID of a village school teacher and there he started a partisan war under the black flag of anarchy. Upon his return he learned that the Austrian army had shot one of his brothers, tortured another to death and burnt his mother’s house to ashes.
His first army consisted of only 40 men who committed a number of reckless yet successful attacks on German army posts in 1918. Official German military records say in April-June alone 118 attacks were carried out. Makhno’s army constantly grew: local workers, peasants, sailors from sunken ships and ex-servicemen joined him, and later a group of anarchists from Kiev added their forces – and “ideological base.” The ideology consisted of five main postulates: suspicion of all political parties, rejection of all dictatorships, negation of any State concept, rejection of any “transition periods” or “proletarian dictatorships” and self-management of all workers through free workers’ councils.
The Makhno army received wide popular support, as his men, unlike the other sides in the war, never robbed the locals. The core of his army was a small mobile group (up to two thousand cavalry, 800 carriages with automated rifles and artillery numbering not more than 5000 people altogether) that, together with locals, was mobilized for each separate attack. Depending on the area, 10 to 15 thousand people joined the army, and after the battle local workers and peasants went home. Makhno was the ultimate decision maker of his army, he ordered the publishing of newspapers to educate people and personally distributed the loot among the villagers. He was given the popular title of Bat’ka – a colloquial way of saying “father” and is known in history as Bat’ka Makhno.It was rumored that Nestor Makhno was an anti-Semite, but this was never proven. Quite on the contrary, as a true anarchist he believed in equal rights for all nations. Some parts of his army attempted pogroms, but these paled in comparison to the attacks organized by the Bolsheviks or the White Army. Once in the village of Verkhny Tokmak Nestor was met by a banner saying: “Kill the Jews, Save the Revolution, Long Live Bat’ka Mahkno.” Makhno found the author and ordered him shot.
Multiple forces were fighting on the territory of Ukraine at the time, tens of thousands of people were shot, tortured, beheaded and raped by the German army, the Whites (counter-revolutionary Russian forces), the Reds (the new revolutionaries), self-organized private armies, partisan gangs… Makhno fought them all. There were many claims of extreme atrocities committed by his army, with particular hatred reserved for the aristocracy, monarchists, White Army officers and the clergy. All of them were executed without mercy. Once Makhno ordered a priest be killed by burning him alive in a steam-train engine. Later, after the split with the Bolsheviks, Red Army commanders and commissars also faced the same fate of summary executions, and only conscript men from the Red Army were let go as “proletarian brothers” with the choice of either joining the Makhno army or returning home.
In December 1918 the Makhno army, with the support of the Bolshevik forces, took Ekaterinoslav, the largest city of the Russian south at the time. The armies’ marauders looted the city. Makhno addressed the residents with the words, “I, on behalf of all partisans of all units, declare that all robberies, looting and violence will not be allowed in any case while I’m responsible in front of the Revolution, and will be stopped by me at the very root.” Later, in immigration, he wrote, “Actually, I’m all for robberies and for violence in general, I shot everyone.”
The Makhno army was instrumental in freeing the Crimea from Wrangel. Makhno himself showed exceptional courage and recklessness in many battles – in the years of the war he was wounded, according to different sources, 12 or 14 times and lost a leg. United with the Red Army, he fought Denikin, but the Bolsheviks intentionally kept the anarchist army without any supplies, denying them food, equipment and essential medical supplies. Moreover, on the order of Trotsky, a propaganda campaign against Makhno’s army was started. Leon Trotsky wrote, “Makhno’s army is the worst kind of bad partisan formation, although there are many single good fighters. There isn’t even a hint of discipline or order in this “army”… The “army” also fights on sheer inspiration; they follow no orders. Separate groups attack when they can, that is, when they see no serious resistance, and at the first strong shot they run helter-skelter, abandoning enemy stations, towns and military property. Useless and rowdy anarchist commanders are to be blamed for it totally.”
On 25 May 1919 the Soviet of Workers and Peasants of Ukraine decided to eradicate Makhno. In the battle for Perekop, one of the bloodiest in Ukraine, Makhno’s soldiers were thrown by the Red Army commanders into the hottest spot of that hell. Most of the men were killed in the fight. The five thousand survivors were killed by the Reds on the order of Trotsky. The news reached Nestor Makhno in a hospital where he was recovering from yet another wound. Having learned of such “gratitude” from the Bolsheviks Bat’ka started his revenge. The cruelty of his non-stop killing spree knew no limits and left a long bloody trail in Russia and Ukraine. Communist Party members, Soviet commissars, chekists and any other Soviet officials were tortured, publicly executed and killed in the most horrible ways, and it is this very image of the merciless monster that appeared in the history schoolbooks in the time of the USSR.
After the Whites were defeated, the entire force of the Red Army was commanded to fight Makhno and his troops. Surprisingly, soldiers sent to liquidate Makhno’s troops massively changed sides. Having gained some forces, Nestor Makhno launched bloody attacks and for a while even joined forces with the nationalist army of Semyon Petlyura, but the power now lay on the side of the Bolsheviks, and Makhno and his army were destroyed. With a small group of his supporters he first fled to Bessarabia in Romania, then moved to Poland. Here Nestor Makhno was imprisoned for a short term for anti-Polish activities. Later he moved to Paris, where he worked on anarchist leaflets and brochures, gave passionate speeches and lived mostly on money donated by European anarchist groups. When possible, he earned a living as a carpenter, and even worked as a stagehand at the Paris opera and at film studios. But soon his health began to deteriorate.
Nestor Ivanovich Makhno died of acute tuberculosis in a hospital in Paris in 1934. Three days after his death he was cremated and buried at the famous Pere Lachaise Cemetery. Over five hundred people attended his funeral.
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The Night of Broken Glass marked the beginning of the Holocaust.
Kristallnacht, also to referred to as the Night of Broken Glass, and also Reichskristallnacht, Pogromnacht, and Novemberpogrome, was a pogrom or series of attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria on November 9–10, 1938.
Jewish homes were ransacked, as were shops, towns and villages, as SA Stormtroopers and civilians destroyed buildings with sledgehammers. Around 1,668 synagogues were ransacked, and 267 set on fire. In Vienna alone 95 synagogues or houses of prayer were destroyed.
Martin Gilbert writes that no event in the history of German Jews between 1933 and 1945 was so widely reported as it was happening, and the accounts from the foreign journalists working in Germany sent shock waves around the world. The Times wrote at the time: “No foreign propagandist bent upon blackening Germany before the world could outdo the tale of burnings and beatings, of blackguardly assaults on defenseless and innocent people, which disgraced that country yesterday.” (Source)
The day after the attacks, on November 11, 1938, both Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, appeared at a press conference for foreign correspondents in Munich. There Goebbels announced, “We shed not a tear for them [the Jews.]” He went on to comment on the destruction of synagogues saying, “They stood in the way long enough. We can use the space made free more usefully than as Jewish fortresses.”
“Kristallnacht” provided the Nazi government with an opportunity at last to totally remove Jews from German public life. It was the culminating event in a series of anti-Semitic policies set in place since Hitler took power in 1933. Within a week, the Nazis had circulated a letter declaring that Jewish businesses could not be reopened unless they were to be managed by non-Jews. On November 15th, Jewish children were barred from attending school, and shortly afterwards the Nazis issued the “Decree on Eliminating the Jews from German Economic Life,” which prohibited Jews from selling goods or services anywhere, from engaging in crafts work, from serving as the managers of any firms, and from being members of cooperatives. In addition, the Nazis determined that the Jews should be liable for the damages caused during “Kristallnacht.” “The Decree on the Penalty Payment by Jews Who Are German Subjects” also imposed a one-billion mark fine on the Jewish community, supposedly an indemnity for the death of vom Rath.
Although the atrocities perpetrated during the Night of Broken Glass did arouse outrage in Western Europe and the United States, little concrete action was taken to help the Jews of Germany. At a press conference on November 15th, President Roosevelt said, “The news of the past few days from Germany has deeply shocked public opinion in the United States… I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a 20th century civilization.” The president also instructed that the 12,000-15,000 refugees already in the U.S. on temporary visitor visas could remain in the country indefinitely. (Source)
The Reichstag Fire, Berlin, (February 27, 1933.)
We will never know the absolute truth of the events surrounding the Reichstag Fire. People have debated this for decades and have never managed to get any closer to the truth. Many say the Nazis started it, others say they had nothing to do with it.
My interpretation of the facts is this:
The Reichstag Fire was started by a Dutch Anarchist named Marinus van der Lubbe, who snuck into the Reichstag on the night of the 27th of February, 1933. This act really isn’t all that surprising in hindsight. This was a period of considerable political violence across the country and one act of extreme vandalism should not necessarily be seen as “shocking”, although the effects of the event were to be enormous.
Now, many have claimed that either Marinus van der Lubbe was not responsible, and that it was actually a supporter of Hitler and the Nazi party who may or may not have been acting under orders, or that Marinus van der Lubbe was actually affiliated with the Nazi party.
Now, both of these assertions are perhaps plausible, but I would not say that they are necessarily likely, or that we should support them. The truth is that there is no evidence of either claim. There has never been a shred of credible evidence which points to either conclusion. As far as we know, and likely as far as we will ever know, Marinus van der Lubbe acted on his own instincts and to his own political ends. Any other assertions are essentially conspiracy claims. While they may be PLAUSIBLE, in my view they can not be legitimately entertained as possibilities from A HISTORICAL STANDPOINT because there is no proof of either alternative possibility being true. We can not, change the facts just because it makes the story better.
While it might sound more interesting to argue that the Nazis planned the Reichstag Fire and that they covertly hired a Dutch anarchist to carry it out, the lack of evidence pointing to this makes that claim entirely unreliable.
So who started it really doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. The debate is, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant. What IS important is to look at how the Nazi party reacted to the event. The fact that Marinus van der Lubbe was unaffiliated with the Nazi party makes this story all the better. The Reichstag Fire and the subsequent passing of the Decree for the Protection of the People the very next day shows how cunning and ruthless the Nazi party was in their quest to power. They knew how to manipulate and control the volatile political culture which existed in Germany in the early 1930’s and this is a far more important distinction to make.
I think that the Nazi Party were not necessarily “puppet masters” who organized a chaotic burning of a governmental system, but rather master reactionaries who successfully seized an opportunity to wrestle more governmental and authoritative control from the Wiemar government, and it is this which makes the story of the Reichstag Fire all the more sinister and indeed all the more interesting.
The Life And Times Of The MGM Lion.
One glorious hair toss of that mane and you’ve got yourself a L’Oréal advert.
I hope to be remembered for my atrocities! 