Makhno & the Bolsheviks
Oct 17 2009 16:03
I've just finished an excellent book, Paul Avrich's 'Anarchists in the Russian Revolution', which looked at the alarm federation and Makhno's group. Makhno and the Bolsheviks had an on again off again relationship, with Trotsky at one point even considering leaving Makhno and the self-managed peasant communes alone. My question is, what ultimately set off the Bolsheviks to send in assassins and write off Makhno? The Marxists I've talked to claim it was due to Mahkno's 'individualist position on grain acquisition"
Could anyone expand on this, as well as on the events which led to the forced closure of anarchist federations?
Basically it was upon the general realisation that the Makhnovists actually represented an alternate model for the running of society to Bolshevik dictatorship.
The Bolsheviks knew that even if the whites militarily conquered the Ukraine temporarily, they wouldn't be able to hold onto it as their only support was amongst big landowners and the rich. Whereas the Makhnovists free communism presented a potentially stable alternative to Bolshevism.
So they attempted to gain control of the Makhnovists army, enlisting them in the red Army, but when it became clear this wouldn't be completely possible they tried to crush them, then when this failed they tried to deprive them of armaments to let the whites crush them.
I saw a very interesting article about the Bolsheviks war against the Makhnovists on some random Ukrainian history site the other day, which I meant to put in the library, but my computer crashed before I got round to it, and now I can't remember where it was...
We have a lot of stuff on it here:
http://libcom.org/tags/Makhnovists