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and attacked a campaign of

and destroyed vilification

the

anarchist

communes; they

launched

against By JuIy

Makhno, cdlling Denikin

him a traitor hard toacross .of inpursue

and a counter-revolutionary.

was driving

wards Moscow, and Makhno was stiIl Ukraine. His retreat continued

retreating August in

westwards a series to

through

c o n c l - u si v e

engagements with exhausted

the Whites , who cont inued

and harass the

insurgents.

fn

late

September which

Makhnots in

column the

reached of the

Umant

in

northwest of the

Uk-

raine, tory. near

was still his

hands to

remnants

Direc-

Handing

wounded over and fought

the

nationalists, battle the east. against

Makhno turned the Whites, later and

Peregonovka them and

a pitched through to

routing

breaking

El-even days Guliai-Po1e,

he had covered his units

the

660 kilometres harass Denikints

from

Umanf to

began to

rear.

Denikin ers have

had underestimated claimed cost him near depot

Makhno,

a misjudgement victory. the

that First,

some writDenikin's destroyed his tenuous

Moscow and Umanr. at Then,

forces

were

oefeated

Makhnovites he A l -I lost this

the White hold

artilfery cities

Berdiansk. in his

Last, rear .

on the

and vi l lages forward Moscow,

decisively its , defenby the

weakened Denikin's sive Iine before

momentum. The Red Army held counter-attacked, up in the and eventually Crimea.

end of

L9L9 , bottled

Denikin

I n D e c e m b e r 1 9i 9 still operating to

tt,e Bolsheviks in its

ordered

M a k h n o' s I n s u r g e n t and badly hit

Army,

home territory front.

by a typhus that if he

epidemic,

the

Po1ish

Makhno, weII

aware

L2

economic the

demands or

on

them

would

have

been

identical

to

those

of

Russians

the

Germans.

t Makhno s military sions. His throwing

role his

was, perhaps, weight into

crucial the

on one or on the It

two occaBolshevik was Makhrefused moveaband the

balance

side may, just

possibly,

have saved the that

revolution.

nofs revolutionary alliance to the

integrity

prevented

pogroms, that

White Guards. Grigor'ev, to the his

who led it

a peasant

ment so similar sorbed by it

lulakhnovshchina that assassination,

was completely so principled, against

after

was not

his men committed Jews .

atrocities

of conspicuous

brutality

I[akhnovshchina change and society. various not both

was a coalition likely to

of

two in

trends, influence

both in

resentf

u1

of

decline

a modernised with

The strata of

petty-bourgeois of the Ukrainian

anarchists peasantry, or

made common cause which were except action

generally under ex-

capable

constructive Together

action they feared,

solidarity a rear-guard

treme

pressure.

fought

against might rob

a revolution them of ty,

which

they

perhaps rather

unreasonably, than the

everything.

The perception, motive.

living the Nestor

reafi-

was the

determinant

The third

element, of

catalyst, Makhno. his deand the

was the

extraordinary his

and unstable

personality

His recklessness, tacticalmanded by the revolut

uncompromising gif t The of

revolutionary were the

fervour, qual ities anarchism and between

sense , and his the ion moment. that the

leadership

contradictions were

between makit'rg,

Bolsheviks

58

two-thirds tile

of

the

Ukraine, areas.

making

it

one of

the

worl-d' s most

f er-

grain-producing

fn the

typical

settlement

pattern the

of the southern nineteenth

steppes to

Guliai-

PoIe had grown by the over 30'000 people. cobbled streets built banks, ft

end of

century in

a town of with had churof a

was about eight buildings.

kilometres The growing

length,

and brick

bourgeoisie

a post

and telegraph and markets was a police of

office, the

and two Orthodox source the

ches - The bazaars rnodest f ame,' there administration rested on the

town were the a hospital,

station,

vol,ost,

bui 1din9, output of

and severa l- schools . This

prosperity and a be-

a few iron-foundries, dotted along the

flour-mills,

farm-machinery tween the river

factory

ribbon

development

and the railway.

The beginnings tariat ' peasant

of

industrialisation

had created

a small

prolel-and. in the

workers

at most a qeneration from Poltava outskirts

away f rom the or of Chernigov the town.

MilI-workers north, to live the

came seasonally in barracks

on the

Others

worked in dle-c1ass settl-ers

factories

or foundries , or in the homes of servants. 1 Jews, Great Russians, area, but the peasants

the mid-

as domestic lived in the

and German

were overwhelmingly

1. Anatol' Hak (pseud. ), vid Hul-iai-Polia do N'iu-rorku (Neu ulm, Ig73), p.2I; victor Peters, Nestor l|akhno (winnipeg , , p.16-1g; BSE 2nd d., s.v. [Ig7o]) "GuIiai-PoIe". Peters' chapter on Makhno's early life was substantially based on information provided by Hak (rvan Antypenko), an emigre native of GuriaiPole who subsequencly pubJ-ished his memoirs.

62

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