Once the communes were set up, their members, without losing any time, began to organize themselves: some were employed in the normal springtime agricultural work, while others formed combat groups to defend the Revolution and its conquests. The same thing happened in other raions, setting an example for the whole country.
The majority of the agricultural communes were composed of peasants; a minority were a mixture of peasants and workers. Their organization was based on equality and the solidarity. All members of these communes — both men and women — brought a very positive attitude to their work, whether it was in the field or domestic work.
The communes had common kitchens and dining halls. But the wish of any members to prepare their own food for their families, or to prepare food in the communal kitchen and then carry it home, never met with any objection from the other members. Each member, or even a whole group, could organize their feeding any way they wished, on condition, however, that they give advance notice to the other members so the appropriate dispositions could be made in the communal kitchen and pantry.
The members of a commune were also required to get up early to tend to the cattle and horses and take care of other domestic chores. Members of the commune had the right to absent themselves, but they were required to advise their work partner in advance so a replacement could be found. This applied to normal work days. On days of rest (Sundays) members took turns going on excursions.
The program of work of the whole commune was worked out during meetings of all the members. Each of the members knew exactly what was expected from them.
Only the question of schools remained open, because the communes did not want to re-establish schools of the former type; among the new schools the first choice was the anarchist model of F. Ferrer which was well known to the communes because of the activities of the Anarchist Communist Group which distributed brochures on the subject. But people trained in the methods of this school were lacking and the communes tried to recruit them from the cities, through the intermediary of the Anarchist Communist Group. If this proved impossible, it was decided, at least for the first year, to get people who were simply able to teach the school subjects.
There existed within a seven or eight kilometre radius from Gulyai-Pole four of these communes. There were many others in the raion. If I dwell on these four, it is because I organized them personally. Their first initiative took place under my supervision, and all the important questions were always submitted to me for advice.
As a member of one of these communes, probably the largest one, I helped out two days a week in all facets of the operation: in the springtime in the fields behind the bukker or the seeding machine; before and after the seeding I did other types of farm work or helped the mechanic at the electric station.
The remaining four days of the week I worked in Gulyai-Pole, in the Anarchist Communist Group or the raion Revkom. This work regime was expected of me by the Group and all the communes and lasted until the defence of the Revolution required the mobilizing of all available forces. For, advancing from the west was the Counter-Revolution in the form of the German and Austro-Hungarian imperial armies and the Central Rada.
In all the communes there were peasant anarchists, but the majority of their members were not anarchists. However the internal life of the commune was a model of anarchist solidarity. In today’s world, only the simple natures of toilers not yet affected by the poisonous atmosphere of the cities are capable of such spontaneous solidarity. The cities always emanate an odour of lies and betrayal which infect even many so-called anarchists.
Each commune was composed of a dozen families of peasants and workers, reaching a size of 100, 200, or even 300 members. Each commune received from former estates of pomeshechiks, by the decision of the Raion Congress of Land Committees, a quantity of land which it would be able to farm with its own labour. Moreover, the communes received the livestock and machinery which were already on the property.
And the free toilers of the communes set to work, singing happy songs as they did so. Their songs reflected the spirit of the Revolution, the spirit of those warriors who propagated revolution for many years and had perished or remained alive and implacable in the struggle for “higher justice” which must triumph over injustice, a struggle which must intensify and become a beacon for all humanity.
The toilers sowed the fields and worked in the vegetable gardens, full of confidence in themselves and in their strong resolution to not allow the former proprietors to recover lands which they had never worked with their own hands, lands which the proprietors had possessed by the authority of the State and which they were attempting to seize again.
The inhabitants of the villages and hamlets adjacent to these communes often had a lower level of political consciousness and were not yet completely liberated from sucking up to the “kulaks”. These people envied the communards and frequently expressed the desire to confiscate the livestock and machinery left by the pomeshchiks and divide them up among themselves.
“The communards could always buy them back from us later, if they want to,” they said. But this attitude was severely condemned by a vast majority of the toilers at congresses and other meetings. The majority of the labouring population saw the organizing of agricultural communes as the healthy beginning of a new social life which, as the Revolution approached the culmination of its creative phase, would grow and develop and stimulate similar phenomena throughout the whole country, or at least in all the villages and hamlets of the raion.
The structure of the free communes was considered by the toilers as the most advanced form of a just society. Nevertheless, most of the toilers decided not to join communes at that time because of the approach of German-Austrian troops, their own lack of organization, and their inability to defend the new system against both “revolutionary” and counter-revolutionary authorities.
That’s why the revolutionary toilers of the raion contented themselves with trying to support in every way those among them — the boldest ones — who had organized themselves into free agrarian communes on the former properties of the pomeshchiks and were leading an independent life there on new social bases.
A certain number of the pomeshchiks and kulaks, as well as some of the German colonists, realized that one way or another they could not continue as owners of thousands of dessyatins of land, exploiting the work of others. Without hesitating any longer, they sided with the Revolution and organized their lives on a new basis, i.e. without using batrak labour and without enjoying the right to rent out their land.
However, at the moment when the oppressed were seized with joy everywhere on liberated soil; when the toilers, oppressed and degraded by political, economic, and social inequality, began to be conscious of their own slavery and sought to be rid of this disgrace once and for all; when it seemed that this liberation was on the point of being accomplished, for the toilers had already become the direct exponents of this concept; when the ideas of freedom, equality, and solidarity among the people began gradually to permeate their lives and simultaneously stifle any possibility of the rebirth of a new slavery; — at this moment, the mouthpieces of the ruling Left Bloc, guided by the crafty Lenin, furiously peddled the notion that Lenin’s government controlled the Revolution and that everyone must submit to this government as the only repository of the people’s secular desires — freedom, equality, and free labour.
The urge to dominate the people and their thoughts, and the great Russian Revolution which they had created, so befuddled the state socialists that they forgot for the moment their fundamental divergences on the Peace of Brest-Litovsk, a peace concluded with the German and Austro-Hungarian “tsars” which was regarded by the revolutionary population with hostility. This fundamental problem, with its stormy discussions, the state socialists neglected for the moment. Now another thorny problem had risen up before them. How, while remaining the originators and leaders of the Revolution in the eyes of the revolutionary masses, could they manage to distort the very essence of the concept of social revolution without being destroyed when their secret intentions were exposed? Their intentions were to divert the Revolution from the path of autonomous, creative action and subject it entirely to the statist doctrines following from the resolutions and directives of the Central Executive Committee and the government.