of Ukraine and the seat of nationalism; and Odessa, a port city crucial to the expected Anglo–French intervention. These were towns with an industrial working class sympathetic to the communist cause.
Antonov was desperate for men and began to recruit partisan groups with a record of anti-German or anti-White activity. He ordered these bands to foment rebellion and to organise themselves in readiness for the expected Allied intervention.144 After the formation of the Ukrainian Soviet Government at Kursk on 28 November Antonov’s position seemed stronger, as he was now, at least technically, working for the Ukrainians. Early in December he assumed real command of the two partisan divisions that had been assigned to him. Both units were under strength, disorganised and demoralised. Antonov energetically set about building his army, a task that required considerable resourcefulness. Throughout December he moved his troops forward into Ukraine, into position for the attack on Khar’kov. He was determined that Vatsetis should not deny him the opportunity to establish Soviet power in the south.
Oddly enough, Makhno had sent a message early in December to local Bolsheviks offering to cooperate against the Directory, but his offer had been refused, ostensibly because his forces were mere anarchist bandits.145 The makhnovtsy were now turning westwards towards Ekaterinoslav, a move that brought them into contact with the forces of the Directory.146 To the nationalists, the makhnovtsy were just another peasant gang that might possibly be usefully recruited. Ignorant of Makhno’s politics, they interrogated him; what did he think of the Directory? What was his idea of Ukraine’s political future? Would an alliance not be in the interests of both groups?147 Makhno was uncompromising, and despite having no allies he refused to have anything to do with the Directory. Ukraine could only be free if the peasants and workers were free. Between the workers’ movement and the movement of the bourgeoisie only an armed struggle was possible.148
After the negotiations broke down, the makhnovtsy moved onto the offensive against Ekaterinoslav. The town had fallen to the nationalists early in December and a week or so later they moved against the local soviet and dispersed it, arresting some Left SRs and communists.149 There were Bolshevik detachments in the suburb of Nizhnedneprovsk on the left bank of the river, and they demanded that their comrades be released.150 The Nizhnedneprovsk committee offered Makhno the command of their workers’ detachments for an attack on the city, with a total of about 15,000 men.151
On 27 December Makhno launched his attack, employing a ruse of the kind that came to be considered typical of his style of warfare. There are various stories of makhnovtsy disguised in wedding dresses, or hiding in coffins at funerals, which are unverifiable and quite possibly fictional.152 Workers were still riding in and out of the city from the suburbs by train, uninspected. The makhnovtsy, with their guns tucked under their greatcoats, boarded an early morning train for the centre of Ekaterinoslav. The trick succeeded, and the insurgents quickly captured the railway station, while fierce fighting broke out in the city.153 The communists captured the bridge into Ekaterinoslav with the loss of only six men. An unexpected bonus came with the defection of a Petliurist artillery officer and his guns and gun-teams to the insurgents’ side.154 The fighting continued in great confusion for three days, until the partisans were in control of most of the city. Makhno opened the jail and released all the prisoners; he also formed a governing soviet and issued a decree against looting.155 As Danilov and Shanin have pointed out, Soviet historiography represented the makhnovtsy as ‘engaged exclusively in looting captured cities … and passenger trains’ while the evidence shows that all the armies – whether German or Austro-Hungarian, Ukrainian nationalists, Bolsheviks and Whites, or peasant insurgencies – needed to survive, and so all robbed and plundered.156 There are other stories of the makhnovtsy engaging in wanton acts of destruction, burning libraries and archives, and deliberately shelling a city’s buildings with cannon.157 However, Makhno was aware that such conduct was incompatible with maintaining popular support and consistently punished it.
The troops of the Directory recaptured Ekaterinoslav after only a day. The insurgents withdrew eastwards across the Dnepr back to the area around Sinel’nikovo, where they dug in.158 A period of cautious non-belligerence followed. Neither side was strong enough to mount a full-scale attack on the other, although intermittent clashes over supplies continued to occur in other areas. Meanwhile, the arrival of Antonov’s army, theoretically under the orders of the Ukrainian Soviet government, split the Directory into a nationalist faction and one (including Vynnychenko) that supported a proletarian revolution as well as a Ukrainian state.
At the end of 1918 Ukraine was like a beehive that had been disturbed.159 Nevertheless, it was a period of relative freedom in the interior of the area under the control of the makhnovtsy. They reached an agreement on a modus vivendi with the Bolsheviks: Antonov was more interested in seizing cities and towns in northern Ukraine. The communists were concentrating on urgent military and political problems rather than local administration – so for a few months the peasants of Guliaipole and its environs again had an opportunity to govern themselves. They returned to the system of communes that they had adopted in 1917–18. Anarchist commentators are careful to distinguish these working communes, or free communes, from other types such as the Bolshevik exemplary communes. These sympathetic accounts are obviously open to charges of bias: according to Volin, for example, the Makhnovite partisans exerted no pressure on the peasants, but confined themselves to propaganda in favour of free communes.160 Arshinov asserts that ‘these were real working communes of peasants who, themselves accustomed to work, valued work in themselves and in others’. But his account provides little detail:
The peasants worked in these communes … to provide their daily bread … The principles of brotherhood and equality permeated the communes. Everyone – men, women and children – worked according to his or her abilities. Organisational work was assigned to one or two comrades who, after finishing it, took up the remaining tasks together with the other members of the commune. It is evident that these communes had these traits because they grew out of a working milieu and that their development followed a natural course.161
One commune near Prokovskoe was named after Rosa Luxemburg. It grew from a few dozen members to over 300, but the Bolsheviks broke it up in June 1919, after the split between Makhno and Trotsky.162 Another, ‘Commune no. 1’, was located about seven kilometres away. Similar communes clustered close to Guliaipole, in a radius of about 20 kilometres. A pamphlet entitled Osnovye polozheniia o vol’nom trudovom Sovet (proekt) (Basic Statute on the Free Worker’s Soviet: Draft) outlined the role of the soviets, which were to be independent of political parties.163 They were to operate within a socioeconomic system based on real equality, consisting only of workers, and could not delegate executive power to any member.164 Even if the anarchist communes were truly voluntary, one difference distinguished the earlier period from the later. Makhno had learned the lesson of the Austro-German invasion. He knew that if the revolution in his area was to remain in peasant control, he needed an army to protect it. He had also learned to choose his enemies. He could distinguish between those to whom he could ally himself (the Bolsheviks), those he could ignore or take advantage of (the Petliurists) and those against whom he should struggle uncompromisingly (the Whites of General Denikin).
Meanwhile, aided by strikes that closed down public utilities, and by the panic which seized the defending nationalists, the Bolsheviks captured Khar’kov in January. Antonov, who had been agitating for the creation of a separate Ukrainian Front for some time, at last got his way. On 12 January the Bolsheviks reached Chernigov in the west, and by the 20th they controlled Poltava. On 16 January, the Directory declared war on Soviet Russia, hoping in vain for assistance from French forces in Odessa, and two days later communist troops led by the sailor Pavel Dybenko attacked Ekaterinoslav, eventually driving the nationalists out for a second time on 27 January. By 5 February Kiev had been abandoned to the Bolsheviks. For civilians, these latest occupiers represented a marked improvement. ‘Compared not only to the makhnovtsy but even to the Petliurists,’ wrote one citizen, ‘the men of the Red Army created an extraordinarily disciplined impression’.165
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