I didn’t want to be hissed. During nine months of revolution I had spoken to many audiences and had never been hissed. Now the Bolsheviks impressed on me that I was going to be hissed. I was apprehensive but I considered it inappropriate to refuse to carry out this mission for the Congress. We set out. We got in a cab. We arrived at the regiment and found the regimental committee. We met the chairman and presented our mandate from the Congress.
The chairman of the regiment read our mandate and, politely offering us chairs, left to gather the soldiers for a meeting.
After 15 or 20 minutes he came back and told us that everybody had been assembled.
At the door of the committee office we were met by two comrade anarchists — sailors from Kronstadt — and the four of us went to meet the soldiers.
At the meeting we basically argued with the officers, causing one of them to break down weeping and rip off his epaulets, and we got the regiment to pass its own resolution, which declared that “the regiment of the Cavaliers of St. George would defend by force of arms against any attack on the Provincial Congress of Peasants and Workers which started its work on December 2, 1917.”
Analogous resolutions were passed by other regiments and squadrons.
This result was unexpected not so much by the Congress as by the Bolsheviks. All the delegates of the Congress were glad that the regular troops were on their side.
The Congress took up its work again and was finished in three days.
It was characteristic of this Congress that all the decisions set out in its resolutions had already been put into practice in Gulyai-Pole raion for three or four months. Only one clause was new to us because we had attached little importance to it: the right of local soviets to a subsidy from the state. I must admit that the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs caught a lot of people with this bait. For Gulyai-Pole raion this innovation was unacceptable because it based its own work on anti-statist ideas and tried to be independent of central authorities who tried to control everything.
Chapter 19
Counter-Revolution of the Ukrainian Central Rada
At the end of the Congress, the delegates dispersed to their homes. We, Comrade Mironov and I, went to the Anarchist Federation with the intention of finding some good propagandists we could take back with us to the countryside. The Federation was in a better state than when I visited it in August while attending the Provincial Congress of Peasants and Workers. At that time I visited its various sections (the club, etc.). The Federation was still rather weak — it was barely able to tend to the city and its adjacent settlements — Amur, Nizhne-Dneprovsk, and Kaidaki. And yet the Federation was rich in armaments: carbines, rifles, and cartridges. In view of the unusual situation holding sway in the city, the Bolshevik — Left-SR authorities had freely issued weapons to the Ekaterinoslav Federation of Anarchists, without any control whatsoever.
The Bloc saw the Federation of Anarchists as true revolutionaries who spurned the Ukrainian nationalists, backed up as they were by the bourgeoisie and generally in the camp of the Counter-Revolution. The Bloc used the enthusiasm, firm belief, and devotion to the Revolution of the Ekaterinoslav anarchists in every serious revolutionary crisis.
Having these weapons at its disposal, the Federation issued several boxes of rifles to us for the Gulyai-Pole Anarchist Communist Group. We loaded these weapons on the train and travelled back to Gulyai-Pole.
In Gulyai-Pole we made a series of reports about the Congress and all the obstacles which stood in its way. Subsequently we made similar reports in other villages and settlements.
From this time Gulyai-Pole raion began to arm itself in earnest and exercise vigilance towards the new revolutionary masters. The notion that these new masters — the Bolsheviks and the Left S-Rs — would also hinder the creative development of free thought and action by the toilers of the oppressed villages little by little began to be confirmed even in the minds of those toilers who wanted to believe in the Left Bloc.
The peasants and workers learned from their delegates that the Bolshevik Epstein stated at the Congress: “The urban proletariat has come to power and one must hope that it will create its own state — a Proletarian State. We, the Bolsheviks, will devote all our strength to helping it create such a State, because this is the only way the proletariat will achieve the happiness it seeks.”
The toilers of Gulyai-Pole interpreted these words as saying that the Bolshevik Party, abandoning all scruples, would build its own “proletarian” State at the expense of the peasants. They began anxiously to follow the course of events in the cities.
In the villages, the peasants began to teach each other how to handle rifle.
“Our enemies, the authorities,” they said, “are armed, and if they decide to deprive us of our right to an independent existence and the right to create new social structures, then they will launch an attack on us. Consequently, we must be prepared to reply in kind.”
So the peasants prepared. In Gulyai-Pole itself there were people from the poor peasantry who had received serious military training. They took young people out into the fields and taught them shooting, manoeuvres, etc.
Among those who knew how to handle weapons and were always ready to share this knowledge with others, one stood out especially — Yakov Domashenko. He inspired both young and old and stuck with the peasants till the very end. When armed struggle broke out, he was several times wounded in battle, fighting with the peasants for Bread and Liberty.
Events were developing rapidly.
Every day we heard rumours that the Ukrainian Central Rada could not come to an agreement with the Left Bloc (over who would be in charge) and, dragging the toiling masses into the fray, they were going to embark on a bloody struggle against the Bloc.
In Gulyai-Pole and its raion more and more often appeared dozens of agents of the Central Rada, who preached “perpetual war with the katzaps”.
The inhabitants of the raion became even more anxious.
Representative from the villages and hamlets of the raion daily appeared in Gulyai-Pole at the office of the Anarchist Communist Group in the building of the Soviet of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies. They consulted with the anarchists and with the Soviet about what to prepare for in the near future, what they needed to do to preserve their right to land, bread, and liberty which might by curtailed by the programs of one or other government.
The Gulyai-Pole Anarchist Communist Group equipped two of its members — N. Makhno and Antonov — so they could travel round the whole raion and share with the population the opinion of our group about what was troubling them.
Simultaneously, the Group pressured the Soviet (through our members N. Makhno, Sokruta, Kalinichenko, Antonov, Seregin, and Krat) to send their members from outlying districts back home to find out the mood of the inhabitants. They were also to inform people about what was happening at the Soviet and what the raion should do in case the stories about the Counter-Revolution were confirmed.
The reciprocal respect and trust between the anarchist-communists and the toiling population of the raion became stronger and broader.
In my capacity as chairperson of the Gulyai-Pole Soviet I was empowered to do whatever was necessary to clarify the difficult situation of the revolution. So I sent two members of the Soviet to Odessa and Kiev (places where the troops of the Central Rada and the Left Bloc were clashing). When they returned and reported on what was happening, we immediately convened a Congress of Soviets.