Nestor Ivanovich Makhnowas an idealist - and therefore fought against everyone. A revolutionary who for 75 years of Soviet power was called a bandit, and his army was called a gang.
The grain between the two millstones pleased ... In this proverb - the fate of Makhno, the fate of the peasant freemen, anarchy in general. But the Makhnovist grain turned out to be fantastic strong. The millstones broke more than once ...
Lenin has not yet arrived in Russia, has not yet performed from an armored car at the Finland Station, and Makhno in Gulyaypole is already the chairman of the Peasant Union and proposes "Immediately take away the church and landowners' land and organize a free agricultural commune on the estates."Until the October coup, another month, Lenin is hiding in Razliv, and Makhno in Gulyaypole signs a decree of the county council on the nationalization of the land and proclaims an alliance with the workers on the basis of the workers' self-government.
It is strange now to imagine that the Makhnovist army in Soviet history, pejoratively called a gang, fought against the troops of Kaiser Wilhelm and Hetman Skoropadsky, against the Ukrainian Central Rada and the Petliura Directory, against Trotsky's Red Army, Denikin's White Army and Wrangel's White Army. Almost four years.
Nestor Makhno considered the Bolsheviks to be ideological enemies. But he recognized them as temporary allies in the revolution.
Lenin - respected, even in awe of him. About which he frankly spoke in his memoirs. Many years after the death of Lenin and Sverdlov, I could have written anything about meeting them in the Kremlin in 1918. However, he did not write. Of course, his presentation of the conversation is selective, and one can only guess what Makhno kept silent about. I did not say outright that they then, probably, decided to make Makhno the organizer and leader of the spontaneous peasant war in Ukraine - against Hetman Skoropadsky and the German invaders. But it is easy to establish the essence from the context.
Lenin: - So, you want to move illegally to your Ukraine?
Makhno: - Yes.
Lenin: -Do you want to take advantage of my assistance?
Makhno: -Very much.
Lenin to Sverdlov: -Who do we have directly now in the bureau for the transfer of people to the South? .. Call, please, and find out.
After which Makhno unfolded, as he wrote, "A powerful anti-state revolutionary movement of the broad Ukrainian masses."
The peasant leader, as best he could, separated himself from the Bolsheviks, called them charlatans, usurpers, accused Lenin and Trotsky of striving to enslave the people: “If comrades Bolsheviks go from Great Russia to Ukraine to help us in the difficult struggle against counter-revolution, we must tell them: welcome, dear friends! If they come here with the aim of monopolizing Ukraine, we will tell them: hands off! "
The Kaiser's soldiers left, Hetman Skoropadsky fell. Makhno opposed Petliura and took Yekaterinoslav (Dnepropetrovsk), placing him at the feet of the Red Army.
Then the war began with Denikin and ... with Trotsky. In March 1919, Makhno, a brigade commander in the Red Army, occupied Berdyansk and Mariupol, in May - Lugansk. The cavalry division of General Shkuro fell on the brigade. The Makhnovists could not withstand the blow. Trotsky considered that they had chickened out, abandoned the front, and shot the chief of staff Ozerov, several other closest comrades of the father. In response, Makhno sent a telegram to Lenin, in which he wrote that he had been framed, that he could no longer tolerate the attacks of "representatives of the central government" and was breaking the alliance with the Bolsheviks "in view of the unbearably ridiculous situation that had arisen."
Trotsky declared Makhno outlawed. The Makhnovists and the Reds became enemies.
In the fall of 1919, Denikin approached Moscow. The Soviet Republic was on the brink of destruction. "Everyone to fight Denikin!" - called Lenin. He was supported by Makhno: “Our main enemy is Denikin. Communists are still revolutionaries ... We can settle accounts with them later. Now everything should be directed against Denikin. "
He called ... Petliura as an allies. Their combined army captured Krivoy Rog, Nikopol, Aleksandrovsk (Zaporozhye), Melitopol, Yuzovka (Donetsk), Mariupol, Berdyansk, Yekaterinoslav (Dnepropetrovsk). It was here that he again proclaimed a Peasant Republic: without the dictatorship of the proletariat and communists, on the basis of free Soviets, full self-government and peasant ownership of land. The army of Makhno and the Republic of Makhno arose not just in the rear of the Whites, but 100 miles from the Headquarters of Denikin. Actually, two runs on carts ...
“The situation was becoming formidable and required exceptional measuresGeneral Denikin admitted in his memoirs. - To suppress the uprising, it was necessary, despite the serious situation of the front, to remove units from it and use all reserves. ... This uprising, which took on such a wide scale, upset our rear and weakened the front in the most difficult time for him. "
In other words, Makhno thwarted Denikin's offensive against Moscow. Who knows how the story would have turned out if he had not hit the rear with such crushing force. After that, the White Army was defeated at the front, and it rolled south.
In gratitude, the Bolsheviks again declared him an enemy. And then they again called me to the allies.
20th year, crossing the Sivash, the storming of Perekop, the defeat of Wrangel and ... the encirclement of the Makhnovist units by the Red Army. Having broken the blockade of the Reds, Makhno led a partisan struggle against the eternal enemies of the allies for another year, and in August 1921 he left for Romania. He died in 1934 in Paris. He lived in obscurity, almost in poverty.
There could be no other ending. In any case, unfortunately, the very idea of \u200b\u200borganizing life without a state is doomed to collapse. And it was Nestor Makhno who served her. The rest was "A man of reality and seething malice of the day."That is what Lenin said about him.
Makhno is a military genius. He invented new combat tactics. He invented a cart and put the rebel army on it. His army covered up to a hundred kilometers a day, suddenly appearing and just as incomprehensibly dissolving into the steppe. The tachanka is in itself a unique combat unit of terrible destructive power.
The Reds immediately took over the cart from Makhno. White - disdained the muzhik weapons. And they lost. This is also why.
Imagine a big cavalry battle. Two horse lavas go against each other. Suddenly one of them crumbles and a line of carts appears. They turn around - and mow down the enemy with machine-gun fire. A deadly whirlwind, debris from people and horses, flight. Further, as Isaac Babel wrote, only "the great silence of the felling" remains.
So on November 11, 1920 in the Crimea, in the famous battle at Karpovaya Balka, the fire of 250 Makhnovist carts, and then with the sabers of the Makhnovists and soldiers of the Mironov's 2nd Cavalry Army, the cavalry corps of General Barbovich - 4590 sabers was destroyed. Wrangel's last hope. The last hope of the White Army.
Nestor Ivanovich Makhno was born on October 26, 1888 (November 8 in the new style) in the family of a peasant from the village of Gulyaypole, Alexandrovsky district, now the Zaporozhye region.
"A novel on a cart"
Dmitry Minchenok
To be honest, for a long time I doubted whether or not to post this article on the pages of our site. Having read it, I think you will understand the reasons for my doubts, but nevertheless, in the end, I decided to include this article in the list of publications about Nestor Ivanovich Makhno. All of the following I leave on the conscience of the author of this article.<С.Ш.>
80 years old tachanka - the legendary "bandura" on wheels, drawn by four horses and "decorated" in the back with a heavy machine gun. Few people know that its inventor was one of the most famous fighters for the Cossack freemen, Batka Makhno. All represent the leader of the anarchists one-sidedly, like a reveler and a psycho. However, few people imagine how deep and, I would say, demon-possessed person. The black banner of the anarchists and the tachanka are only one side of the coin. In his life there was still a completely unique love story, more precisely, three love stories that make the daddy, if not great, then at least a very significant person on a historical scale.
In the early morning of April 14, 1924, in the Polish resort town of Torun, on the second floor of a cozy house, lying in bed, Nestor Ivanovich Makhno took a razor in his hands and slashed himself down the throat ...
His death was mourned in dozens of squalid apartments in Paris, Constantinople, Belgrade, Berlin and Prague, which sheltered Russian emigrants. Under the guitar bustle, the former comrades-in-arms of Batka Makhno sang a hymn allegedly composed by the former head of the Makhnovist counterintelligence agency Leva Zadov: "Fried chicken, steamed chicken, chicken also wants to live ..." And again the black cloths proudly, but not for long, fluttered in the foreign wind of three continents.
In Moscow, his former friend and associate, and now the red Chekist Leva Zadov, upon learning of this, began to cry like a little child. However, the message transmitted to all the telegraph agencies in Europe turned out to be a duck.
In the distant city of Paris, my father's wife Galina Kuzmenko was washing clothes ... and his one-year-old daughter Lenochka was sleeping in a crib when there was a knock on their door. Galina reluctantly opened the door and screamed out loud. On the threshold stood her resurrected husband - greatly changed, in a short gray jacket, dusty boots, but with the same wild, hypnotizing gaze of a demon who still had no peace anywhere. How Nestor Ivanovich survived, why he even tried to commit suicide, remained a mystery. Only from that time did they begin to talk about the immortality of the father.
Few people then understood and still understand what the phenomenon of Makhno's attractiveness consists of. He was not physically strong. He did not have the conspicuous appearance or charm of a hero-lover. The only thing that distinguished him from the rest was the constantly living in him, desperate, not abating for a second, rage. They say that this is due to the red planet Mars, which rose above the Gulyaypole horizon at the time of Nestor's birth - October 27, 1889. The children of Mars are said to have an indomitable energy.
There were few people on earth who could withstand the gaze of the old man. Outwardly, this man did not fit the role of a warrior. "Small, thin, with an effeminate face, with black locks of hair falling over his shoulders, Makhno made an eerie impression thanks to his piercing eyes with the fixed gaze of a maniac and a hard fold around his mouth on an emaciated pale face" - this is the opinion of the enemy - one of Denikin's officers, whom the dad took into his squad, and then shot.
And here is the description of Makhno, left by the Gulyaypole teacher Marina Sukhogorskaya, a close friend of his last wife, mother Galina.
"At first I thought that only I was getting scared when he looked at me with his gray, cold, steel, downright hypnotizing eyes, but then it turned out that the most inveterate Makhnovist robbers could not stand this look and began to tremble with a small shiver at every gaze of the father. "
He knew how to feel the psychic field of the crowd that surrounded him. It does not matter who this crowd consisted - of admirers or overthrowers. Somehow, together with his friend Leva Zadov, who was the head of his counterintelligence service, and in 1924 he went over to the side of the Reds and, just as he used to hang the Reds, now he hung up the Whites and "zhovto-blakitnye", he was surrounded by Budyonny's cavalry. This was the most critical moment in my father's career. By all the logic of things, he should have been killed. They were in the same house when the red horsemen of Budyonny quietly surrounded the village. Father's orderly noticed the red patrol drive up too late. In panic, he ran into the hut and only managed to shout: "Budennovtsy!" Daddy immediately ordered everyone to jump into the cart. And not long before that and it is not clear why the machine gun was removed from this car. But instead of hastily installing it, he ordered Lyova to throw all the junk from the looted chests into the tachanka and drive everything out. The pursuers, naturally, noticed this car. They rushed in pursuit. It seemed that they would inevitably be overtaken and chopped to pieces. Enemies surrounded the cart on all sides. And then the dad made a maneuver that could only be performed by a person who is not speculating, not guessing, but precisely penetrating into the unconscious soul of the crowd.
He shouted to Leva, who was sitting next to him, only one phrase: "My cash desk!" And Lyova understood him without words. He opened Batka's chest and began tossing handfuls of gold coins at Budenovites, throwing expensive shawls from chests and precious cups at the horses' feet. Seeing the gold, the attackers began to sharply upset the horses and pick up abandoned valuables from the ground. Instantly some of the pursuers fell behind. A gap was formed, into which Makhno's carriage slipped.
Later, talking about that incident, many recalled that at that moment Nestor Ivanovich heard a Voice, which told him that he had to save himself not with weapons, but with money. It was then that he appeared as a man who decided on what he was mortally afraid of - namely, to renounce the Force, that is, from the Bullet - and rely on his own insight, which overcame his fear because it was prescribed by the Voice, which he finally began to hear. ...
Over the years, his intuition, or his Voices, guarded and helped him. True, sometimes they became extremely cruel to those who loved Makhno, and tried with their love to tear dad away from his Idea. He, as history has shown, has always remained faithful only to the Voices.
His first marriage can be called the tragic love story of a young ataman and a garnished Ukrainian maiden Nastya Vasetskaya. No other woman could achieve from the wild dad what Nastya achieved. The archives have not preserved her photographs. In March 1917, returning from prison, Father Makhno suddenly married this same girl. They were connected only by a thin thread of correspondence from Butyrka to his native Ukraine. The portrait of a girl can only be restored from the meager memories of Batka's subordinates. Clear and bottomless eyes, which Gogol's lady probably had in "Viy", made Nastya hypnotically attractive in her own way. In general, their relationship can be called mysterious. They fell in love with each other in absentia, without seeing faces, only by letters. It is not known what emotions they experienced when they first met. The fact is that as soon as the dad returned from prison, he literally immediately married Nastya Vasetskaya.
Makhno's friends noticed that right after the marriage, the daddy changed dramatically. Which, in fact, caused fear among his entourage. Father's rage disappeared. He became quiet and peaceful. The fight for the Cossack freemen became just a dream. And then his entourage intervened. Unnoticed by Nestor Ivanovich, secret threats rained down on Nastya from all sides. They threatened to hang her, drown her or burn her if she did not leave her father alone. But all threats seemed to be useless. Nastya soon became pregnant and gave birth to Nestor Ivanovich's first child - a boy. The powerful chieftain was in seventh heaven with happiness. And suddenly, under strange circumstances, his son dies. A seven-month-old boy was found suffocated in a cradle. Makhno's friends immediately began to whisper to dad that Nastya had overlooked it. At first Makhno was furious with these accusations, and then gradually believed. Nastya was dejectedly silent and instead of explaining she was crying quietly in the corner.
Then the companions told her that either she would disappear or the dad would be killed. It is difficult to understand why Nastya did not tell her husband about everything. Most likely, the fact that the patriarchal morals that reigned in the Cossack environment did not contribute to sincere relations between husband and wife played a role. The whole strategy of spiritual closeness between spouses was limited to the formula "food, bed, and everything else is not your business."
In short ... one fine day Nestor found his hut empty: no greetings, no note from Nastya - she disappeared like a ghost. He took it as a betrayal. His most beloved person left him. Since then, he completely lost faith in women.
In general, distance from women is not uncommon, especially among people like shamans, although this is much less typical for people like a leader. Despite the numerous gossip that circulated in Paris about the allegedly unbridled sexual temperament of Nestor Ivanovich, it was difficult to imagine that he was leading a normal sex life, as, for example, his opponents - the red leaders Budyonny, Frunze, or his associates such as Ataman Grigoriev. The true passion of Nestor Ivanovich was, of course, the Idea of \u200b\u200bthe Cossack Freemen. It can be said that he could be either only under the rule of a woman, or only under the rule of the Idea. Which, in principle, was the same for him. The idea is always feminine.
And the behavior of his friends is understandable. And the point here at all, as I think, is not in the meanness of their characters. It is more likely to assume that in the minds of Batka's associates there could be no married Makhno, because then he ceased to be Makhno. And his companions, just like himself, who were under the rule of the Idea, felt this especially well.
You can even say that it was not he who controlled his army, but the army controlled him. He did only what those many thousands and thousands of ordinary people who had risen under his banner unconsciously wanted. And this is what made the daddy psychologically attractive and mysterious. Therefore, in the eyes of his "brothers" he was a certain kind of shaman, hypnotist, semi-god.
Knowing how to hate strongly, Nestor Ivanovich knew how to love strongly, to joke and treat life as a holiday. At times, when the Voices left him alone, he turned into the most ordinary person, something cowardly, something funny. I want to tell you about this completely everyday trait of his character, which very rarely awakened in him.
His next, after the unfortunate Nastya, passion was Marusya Nikiforova - the legendary anarchist, Cossack woman, with whom Makhno gloriously walked along the Ukrainian steppes. It was difficult for Marusya Nikiforova to be called a woman in the truest sense of the word. She spent almost all her life on horseback and in a man's suit. No, she did not become less a woman from this, but she could not be more either. Rather, she can be called a daredevil in a skirt. The story of her love for dad is full of anecdotal situations, which, with various comments and conjectures, quickly spread in the closed world of the Parisian emigration. Being the same Scorpio as Makhno, Marusya did not tolerate anyone's power over herself. And even more so the power of a loving husband. Actually, that's why this story happened.
And it would be even more correct to say that there would be no history at all if not for our Russian weather.
This was the time of the beginning of the romance between Batka and Marusya. At the same time, Marusa liked a young Cossack anarchist named Golik. And she herself liked the Makhnovist favorite Theodosius Shchus. He harassed her in the most unassuming way - he blackmailed her, promised to watch and rape her. A long scar across the entire face of Theodosius prevented Marusa from discerning a kind and sympathetic soul in his "insides". Yes, and the revolver interfered with it, which by itself constantly fired, even while in the holster.
Once the daddy with his personal guards went from Gulyaypole - the center of the rebel movement - to the neighboring village of Voronya. The path was not so close, but not far. Feeling very lonely, Marusya called Golik to her. The chance was tempting. They locked themselves together in a white hut, on the walls of which the paint of shame does not appear, curtained the windows and went to bed.
Not only Marusya Nikiforova, but the rest of the Gulyaypole freemen knew that the father had left. Feodosiy Shchus, seeing the horse backsides of the father's guard, immediately headed for Marusin's hut. He knocked exactly at the moment when Maroussia hotly kissed the naked Golik. The demanding knock on the door instantly sobered the woman. At first she thought not to open - to sit out, but Shchus, who probably knew that she was at home, did not think to give up. Frightened that by his impudent solicitation Theodosius would attract the attention of his neighbors, Marusya said: "What the hell are you scaring people?" - leaned out the window. Shchus, seeing her open shoulders, finally ignited and began to bang on the door even more desperately, demanding to open it. If Marusya had a saber, she would have hacked him down, would have had a revolver, and shot him. But at that moment she had nothing but a naked Golik. And she backed down, entered into negotiations with the bastard. Shchusi just needed that. He immediately felt a woman's weakness and even more began to press on Marusya. He promised to disgrace her in front of the dad so that she would never wash off. He recalled the fate of Nastya Vasetskaya and said that an even worse fate awaited her.
His threats worked. Marusya decided to open it. But what to do with Golik? He had to urgently climb into the chest in the daddy's room.
Shchusya himself was taken by Marusya to her room, where the unfortunate Cossack was a minute before. Here Marusa faced the most difficult thing - not to let Theodosius put himself into an open bed. What tricks she didn’t go for. What topics of conversation did she not start. And about the dead, and about the treasure, allegedly buried by her near Poltava. And absolutely unprecedented - she promised to tell Shchus the secret of Father's immortality. Good or bad, but for an hour she kept him at arm's length from her chest. And when there was not a single story left in her imagination that could interest Theodosius even for a while, there was a knock on the door. Marusya looked out the window and was stunned. Dad stood on the threshold. It seems that in fact there would be no history if it were not for the Ukrainian weather there. The rain that had dripped in the morning turned into a real downpour by the end of Marusya's tales. That made the father half-way to turn his horses and return back to his residence.
What did Marusya experience here? Two men in the house. One is in the daddy's room, the other is in Marusya's room. And both are in the stage of molestation. Maroussia trembled, frantically looking for a way out of this situation.
She did not have a moment to think. It happens that the Lord gives His signs of mercy at such moments. Marusya looked at the dad, looked at Shchusya - she figured that first they would start killing each other, then her, and said to the crooked Cossack: “Calm down. Don't panic. devil, with the words: "I will get there before you, bastard!" After which, without paying the slightest attention to the daddy, go up to your horse, sit down and gallop away at full speed. Do what I tell you, otherwise daddy us chop. "
Shchus was stunned by such a charade. But there was no way out. The old man was already nervous outside the door.
Theodosius grabbed the sword, jumped to the door, with one kick of his foot opened it wide and jumped out into the street. His teeth gnashed, his eyes threw thunder and lightning, in addition, he brandished his sword so that he almost blew off my father's head. "Well, wait! I'll get you yet!" Shchus yelled. Dad was even taken aback. "Just get caught by me," continued Shchus, as if not noticing anyone. Makhno quietly entered the house a little sideways and quickly closed the door behind him. through the window he watched as Shchus jumped on his horse and, shaking his saber, rushed off into the distance ...
"Why did he want to kill me?" - Dumbfounded asked the dad Marusya. At that moment he was not up to Marusya and not to her answers to the question why she did not open for so long.
Marusia regretfully twisted her finger at her temple: “Oh, dad, I don’t know. Belena, perhaps, overeat? Burst into the house, almost killed me and your orderly Golik. I rescued him by violence.”
- Holik? And what does Golik have to do with it?
- Yes, go and take it apart ... I went out into the yard, pick sorrel, smoke, half-shriveled sunflower seeds, suddenly I see a horseman rushing at full speed straight to our hut. He drove up to the house, opened the gate, ran to me, at my feet - boo. I see, Lord God, and this is your orderly Golik.
- What happened, kid? - I ask.
- Shchus wants to chop me, - answers. - Save!
- For what? I ask him.
- Yes, I stepped on his corn, and he was so furious that he swore to chop off my head, chasing me. Save me, Marusya!
I see - the guy is not lying. She let him into the hut and hid him in a chest in your room. I just hid it when Shchus drives up and straight to me: "Where is Golik?" I say, what are you, what kind of Golik is there?
- Why is his horse standing here?
“But he left him and ran on,” I say. - Look for the wind in the field!
- No, - he answers, - you are deceiving me. - Well, let me go into the hut. I'll see it myself. He burst into our hut and let's fumble in all corners. If not for you, you would surely have found Golik and hacked him to pieces. Thank goodness you came.
- So what is Golik? So it sits in my chest? - suddenly asks the dad with a laugh.
- So he sits, - says Marusya.
- Well, show me! - Makhno demands.
Marusya takes him to the upper room, opens the chest, and Golik sits there - neither alive nor dead. Makhno, laughing, grabbed his sides: "How are you, - he says, - Shchusyu stepped on a corn that now he is chasing you? Well, fun! Don't be afraid! I will stand up for you!"
Maroussia immediately brought vodka. Charka - to dad, glass - to Golik, and escorted him out of the yard. And Shchus, as he figured out what was the matter, bit his tongue. So this story was hidden from the father. They were resourceful people.
... The third and last love, which went down in history under the name of Mother Galina, was different from Marusya or Nastya. An exact copy of the old man. Strong-willed, with steel in her eyes - beautiful with cold, satanic beauty, who knew how to command even the most rabid friends of Batkov, she came from a completely different world than Nastya Vasetskaya. Of medium height, slender, according to the recollections of people who saw her, she was in no way inferior to European beauties. Galina was a rural teacher in Gulyaypole. Old Man laid eyes on her in his third, last period of struggle with white and red. Apparently, his tortured soul was tired of loneliness and bored with a fleeting refuge on an accidental female breast.
It was safe with Galina, and he asked her to become his wife. She officially became known as "mother". With her, he shared all the hardships of his Polish captivity and Parisian exile.
Nestor Ivanovich loved to dress up as a woman. Many of his contemporaries noted this feature sitting like a thorn in him. With long flowing hair, often rosy, he gave the impression of a regimental waitress.
His passion for travesty was no doubt just a ruse. Perhaps the craving for dressing up lived in him as an opportunity to achieve physical transformation into his own Ideal.
It is said that once a quiet village on the shores of the Sea of \u200b\u200bAzov, occupied by the soldiers of General Denikin, was awakened in the morning by the ringing of bells and bold songs. Crazed soldiers jumped out into the courtyard and saw how a chaise pulled by a train was rushing along the main street. On the trestle sat a huge fellow with a scar all over his face, and behind him were three guys in multi-colored caftans, with famously crooked caps and picturesque forelocks sticking out from under them. Closely squeezed between them sat a girl in a white robe of the bride. The carriage stopped at the headquarters building, and the whole company, shouting: "Let the officer marry us," rushed inside the house. The girl stuck out her tongue and tried to kiss the lieutenant who jumped out to meet him. The officer smiled and relaxed. The calmed down security also freely let the company inside the house. There, the girl threw off a huge shawl, and everyone noticed that she was pregnant. "For the health of the bride!" - shouted the groom and climbed to kiss his betrothed, not allowing the officers to examine her more closely. The grinning officers scrambled for a bottle of moonshine. The bride began to dance. The popping of torn bottles of champagne sounded so convincing that none of the security soldiers standing next to the open door even bothered. Only the lieutenant, looking into the bride's face, began to slowly slide to the floor. There was amazement in his eyes. Instead of a bride, an elderly man stood in front of him with a pistol in his hands. It was dad Makhno. Several more dry claps sounded inside the house. A minute later, the whole company fell out into the street and opened a hurricane of fire on the soldiers standing there. They shot every single one. Then they calmly pulled out all the weapons and ammunition from the hut, loaded them onto the chaise and quickly rushed away from the village ...
In 1934, Nestor Makhno died quietly in a Parisian hospital on rue Daru. As quietly as old pensioners usually die.
Revolution under black banners
There is no more mysterious and legendary person in the history of the Civil War than Nestor Makhno. For many years in the USSR, he - "the threat of the Chekists and commissars" - was represented as a half-mad robber and bandit. However, the preserved historical documents refute this assessment.
Nestor Makhno was born on October 26, 1888 in a small village with the epic name of Gulyai-Pole. His childhood, as he himself said, was overshadowed by severe need and deprivation. In 1903, Nestor entered the iron foundry as a laborer. In his spare time he studied in a theatrical circle and carried out "expropriations of expropriators" in a revolutionary anarchist organization. In March 1910, Nestor Makhno and his comrades "for belonging to a malicious gang formed to commit robbery," were sentenced to death by hanging. In his youth, the "Stolypin tie" was replaced by him with an indefinite hard labor. In March 1917, the revolution freed him from the Butyrka prison. Without delay, Nestor Makhno went home.
Gulyaypole Republic
In Gulyai-Pole everyone was interested in what would happen to the land. Nestor had a prepared answer: "The land to the peasants!" Moreover, if the Bolsheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries saw this as a slogan, then Makhno - as a guide to action. When he was elected chairman of the peasant union, the first thing he did was to offer the landowners the documents for land ownership. No, he did not threaten them with a Mauser and did not burn their estates. But something flashed in the eyes of the convict, which made his words seem very convincing. By the way, one of his cellmates was Dzerzhinsky. Do you remember his hard look during your work as the chairman of the Cheka? Nestor Makhno's eyes were much harder. And by strong-willed qualities he surpassed the "iron Felix" by a head.
What do you think he did with the documents? I just burned it. And then he distributed the landlord's land justly. He also did not offend the landowners, leaving them just enough land so that they could cultivate it on their own. On the basis of two or three estates, the owners of which neglected physical exercise in the fresh air, he organized agricultural communes. The land issue was settled.
The workers also reached out to Nestor Makhno, having elected him chairman of the trade union of metalworkers and woodworkers. Makhno immediately demanded that the plant owners double the workers' wages. They suggested increasing it by 50%. The workers rejoiced, and Makhno was outraged to the depths of his soul that the breeders did not believe in the ideals of anarchism. He really intended to implement the principle of "Factory - to workers!", But the breeders, citing errors in the calculations, agreed with the demands of the trade union. As is customary among "serious boys", they were punished for their sluggishness. On October 25 (the day of the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd), the board of the trade union, at the initiative of Makhno, decided: "To oblige the owners to do work for three shifts of 8 hours each, accepting the missing workers through the trade union." Unemployment in Gulyai-Pole was eliminated.
The last step remains: "All power - to the Soviets!" Makhno also understood it literally. Everything has been said, so everything. Accordingly, the Bolshevik decrees from Moscow and the decisions of the Central Rada from Kiev, not to mention the directives from the provincial Yekaterinoslav (now Dnepropetrovsk) and the district Aleksandrovsk (now Zaporozhye), did not operate on the territory controlled by Nestor Makhno. Rather, they acted, but on the condition that they were approved by the Gulyaypole Council. In turn, the decisions of the council were accepted for execution only when citizens agreed with them at meetings. Makhno himself, when, for example, he needed money for public needs, first turned to the council, and only then went to the bank. The Gulyaypole bankers turned out to be very sympathetic people and immediately gave him the required amount, and with such an air that they secretly dreamed about it, but were shy to offer it.
By the spring of 1918, thanks to the efforts of Nestor Makhno, the anarchist ideas of Bakunin and Kropotkin combined with the age-old traditions of the Zaporizhzhya-Gaidamak freemen in the best possible way in Gulyai-Pole and the districts adjacent to it, forming something very reminiscent of the Zaporizhzhya Sich. Any attempt on the independence of the "free republic" Nestor Makhno perceived as a personal insult and even, speaking in modern jargon, as a run over. The Don Cossacks were the first to understand this, their echelons, without the consent of the Gulyaypole Council (!), Went through Aleksandrovsk to General Kaledin. Then Makhno personally led the operation to dismantle the rails and disarm the Cossacks. As a result, the Cossacks returned to the Don with only whips.
Welcome or hands off!
But on April 22, 1918, according to the Brest-Litovsk treaty concluded by the Bolsheviks, German troops entered Gulyai-Pole. Realizing that he alone would not be able to disarm an army of six hundred thousand, Makhno went to Russia in search, to use the jargon again, for a “roof”. He met with anarchists, including the elderly P. Kropotkin, but was unable to put them under arms. He turned to the Bolsheviks, trying to captivate Lenin with the ideas of anarchism, but did not find understanding. Makhno had to act at his own peril and risk. Later, the Germans scrupulously calculated that he had made 118 raids, causing considerable damage to the German army. There was even a rumor among the people that the Germans preferred to go home precisely because of Makhno. On December 27, Batka, as they began to call Makhno, defeated Petliura, who captured Yekaterinoslav, again without the consent of the Gulyaypole Council. The Red Army also arrived in time. So that no one doubts who defeated the Petliurites, Makhno was appointed division commander, receiving the Order of the Red Banner of the Battle for No. 4.
Ataman Grigoriev, who controlled the south of Ukraine and occupied Odessa, was also appointed division commander. And with this chieftain, Makhno had his own scores. In the literature, one can often find a description of the "eternally drunk" Makhnovists, in whose clothes "colored ladies' stockings and panties coexisted next to rich fur coats." In fact, this is how the “fighters” of Ataman Grigoriev looked like, often posing as Makhnovists. As for the soldiers of the insurgent army of Makhno, they outwardly resembled the characters in Repin's painting "The Zaporozhian Cossacks Write a Letter to the Turkish Sultan" - in wide trousers belted with red sashes, in long knitted or woven sweatshirts. And in the service they did not "use", since in the Makhnovist army drunkenness was considered a crime and was punishable by execution.
Having seized Odessa, the “revolutionary general,” as Grigoriev liked to call himself, requisitioned the values \u200b\u200bof the Odessa State Bank: 124 kg of gold bullion, 238 pounds of silver and over a million rubles in gold coins of the tsarist minting. Sitting on a sack of gold, this character from The Wedding in Malinovka wrote to the Makhnovists: "What is your father Makhno, the commander, how does he have a lot of gold reserves?" Makhno really did not have a "gold reserve" - \u200b\u200bhaving burst into Yekaterinoslav under black anarchist banners, he declared: "In the name of the partisans of all regiments, I declare that any robberies, robberies and violence will by no means be allowed at this moment of my responsibility to the revolution and they will be nipped in the bud by me. " When Makhno learned about the negotiations between Grigoriev and Denikin, at the next "arrow", that is, I beg your pardon, at the "congress of rebels of Yekaterinoslav, Kherson and Tavria" he shot the ataman-"outrageous".
But that was later, and in the spring of 1919, the All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets decided to nationalize the land, that is, to transfer it to the ownership of the proletarian state. Commissars appeared in Gulyai-Pole and announced the surplus appropriation. We met them, to put it mildly, unfriendly. But Nestor Makhno warned: “If comrades Bolsheviks go from Great Russia to Ukraine to help us in the difficult struggle against counter-revolution, we must tell them: welcome, dear friends! If they come here with the aim of monopolizing Ukraine, we will tell them: hands off! "
Under these conditions, the Revolutionary Military Council, headed by Trotsky acted very witty. He stopped supplying the Makhnovist units with cartridges. Apparently, Makhno posed a greater danger to the proletarian revolution than Denikin ... The commander-in-chief of the Volunteer Army did not fail to take advantage of this. On May 17, General Shkuro's cavalry cut through the front at the junction of the Makhno brigade and the 13th Army of the Southern Front. What did Trotsky do? Maybe he ordered to restore the supply of Makhnovist units? No, he ordered to liquidate them, and to bring Makhno himself to trial by the Revolutionary Tribunal. In response, Makhno gave up the dubious honor of being the divisional commander of the Red Army and disappeared. No one dared to liquidate his units - they continued to restrain Denikin until the front finally collapsed.
"Long live Nestor!"
Denikin did not take into account the experience of his predecessors. The invasion of the territory of the Makhnovist republic and the unceremonious treatment of its citizens cost him dearly. Denikin had already captured Oryol and was preparing for the decisive assault on Moscow, but Makhno met Petlyura in Zhmerinka, and they shook hands. On September 27, the combined forces of Ukraine attacked Denikin's army. In the area of \u200b\u200bthe village of Peregonovka near Uman, a general battle took place between the Makhnovists and Petliurists against the Whites. As a result, about 15% of the entire personnel of the Denikin army was destroyed in one day. After that, the Makhnovists moved east, to their "indigenous" regions. They captured Krivoy Rog, Nikopol, Aleksandrovsk, Melitopol, Yuzovka (Donetsk), Berdyansk, Mariupol, Yekaterinoslav. Makhno, in the literal sense of the word, ripped open the belly of the Volunteer Army, cutting off the channels of its supply with food and ammunition. The offensive of the Volunteer Army on Moscow was thwarted. Makhno, in fact, saved the Bolsheviks from inevitable defeat.
General Slashchev's corps and Shkuro's cavalry were sent from the front against the Makhnovists. "So that I no longer hear the name Makhno!" - ordered Denikin. For 10 days of fighting, Shkuro's units lost half of their strength, but did not achieve any noticeable success. "The Makhnovist" troops "differ from the Bolsheviks in their fighting efficiency and resilience," noted Colonel Dubego, chief of staff of the 4th division of the Slashchevites.
Makhno's army outnumbered the opponents in all respects. It was Makhno who first widely used spring carts, placing the infantry on them. That is why his army of up to 35 thousand people with 50 guns and 500 machine guns moved at a speed of up to 100 km per day, while according to all military regulations, even the cavalry had a pace of 35 km per day. Makhno developed tactical operations that were included in the annals of military art. For example, on November 11, 1920 in the Crimea, near Karpovaya Balka, the Makhnovists, with the support of units of Mironov's 2nd Cavalry Army, demonstrated their famous "technique of imitating a counter attack." In the course of a fleeting battle using 250 machine guns, Barbovich's cavalry corps (4500 sabers) was completely destroyed. Upon learning of this, Wrangel issued an order to disband his army.
Nestor Makhno himself was wounded (in total during the years of the Civil War, he received 14 gunshot and saber wounds) and therefore did not participate in the defeat of Wrangel. On November 15, he held the last meeting of the Gulyaypole Council, and a week later the Bolsheviks, violating the agreement with Makhno, deployed three armies against him, not counting the punitive Dzerzhinsky and the ubiquitous "internationalists". For another nine months, Nestor Makhno made endless raids, mercilessly slaughtering security officers and commissars. It's amazing that at the same time he could still write poetry:
I rushed into battle with my head, I did not ask for mercy from death, And I was not guilty that I was alive Remained in this whirlwind. We shed blood and sweat, We were frank with the people. We were defeated. Only our Idea was not killed!
In August 1921, Nestor Makhno, at the head of a small detachment, was forced to cross the Romanian border and lay down his arms. Lenin I was very worried about this: "Our military command disgracefully failed, releasing Makhno, despite the gigantic superiority of forces and the strictest orders to catch!"
On April 12, 1922, the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee announced a general amnesty for those who fought against the Reds, with the exception of Skoropadsky, Petlyura, Makhno, Ataman Tyutyunnik, Baron Wrangel, General Kutepov and Savinkov. And in May, the Supreme Tribunal of Ukraine recognized Makhno as a "bandit and robber." But neither Romania nor Poland handed him over to the Soviet government. Nestor Ivanovich Makhno died in 1934 in a Paris hospital for the poor. Buried in the Pere Lachaise cemetery. The author of the book "Cars from the South" V. Golovanov said that he found three inscriptions in this cemetery: Oskar Wilde forever! (Oscar Wilde Forever!), Jim Morrison (Jim Morrison, leader of the rock band Doors) and Viva Nestor Mahno! (Long live Nestor Makhno!).
EVGENY KOKOULIN
The name of Nestor Makhno is so odious that it in itself makes it difficult to determine the scale of his personality: either he was an ordinary partisan-anarchist, or an incomparably more significant figure, standing, if not in the first, then in the second row of participants in the Civil War so tragic for Russia ... In other words, one of those who could influence its course.
Behind all the myths with which the name Makhno has grown, it is most difficult to discern that this is so. In any case, along with the leaders of the rebellious Kronstadt, Makhno with his Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army was the most outstanding representative of the "popular" opposition to Bolshevism.
If Kronstadt was crushed within a month, then Makhno held out in the ring of the Civil War for 3 years, having managed to fight the Hetman Skoropadsky's Haidamaks, Germans, whites, reds - and still remain alive. He alone managed to achieve what not a single popular movement opposition to the Bolsheviks sought: in 1920, the Insurrectionary Army and the Council of People's Commissars of Ukraine signed an agreement on political loyalty, on freedom of speech and press (within the "socialist" frequency range), as well as on free election to the councils of representatives of all socialist parties ... If Wrangel had held out in the Crimea a little longer, it might happen that Makhno would have demanded from the Council of People's Commissars the territory for creating a "free Soviet system." Of course, for the mature Bolsheviks of 1920, all the points of the agreement were just a tactical trick, and all "free councils" would have been defeated the very next day after the whites laid down their arms. And yet ... The Bolsheviks never stooped to negotiations with the insurgent people, suppressing any uprisings with exceptional cruelty. Makhno, on the other hand, forced the ruling party of the first totalitarian state of a new type in the twentieth century to reckon with the people. Only for this did he deserve posthumous fame.
He was the fifth, youngest child in a poor family of a coachman who served for Mark Kerner, the owner of an iron foundry in Gulyai-Pole, a small town in the Azov steppe, whose very name seems to be an echo of the epic Zaporozhye times. What is true: from the island of Khortytsya on the Dnieper, from where the Zaporozhian Sich squandered its liberty and robbery, to Gulyai-Pole hardly fifty miles, and what did the Cossacks walk here, and in the battles with the Krymchaks they laid their forelock heads, in the place of which their villages later grew numerous descendants - there is no doubt.
In 1906, at the age of minor (17 years), Makhno ended up in prison for hard labor, which, of course, was also due to the circumstances of place / time. The seeds thrown by the "Narodnaya Volya" and the Socialist-Revolutionary Party sprouted up in wild growth. Russia raved about revolution. In the history of the first Russian revolution, what is most striking is the selflessness with which people rushed "into terror", whom it is not so easy to imagine filling homemade bombs: some workers, school students, employees of railways and post offices, teachers. The age-old tyranny demanded revenge. The explosion of the bomb was tantamount to the execution of the judgment of the Court of the Righteous. The "draft terror" in Russia in 1906-1907 has no analogues in world history. But from within itself this phenomenon looks terrible and ordinary. And the activities of the Gulyai-Polye group of anarchists, which included the young Makhno, did not go beyond this ordinariness: they got revolvers, made bombs, robbed, for starters, the owners of the iron foundry where a good half of the group worked, and then some of the local rich , then the liquor store ... During the raid on the post carriage, the bailiff and the postman were killed. Have come under the suspicion of the police. Arrested. Court. Sentence: 20 years. Moscow "Butyrki".
February 17th, the tsar's abdication, a general amnesty ... In seething Moscow, Makhno never found a place or a job for himself. He did not like at all, did not understand cities. At the age of twenty-eight, without a penny or a traveling profession in his soul, he moved south to his native Gulyai-Pole. And then he suddenly found himself in demand by the time: around the crowd, rallies, vague forebodings, resolutions, meetings - and he is savvy, he knows what to ask for, what to demand. He is taken away by five committees - and nothing, he is not lost, he chairs. Mother, Evdokia Ivanovna, being proud of the youngest, wants to arrange his life for him, as with people, finds a wife, the beautiful Nastya Vasetskaya. The wedding was buzzing for 3 days. But was he up to his wife?
Already in July 1917, power in Gulyai-Pole passed to the Soviet. Makhno naturally became chairman. Now he is preoccupied with the creation of detachments and the procurement of weapons in order to start confiscating land from the landowners by the fall. Makhno sometimes flirts in search of his "theme" in the revolution: now he travels as a delegate to the Provincial Congress of Soviets in Yekaterinoslav, from where he returns disappointed with the inter-party struggle. Then he goes to Aleksandrovsk, where, together with a detachment of the Bolshevik Bogdanov, he disarms the Cossack echelons, rolling back from the front to their native villages, and so gets 4 boxes of rifles, but unexpectedly turns out to be the chairman of the judicial commission of the Revolutionary Committee, called upon to examine the cases of "enemies of the revolution." In this paper and punitive position, he finally fails and explodes: he is turned away by the arrests of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries - yesterday's "fellow travelers" in the revolution, but especially by the prison. His first prison, where he sat, awaiting a hard labor sentence. “I have repeatedly had a desire to blow up the prison, but never once managed to get enough dynamite and pyroxylin for this ... Already now, I told my friends, it is clear that ... not the parties will serve the people, but the people - the parties” ...
In January 1918, he announced his resignation from the revolutionary committee and left for Gulyai-Pole to make his own revolution. It is this time in Makhno's memoirs that is colored in lyrical tones: he tells about the first communes created in the former landowners' estates, about the first kindergartens in Gulyai-Pole ...
It all ended unexpectedly quickly: in March 1918, the Germans occupied Ukraine, placing Hetman Skoropadsky, who was loyal to him, under the rule. Several anarchist and Bolshevik military squads tried to resist the invasion, but they too soon found themselves in Rostov - on the territory of Russia "reconciled" with the Germans.
The hetman's authorities restored all pre-revolutionary order, roughly punishing the troublemakers of 1917. Makhno, disguised as a woman, went to look at his native village. Gulyai-Pole was occupied by a battalion of Magyars under the command of Austrian officers. The invaders burned down the house of Makhno, and the two older brothers were shot only for their surname, although both were not involved in the riot. Not a trace of the "communes" remained. I had to start all over again. But if in 17 the main thing was to "push the speech" more incendiary, now - what then? It was necessary to act. To take revenge, kill, let a red rooster, raise an uprising - and in this matter, no cruelty seemed excessive.
Makhno found the old brawlers who were hiding in the villages - Chubenko, Marchenko, Karetnikov, eight people in total. With axes and knives, they crept into the estate of the landowner Reznikov at night and massacred the whole family - because there were four brother officers who served in the hetman police. So they got the first 7 rifles, a revolver, 7 horses and 2 saddles. Makhno was triumphant: was it not such officers who killed his innocent brothers? He took revenge. Did anyone then think how many brothers would have to avenge their brothers if the knot of hatred was untied? No. Then everyone who had a weapon felt in power, and in right, and in truth.
On September 22, the Makhnovists, dressed in the uniforms of the sovereign wart (police), met the patrol of Lieutenant Murkovsky on the road. Makhno introduced himself as the head of a punitive detachment sent from Kiev by order of the hetman himself. Murkovsky, not feeling the trick, said that he was going to his father's estate to rest for a day or two, to hunt for game and seditious people.
- You, mister lieutenant, do not understand me, - suddenly the wart "captain" uttered in a voice breaking with excitement. - I am the revolutionary Makhno. The surname seems to you quite well-known?
The officers began to offer Makhno money, but he contemptuously refused. Then the "hunters", like hares, scattered across the fields. They were slashed with a machine gun ... Oh, Makhno loved provocation - classical, with desperate lies and masquerade - he was an actor! He loved to see the horror in the eyes of his enemies when he suddenly announced his name to them. At that time, tens or hundreds of tiny detachments, like particles of fiery phlogiston, circled around Ukraine, sowing fire and death everywhere. And only when the punishers, who were brutalized by the partisan raids, began to burn villages, kill and torture the peasants, the flame of the people's anger flared in breadth. Detachments of several hundred people armed with shotguns, pitchforks and "sticks", in fact, became the embryo of Makhno's Insurrectionary Army. But for this they had to be organized somehow.
It is surprising that out of all this half-drunk freeman Makhno, in a few months, it was possible to create an absolutely disciplined and paradoxical in its maneuverability formation, which was noted by General Slashchev, whom Denikin instructed to conduct operations against Makhno.
Meanwhile, the situation changed again: before the news of the revolution in Germany reached Ukraine, another coup took place in Kiev: the hetman fled, power passed to the Directory, which was headed by a very left Ukrainian Social Democrat Vynnychenko, who first of all sent a delegation to Moscow to negotiate with the Bolsheviks about peace. Ironically, while these negotiations were going on, the former Minister of War of the Directory S. Petliura seized power, and the Bolsheviks occupied Kharkov without any negotiations, where on January 4, 1919, the first Prime Minister of Red Ukraine, Comrade Pyatakov, received a military parade from the available forces. The trouble was that there were only 3 or 4 regiments, because after the Brest-Litovsk Peace, when Germany, together with Ukraine, almost devoured half of Russia, none of the most courageous revolutionaries even thought that in an instant her omnipotence might collapse, and Ukraine will again "open" for revolution. However, it soon became clear that all the work on "clearing the territory" was carried out by the Ukrainian partisans. What kind of people they were, no one knew, they were feared, suspecting of nationalism, kulaks and in general, the devil knows what, but the well-known party free-thinker V.A. Antonov-Ovseenko was not afraid to stake on these parts. And, in general, this strategy has paid off. Shchors and Bozhenko took Kiev from the Petliurites, Grigoriev recaptured Nikolaev and Kherson, where, after a 3-hour artillery duel, the Greeks and the French were beaten by them, who started an intervention, after which they took Odessa. Makhno restrained the advance of the whites in the southeast and, although he did not achieve much success, it seemed that he had put up a reliable barrier, asking, like all partisans, for only one thing: weapons. Viktor Belash, who specially came to knock out rifles and cartridges in Kharkov, was treated kindly by Antonov-Ovseenko and left full of hope. Together with him, a group of anarchists from the Nabat federation went to Gulyai-Pole to establish the work of the cultural and educational department. Makhno, having received the brigade commissar Ozerov on the staff, became officially the red brigade commander, subordinate to the commander of the 2nd Ukrainian army, comrade Skachko. True, he honestly admitted that there were never any other units in the army, except for the Makhno brigade.
Of course, none of the Bolsheviks expected such a fortunate combination of circumstances. As long as the partisans fought at the fronts, they could calmly build up their power, start a Cheka, send food detachments to the village and generally feel at home, while scolding the partisans and discussing whether it was time, say, to "remove" Makhno because of several unsuccessful battles ? In addition, on April 10, in Gulyai-Polye, the third congress of "free councils" incomprehensible to the Bolsheviks took place, which announced mobilizations into the Insurgent Army and ended with rather harsh political declarations: "Down with the commissar and appointees!" - "Down with the emergency services - modern secret police!" - "Long live the freely elected Workers 'and Peasants' Soviets!"
Kharkiv Izvestia, the main newspaper of red Ukraine, immediately reacted with an article: "Down with Makhnovshchina!" Recalling the Makhnovist congress, the author of the editorial demanded an end to the "outrages" happening in the "kingdom of Makhno", and for this - to send agitators, "wagons of literature" and instructors for organizing Soviet power to the region. Although no one knew about what was happening in the “kingdom of Makhno,” for of course not a single newspaper clicker was there.
At that moment, Antonov-Ovseenko decided to pay an inspection visit to the "kingdom of Makhno". On April 29, a troika met the front commander at the Gulyai-Pole station. In the village, the troops lined up in the front broke out "Internationale". To meet Antonov came “a small, youthful, dark-eyed man in a fur hat on one side. I saluted: the brigade commander, Batko Makhno. We are holding on to the front successfully. There is a battle for Mariupol ”. A face-to-face conversation followed, after which Antonov-Ovseenko abruptly wrote to the Izvestiya editorial office: “The article is full of factual untruths and bears a downright provocative character ... Makhno and his team ... deserve not official abuse, but fraternal gratitude from all the revolutionary workers and peasants ".
To Commander-2 Skachko - on the same occasion: "Allocate money for the brigade, uniforms, a trench tool, at least half a staff of telephone equipment, field kitchens, cartridges, doctors, one armored train for the Dolya-Mariupol line." Never before has Makhno been so interested in an alliance with the Bolsheviks as after the visit of Antonov-Ovseenko. He had never established comradeship at such a level with any of them. He was waiting for help, which would testify to one more thing: trust in him.
But absolutely nothing of what Antonov-Ovseenko asked for was done. The newspaper harassment of the Makhnovists did not stop. They received no weapons. What can you do? The Bolshevik strategists of the direction of Denikin's main attack were waiting for Tsaritsyn, and he struck at Makhno, rushed through the Ukraine straight to Moscow. And it was then that the morally beaten commander-2 Skachko blabbed out, making excuses that he had not supplied Makhno with weapons on purpose and, therefore, sent thousands of people to slaughter on purpose, thinking that it would do. Of course, all this double-dealing policy should have ended in disaster, but for the time being, everything went well. Speaking on April 1 at the plenum of the Moscow Soviet, Trotsky assured the audience that the Southern Front would soon face decisive changes, which he depicted in extremely rosy colors. Victory over the Whites seemed close and inevitable when a catastrophe broke out: Grigoriev's division, returning from Odessa, found mercilessly wielding food detachments in its native villages and blazed with mutiny in half of Ukraine.
A telegram from Grigoriev to Makhno was intercepted: “Batko! Why are you looking at the communists? Hit them! Ataman Grigoriev ". Makhno did not answer. On May 17, Shkuro's cavalry split the front at the junction of the Makhno brigade and the 13th Army of the Southern Front and covered about fifty kilometers in one day. There was nothing to close the breakthrough. In the reserve of the 2nd Army there was one "international" regiment with 400 bayonets. After weeks of fighting, Skachko stated melancholy: "Makhno does not actually exist."
Indeed, the brigade, devoid of firearms, was turned into some kind of bloody rubbish, in which, however, the hooves of the horses of the Caucasian division of Shkuro were still tangled. Makhno began to retreat, which decided his fate: he was instantly numbered among the rebels, and on May 25, at the apartment of Kh. Rakovsky, the second red prime minister of Ukraine, a meeting of the Workers 'and Peasants' Defense Council took place with the agenda: "Makhnovshchina and its elimination." Note that nothing has happened yet. Moreover, the Makhnovists managed to literally stop the White advance with bayonet attacks. It would seem that a simple sense of self-preservation should have prompted the Bolsheviks that they should not fight against Makhno's invented rebellion, but, on the contrary, support it! So no, and the sense of self-preservation has kicked off! Why? None of the Bolsheviks apparently imagined what forces Denikin had concentrated on the front by that time. But on May 26, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee adopted a regulation on socialist land use, that is, on the socialization of land for state farms. And in this light, the IV Congress of "Free Soviets", scheduled for June 15, was not at all necessary for the Bolsheviks.
To crown it all, Comrade Trotsky arrived in the Ukraine before the Revolutionary Military Council of the republic. Hurrying on the train, in his personal newspaper "On the way" he publishes the article "Makhnovshchina", reprinted on June 4 by the Kharkov "Izvestia". In it, all the failures of the Red Army are pushed onto Makhno. “Scratch a Makhnovist - you will find a Grigorievite. And more often than not, you don't need to scrape: a rabid fist barking at the Communists or a petty speculator sticks out. " Is it in the trenches - kulaks and speculators ?! The defensive remarks of Antonov-Ovseenko and Skachko were useless: the Ukrainian front had 2 weeks to survive, the 2nd Army was transformed into the 14th, Skachko was displaced, and Voroshilov took his place, who dreamed of "getting Makhno" in order to carry out revolutionary justice over him. ..
Makhno did not know what to do. He did not want to die and wanted to reserve the place of a revolutionary. On June 9, from the Gaichur station, he sends Trotsky (copies to Lenin, Kamenev) two long messages, in which he asks to be relieved of his command: “I perfectly understand the attitude of the central government towards me. I am absolutely convinced that this government considers the insurrectionary movement incompatible with its state activities. She also believes that this movement is connected personally with me ... I need to leave my post. "
Suddenly, with a detachment of horsemen of several hundred people, mostly old rebels of 1918, Makhno appears in Aleksandrovsk and surrenders the affairs of the command, without responding to requests to protect the city. It passes to the right bank of the Dnieper and dissolves in the deserted spaces of the red rear.
On June 14, convinced that Makhno left and it would not be possible to lure him into an armored train, the enraged Voroshilov gave the order to shoot the commissar of the brigade Ozerov and the commander of the brigade's sapper units, Mikhalev-Pavlenko, “the beautiful soul of an idealist youth”. Makhnovist units join the 14th Army. On July 7, in the capital's newspaper Izvestia of the People's Commissariat for Military Affairs, Trotsky wrote: "Denikin was on the verge of death, from which he could only be separated by a few days, but he correctly guessed the scum of boiling fists and deserters." The catastrophe of 1919 ended in the failure of the Red Front as far as Tula. Comrade Trotsky did not want to take responsibility. Comrade Trotsky remained clean.
Meanwhile, at the Novopomoshchnaya station, Makhno was waiting for the development of events. The Reds, leaving Ukraine, bypassed him, fearing that some units, not wanting to part with their homeland, "stick" to him. After the retreat from the Dnieper to the New Bug, Makhno's entire former brigade and some of the red units really went over to Makhno. They were ready to fight to the end. After the front went north, the Whites formed 2 divisions against Makhno under the command of General Slashchev and decided to crush him. At this time, even the legend of Colonel Kleist, the German genius Makhno, was born among the whites. He, the German colonel, was not ashamed of losing battles, but the "partisans", the "rabid peasant" - were ashamed. At the beginning of September, the Whites made the first attempts to knock Makhno out of their positions: as a result, he almost took Elisavetgrad, saved at the cost of a heroic officer's counterattack. Perhaps the Makhnovists would have won the battle if they had ammunition. Only when they rolled back under Uman and, by conspiracy, surrendering the wounded to the Petliurites, they received a certain amount of cartridges in addition, which helped them withstand the next battle. The Petliurites were afraid of the Whites and were ready to supply anyone with cartridges, just to postpone the moment of meeting with Denikin. On September 25, Makhno suddenly announced that the retreat was over and the real war would begin tomorrow morning. With some supernatural instinct, he determined that he had one chance to save the army: to attack the core of the pursuers and destroy it.
The Battle of Peregonovka is one of the strangest events of the Civil War. Several memories have been preserved about him (Arshinova, Volin, several White Guard officers), from which it is clear that he cannot be called a major military operation. It was just a fierce, brutal battle, where they really fought for life and death. And at the same time, the outcome of this battle influenced the entire further course of the war. Three and a half thousand partisans escaped from the encirclement. But it turned out that they escaped into the open space of history.
The reconnaissance sent to Pyatikhatki, Yekaterinoslav and Aleksandrovsk did not find the enemy. The rear garrisons of the Denikinites were extremely weak: over the Dnieper, from Nikolaev to Kherson, there were no troops, in Nikolaev there were 150 officers of the state guard. Naturally, in such an atmosphere, Makhno resurrected like Phoenix, having once again flown to Guyay-Pol and Berdyansk. Having shredded the port through which the supply of the Volunteer Army went and shredded all the railways that came to hand, he practically paralyzed the Denikin rear. “This uprising, which took on such a wide scale, upset our rear and weakened our front in the most difficult time for him,” A.I. Denikin. But Makhno, having secured victory for the Reds, tried to destroy himself. True, he was counting on something else: that his heroism would finally be appreciated. He wanted to serve the revolution. He just could not be a meek executor of someone else's will. And for this reason alone, like Oedipus, he was doomed to go from one disappointment to another. However, at first Makhno reveled in triumph.
He again commanded the army and was the sole master of the vast territory on both sides of the Dnieper. Aleksandrovsk, late, but still warm autumn, solemn entry into the city: he and "Mother Galina" in the sky-colored landau, accompanied by all his picturesque retinue ...
The surprise of the townsfolk: what's going to happen?
Declaring liberties to the population ...
In Aleksandrovsk, Makhno finally realized what he had dreamed of all his life: the Congress of Independent Free Soviets of the entire territory under his control. Shortly before the congress, Comrade Lubim from the Left SRs came to see Volin. An interesting conversation took place.
- You are calling a congress of workers and peasants. It will make a huge difference. But what are you doing? No clarification, no propaganda, no list of candidates! But what will happen if the peasantry sends you reactionary deputies who demand that a Constituent Assembly be convened? What will you do if the counter-revolutionaries fail your congress?
Volin felt the responsibility of the moment:
“If today, at the height of the revolution, after everything that has happened, the peasants are sent to the congress of counterrevolutionaries and monarchists, then - hear - the work of my whole life was a complete mistake. And I have no choice but to blow my brains out of the revolver that you see on the table ...
“I'm serious,” Lubim began.
“And I'm serious,” Volin answered.
Makhno opened the congress, but refused to preside. This astonished the peasants, but gradually they got used to it, and in 3 days, little by little, they developed and approved the principles of the "free Soviet system", which for Makhno sounded sweeter than the ode "To liberty."
Meanwhile, the Whites came to their senses and decided to do away with Makhno. As a result, the rebels were forced to leave Aleksandrovsk and move the "capital" of their republic to Yekaterinoslav, fenced off from the whites by the Dnieper and the front, stretched between the two bows of the Dnieper, like a bowstring. Slashchev, once again moved against the partisans, realized that, having seized the territory, Makhno had lost his main quality - maneuverability. Therefore, without dispersing his forces, he strikes in one place, along the Pyatikhatki - Yekaterinoslav railway. The front is bursting. The capital Makhno ends up in the hands of whites. Daddy counterattacks eight times from the suburban mud, trying to recapture the city - in vain! This ruins all his plans. He dreamed of meeting the Reds as the master of an anarchist free republic with the capital in the largest city in eastern Ukraine, and once again turned out to be the commander of a seditious partisan detachment, which was also pretty battered by the Whites.
On January 1, the long-awaited meeting took place. A wave of joint victorious rallies swept through. On January 4, Army Commander-14 Uborevich issued a secret order to destroy all Makhno's bands. But a pretext was needed to start open action against the rebels. He didn't have to wait long. On January 8, the Makhnovist headquarters in Aleksandrovsk received a categorical order to move the Insurrectionary Army to the Polish front. The army did not obey either Uborevich or any red commander, either formally or in fact. The Reds knew about it. Moreover, they hoped that the Makhnovists would not obey the order, which Uborevich let slip to Yakir.
But the Makhnovists did not simply disobey the order. The Revolutionary Military Council of the rebels issued a Declaration, which the Bolsheviks could not perceive otherwise than as an attempt to wrest the political initiative from them. It was a colossal audacity. A year before the Kronstadt mutiny, the declaration formulated all the basic postulates of the heresy most hated by the Bolsheviks - "For Soviets without Communists." In addition, Uborevich's headquarters, as expected, received the refusal of the Makhnovists to go to the Polish front, primarily because "50% of the soldiers, the entire headquarters and the army commander are sick with typhus."
The answer completely satisfied the Bolsheviks. On January 9, F. Levenzon's brigade and the troops of the 41st division, together with the Makhnovists, occupied Aleksandrovsk, made an attempt to seize Makhno's headquarters, located in the best hotel in the city. The headquarters hacked out of the city along with the "father's hundred", and Makhno himself, dressed in a peasant dress, drove out of the city in a cart, unnoticed by anyone. His reward was another declaration "outlawed" ...
Makhno retired from typhus and military failures only in the spring of 1920. A detachment, a little man, gathered an "army" - this time a small, about five thousand, a detachment of well-armed people, certainly horse. One of the bloodiest campaigns began, the mechanism of which, fine-tuned over previous years, worked with depressing clarity.
The communists were killed. The communist organizations were smashed. In one village, in another, in the third. Cars. Leaflets. Blood. There is nothing romantic about this. Moreover, there is no hope. But there is one undeniable truth in this - the truth of resistance.
“To die or to win - this is what is now facing the peasantry of Ukraine ... But we cannot all die, there are too many of us, we are humanity, therefore, we will win” - this is how Makhno experienced this feeling of immensity. 1920 is the year of continuous peasant uprisings, the last war of the peasantry for their rights. The peasants lost it. We lost on the fields of decisive battles, and we also lost politically. And although the NEP - a kind of peace protocol - was signed, it seemed, with the interest of the peasantry, in the 29th, when they again began to take land for collective farms, it turned out that everyone had lost completely. There is no one to defend the rights before the government, and there is no one to rise to a riot.
Makhno was the last one who tried to provide his descendants with at least some kind of "right", which in the revolution is obtained only by force.
In June, Wrangel withdrew from the Crimea, and in the south of Ukraine the "last and decisive battle" of Russia for its future broke out. The package of laws adopted by the Wrangel government would undoubtedly have become a healing medicine for the country in 1917, but in 1920 the pill had to be pushed by force: so the battles were of such intensity that the Civil War had not known before. Throughout the summer, Makhno's army dangled in the red rear, methodically destroying it: disarming units, destroying food detachments (which it succeeded in, food appropriation in the “Makhnovist” regions was completely ruined). And only in the fall, when a bullet shattered Makhno's ankle in a battle near Izium, the army stopped for a whole month, occupying Starobelsk near the border with Russia, where truly extraordinary things began to happen.
First, a representative of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries (a "minority" - that is, those who recognize cooperation with the Bolsheviks) came to Makhno and hinted that in the face of such a dissent as Wrangel, true revolutionaries should forget all differences and unite. The Makhnovists immediately understood that the messenger was choosing the opinion of certain Bolshevik circles. A meeting of the Revolutionary Military Council of the army took place, at which even the most "red" among the Makhnovists, Kurylenko and Belash, spoke out in the sense that the struggle against the Bolsheviks should not be stopped.
Makhno did not oppose: he adhered to the line of the most severe agrarian terror, which, after all, was also an argument in politics. He made it clear that this time you will not get away with talking about "peace" - I found a scythe on a stone, and that if negotiations, then seriously - with seals, publicity and guarantees.
And in this, his calculation turned out to be correct: only the fear that at the moment of a decisive attack on Wrangel the Insurrectionary Army would again move from its place and go to smash the red rear, forced the Bolsheviks to negotiate. In September in Starobelsk, no longer disguising himself as Left SRs, Ivanov, an authorized RVS of the Southern Front, arrived. On September 29, the Central Committee of the CP (b) U, represented by Rakovsky, confirmed the decision to negotiate with Makhno.
Question: what was Makhno hoping for when concluding an agreement with the Bolsheviks? After all, he knew them well. No worse than they are. And yet he hoped that this time he gave up, and that they would have to reckon with him, at least in the face of Wrangel. Who knew that the "black baron" would be defeated so soon! The Perekop fortifications were considered impregnable. And that the wind will drive the water out of Sivash ...
On October 2, the agreement was signed. Not only was its meaning unprecedented, implying, for example, an amnesty to anarchists and freedom of anarchist propaganda, but also the very formula of the consent concluded by the Insurrectionary Army and the government of Ukraine. Apparently, Makhno himself was blinded by the results of his victory: after 8 months of accursed banditry, the long-awaited peace came. His wound was treated by Moscow professors, his fighters were lying down in the regular Red Army hospitals!
And most importantly, the army finally received a supply of weapons, which seemed the height of confidence. Makhno did not yet know that his elite units, the 5,000-strong Karetnikov corps, would have to play an almost leading role in crossing the Sivash. That without a weapon it would hardly have been possible. But as soon as Wrangel fell, it was all over: all clauses of the "Agreement" were instantly annulled, the Makhnovist delegates were arrested in Kharkov, Makhno was "outlawed." He did not expect such a meanness. Now he had only one thing to do - to wait for his best parts, the Krymchaks, to talk to the traitors in earnest. The meeting was to take place on December 7 in the village of Kermenchik. There was a frosty yellow dust in the air. Old Man saw two hundred emaciated horsemen. Marchenko jumped up to him with a crooked grin on his face:
- I have the honor to report that the Crimean army has returned ...
Makhno was silent. Looking at the faces of his comrades, Marchenko concluded:
- Yes, brothers, now I know what communists are ...
The Makhno raids of 1921 are interesting only for the historian: drawn on the map, they resemble the repeating dance of some insect. Obviously, this kind of interest was shown by Frunze's deputy, R. Eideman, before he realized that Makhno walked along strictly laid routes, here changing horses, leaving the wounded here, replenishing weapons here ... Having calculated the trajectory of the detachment, in June 21, Eideman for the first time abandons the tactics of pursuit and strikes Makhno a counter blow. And then there was just agony, which lasted another 2 months.
Makhno was doomed. He still lived in 1919, and it was already 1921. The revolution has won. The winners took full advantage of its fruits. They mastered new positions. We tried on new jackets. The seething, crazy time of NEP was approaching - the time of the market and the ephemeral luxury of being ...
Makhno, on the other hand, continued to be bandits with a handful of the same, who had lost everything and ready-made partisans. What the war taught them was no longer needed by people and became dangerous for them. The Makhnovists had to disappear. The safest thing to do is to die. But Makhno could not resign himself. The war gave him everything - love, comrades, human respect and gratitude, power ... The war chained him to itself with vengeance: it killed all his brothers, burned down his home, taught his heart to indifference and ruthlessness ... He was left alone: \u200b\u200bthe war ruined almost all of his friends. He knew why they had fallen, why they had not resigned themselves, he knew the law of battle: bend your head - they will put you on your knees. But he knew only his own truth, not wanting to know the truth of the changed time: during this time, a new generation grew up that wanted to live, not fight. For this is the law of youth, the law of life. And he, with his 19 th year in his heart, stood across this law.
He was overdone and carried death in himself and was no longer needed. During the pursuit of the last Makhnovists by armored vehicles, the peasants - for the first time in the entire war! - pointed out the direction to the detachments ... Looking at the emaciated, half-mad faces of the rebels, the peasants also understood: uh-uh, why should they look for good from these. Enough. Bad, mischievous, cursed - nothing will come from them, except worry and thin ...
On the crossing of Ingul, a bullet struck Makhno in the back of the head and came out of his cheek, opening his face as if with a saber scar. This was his last, 14th, wound, which was supposed to put an end to his fate, similar to those that were placed in the fate of almost all of his comrades.
But Makhno survived. Probably, the Lord decided to test him to the end: to drag him through all the bitterness of loss and outcast, emigration, betrayal of friends, poverty ...
In 1934, the flu, superimposed on chronic tuberculosis, resolved it from the bonds of the earth in a stateless Parisian hospital. The incomparable partisan drank the cup of earthly life to the end.
On November 27, 1918, Nestor Makhno proclaimed Gulyaypole the capital of his revolutionary insurgent detachment. In fact, from that moment began the history of a bizarre experiment, an attempt to establish an anarchist peasant freemen. The center of Volnitsa has always been Makhno's native Gulyaypole, but at some moments significant territories were under the control of the Makhnovists. Nestor Makhno, being one of the most colorful participants in the Civil War, gave birth to a whole movement, which in Soviet times was called Makhnovshchina - spontaneous peasant anarchism. The most bizarre legends still circulate about Father Makhno himself and his Free Territory. Some of them portray the dad as a cruel monster, a pogromist and a drunkard, while others as a defender of the interests of the poor peasantry and a real Robin Hood. Life figured out where in these stories is true, and where is fiction, and how his famous freeman functioned. Nestor Makhno To better understand the essence of the phenomenon, it is necessary to understand its inspirer. Nestor Makhno was born into the family of a Gulyaypole peasant who seriously abused alcohol. Makhno was the youngest of five brothers. None of them survived the Civil War, three of the brothers joined Makhno's detachment and died at the hands of the Reds and Austrians. One stayed away from the war, but also died when he was beaten by whites, trying to find out where his brother was. Makhno's father died shortly after his birth. For the eldest in the family, the most serious and thorough of the brothers became - Polycarp, who was 20 years older than Nestor. Makhno graduated from a two-year zemstvo school, after which he worked as an auxiliary worker. Obviously, with such an education, he did not have any bright future; most likely, he would have remained a worker all his life and lived from paycheck to paycheck. But then the 1905 revolution began. 17-year-old Makhno joined the local anarchist cell. Anarchists were then divided into theoreticians, who included high-brow intellectual-thinkers such as Kropotkin, who were engaged in the theoretical foundation of anarchism, and practitioners who were engaged in robbing the bourgeoisie. Among this category of anarchists, there were many ordinary criminals for whom anarchism was just a convenient cover. One had only to declare that the robbery was not a robbery, but a noble act of expropriation, one could count on the support of a caring public and the best political lawyers. Makhno, who graduated only two classes and read with difficulty, of course, could not be a theoretician and joined the practitioners. He became a member of a gang of anarchists engaged in expropriation and political terror. Soon he was arrested for the attempted murder of two guards (a rural analogue of the police), but was released due to his youth and lack of evidence. After a while, he took part in the murder of a local government official. His accomplices were caught and sentenced to death, Makhno escaped the death penalty due to his minority and was sentenced to hard labor. In hard labor, Pyotr Arshinov, who was a member of the Yekaterinoslav terrorist group of anarchists, who was engaged in undermining police stations, became his mentor. Arshinov took the trouble to explain to the semi-literate Makhno the theoretical subtleties of anarchism. Makhno was freed by the February Revolution, which opened the doors of prisons. After almost 10 years in hard labor, Nestor returned to his native Gulyaypole, where he turned out to be almost the only political prisoner and as a "victim of the regime" was considered a local celebrity. He created the anarchist detachment "Black Guard", was elected chairman of the local council of workers and peasants and began to implement his ideals, taking land from landowners and large owners and reducing the entire population to agricultural communes. After the signing of the Brest Peace Treaty by the Bolsheviks, the territory of modern Ukraine was occupied by German and Austrian troops. Makhno went to Moscow to negotiate with his associates and seek support from the Bolsheviks. It is known that Lenin himself received him. In the summer of 1918, he returned to Gulyaypole and gathered a small detachment of a couple of dozen people. Later, the detachment merged with the anarchist detachment of Fyodor Shchus, already operating in the district, who became the leader of the detachment. They were mainly engaged in robbery and murder of local landowners and the bourgeoisie, since the forces of the detachment were too small to enter into confrontation with the Germans, although skirmishes with small detachments did happen. Gradually, Makhno managed to push Shchus away from the command, and by the time the Germans left, the detachment had already unquestioningly obeyed this little man (Makhno was only 160 centimeters tall). Anarchist Republic On November 27, 1918, Makhno's detachment entered Gulyaypole, proclaiming it their capital. The organization of the headquarters began. Now the main opponents of Makhno and his anarchists were the Petliurists. Both those and others fought for the same audience - the peasants, only the Petliurists tried to appeal to the national feeling, which was very weak among the semi-literate peasants, while Makhno offered anarchist freedom, free land and the absence of the state. However, in reality they were not competitors. Makhno never went far from his capital and did not dream of extending his power to the entire territory of the country. The Petliurists, however, were not averse to expanding their power to these fertile lands, but they considered the Bolsheviks to be the main enemy, and concentrated all efforts on fighting them. Makhno spared no effort to strengthen his base. He knew how to win over the peasants. Makhno's detachments carried out raids on towns and villages within their radius of action, where they imposed "indemnities" on the bourgeoisie either in money or in property and food. The Makhnovists brought the money and valuables received to Gulyaypole, where Makhno personally donated part of it to the local peasants. Of course, after this, the peasants were happy to recognize Makhno as a "dad", and took a personal part in some raids. The economy of the Makhnovist freemen operated in a rather bizarre way. Most of the factory owners fled or were killed, so workers' self-government was introduced in the factories, that is, the factories were completely controlled by the workers. At the same time, they were not paid salaries, Makhno's ideal was the complete withering away of commodity-money relations and private trade. Therefore, instead of buying and selling, natural exchange was used. The peasants had to exchange with the workers: the peasants gave them food, the workers in exchange created the agricultural tools they needed. Obviously, in such conditions, the normal functioning of the economy was simply impossible, production chains were destroyed or became confusing and ineffective due to improvisation on the ground. It cannot be said that Makhno was greatly worried. After all, although formally he was considered an anarcho-communist, in fact he was a representative of spontaneous and chthonic peasant anarchism with a corresponding worldview (my village is the whole universe, and the rest simply does not interest). Makhno saw the ideal as an anarchist peasant republic, in which all peasants work together and without compulsion in the communes and help each other. Towns Makhno did not understand and did not like, when a delegation of workers came to him one day with complaints that they had not received money for a long time, Makhno cursed them with freeloaders and Denikin's aftermaths and kicked them out. Do not forget that Makhno was a man who lived 2/3 of his life in the village and spent one third in hard labor. Of course, in prison, comrades explained to him the essence of anarchism and gave him clever books to read, but reading them is one thing, and understanding is quite another. The peasant Free Territory seemed to him an ideal peasant kingdom, in which everything is arranged by itself at the expense of the consciousness of the inhabitants. The legends about the existence of the Makhnovist rubles, which he allegedly printed, are still popular. Sometimes there are even photographs of banknotes with skulls and bones. In fact, this is a legend, not a single banknote printed in Gulyaypole was found, and all modern photographs are fakes. On the territory of the Makhnovist republic, all banknotes that were in use in neighboring territories, from pre-revolutionary "kerenki" to the currency of the Petliurites, circulated simultaneously. As in all other territories controlled by all kinds of atamans, Makhno was both power and law. He made the rules, he also ruled the court. True, unlike the others, Makhno sometimes observed some democratic rituals for the sake of decency. On secondary issues, decisions were allowed to be made by the Soviets, and some were even made by a simple peasant vote. But, as already mentioned, these questions were mostly secondary, and if Makhno did not like some decision, he reserved the right not to observe it or cancel it. And if it was very necessary, then generally dispensed with conventions and was very quick to reprisal, as happened with the executions of his political opponents. Makhno was very vigilant that a strong competitor did not appear in his ranks, who would want to challenge the power of the dad. For example, one of the field commanders of the Makhnovists, Polonsky, was shot together with his female partner and a group of his closest associates without any trial or investigation, which angered even Makhno's closest associates. In his defense, he stated that Polonsky allegedly was preparing a conspiracy against him and planned to poison him with either moonshine or potatoes. In fact, there was no serious evidence against Polonsky, and the dad, apparently, feared an increase in his popularity, especially since things were not going well with the Makhnovists at that moment and some former comrades-in-arms could grumble. Especially for the consideration of all "political" cases, the Anti-Machinery Commission was created, which was something like the revolutionary tribunals at the Reds and the military courts at the Whites. Also, following the example of the Reds and Whites, he organized counterintelligence, which combined the functions of military intelligence and the punitive functions of the Soviet Cheka, identifying anti-Makhnovist sentiments, as well as Bolshevik agents (in those periods when the Makhnovists were at enmity with them). It is worth noting that, unlike similar structures in the Reds and Whites, which were systematized and well-organized, among the rebels it was chaotic and did not have a centralized nature, with rare exceptions. Almost every insurgent unit had its own counterintelligence, often not connected in any way with the higher one. Makhno also had his own counterintelligence, which combined the functions of his personal protection - the so-called. "Black Hundred", which included the rebels most loyal to the dad. Makhno and the Bolsheviks Makhno's relationship with the Bolsheviks was very complicated. The parties either entered into an alliance, then they broke, after which Makhno was declared a bandit outlaw. In 1917, even before the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks viewed the anarchists as temporary allies and recruited them into revolutionary uprisings. After the seizure of power, the anarchists became a hindrance and serious competitors. The Bolsheviks, with the help of populist slogans, intercepted popularity from the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, and now the anarchists, with their even more populist slogans, were already seizing influence from them. The number of the "Black Guard" - the armed detachments of the anarchists, grew steadily. In 1918, the persecution of anarchists began, however, the Bolsheviks assured that they only persecuted criminals posing as anarchists, and ideological comrades enjoyed immunity. The Bolsheviks badly needed the support of all kinds of batek-atamans (of whom there were many in the southern peasant regions) against Denikin's army and offered Makhno an alliance. His detachment as a combat unit joined the Zadneprovskaya division of the Red Army. She was also joined by another daddy-ataman Grigoriev, who by that time had already managed to serve the Petliurites and be an independent daddy. However, Batek's romance with the Red Army was short-lived. Their detachments, accustomed to the lack of strict discipline, could hardly endure their stay in the Red Army, and the atamans themselves, accustomed to being an uncontested power, could hardly put up with the need for submission. Soon Grigoriev rebelled, and then Makhno left the front line, outlawed for this. Both atamans entered into an alliance, but the two bears were cramped in one den, each of them was very suspicious of the other, in addition, Grigoriev was a direct competitor to Makhno in the struggle for the sympathy of the peasants. In the end, Makhno and his comrades-in-arms lured Grigoriev into a conversation and killed him under the pretext that he was trying to enter into relations with whites. Some of Grigoriev's people joined Makhno's troops. Army of Makhno In 1919, Makhno begins to form a rebel army. The word army sounds loud, it is obvious that his units were not at all like the army. Although some sources indicate its number of almost one hundred and a half thousand people, this is a clear exaggeration. The core of the army, that is, its more or less constant composition, numbered several thousand people. They could be joined by peasants from outside to take part in separate raids. The Makhnovists did not have a constant and clearly fixed number, just as there was no military uniform of the established pattern. Makhno's army had all the typical shortcomings of such organizations: low discipline, the ability to operate only in a narrowly limited space - within a radius of several tens of kilometers from their native villages, very weak theoretical and practical military training. Therefore, the combat value of the Makhnovists as front-line troops was very low. His rebels could not withstand a direct clash with the enemy's regular military formations, which is why all their successes were associated with partisan tactics. When it was required to arrange a raid along the unprotected rear areas, sweep in a whirlwind and burn everything in the way, and then quickly retreat, Makhno had no equal in this. But one on one his army was weaker than any enemy. The Makhnovists could successfully operate precisely in the conditions of the confusion and chaos of the Civil War, when several forces acted simultaneously on a small territory: red, white, Petliura, green, who either entered into alliances with each other, then began to fight again. Father Makhno's strength was in the weakness of his army. Neither the red nor the whites considered his irregular peasant formations to be their primary enemy, and turned a blind eye to them, preferring to first deal with each other. In these conditions, Makhno was constantly faced with the task of deciding with whom and against whom to fight. Obviously, none of the forces was interested in Makhno and there would be no place for him either in the independent Ukrainian project of Petliura, for which he was a competitor in the struggle for the peasantry, or in the project of the Whites, for whom Makhno was a bandit who, by a strange quirk, got carried away politics, nor in the Soviet project, which provided for the dictatorship of one party on behalf of the proletariat, and not at all the peasantry. Makhno himself reasoned simply: the whites are bourgeois, and the reds are revolutionaries, but they are wrong. You have to fight with the bourgeoisie, but you can negotiate with the revolutionaries. However, he did not take into account that it would not be possible to outwit Lenin. This man had behind him a quarter of a century of sophisticated political struggle, party intrigues, factional splits, and people like Makhno, Lenin snapped like nuts. While he could bring some benefit in the war with the whites, Makhno pointedly hinted that the Bolsheviks were not against the anarchists and that Makhno might even be allowed to experiment in Gulyaypole. As soon as the whites were finally defeated (the Makhnovists participated in the Crimean operation as the allies of the Reds, having entered into an alliance with them for the second time) and Makhno was no longer needed, he was declared a bandit and an entire army was thrown into liquidation. Makhno rushed through the forests for several months, lost his entire army and a significant part of his associates, and in the end, in the summer of 1921, Makhno with 78 associates (all that remained of his army) crossed the Romanian border. The Bolsheviks demanded his extradition, so he moved to Poland, and then to France, where he changed his name to Mikhnenko and lived the rest of his life. The once almighty dad earned his living by weaving slippers, finding shelter with the bourgeoisie so hated by him. Makhno died in 1934 from bone tuberculosis at the age of 45. In Soviet times, Makhno was portrayed in books and films exclusively as a negative hero, a thug and a drunkard. With the collapse of the USSR, Makhno's personality gained new popularity. He became the most famous hero of the third force of the Civil War - the “greens”, being the most colorful of all the peasant atamans, because, unlike most other such characters, he had a clear political platform and even tried to put it into practice, although it is clear to many that the program this could be realized within the framework of one village, but not the whole country.
