This is a persistent myth that is shared amongst anarchists and RadLibs alike that the Soviets betrayed the Makhnovists by reneging on their so-called alliance with the Black Army, turning on them immediately after the defeat of the White Army.
This furnishes the anarchist persecution fetish and common narratives about how communists will always betray “the true revolution” and how Lenin was a tyrant.
The historical facts, however, paint a significantly different picture.
For one, you do not sign pacts with your allies. There was a military pact that was signed but, like the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, this is something that occurred between two parties that were constantly at odds with each other and the pact was signed out of conditions where the interests of both parties were temporarily aligned. This simple fact escapes the historical revisionists constantly but, unsurprisingly, only when it serves their arguments.
Secondly, Makhno himself knew that this pact was only temporary. Upon the signing of the pact he had this to say in The Road to Freedom, the Makhnovists’ mouthpiece, in October 13, 1920:
"Military hostilities between the Makhnovist revolutionary insurgents and the Red Army have ceased. Misunderstandings, vagueness and inaccuracies have grown up around this truce: it is said that Makhno has repented of his anti-Bolshevik acts, that he has recognized the soviet authorities, etc. How are we to understand, what construction are we to place upon this peace agreement?
What is very clear already is that no intercourse of ideas, and no collaboration with the soviet authorities and no formal recognition of these has been or can be possible. We have always been irreconcilable enemies, at the level of ideas, of the party of the Bolshevik-communists.
We have never acknowledged any authorities and in the present instance we cannot acknowledge the soviet authorities. So again we remind and yet again we emphasize that, whether deliberately or through misapprehension, there must be no confusion of military intercourse in the wake of the danger threatening the revolution with any crossing-over, ‘fusion’ or recognition of the soviet authorities, which cannot have been and cannot ever be the case."
[Source: Nestor Makhno: Anarchy’s Cossack by Skirda and Sharkey, pp. 200-201]
Clearly these are not the words that allies speak about one another.
At the successful Seige of Perekop, whereby the Red and Black Armies successfully broke the back of Wrangel’s White Army forces and brought the Southern front to a conclusion, Makhno’s aide-de-camp Grigori Vassilevsky, pronounced the end of the pact, proclaiming:
“That’s the end for the agreement! Take my word for it, within one week the Bolsheviks are going to come down on us like a ton of bricks!”
[Source: Nestor Makhno: Anarchy’s Cossack by Skirda and Sharkey, p.238]
The fact is that USSR furnished the Black Army with much-needed military supplies without which they would have been unable to continue fighting and Makhno was no pluralistic leader who was open to Bolsheviks; in fact, his army incorporated Bolshevik forces which defected to the Black Army and Makhno set his military secret police force, the Kontrrazvedka, to at first surveil the former Bolshevik military leaders along with the rising Bolshevik influence that had developed particularly around Yekaterinoslav, and then later summarily executed the Bolshevik leaders when they posed too much of a threat to his power due to commanding some of the strongest units in his army.
But that’s a topic which deserves its own post…
Thanks for this post. Always wanted to understand what was rly going on between the Anarchists and Bolsheviks. At first I was actually heavily sympathetic towards them as I didn’t grasp just how much of a significant difference there is, and I simply considered them ‘slightly confused allies’ or so. Never got around to read anything on the matter though, as there’s enough books I gotta read first. Looking forward to the next post.
Honestly, there’s really sparse historical work on Makhnovia tbh and it’s either glossed over by liberal historians or it’s written by starry-eyed anarchists who just ignore or outright excuse some really egregious actions on behalf of Makhnovists.
The upshot of having the most comprehensive historical stuff coming from anarchist historians means that, when you read closely and with a critical eye, you can paint a picture of Makhnovia using sources that anarchists have difficulty disputing. (Although that’s a little naive of me to say because I’ve legitimately had anarchists dismiss Volin’s eyewitness testimony as being Bolshevik propaganda despite Volin essentially being a leftcom who then became a lifelong anarchist that served in the Makhnovists’ Revolutionary Military Council, so yeah…)
Some of it is really arduous reading though. I recently finished reading Nestor Makhno In the Civil War by Michael Malet and he switches from referring to figures by their first names and their last names (and a lot of these figures don’t even have Wikipedia entries), he expects you to remember factions based on the numbers of brigades and divisions etc. (i.e. he’ll say “the 12th brigade encountered the 4th regiment near Yekaterinoslav” as a full sentence and you just have to figure out whether this was a military engagement or allies meeting up with one another based on little if any other contextual clues) when there were multiple factions battling it out and one particular bastard who switched sides more times than I could count, and he literally dropped the most opaque prose with referents being difficult if not impossible to distinguish, for example:
If that passage left you puzzled then believe me when I say that reading the book and trying to track all these fragments of info that would be introduced without context clues didn’t make it much easier.
Honestly reading the Game of Thrones novels and tracing the heraldry and all lineages and relations was easier for me than this book was, despite this thing only being 200 pages.
You’re not missing out tbh.
I wouldn’t say that I’m unsympathetic towards them, being essentially a lifelong anarchist who only recently became an ML after more years than I’d care to admit, but they definitely didn’t live up to their principles as anarchists and in studying anarchism put into practice, it really made me recognise just how much things like vanguardism and the recreation of state apparatuses and a transitional state occurs out of necessity to defend the revolution, regardless of how much you are ideologically opposed to this sort of stuff.
It’s just the nature of a revolution and fighting against counterrevolution.
I’d be glad to be proven wrong but more than that I’d love to see a new anarchist revolution take place today because I would contend that it’d follow along the lines of other revolutions where the necessity for secret police, vanguardism, a centralised military force and economic management, even things such as political purges would get proven to (once again) be necessary because it would vindicate the ML position on these matters.