The state often uses its former adversaries once they are dead and no
longer pose the threat they did in life. The Ukrainian state and itspropaganda media did just that with the legendary anarchist communist
Nestor Makhno.
A native of Guliai Pole in the Zaporizhia region of Ukraine, Makhno was
an anarchist revolutionary all his life. The son of poor peasants, he
joined the local anarchist communist group in 1906, later spending nine
years in prison for his involvement in the murder of a district police
officer. While in prison he developed his political ideas and when he
was released by the Provisional Government in 1917 he returned to his
hometown, where he was elected chairman of the Metalworkers' and
Woodworkers' Union and the Soviet of Peasants' and Workers' Deputies,
throwing himself into the vortex of the Russian Revolution in Ukraine.
He became famous above all for leading the Revolutionary Insurrectionary
Army, also known as the Black Army. This military-political force fought
the counter-revolutionary White armies and the Red Army. But it also
resolutely fought the Ukrainian nationalists, who had killed Makhno's
brother, Homily. Makhno was no friend of any nationalism, neither
Ukrainian nor Russian. The Makhnovist movement attempted to create a
free territory based on self-governing agricultural communes. The
largest of these was named after Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish revolutionary
Marxist of Jewish origin. These were certainly not nationalist actions.
This has not prevented Makhno from being claimed as a Ukrainian patriot,
despite all the evidence. Although this phenomenon began before the 2022
Russian invasion, it has intensified during the war, with many fighters
claiming to be part of the Makhno tradition and with nationalists using
symbols associated with the Makhnovists. This phenomenon was most
evident with the destruction of the Gulyai-Pole museum on 23 August this
year, following a Russian missile attack. The museum was dedicated to
Gulyai-Pole's most illustrious son and the movement associated with him,
and housed permanent exhibitions and displays. The day before the
attack, however, the exhibits had been transferred to central state
storage for safekeeping away from the city, which is on the front line.
The destruction of the museum, seen as a direct attack on Ukrainian and
regional culture, was used to foment patriotic sentiments, and the
memory of Makhno, transformed into a national hero - a sort of
"nationalist anarchist" - was exploited to support mobilization and
support for the war, at a time when resistance to compulsory military
conscription has reached its highest point since the beginning of the
conflict.
In addition, the statue of Makhno in Gulyai-Pole, partially destroyed by
a Russian attack on May 23, was recently replaced with fanfare, with the
addition of a Ukrainian national flag in the hand of a man who would
never have held it in his life. The replacement of the statue was aimed
at boosting morale in a city where the only public building still
functioning was the museum. Since May 2023, there are no ATMs or
doctors, there is only one shop open two hours a day that only accepts
cash, and there are only six hundred civilians left compared to the
fourteen thousand who lived here before the war.
Odessa historian Vyacheslav Azarov provides some insight into the
attempts to co-opt Makhno to the nationalist cause: «The first campaign
of appropriation of Makhnovism by nationalists began during the "orange"
demonstrations of 2004 and the subsequent government of Viktor
Yushchenko. The organizers of the first Maidan [1] in 2013 tried to
compare their experiments in political engineering with the popular
liberation of Gulyai Pole, and the nationalists, subsidized and led by
Oles Doniy, persistently called for the «posthumous Ukrainization» of
Makhno. They did not hide the fact that the appropriation of the
Makhnovist heritage was necessary for the purpose of promoting
nationalist ideology in the south-eastern territories, hostile to the
Banderist movement [2]. The culmination of this campaign was the
ceremony for the installation of the monument to Batko [3] in Gulyai
Pole, organized by the then Minister of Internal Affairs Yuriy Lutsenko
with the financial support of a well-known oligarch from Zaporizhia. The
commemoration of Makhno is certainly a positive thing, but the fact that
it was launched by the Minister of Police - who then dropped the phrase:
"Call me a racist if you want!" - gave the event a paradoxical character.
This political appropriation was particularly evident in the
Independence Day celebrations, at the Makhnofest, which was held in
Gulyai-Pole for several years in a row under the patronage of Lutsenko
himself. Bandera banners were waved during the concert, and anti-Semitic
and xenophobic slogans could be heard from the stage. The organizers
banned singing songs in Russian and speaking in Russian on stage,
although this is the native language of the absolute majority of
Gulyai-Pole residents. Non-aligned Makhnofest-goers had to note the
prevalence of nationalists and reactionary rhetoric, suffice it to say
that the Odessa neo-Nazi leader Maxim Chayka took part in it. All this
completely contradicted the ideas of the outstanding Ukrainian
anarchist. Sad and bitter days in Makhno's hometown.
https://www.anarchistcommunism.org/2024/09/25/makhno-in-the-service-of-the-ukrainian-war-effort/
Translator's note:
[1] The first Maidan, a demonstration held in November 2013 in Kiev's
Maidan Square, started the pro-Western protest movement in favor of
Ukraine's entry into the European Union that led to the removal of
pro-Russian President Yanukovych.
[2] The Bandera movement, which today is the inspiration for the
Ukrainian far right, was founded during World War II by the pro-Nazi
ultranationalist Stepan Bandera, leader of the most extreme faction of
the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and head of the
Ukrainian Insurgent Army (not to be confused with the Revolutionary
Insurgent Army of Ukraine led by Makhno). In southeastern Ukraine, where
Guliai Pole is located and where Makhno operated, the Russian-speaking
minority still considers Bandera a traitorous collaborator.
[3] "Father" was the name given to Makhno by Ukrainian peasants as a
sign of respect and admiration.
For further information: I makhnovisti e i liberi sovieti, Quaderni di
Alternativa Libertaria, n. 20, 2015. Request from: ilcantiere@autistici.org.
http://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/
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