‘Memories of Makhno’ (by Ida Mett)

I would have said that the essence of the man was that he was and had remained a Ukrainian peasant. Not that he was by any means a happy-go-lucky sort; on the contrary, in the depths of his soul he was a thrifty peasant perfectly familiar with life in the countryside and with the hopes of the inhabitants.In his early youth he had become a revolutionary and terrorist, in which he encapsulated the prevailing spirit of the age and of his background – he was the son of a large and greatly impoverished family of a farm labourer. Along with a few friends he had set about manufacturing bombs in the very same crockpot in which his mother used to knead her dough. Imagine his mother’s horror when she saw that crockpot explode and catapulted out of the main oven. Shortly after that tragic-comic incident the young Makhno attempted the life of a local police official and was sentenced to death. But he was only seventeen years old and overtures made by his mother resulted in the sentence’s being commuted to life imprisonment. And so here mained in the Butyrki prison up until the revolution in 1917.  Now the Butyrki back then was a sort of a revolutionary university.  Quite young men would often go inside knowing nothing about just about any revolutionary theory and it was inside the prison that they acquired from older comrades and intellectuals the grounding that they lacked. Makhno too learnt a lot in prison, but being an inflexible sort, he was forever at loggerheads with the prison authorities and that often led to his being placed in solitary and just made him all the more bitter. It strikes me that he came away from the Butyrki prison also with a measure of animosity towards intellectuals, of whom he was to some extent jealous. But within him there was a genuine, healthy thirst for learning and a regard for it. He would often recount the old chestnut widely told about him in Ukraine; it seems that once upon a time, receiving a delegation of railwaymen, Makhno had told them that he had no further use for them as he was planning to replace the railways with tatchankis (carts in wide use in Ukraine). Look at this rabble! What have they come up with? he spluttered. He entered the Butyrki in 1908 or 1909 and by around 1914 had had time enough to absorb many things and plenty to mull over. When the ’14 war broke out, the bulk of the political prisoners held in the prisonturned into supporters of the defense of the nation; at the time Makhno, acting on his own, drafted a defeatist leaflet and scattered it around the prison. That leaflet opened with these words: “Comrades, when are you going to stop being scoundrels?” The leaflet created a bit of a stir and some veterans of the revolution such as the Social Revolutionary Minor launched a bit of an investigation to trace whoever had dared issue it.(3) I had this account from Makhno himself and it was confirmed by his prison comrade, Piotr Arshinov.(4)  The February 1917 revolution also opened the gates for this inmate who was at large again at the age of twenty-five. Carrying some intellectual baggage that he had picked up in the Butyrki revolutionary university. He only stayed in Moscow a very short time and hurried home to his village, Gulyai-Polye, where his entire family was living and the young revolutionary was soon diving headlong into the radiant abyss of revolutionary Ukraine.Among the peasants in his village he enjoyed great authority and he organized anarchist groups among the local peasants, so that later, when he tried to write a history of the Makhnovist movement, he credited those groups with having been the instigators of the partisan movement and he denied that any outside anarchists had exercised any sway over the movement. He referred to the latter as “touring players” and accused them of having brought nothing to the movement. And if, according to him, the movement had been anarchist in character even so, that was a cachet bestowed upon it by Makhno himself and by the peasant groups organized by him.

Was Makhno an honest man seeking the welfare of the people or was he a lucky one dropped into the melée by sheer fluke? I think that his goodwill towards society was sincere and beyond all question. He was a politician with an innate gift and dabbled in stratagems that were often out of all proportion with his limited political expertise.  However, I believe that he was perfectly at home in the role of people’s avenger. As to the matter of knowing what he and his class wanted and hoped for, that was actually the Makhnovist movement’s weak point. But that weak point was shared by the whole of peasant Russia, no matter which the camp. They wanted freedom, and land but what purpose they would turn those two to was harder to define.The same weakness partly accounts for the fact that the Russian peasantry later failed to put up determined opposition to the new serfdom introduced by Stalin.  I can recall Nestor Makhno once mentioning in my presence a dream that he would have liked to see realized. It was in the autumn of 1927 in the course of a stroll around the Bois de Vincennes.(5)  It was asplendid day. The rural setting doubtless stirred the poet in his souland he improvised his dream story: the young Mikhnienko (being Makhno’s real name) arrives back in his native Gulyai-Polye village and begins working the land and leading a normal, peaceable existence. He remarries, a young girl from the village. He has a good horse and a good harness. One evening he makes his way quietly home with his wife from the fair they went to to market their harvest. And are now in the throes of fetching some presents back fromtown. He was so carried away with his story that he had completely forgotten that he was not in Gulyai-Polye but in Paris, that he was without land, house or young wife. In actual fact, he was not living with his wife at the time, or to be more precise, was no longer living with her as they had separated on several occasions and were just starting life together again, for God knows what reason. They were psychologically and quite possibly physically strangers to each other.At the time she certainly did not love him and who knows if she ever had. She was a Ukrainian schoolteacher, rather sympathetic to the Petliurist movement and had never had anything in common with the revolutionary movement.(6)  I read somewhere that Makhno had become a revolutionary due to the influence of a female schoolteacher who later went on to become hiswife. That is an absolute crock. By the time he met his wife, Galina Kuzmienko, he was already Batko Makhno; she had been seduced by the role of wife to the all-powerful ataman of Ukraine.(7)  Besides, she was not the only woman to have courted Makhno. While in Paris he told me about that period in his life when folk were groveling to him and when he could have had any woman he wanted, such was his glory, but in actual fact he did not have any free time to spend on his personal life. He was telling me this in order to rebut the legend of the orgies that had supposedly been organized by and for him.(8)  In his book, Voline peddles the same claptrap. In actual fact, Makhno was a male virgin or a bit of a puritan. As to his dealings with women, I would have said that he was a combination of a sort of a peasant simplicity and respect for womanhood, typical in Russian revolutionary circles at the beginning of the century. From time totime he would reminisce, genuinely wistfully, about his first wife, apeasant woman fromthe village of his birth, whom he had married on his release in 1917. He even had a child by that marriage, but under the German occupation he had gone into hiding elsewhere and his wife, tipped off by somebody that he had been killed, had remarried.  Their child had died and they never did meet again.  On his right cheek Makhno had a huge scar sweeping right down tohis mouth. His second wife, Galina Kuzmienko, had tried to kill him in his sleep. That was in Poland and it seems it had something to do with an affair that she had had with a Petliurist officer. What the immediate trigger for her action was, I do not know. She would very often do her damnedest to compromise him or slight him psychologically in the presence of others. Thus on one occasion when I was present she said of someone: He was a real general, unlike Nestor here, her intention being to stress that she did thought him no general. Now she was aware that during Makhno’s time in Romania the Romanian government had rendered him all the honors attendanton that rank.  In Paris, Galina Kuzmienko worked sometimes as a housekeeper and sometimes as a cook and she reckoned that nature had her marked out for something better. In 1926-27 she had written to Moscow to ask the government if she might return to Russia.(9)  As far as I know, Moscow had rejected her application. It seems to me that after that she was back living with Makhno as husband and wife. I do not think that he had forgiven her for having made that application and I reckon rather that they had both been prompted by moral weakness. After Makhno’s death, she became Voline’s wife and together with him she had committed the lousiest moral offense: they had both stolen Makhno’s private journal from his deathbed and spirited it away.(10)  Now Makhno had been keeping that diary throughout his entire time as an émigré and in it he had set down his opinions of his co-religionists and their activities; I can state that because in 1932 Makhno made it known to me that he would have liked my opinion on an incident to which I was a witness, in order to check the accuracy of what he had jotted down in his private journal. It appears that during the German occupation of France, Galina Kuzmienko had become intimate with a German officer and had then moved with her daughter to Berlin where she had been killed during an air raid. It may well be that this is not true either and that she is still alive somewhere, maybe even inside Russia.  Makhno was besotted with his daughter. How their relationship stood by the end of his life I cannot say but when the girl was little and was under his supervision he granted her every whim; but on occasion, he snapped and beat her, after which he was almost ill at the very thought that he had lifted his hand to her. His dream was for her to become an intellectual. I had occasion to see her after Makhno’s death: she was seventeen and closely resembled her father physically, but she did not know much about him and I cannot say whether she had any great curiosity about him.  As for Makhno’s dealings with Voline, I can certify that not only did he not like Voline but that he had no regard for him, looking upon him as a worthless creature with no character. He told me several times that in Ukraine Voline had been in a hurry to play up to him and never ventured to express an independent opinion in thebatko’s presence. Thus a Red envoy, one Polonski, was executed by the Makhnovist general staff. Certain members of the staff were unhappy about that. And lo and behold Voline showed up from somewhere.  He was briefed on the matter but in response merely asked: And Batko was happy with that? If the answer is yes, I refuse to even discuss the matter.  It so happened that Makhno was in an adjoining room and in a half-drunken state. On overhearing the conversation,  he strode into the room where Voline was and asked him:  So, you are in agreement with a man having been shot without even asking the reason why he was executed? And even if the Batko had been in agreement, could he not have been mistaken, and if drunk when he had had him shot, then what?Voline did not dare utter another word. On the other hand, in Paris, when Makhno was living in poverty and neglect, everybody was critical of his past record and activity in Ukraine, whereas over there the very same people had not had the gumption to express any opinion. Makhno was clever enough to realize that and he repaid the sources of the criticisms with an implacable hatred. Moreover, when candidly told the truth he appeared to take umbrage, but I amsure that in his heart of hearts Makhno looked up to such folk as he had it in him to observe a modicum of objectivity. However, I would have been in a position to deduce the opposite from my own experience; on one occasion it fell to me to type up a copy of his memoirs. In the course of that effort I noted that some facts of authentic historical interest had been jumbled up with citations from speeches from meetings, delivered during the early months of the revolution, citations containing nothing that was original and therefore not worthy of being cited. By whom and how had they been recorded back in 1917 for verbatimq uotation? Backthen, thousands of such speeches had been delivered. I made a point of telling Makhno that, although his memoirs were very interesting, that was no way to write a book and that the most important facts and documentation had to be picked out and marshaled into a single book, whereas he had written two books and even then had yet to come to the Makhnovist movement proper and was still on the lead-up to it.  He listened to me attentively but never took my advice. True, I was no great diplomat myself and I said to him– You may be a great soldier, but you are not a great writer. Just ask one of your friends –Maria Goldsmith say – to collate your memoirs.(11) Not only did he not act on my advice but he never forgave me for offering it. During the last years of his life, though, he may well have remembered my advice as unfortunately what I had foreseen came to pass and his book on the Makhnovist movement was never written. Indeed, a French friend had offered Makhno some material assistance with the writingof his memoirs, but given that there was no sign of the work’s being completed, that friend had resiled from that assistance. So Makhno was obliged to earn a living and apparently the memoirs were never finished. Later on he was living in such dire poverty that he had no inclination to write.

Was Makhno an anti-semite? In my view, not at all. He believed that the Jews were a capable and clever people and he may well have been somewhat envious of them, but there was no animosity towards the Jews of his acquaintance. It did not cost him a thought to befriend a Jew. When accused of anti-semitism, he took grievous offense and was saddened by it, as he was too closely connected in his past with internationalist ideology not to be sensible of the significance of such a charge. He was proud of having had the ataman Grigoriev shot and reckoned that all the rumors of pogroms supposedly carried out by the Makhnovists were just odious inventions.(12)

When I wondered why a man like Makhno had suddenly assumed such power in his day, I explained it primarily in terms of the fact that he himself was the flesh of the flesh of the Ukrainian peasantry and also because he was a great actor and, in front of a crowd, he was transformed and became unrecognizable. In small gatherings he found it hard to make himself understood, which is to say, his po-faced way of speaking was laughable in a setting of intimacy. But had only to appear in front of a larger audience for the man to turn into a great public speaker, eloquent and self-confident. Thus, I had occasion to see him at a public meeting organized in Paris by the Club du Faubourg at which the issue of anti-semitism within the Makhnovist movement was up for discussion.(13)  From listening to himand above all from seeing him I understood this Ukrainian peasant’s capacity for transfiguration.  However, there was another character trait of his that no doubt accounted for his sway over the crowd and that was his physical bravery. Despite being a bit hostile to him, Arshinov, while in Paris, insisted that Makhno would stroll through a hail of gunfire the way other people would through rain; Arshinov regarded such courage as a sort of a physical anomaly.  During his years abroad, Makhno was stricken by an ailment typical of former luminaries, who normally struggle to revert to simple living and run-of-the-mill conditions. He seemed to resent the fact that no one was talking about him, and he would grant interviews to all manner of journalists, even though he knew that most parties and people were inimical to him. On one occasion some Ukrainian journalist had asked him for an interview, with myself as go-between. I advised him against granting that interview, anticipating that the journalist was about to twist everything and that Makhno would not be given any chance to put his case. My advice, of course, was ignored and the journalist had published whatever suited his purposes and which was not at all what the former batko had told him.  Makhno was incandescent, but I do not think he learnt anything from it. Could he have reverted to being some little non-entity? It was certainly his dream to become an ordinary Ukrainian peasant again, but I reckon that that sort of life had been shut off to him for good.  I remember that one day we chatted with him about the careers of the soviet generals Budyenny and Voroshilov.(14)  Makhno had a high opinion of them as a fellow professional; it struck me that he may well even have been somewhat envious of their careers. It cannot be ruled out that he was reluctantly niggled by thoughts that he too might have made a Red Army general. Not that he ever said as much to me, though. Instead, in conversation he used to tell me that if he were to go back to Russia, he would have to start learning the rudiments of regular military skills from scratch. That conversation should be thought of as his daydreaming out loud. I am certain, though, that had he gone back to Russia, he would not have been able to sit still for two days without falling out with and challenging the rulers there, because, in his heart of hearts he was an honest man and would not have been able to stomach the hierarchical authorities, nor the lying society.  Makhno lived long enough to learn about the collectivization in Russia, but I have no idea what he thought of it.

Was Makhno a true believer in anarchism, having claimed to be a subscriber to it? I think not. His was more of a loyalty to the memories of his youth when anarchism meant a belief that everything on earth might be altered and that the poor deserved their place in thesun. The anarchists that Makhno got to know in Russia during the revolution he had no great regard for, because they struck him as inept and also because they parachuted into the Makhnovshchina as theoreticians and, when it came to courage, were no match for those simple Ukrainian peasants who could have taught anyone a thing or two about physical bravery. He was bitterly critical of Kropotkin’s patriotism in 1914. I could sum this up by saying that he had a flawless grasp of anarchist thinking’s being a poor fit for the practicalities of social life.Was Makhno the drunkard as which Voline depicts him? I think not. Over a three-year period in Paris I never saw him drunk and I was seeing him very often at that time. I had occasion to accompany him as his interpreter to dinners organized in his honor by some foreign anarchists. A single drink made him tipsy, with his eyes twinkling and his tongue loosening, but I never saw him properly drunk. They tell me that in his final years he went hungry, let himself go and maybe he started drinking then; I cannot rule that out. But as a rule, what with his ailing and weakened physique, he got drunk on just a few drops of alcohol. Being an ataman, he had had to match the drinking habits of the ordinary Ukrainian peasant in his everyday life.  In terms of character flaws, I might have pointed to his being extremely incredulous and diffident, albeit that I could not argue that these traits were not pathological consequences of his civil war-time military activity. On occasion he could be suspicious even of his closest friends. Which explains why, in his personal relations, hefound it hard to distinguish between what mattered and the trivial.  Could he tell his friends from his enemies? I reckon that somewhere inside himself he could tell the difference between them, but, given his prickly character, he was quite capable of squabbling with people who wished him well. After his death, his private journal fell into thehands of two of his enemies, his wife and Voline. For all his suspiciousness, he could scarcely have anticipated such a catastrophe.