In the Tenon hospital at Paris there recently died a man poor and forsaken by almost every one of the millions that had once hailed him as liberator and hero. His name was Nestor Makhno.
Great personalities are the cameos of life, standing out in bold relief on its canvas and giving us a clearer understanding of the social background. History itself often sculptures such significant figures that even the passage of time cannot obliterate. They personify the genius of their people, and their lives and deeds illuininate the past and cast a prophetic light on the future. Such a figure was Nestor Makhno.
True child of a revolutionary epoch, his life and activities were imbued with the spirit of a dominating purpose, and it is more than probable that but for him and his insurgent army of Ukrainian peasants Soviet Russia might now be only a memory.
It was in 1920 while traveling in Russia that I first heard of Nestor Makhno. The stories circulated about him were so romantic, his exploits so fantastic, and the estimates of him so contradictory that he seemed a legendary figure.
"Who is this Makhno they talk so much about?" I asked a prominent Bolshevik.
"A bandit", he replied with irritation, "a dangerous counter-revolutionist who is giving us much trouble".
"I’ve heard people call him a revolutionary hero", I said.
"He’s a bandit", he repeated angrily. "There is a big prize on his head and he will be shot on sight".
It was not till I came to Ukraina that Makhno began to assume more definite form. Yet there too his personality proved elusive for a while, and I gathered the true facts about him and his activities only when chance threw me in contact with men that knew him at first hand. In the pursuit of my work of collecting material on the history of the Revolution, I called one day on the Chairman of the Communist Party in Kharkov, as was my wont in every city I visited. The Soviet Government had not yet firmly established its rule in Ukraina at that period, and Kharkov resembled a military camp. It was difficult to secure admission to Bolsheviki in high position, but my credentials from "the center", as Moscow is called in the provinces, soon overcame all obstacles. I was in conversation with the Secretary when a tall young man in military uniform passed through the room. He glanced at me cursorily, looked again and approached me.
"Pardon me, tovarishch", he said, "but are you not Berkman?"
I admitted the identification. "Alexander Berkman? Really?"
And before I knew what he was about, he had thrown his arms around me and kissed me three times in the traditional Russian fashion. It was my old friend Leo, of America, Chief of the Commissary Department of the Red Army stationed in Kharkov. The delicate, slender youth I had known in new York many years before had become a strapping fellow of assured military bearing. A deep scar on his face, evidently a sword cut, added resolution to his appearance.
"Well, I’ll be damned!" he cried, "who would have ever dreamed of meeting you here! I didn’t know you were in this country - heard you were in prison. Say, there’s a thousand things I’d love to talk over with you and ...
" Suddenly interrupting himself he asked "Perhaps on a secret mission?"
"Not at all", I said.
"Well, then, I want you to look me up, and there’s a bunch of fellows with me who’d be wild to see you". He scribbled an address on a slip of paper and left.
I had some difficulty in finding Leo’s place. It was outside the city limits, a small camp occupied by the officer and his family. Among those present I recognised several men from the States; one of them, called the Emigrant, I had known in Detroit.
"You’re late, old boy, not at all American-like", Leo chided me good-naturedly. He waived my excuses aside: "It’s all right - we’re a bit out of the way. But it’s quiet here and we can talk!"
We talked of old times, everyone eager to know what was going on in the world and particularly in America. Russia was blockaded, and they felt cut off from the rest of mankind. But before long the conversation turned to the Revolution. Ukraina was still in a state of war - the Whites had started a new offensive, and fighting was going on in different parts of the South. Leo had been active in the Revolution from its very beginning; he had served on various fronts and he was thoroughly conversant with the situation. "You’ll find conditions different here than in Petrograd or Moscow", he said. "There things are more or less settled, but here we’re still in the midst of revolution. You see, victory in Russia proper was comparatively easy, but Ukraina is not Russia. We are a country of 40 millions, of different stock, with our own language and culture. The Revolution did not follow the same lines here as in the North. There the Bolsheviki easily got into power after the fall of Kerensky, but here we’ve had fourteen different governments in the last two years..."
"And no government at all", the Emigrant put in.
"He means Makhno", Leo explained. "You must have heard of him, haven’t you?
"I have. In Moscow I was told that he is a bandit who is to be shot on sight".
"They’ll have to catch him first", the Emigrant laughed.
"Oh, they told you that, did they?" Leo cried, suddenly jumping to his feet. "You see this?" He pointed to the scar on his face. "That’s what I got for believing Makhno a bandit!"
"Don’t talk in riddles", the Emigrant said. "Why don’t you tell it straight - you’re ashamed of it, are you?"
"Yes, I’m ashamed", Leo retorted. "Ashamed of having been such a damned fool! You see", he continued, turning to me, "I also believed Makhno a bandit. I was in Budenny’s cavalry then. Several detachments of our 19th Division were stationed in a village in the Gulyai-Pole district - the Makhno region, you know. Well, one day we received orders to attack a band of Greens operating in the neighbourhood..."

"But he doesn’t know who the Greens are", the Emigrant interrupted.
"That’s so", Leo admitted. "The Greens are bandits, so called because their headquarters are always in the woods. Well, we surrounded the forest and we were sure we had the entire band when we saw clouds of dust rising from the valley. Some horsemen were approaching - there wasn’t more than fifty of them. Budenny shouted something and my company, over two hundred strong, fired a volley right into the bunch. They had evidently not seen us and were taken by surprise. I saw the men in the first line fall and their horses run wild. We prepared to pursue them - we were sure they’d turn and flee - we outnumbered them five to one.
Well, before we knew it they had galloped straight into us, slashing right and left with their sabres and shouting ’Liberty or death’. Their attack was so unexpected, so incredibly reckless that our men became panicky. We fled."
Leo stopped, his hand raised to his scarred cheek as if in recollection of the pain. "We knew no Greens could fight like that", he began again. "Budenny had lied to us - they were Makhno men".
"He got a taste of Makhno without ever seeing him", the Emigrant teased. "Served him right, too!"
"They were not bandits?" I asked.
"Bandits hell!" Leo cried angrily. "Don’t you believe such rot! Makhno a bandit! He and his forces were part of the Red Army then!"
Evidently reading the amazement in my face, he added: "You have a good deal to learn before you’ll understand what has been going on here".
"He’ll learn all right, don’t you worry", the Emigrant commented cheerfully; "no better school than the Revolution".
"He’ll never learn it in Moscow", Leo persisted, "but if he stays long enough here, and if you..."
He hesitated a moment, looking questioningly at his friend. "Can I tell him?" he asked.
"Of course. Go right ahead", the Emigrant said.
"Well, Alexander, he can tell you things that will be eye-openers all right. He’s worked with Makhno, you know".
I remembered the Emigrant as a quiet, serious youth interested in social problems. He was of a studious rather than military disposition, and I could not conceive of him in the role of a bandit or dare-devil under any flag whatever. I wondered what his "work" with the redoubtable Makhno might have been.
"Speaking of eye-openers", the Emigrant remarked genially, "how about a drink, boys? It’s fearfully hot". The home-made Russian kvass, distilled from apples, tasted cool and refreshing. It was a typical Ukrainian midsummer night: not a breath of air stirred; the sky, star studded, hung low but clear, and all was quiet save for the monotonous murmur of the spring nearby and the occasional trill of a bird in the woods. In the distance lay the wide steppe and the voluptuous fileds, majestically silent and indifferent to human strife. We talked far into the night.
The Emigrant proved a veritable encyclopedia with a phenomenal memory for names, dates and events. He sketched for me the story of the Revolution since its inception with the illuminating insight into cause and effect that marks the creative historian. He seemed familiar with every phase of the great struggle, and he had the habit of punctuating his story with:
"It’s my document Number so and so - of such and such a date - signed by so and so..." He was apparently a non-partisan collector, and when later I had opportunity to examine his historic treasure, I found rare and valuable documents in it, proclamations and decrees issued by Lenin and Trotsky, by the German occupational forces, by Makhno, as well as by Denikin, Wrangel and other White generals.
It was from the Emigrant that I first heard the story of Makhno. To my amazement I learned that far from being a bandit, as the Bolsheviki had assured me, he was an old "political" who had been condemned to death for revolutionary activity under the Tsarist régime. Because of his youth the sentence had been commuted to life imprisonment, and Makhno spent 10 years in the Butirky, the Central Prison at Moscow, where for 9 years he was kept chained hand and foot till he was liberated by the February Revolution.
The Emigrant lived in Ukraina at the time and he met Makhno soon after the latter had returned to Gulyai-Pole, his native village in the province of Ekaterinoslav. Makhno, then less than 30 years old, was slightly under medium height, of strong build, with piercing steel-grey eyes and determined expression. The son of an Ukrainian peasant, there flowed in his veins the blood of Cossack forebears famed for their independent spirit and fighting qualities. Though weakened by long confinement, during which his lungs had become affected, Makhno astonished every one by his vitality and energy. Soon he became talked of as the leader of small insurgent bands against the Austro-German invaders of Ukraina who had become the rulers of the country after the Brest-Litovsk peace. It was apparently a hopeless struggle against tremendous odds that Makhno and his handful of rebel peasants undertook; but their extraordinary daring and fantastic exploits quickly won for them popular admiration, and within a short time Makhno had a considerable force generously supplied with provisions and horses by the grateful peasantry. He waged merciless guerilla warfare against the native masters and the foreign oppressor, and fought every counter-revolutionary general who sought to subdue the rebellious peasantry and take away from them the land they had expropriated from the big landlords. Entire armies were sent to "catch and punish Makhno", as the phrase went, but he always proved elusive, attacking the enemy at the most unexpected time and place and spreading terror among them.
Invariably at the head of his light cavalry, he seemed to have a charmed life. He was reputed never to have lost a battle and never to have been wounded, though his favorite method was a hand-to-hand fight with a sword or saber. His fame spread far and wide, and before long the Ukrainian peasantry grew to believe that Makhno was "immune to bullets and safe from the sword".
It was due mainly to the leadership and unique generalship of Makhno that by the end of 1918 Ukraina was freed from the foreign invaders. But the rebel chieftain was not content with military victories. He undertook to put into practice the unrealised ideals of the October Revolution and to protect his Gulyai-Pole region against domination of any kind, political or military. He exchanged the sword for the pen and the platform, and became the adviser and teacher of his people.
Soviets of Peasants and Workers were organized throughout Southeastern Ukraina, differing from the Bolshevik Soviets in that they were entirely independent of political parties or governmental authority.
Continued in Part 2