Comments

You must log in or register to comment.

chaos wrote

Cool. How successful was it?

2

EdgyIndividualistBuffoon wrote

I would say that anarchist Ukraine was successful -- at least as successful as Catalonia, and perhaps even more so depending on how one measures success. The Ukrainian anarchist insurgents succeeded in complete liberation of a territory stretching north from Melitopol to Ekaterinoslav (modern-day Dnipropetrovsk or Dnipro as of very recently) east to Bakhmut near the far eastern border with Russia, and south again to Mariupol. The economic character of the core area was an anarchistic one, in which the direct producers democratically organized production through councils and organized distribution democratically through a council representing made up of the smaller councils together. Farmers decided the ins and outs of collective food production on their farms, teachers decided on curriculum and method for teaching students, factory workers on commodity production in the factories, etc. There was freedom of speech and by far the most tolerant and inclusive notion of community membership in all of Europe at the time: Jews, Christians, Ukrainians, Greeks, Russians -- no one was excluded on the basis of their identity. The character of the territory was very much anti-racist and intolerant of hate. The Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army was the only fighting group in Ukraine at the time other than the Bolsheviks to not take part in anti-Jewish pogroms, and the only fighting group, including the Bolsheviks, to actively hunt down perpetrators of pogroms, give them a trial, and execute them for crimes against the people. The needs of the Insurrectionary Army tasked with defending the territory and liberating further territory were determined by a Revolutionary Military Council made up of workers, peasants, and insurgents from all over the Free Territory, and the disposition of the Army was determined by a council as well, although certain voices (e.g. Makhno) within that council were definitely more persuasive than others. This fits with Bakunin's thoughts on the matter of expertise:

Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor the savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest.

Beyond the core area, various degrees of liberation at different times set an even further limit on the territory, stretching from the outskirts of Odessa, north to Myrhorod, east to Starobilsk, and south again to Tagonrog in Russia.

It wasn't entirely perfect: Makhno himself complained that they weren't completely successful in eliminating the use of currency for trade, which means they didn't completely eliminate wealth and property for everybody in the entire region, but they did end the reign of the landlords, the capitalists, and the state bureaucrats, and production and distribution was by and large democratic and fair. There was one sort of undemocratic element of the administration of the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army: the Kontrrazvedka, the counterintelligence group tasked with working against the spies of the Hetman, of the Whites, of the Nationalists, and eventually of the Bolsheviks. Intelligence work is always nasty, though, and that's especially true for the period in question at the end of World War I. The entirety of the territory didn't stay liberated for the entire lifespan of the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army: Ukraine was in the middle of a 4-way civil war between the old Hetman monarchist-militarist state, the right-wing Ukrainian Nationalists like Petliura, the counterrevolutionary White Army led by the likes of Denikin, and the alliance between the anarchists and the Bolsheviks, which eventually broke. Different parts of the expanded Free Territory fell under the control of different factions at different times, had to be re-liberated, etc.

For more information, here are some sources:

Voline's book is absolutely worth reading, but most of the information in it about the Ukrainian anarchists comes directly from Arshinov's book, with a little coming from Voline's own direct witness testimony. Unfortunately, much primary source material has been lost. Most of it was held by Arshinov, and there were several instances in which he lost material like newspapers and documents of the councils. Some were lost in battle, some were lost in searches by other authorities (namely the Bolsheviks, who would not have been quick to publish these documents since they would directly contradict Trotsky's lies about the anarchists), and a large trove of irreplaceable documents was lost when a train was stopped and searched (I believe by the Bolsheviks) near Kharkov and Arshinov narrowly escaped.

5