Malaydakh, Gavriil Fadeevich (1891-1938)

Gavriil Malaydkh was born into a peasant family in the village of Braga, in the province
of Kamenets-Podolsk, in Ukraine, on April 1st 1891.

In 1906 he was involved in anarchist communist propaganda and organisation in Podolsk, Yekaterinoslav and Bessarabia provinces. He used the underground name “Raphael”.

He was arrested in 1908 in Podolsk province and on March 11th, 1909 was convicted of belonging to the anarchist communists and of being involved in the attempted murder of a police officer. He was sentenced to 6 years hard labour.

He served the sentence until 1913 in the Kamenets-Podolsk prison, and then in the Kherson central prison. He was then sent to an exile settlement in Irkutsk province, from where he escaped to the city of Irkutsk. He worked underground, and joined the Group of Anarchist Communist Exiles in Eastern Siberia. He was one of the organisers of a conference of anarchist exiles in Manzurka, in the Verkholensky region, which took place from 20th-26th April

He was arrested on October 22nd at an anarchist conference in Irkutsk that year, for conducting agitation against the war amongst the soldiers. He was imprisoned at Irkutsk prison until liberated with the coming of the February Revolution.

He became a member of the Braclav Consumer Society, and a delegate to the Podolsk Cooperative Congress which took place on 9th-11th April 1917.

In 1919 he was a member of the Communist Party of Ukraine . He undertook party work in Kyiv, and served on a revolutionary committee.

In 1921 he left the Communist Party, and lived in Vinnytsia, where he was head of the Pogub, political and educational department of the provincial military commissariat.

He helped organise the Vinnytsia anarchist communist group, and was a supporter of the All-Russian Federation of Anarchist Communists. In autumn 1921 he organised an artel, which was named after him.

In 1923-24 he lived in Kamenets-Podolsk. Here he was an active member of an underground anarchist group., which distributed agitational leaflets. He maintained contact between anarchists in Podolsk and Kyiv.

In 1924 a GPU (new name for the Cheka) provocateur infiltrated the group. Malaydakh, Nukhim Driker, and Iosif Shlyakman were arrested in May or summer 1924 on charges of underground anarchist activity and the distribution of leaflets to workers and peasants.

However, the Podolsk District GPU came to the conclusion that the activities of the group were provoked by their agent , so the case was closed and members of the group were released in November 1924.

In 1938, Malaydakh was working on a farm. He was arrested on February 21st that year, on charges of counter-revolutionary activities. He was sentenced to death on 31st March and subsequently shot.

Gavriil’s younger brother Andrei, seems to have taken a different path altogether, and fought as a second lieutenant with the Whites.

Nick Heath

Sources:

https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1440606683912299&id=100038889437316

https://poisk.ngonb.ru/flip236/Kraevedenie/02/180527_Политическая%20каторга%20и%20ссылка%201934%20г/386/

Dubovik, A.V. On the history of the anarchist movement in Ukraine (1922-1938):
http://www.makhno.ru/forum/showthread.php?t=1182