Nestor Makhno and Rural Anarchism in Ukraine, 1917–21 by Colin Darch

Author:Colin Darch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pluto Press

The most important plank in this policy platform was the tax-in-kind, introduced in Russia in March and described by Lenin as marking ‘a transition … to a regular socialist exchange of products’.138 Grain requisitioning was replaced by the tax in an attempt to win peasant support. After the government had taken 25 per cent of the crop, the peasants could dispose of the remainder as they pleased. Significantly, the tax was to be less than what had been taken by requisitioning; it was to be progressive; responsibility for payment was individual, not collective; and the amount was to be fixed before the spring sowing.139

But things were not so simple. On 2 March Vladimirov, the Ukrainian Commissar for Food Supply, reported to Moscow that working conditions were ‘such as to wreck all plans’. Makhno had completely destroyed the food supply system in both Aleksandrovsk and Berdiansk, and had massacred food supply workers there.140 He was now doing the same around Kherson. He had crossed the Dnepr from Dneprovsk uezd, and had killed the district supply commissar as well as 42 workers from the Greater Aleksandrovsk food supply committee. From the Ukrainian point of view, continuing to supply the Donbass and the Red Army was an ‘almost insoluble problem’. Food requisitioning in the Ukraine had altogether cost the lives of 1,700 workers.141 Vladimirov was uneasy about the imminent change-over from grain requisitioning to the tax-in-kind, which he described as ‘dangerous’. He argued that the peasants would contest the official crop assessments, acceptance of which was the basis for paying the tax and permitting the barter of the remaining crops.142 Despite these and other objections, the tax-in-kind was promulgated on 15 March 1921.143 Lenin commented to Trotsky that ‘the Ukrainian communists are wrong. The conclusion is not against the tax, but for stronger measures for the total annihilation of Makhno’.144 Nevertheless, the introduction of the NEP in Ukraine was delayed by six months. While Vladimirov was complaining about the change of policy, the unit led by the deserter Maslak, which despite the need for mobility still possessed two field-guns, was moving north-eastwards towards the undefended town of Tsaritsyn, where 500,000 pudy (about 9,000 tons) of grain, the only reserves for Astrakhan’, were stored.145

The Bolsheviks were also counting on the war weariness of the Ukrainian peasants to help them liquidate makhnovshchina. Different approaches were tried. The 5th All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets offered an amnesty to all ‘bandits’ who voluntarily turned themselves over to the authorities by 15 April, and later on the VTsIK extended the deadline. In April Plamia Truda reported some surrenders under the terms of this amnesty, including one allegedly involving 63 former insurgents in Guliaipole. On 1 June the same newspaper reported that some makhnovtsy insurgents had surrendered at Zmiev uezd, in Khar’kov, and had been given land.146

By March 1921, Makhno’s situation had become desperate. His army was split up into marauding groups which carried out sabotage actions as they tried to survive by plundering military warehouses, or by battening onto the weary peasantry.

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