“The Revolution proclaimed the principles of freedom, equality, and free labour,” said the oppressed toilers of Gulyai-Pole raion, “and we intend to see these principles applied. We shall kill all who try to stop us. The government of the Left Bloc, in spite of its revolutionary character, is harmful to the creative forces of the Revolution. We will destroy it or we will die trying. We will not tolerate the obstacles this government puts in the way of the free development of our forces and the improvement of our social condition. We will not accept the humiliation and oppression which this government’s agents seek to impose on us and on all that is beautiful in the Revolution.”
Yes, the labouring population of Gulyai-Pole on that day was ready to rise up against the government of Aleksandrovsk. And who was against this idea? Why no one! We, who had been militants from the first days of the Revolution, would not recoil from such an act because we weren’t the kind of revolutionaries who need a party membership card in their pocket to prove their militancy. We were revolutionaries because we were dedicated to the idea of the triumph of justice — the idea the Revolution had chosen as its credo. We couldn’t allow this inspirational idea to be soiled by compromise with the authorities. We considered it our duty to keep this credo from being soiled by the two parties ruling at that time — the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs. We strove to broaden, deepen, and develop further the Revolution in the lives and struggles of the toilers.
Certainly we did not have sufficient forces for such a momentous task. Nevertheless we wanted to make the attempt with the forces we had at our disposal, knowing full well what would be the real results of such an effort.
That’s why there was not one comrade among us who spoke against marching on Aleksandrovsk — on the contrary, everybody was up for it. I was personally convinced that the time was ripe for myself and several comrades (Kalinichenko, Marchenko, Petya Isidor, Lyutyi, S. Karetnik, Savva Makhno, Stepan Shepel) to become first among equals and lead the revolutionary forces into combat. And it seemed, indeed, that this was really going to happen.
Some cries rang out from the crowd: “Nestor Ivanovich, tell us your opinion! We must respond to this shameful provocation directed against us by the agents of the government in Aleksandrovsk.”
I, as the chief of the revolutionary troops of the raion, knew what these troops were capable of. I said what I had to say: that the decision of the toilers in this case reflected their beliefs, that I shared their beliefs, and would carry out their wishes.
At this moment Comrade Seregin received a telegram from the Aleksandrovsk Government Provisioning Section. This telegram announced that the Provisioning Section of Aleksandrovsk had received the telegram from the Gulyai-Pole Revkom and Soviet, and acknowledged that the textiles re-directed to the Section had already been paid for by the toilers of Gulyai-Pole. Therefore the Section, in agreement with other Soviet organs in Aleksandrovsk uyezd, had decided to allow the textiles to be released to Gulyai-Pole. It was only a matter of sending some people to receive the shipment and accompany it to Gulyai-Pole.
When this telegram was read out to the General Assembly, the audience rejoiced but they by no means abandoned the idea of preparing for armed resistance. The meeting expressed the wish that Comrade N. Makhno organize the armed forces so that if Comrade Seregin had not received the textiles within two days, the troops could be mobilized within a day and the city of Aleksandrovsk occupied.
“We have no reason to march at the moment,” said the peasants. “We’re not looking to pick a fight over nothing. But we should be ready to march whenever it’s necessary — that’s what we think now and that’s how we will think in the future.”
Within a day Comrade Seregin told the Revkom that he had received news from the agents he had dispatched to the effect that they had received the goods and they had now arrived at the Gulyai-Pole station. Therefore he called another General Assembly of peasants and workers at which he was empowered to ask the peasants to help organize the transport of the textiles to the provisioning depot and also to arrange for distributing the textiles to the population of Gulyai-Pole.
Comrade Seregin asked me, as well as other comrades from the Revkom and the Anarchist Communist Group to attend the meeting and help him explain to the population the advantages of such exchanges between city and country, exchanges which ought to be carried out on a greater scale and extended to all branches of consumption.
The General Assembly proceeded under the following theme: how to arrange the exchange of goods between city and country without the intermediary of state power.
The example was before our eyes: without the intermediary the country would get to know the city better and city would get to know the country better. This was a necessary condition for successfully unifying the two class forces of labour for the common goal — to relieve the State of all power over public functions and abolish its social authority; in short, to abolish it.
To the extent that this great idea developed itself among the toilers in Gulyai-Pole and its raion, to the extent that they adopted it, they took up the struggle against the authoritarian principles which were impeding them. The toilers grasped the importance of these exchanges of goods and affirmed their right to carrying out these exchanges.
At the same they also saw such exchanges as a way of undermining the bases of capitalism in the Revolution, vestiges which remained from tsarist times. That’s why, after all the textiles had been distributed, the population of Gulyai-Pole considered how they might extend the exchanges to all essential objects of consumption. This would prove that the Revolution was not just about destroying the bases of the bourgeois-capitalist system, but also about planning the construction of a new society on a basis of equality in which would grow and develop the free consciousness of the toilers. Their lives would then be devoted to the struggle for a “higher justice” in place of the injustice which now prevailed and which was rooted in people exploiting and oppressing one another.
The toilers of Gulyai-Pole conferred with the toilers of other villages and raions in order to bring about the exchange of goods between city and country and to coordinate this with the existing situation where the Revolution had to be defended. But the defence of the Revolution will be steadfast and durable only if the non-exploiting classes recognize its essentially creative character. This can only happen when, after casting off the yoke of the bosses — the factory owner and the estate owner — and that of the supreme boss — the State — the people organize themselves for their new social and political life and that they defend it. Consequently, it is essential that the toilers of the villages, in order to better understand and defend more effectively the creative principles of the Revolution, draw closer to the city workers. The village toilers will thus have a better sense of their role in creating the Revolution.
The destructive period of the Revolution will be completed only when the creative phase begins, the phase which will involve not only the revolutionary vanguard (and its detachments), but the whole population, Inspired by the flame of the Revolution, the people will try to help it, in acts and in words, to overcome the obstacles which turn up.
During the ten or eleven months of their active participation in the Revolution, the toilers of Gulyai-Pole raion had many occasions to verify the correctness of this scheme and apply it to develop their own lives in a free and healthy way — forged by them daily in their own practical activity.
This healthy social phenomenon in the life and struggle of the toilers generally and of the toilers of Gulyai-Pole raion in particular could not help but be noticed by the Left Bloc headed by Lenin. The Left Bloc noticed this phenomenon from the first days of its appearance on the revolutionary scene. And this so-called ultra-left socialist power entered into open struggle with it. First this affected communications between city and country, and then the authorities took on the role of determining the degree of revolutionary character and legal rights not only of individuals, but of the whole working class. We’re talking here about the right to use their own intelligence, their own will, about their very participation in the Revolution on whose behalf it was supposedly being carried out.