Dear, dear, funny fool
Well, where is he, where is he going?
Doesn't he know that living horses
Did the steel cavalry win?

Sergei Yesenin (From the poem "Sorokoust")

Somewhere in the Kuban steppes, Yesenin dreamed of this touching picture: a foal was running after a train. The poet recalls this in a letter to his girlfriend.

And - the foal suddenly appears as Father Makhno!

“We were driving from Tikhoretskaya to Pyatigorsk, suddenly we hear screams, look out the window and what we see, behind the locomotive, that there is strength, a small foal is galloping, so galloping that it immediately became clear to us that he had decided for some reason to overtake him. He ran for a long time, but in the end he began to get tired and at some station he was caught. The episode is insignificant for someone, but for me it says a lot. The steel horse defeated the living horse, and this little foal was for me a clear, dear, endangered image villages and the face of Makhno. She and he in our revolution are terribly like this foal by the attraction of manpower with iron ... ".

Poems and the element of rebellion

Volumes have been written about this man. But Yesenin's lines are perhaps the best of what I have read about Nestor Ivanovich Makhno. Their special price is that Yesenin himself died because he was the same exhausted foal. And he, the poet, has a lot in common with the ataman. First of all - pain for the tragedy of the village. But also a craving for beauty. It is known that Makhno also wrote poetry. And they are far from graphomaniac:

Curse me, curse me
If I've lied to you,
Remember me, remember
I fought for the truth, I fought for you.

For you, oppressed brotherhood,
For the deceived people.
I hated arrogance and nobility,
I had a machine gun with me.

And a cart flying like a bullet,
Sabers shine stunned lift up.
Why did they turn away from me
You, to whom I gave my life?

There is not a word of reproach in my song,
I dare not blame people.
Why am I so lonely
I can't tell or understand.

You forgive me who is on the attack
Walked with me and struck by a bullet,
I should cry for you
But I see the eyes of your wives.

Here they will take you back, pay you back
And the lamps won't go out...
Well, dad can’t help it,
He knows how not to cry, but to take revenge.

Yesenin lived in the element of popular revolt in the poem "Pugachev".

Makhno carried out the element of this rebellion in his life.

See Paris and die

Mark Aldanov, a famous Russian writer abroad, saw Makhno in Paris. It didn't take long for Nestor Ivanovich to walk the earth. And he no longer resembled the once formidable chieftain:

A few years ago they showed me Makhno at the cemetery in Paris, where he could not give the "severe orders". He followed the coffin of an old political figure, who maintained good personal relations with him. For about ten minutes I walked two steps away from him, not taking my eyes off him: there were legends about this man. There was nothing remarkable about his appearance. Makhno had the appearance of a very weak physically, sick, consumptive person, in addition, living under the eternal threat of attack. Here, it would be appropriate to use a cliché: "looked around like a beast"... Makhno glanced at anyone who approached him with a quick, suspicious look. In this way he reminded me of one famous Russian terrorist - he in Paris, having long since broken with the revolution, did not like to walk on the sidewalk; he kept on along the pavement, as if people would rush at him from the gateway ... His eyes were angry, but I did not see the expressions "knowing everything", "having put an end to all doubts once and for all", etc., I did not see in them. The very words here do not fit at all. No, there was nothing demonic in Makhno's appearance: all this is literature.

One can easily imagine what he did when he came from the cemetery. Of peaceful affairs, Makhno knew only shoemaking. In Paris, he learned to weave frivolous shoes for cheap girls from Madame Tellier's neighboring institution from colored braid and twine - something between the Old Testament sandals of Sulamith and Russian bast shoes. Carefree girls did not even imagine how famous their gloomy couturier was ...

Cruel irony of fate: the last years he lived in a big city.

Makhno hated the cities.

Peasant kingdom of justice

The city is the enemy. All the trouble that fell on the orphaned peasant left the city. The city is insatiable. With a thousand long, greedy iron hands, he rummages through the cellars and barns. From him - death. The city is being robbed. All the power that does not allow the peasant to live by divine rules on earth was invented in the city, and it is not real, alien, disastrous. The peasant is not on the way with the city. He is worse than the plague, you can’t drive him away with the ringing of bells. So he must be killed.

Here is the attitude of Makhno, a cruel practitioner of the civil war, towards the city and the city dweller. The appearance and essence of the intelligentsia, which lives in the city and comes up with laws on how to rob and humiliate the village, is instinctively hostile to Old Man Makhno and his black earth army.

Here is an observation by a certain N. Sukhogorskaya of the behavior of a Makhnovist who noticed a man in a hat on a city street:

Look, in a hat ... you can see an intellectual, he would finish off ...

Later, this phrase will be repeated in its own way by the famous Spanish general who fought on the side of Franco: "When I hear the word "intellectual", my hand reaches for the holster."

I do not think that today's peasant Russia, once again mutilated by urban reformism, thinks much better about its intelligentsia. And this is the sad immortality of the Makhnovist heritage for us.

But he was also a theoretician. Naive and unexpectedly touching. If cities don't give real freedom, leave the cities. Their song is sung, and there is no place for a real free man. Go cheerfully to the villages, steppes and forests. Go to Father Makhno - and together we will build a new, better, meaningful peasant life. Life, provided with earthly fruits, which we will get together. We ourselves will figure out what kind of power we will have ...

Soviet historians unanimously ridiculed Father's childhood political literacy. Despite the fact that European thought, suffocated in the city frenzy, has long proclaimed something similar. Max Nordau and Oswald Spengler spoke about the spiritual sterility of cities, and at the same time they looked into their mouths. But Father Makhno did not come up with anything new. In his ideal republic of Makhnovia, he simply wanted to realize the old peasant dream of Belovodie - a free and fair kingdom. Many restless Russian people once scattered across the earth in order to find this peasant kingdom of final justice. And some wanted to build it where they live, and dad was one of the latter.

Only now he built his kingdom of justice by force.

His cruelty was also naive, and therefore all the more terrible.

Life against a cigarette case

Makhno is blamed for the fact that he did not have convictions - neither red, nor white, nor green, not even anarchist, although he formally reckoned himself among them, anarchists.

This is not true. He had a constant idea of ​​a peasant republic in Gulyai-Pole, and with those who interfered with this idea or knocked it out, he acted fiercely.

At first it was the Germans who took away bread and other fruits of free labor from his people. "Any force that is unjust has no right to exist" - the slogan of Old Man Makhno, who became a people's avenger. Partisanship began, rude and reckless, cruel to animal baseness and noble to holiness. The audacity of Old Man Makhno finally pissed off the German command in Kyiv. In order to destroy the rebel, it sent a significant force. Makhno retreated, blundered tactically, ended up in the ring. The methodical Germans for a long time hollowed out those surrounded by artillery ...

But the old man had already managed to seep through the iron ring and, with an unprecedented march on his carts, having traveled sixty miles in one night, escaped the massacre.

This will then be repeated. It will make Makhno elusive, invisible, existing nowhere and present everywhere. “The bandit Makhno has been destroyed,” the German Kiev authorities managed to rejoice in the announcements, but on the fifth day after that, Makhno was already playing cards at his headquarters with the captured commanders sent to capture him. The detachment itself was destroyed in the most ferocious peasant way - hand-to-hand and under the root. And the bet in the card game is life against the father's silver cigarette case. Makhno himself played with each of the Germans. Won - go with a cigarette case on all four sides. Did not win - the path to the nearest wall.

Played for two days. The old man desperately twitched his cards, no one could win a life. Once the father played honestly, lost. And he shot an officer for daring to beat him ...

And another time, having captured a detachment of Austrians, he disarmed the prisoners, gave everyone fifty rubles each, a bottle of moonshine, and let him go ...

Nickname Modest

The figure of the father is small, flimsy. Dun - and break. But his gaze - he did not look into the eyes, but somewhere over the heads - was frightened by the once inveterate urks in the Oryol Central, in the penal servitude Akatuy. And the convict pseudonym Modest, which remained with him to the end, they say, fully corresponded to the internal appearance of Makhno.

He was a completely unselfish person. He knew how to appreciate a man's act. Here is his right hand, the terrible Kiiko, suffering from painful fits of rage, chopping unarmed prisoners. One suddenly dodges with a desperate blow, the executioner falls and cannot recover for a long time. Makhno is silent for a while, struck by this picture, then he says:

That's how you have to fight for life, free him! ..

And even the fact that he refuses to serve with him does not change Makhno's mood. He releases the prisoner, and so that he does not fall into partisan hands again, he gives him an "unlimited" pass: "Let Okhrimenka pass as a good person. I declare. Anyone who does not believe him is a scoundrel. Old Man Makhno."

And at the same time, human life is worth little in his eyes. The projectile, which successfully turned the city block, delivers painful pleasure. A death threat emanates from the city. The city is vile and terrible to him.

Red and white freemen

At one time, Old Man Makhno went after the Reds.

Sailor Pavel Dybenko was appointed to command the fourth Ukrainian Soviet army by the summer of 1919. First of all, he demanded Makhno at his headquarters. I handed him a bunch of orders.

What is this for, - Makhno did not understand.

Fulfill, - said Dybenko briefly. - And if something is not clear, I, comrade, have already sent you specialists.

For starters, Makhno put Spetsov in a casemate. Then he interrogated everyone. Of all, he liked only the former captain of the tsarist General Staff, Vasiliev. He was not a fool to drink, and besides, he showed himself remarkably well in practical shooting from the Makhnovist artillery. Vasiliev remained in the Gulyai-Polye army as chief of staff.

The rest, after a week of arrest, were sent on foot to Simferopol with stern orders never to return again on pain of death.

Thus, Makhno's cooperation with the Soviet authorities began ambiguously. But he fought for the Reds with dignity. He was awarded the Order of the Red Banner N4 for a raid on the rear of the White armies, which gave the Reds the opportunity to gather forces and go on the autumn counteroffensive of 1919. Denikin threw his best generals into battle against Makhno, but to no avail. General Yakov Slashchev, a talented military leader (the prototype of General Khludov in M. Bulgakov's play "Running"), admitted to his comrades-in-arms that his dream was to fight like Makhno. It was Makhno's cavalry who helped Frunze storm the Crimea. During the capture of Perekop, his troops were thrown into the most difficult area and almost completely knocked out (they took the Turkish Wall head-on) ...

But Makhno also fought against the Reds. How he fought for four damned Russian years against the Germans, against the hetman, against Petliura, against the whites ...

Against everyone.

He dreamed of free Soviets, which should regulate the meaningful life of the Makhnovist commune. About people's self-government without any party influence. Once, having won Alexandrovsk, a strategically large center, from the Reds, he issued a leaflet: “Your city is occupied by the revolutionary insurgent army of the Makhnovists. This army does not serve any political party, any power, any dictatorship. On the contrary, it seeks to liberate the region from all political power, from any dictatorship. Its task is to protect the freedom of action, the free life of the working people from any kind of inequality and exploitation."

Yes, naive. But naivete is just another name for purity. Politics becomes a dirty business if there is no place left in it for the naive belief that the truth is better than profit.

Who entered Nestor Makhno into history? Partisan? An avenger? An unappreciated prophet of just power?

"I threw myself into battle with my head ..."

Four years of the struggle of Old Man Makhno, this "pulling of manpower with iron" may seem meaningless. Like a foal running after a soulless colossus of a train. However, that "state emptiness", in a huge diameter of up to six hundred kilometers, in which the drama of the Makhnovshchina took place, nevertheless tired the iron. The hitherto inflexible Bolshevik government caved in. Lenin was the first to sense that if the people were not given a respite now, the authority of the authorities, insisted on a lot of bloodshed, would turn into ashes. Nestor Makhno and many leaders of peasant uprisings throughout Russia are the main ones who wrested the NEP from Lenin. History cautiously, as if closing its eyes, groped for other ways...

Nestor Ivanovich Makhno died in 1934 from influenza, which aggravated chronic tuberculosis, in a Paris infirmary for the poor. He left, leaving questions unanswered and several poems to posterity.

I threw myself into battle with my head,
Don't ask for mercy from death
And it's not guilty that he's alive
Stay in this circle.

We shed blood and sweat
They were frank with the people.
We have been defeated. But
Our idea was not killed.

Let them bury us now
But our Essence will not sink into oblivion,
She will rise at the right time
And win. I believe in it!

The name of Nestor Makhno is so odious that in itself it makes it difficult to determine the scale of his personality: whether he was an ordinary anarchist partisan, or a figure incomparably more significant, standing, if not in the first, then in the second row of participants in the Civil War so tragic for Russia . In other words, one of those who could influence its course.

Behind all the myths with which the name of Makhno has grown, it is most difficult to see that this is so. In any case, along with the leaders of the rebellious Kronstadt, Makhno, with his Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army, was the most outstanding representative of the "people's" opposition to Bolshevism.

If Kronstadt was crushed for a month, then Makhno held out in the ring of the Civil War for 3 years, having managed to make war with the Haidamaks of Hetman Skoropadsky, Germans, Whites, Reds - and still stay alive. He alone managed to achieve what no popular movement opposed to the Bolsheviks had achieved: in 1920, the Insurgent Army and the Council of People's Commissars of Ukraine signed an agreement on political loyalty, on freedom of speech and press (within the "socialist" frequency band), and on free election to the councils of representatives of all socialist parties ... If Wrangel had held out in the Crimea a little longer, it may turn out that Makhno would have demanded from the Council of People's Commissars the territory for the creation of a "free Soviet system." Of course, for the mature Bolsheviks of the 1920 model, all the clauses of the agreement were just a tactical cunning and all the "free councils" would have been crushed the very next day after the whites laid down their arms. And yet ... The Bolsheviks never stooped to negotiations with the insurgent people, suppressing any uprisings with exceptional cruelty. Makhno forced the ruling party of the first totalitarian state of a new type in the 20th century to reckon with the people. For this alone he earned posthumous fame.

He was the fifth, youngest child in a poor family of a coachman who served with Mark Kerner, the owner of an iron foundry in Gulyai-Pole, a small town in the Azov steppe, the very name of which seems to be an echo of the epic Zaporozhye times. What is true: from the island of Khortitsa on the Dnieper, from where the Zaporizhzhya Sich squandered its liberty and robbery, to Gulyai-Pole is hardly fifty miles, and that the Cossacks walked here, and in the battles with the Krymchaks they laid their forelocks, in the place of which their villages later grew numerous descendants - no doubt.

In 1906, at the age of minority (17), Makhno landed in prison for hard labor, which, of course, was also due to the circumstances of the place / time. The seeds sown by Narodnaya Volya and the Socialist-Revolutionary Party sprouted in luxuriant growth. Russia raved about the revolution. In the history of the first Russian revolution, what is most striking is the self-forgetfulness with which people threw themselves “into terror”, who are not so easy to imagine behind the stuffing of home-made bombs: some kind of workers, high school students, employees of railways and post offices, teachers. Age-old tyranny demanded revenge. The explosion of the bomb was tantamount to the execution of the judgment of the Court of the Righteous. "Draught terror" in Russia in 1906-1907 has no analogues in world history. But from within itself, this phenomenon looks terrible and ordinary. And the activities of the Gulyai-Polye group of anarchists, which included young Makhno, did not go beyond this mediocrity: they got revolvers, made bombs, robbed, for starters, the owners of the iron foundry, where a good half of the group worked, then someone else from the local rich , then a liquor store ... During a raid on a mail coach, a bailiff and a postman were killed. They fell under the suspicion of the police. Arrested. Court. Sentence: 20 years. Moscow Butyrki.

There he met Pyotr Arshinov, an "ideological" anarchist, whom, even as a commander of the Insurgent, he continued to call his "teacher". Then - February 17th, the abdication of the king, a general amnesty ... In seething Moscow, Makhno never found a place or a job for himself. He did not like at all, did not understand cities. Twenty-eight years old, having neither a penny nor a traveling profession, he moved south, to his native Gulyai-Pole. And then suddenly he turned out to be in demand by time: around the crowd, rallies, vague premonitions, resolutions, meetings - and he is savvy, knows what to ask, what to demand. He is pulled apart by five committees - and nothing, he is not lost, he presides. Mother, Evdokia Ivanovna, proud of her youngest, wants to arrange his life, like people do, finds a wife, the beautiful Nastya Vasetskaya. The wedding buzzed for 3 days. But before his wife was he?

Already in July 1917, power in Gulyai-Pole passed to the Soviet. Makhno naturally became chairman. Now he is preoccupied with the creation of detachments and the extraction of weapons, so that by the fall he will begin to confiscate land from the landowners. Makhno sometimes still flirts in search of his "theme" in the revolution: then he goes as a delegate to the Provincial Congress of Soviets in Yekaterinoslav, from where he returns disappointed with the inter-party struggle. Then he goes to Aleksandrovsk, where, together with the detachment of the Bolshevik Bogdanov, he disarms the Cossack trains, rolling back from the front to their native villages, and so he gets 4 boxes of rifles, but unexpectedly for himself, he turns out to be the chairman of the judicial commission of the Revolutionary Committee, designed to sort out the cases of "enemies of the revolution". In this paper and punitive position, he finally cannot stand it and explodes: he is turned away by the arrests of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries - yesterday's "fellow travelers" in the revolution, but especially by the prison. His first prison, where he sat, waiting for a hard labor sentence. “I repeatedly had a desire to blow up the prison, but not once did I manage to get enough dynamite and pyroxylin for this ... Even now, I told my friends, it is clear that ... not the parties will serve the people, but the people will serve the parties” .

In January 1918, he announced his resignation from the Revolutionary Committee and left for Gulyai-Pole to make his own revolution. It was this time in Makhno's memoirs that is painted in lyrical tones: he tells about the first communes created in the former landowners' estates, about the first kindergartens in Gulyai-Polye...

No one will ever know what was left outside this idyll, what was happening during these dark winter months in the remote districts of the steppe Ukraine. God knows what happened in the cities. In Kyiv, after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the first government of independent Ukraine was imprisoned, headed by a third-year student Golubovich. However, the power of the Central Rada did not extend to such cities as Kharkov or Yekaterinoslav: revolutionary committees ruled here, in which the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs squabbled. The commissar of the Black Sea Fleet, the Left Social Revolutionary Spiro, responded to the proposal of the German command to flood the fleet in Sevastopol by declaring the Crimea a separate independent republic and appointing the mobilization of people and horses ... True, he was soon arrested for arbitrariness.

It all ended unexpectedly quickly: in March 1918, the Germans occupied Ukraine, putting the hetman Skoropadsky, who was devoted to them, in charge. Several anarchist and Bolshevik fighting squads tried to resist the invasion, but they soon ended up in Rostov - on the territory of Russia "reconciled" with the Germans.

Another "failure" in the biography of Makhno is a trip through Tsaritsyn to Moscow. True, he made several correct conclusions about the nature of the central government maturing in the capital and met with the “apostle of anarchy” P.A. Kropotkin. And besides, in search of housing, he accidentally wandered into the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, which was located in the Kremlin and distributed warrants for rooms. There Sverdlov intercepted him and, catching the southern dialect of his interlocutor, began to ask about the state of affairs in Ukraine. Makhno spoke as best he could. Sverdlov suggested that he come in the next day and tell the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars about everything in more detail. Fantasy! In what other country could the search for a room end with a meeting with the head of government? However, nothing can be done: this is how Makhno's meeting with Lenin took place.

Lenin asked quick, specific questions: who, where, how did the peasants react to the slogan “All the Vast to the Soviets”, did they rebel against the Rada and the Germans, and if so, what was missing for the peasant riots to result in a widespread uprising? Concerning the slogan "All power to the Soviets," Makhno diligently explained that he understood this slogan precisely in the sense that power is for the Soviets. To the people.

“In that case, the peasantry of your localities is infected with anarchism,” Lenin remarked.

— Is it bad? Makhno asked.

“I don't want to say that. On the contrary, it would be gratifying, as it would hasten the victory of communism over capitalism and its power.

Lenin, apparently, was satisfied with that conversation: he considered the anarchism of the peasants a temporary and soon curable disease, which, however, gave a chance on the shoulders of a peasant uprising to break into Ukraine and establish a Bolshevik order there. Makhno immediately received a false passport to return to his homeland and a chain of underground Bolshevik appearances. I took my passport. I did not use turnouts.

Leaving Moscow on June 29, Makhno arrived at his native place when the situation was tense to the limit. The hetman's authorities restored all the pre-revolutionary order, roughly punishing the troublemakers of 1917. Makhno, disguised as a woman, went to look at his native village. Gulyai-Pole was occupied by a Magyar battalion under the command of Austrian officers. The occupiers burned Makhno's house, they shot two older brothers only for their surname, although both were in no way involved in the rebellion. Not a trace of the "communes" remained. I had to start all over again. But if in the 17th the main thing was to "push the speech" incendiary, now - why? It was necessary to act. To avenge, to kill, to let a red rooster go, to raise an uprising - and in this case, no cruelty seemed excessive.

Makhno tracked down old brawlers hiding in the villages - Chubenko, Marchenko, Karetnikov, eight people in all. With axes and knives, they crawled into the estate of the landowner Reznikov at night and slaughtered the whole family - because it had four brother officers who served in the hetman's police. So they got the first 7 rifles, a revolver, 7 horses and 2 saddles. Makhno triumphed: weren't these officers who killed his innocent brothers? He took revenge. Did anyone then think how many brothers would have to avenge their brothers if the knot of hatred was untied? No. Then everyone who had a weapon felt in strength, and in the right, and in the truth.

On September 22, the Makhnovists, dressed in the uniforms of the sovereign Varta (police), met Lieutenant Murkovsky on the road. Makhno presented himself as the head of a punitive detachment sent from Kyiv by order of the hetman himself. Murkovsky, not sensing a dirty trick, said that he was going to his father's estate to rest for a day or two, to hunt for game and for seditious.

“You, mister lieutenant, don’t understand me,” the guard’s “captain” suddenly said in a voice shattered by excitement. - I am a revolutionary Makhno. Your surname seems to be fairly well-known?

The officers began to offer money to Makhno, but he contemptuously refused. Then the “hunters”, like hares, rushed across the fields in all directions. They were slaughtered with machine guns... Oh, Makhno loved provocation - classical, with desperate lies and masquerade - he was a hypocrite! He loved to see the horror in the eyes of his enemies when he suddenly announced his name to them. At that time, dozens or hundreds of tiny detachments, like particles of fiery phlogiston, circled around Ukraine, sowing fire and death everywhere. And only when the punishers, brutalized by partisan raids, began to burn villages, kill and torture peasants, the flame of popular anger flared in breadth. Detachments of several hundred people, armed with shotguns, pitchforks and "clubs", in fact, became the embryo of Makhno's Insurrectionary Army. But for this they had to be organized somehow.

When Viktor Belash, the future chief of staff of the army and one of Makhno's best strategists, arrived in Gulyai-Pole, occupied by the rebels, he was first of all instructed to bring all the various detachments into normal regiments and convince their commanders of the need to follow the orders of the headquarters, because a new danger was approaching: from southeast, whites began to penetrate into the "free region". It was necessary to organize and hold the front. A real civil war was on the nose, but for the time being, under the canopy of night, one could find paintings that seemed to be written off from the Middle Ages. Let's say, near Orekhovo, Belash found a detachment of 200 people sitting around a fire. “In the middle, a stout middle-aged man was squatting. Long black hair hung down over her shoulders, falling over her eyes. - "Lemons have scattered across the open field, get out, Cadets, give us vo-o-o-ol!" he shouted.

“This is our father Dermendzhi,” one of the rebels explained.

Suddenly machine guns and rifles crackled at the position. Two riders galloped all over the quarry and shouted "The Germans are advancing!".

"Father" shouted: "Well, sons, get ready ..."

"To the front, to the front, with an accordion!" the crowd roared. And they, stumbling and in a hurry, ran in disarray to the position.

Dermendzhi was a well-known person - he participated in the uprising on the battleship Potemkin. But detachments of personalities unknown to anyone were still spinning around - Zverev, Kolyada, Patalahi, Old Man-Pravda. Belash also saw the latter: he turned out to be a legless disabled person who, having entered the village on a cart, gathered people and yelled with half of his body: “Listen, guys! Let's sit on your shii until you give us a drink like a slid!

It is surprising that out of all this half-drunk freemen, Makhno managed to create an absolutely disciplined and paradoxical in its maneuverability unit in a few months, which was noted by General Slashchev, whom Denikin instructed to conduct operations against Makhno.

Meanwhile, the situation changed again: before the news of the revolution in Germany reached Ukraine, another coup took place in Kyiv: the hetman fled, power passed to the Directory, headed by the very left-wing Ukrainian Social Democrat Vinnichenko, who, as a first duty, sent a delegation to Moscow to negotiate with the Bolsheviks about the world. By an evil irony of fate, while these negotiations were going on, the former Minister of War of the Directorate S. Petlyura seized power, and the Bolsheviks occupied Kharkov without any negotiations, where on January 4, 1919, Comrade Pyatakov, the first Prime Minister of Red Ukraine, received a military parade from the available forces. The trouble was that there were only 3 or 4 regiments of forces, because after the Brest Peace, when Germany, together with Ukraine, almost devoured half of Russia, none of the most courageous revolutionaries even thought that in an instant her omnipotence could collapse, and the Ukraine will again "open up" to the revolution. However, it soon became clear that all the work on "clearing the territory" was carried out by Ukrainian partisans. No one knew what kind of people they were, they were afraid of them, suspecting them of nationalism, kulaks, and in general, the devil knows what, but the well-known party freethinker V.A. Antonov-Ovseenko was not afraid to bet on these parts. And, in general, this strategy justified itself. Shchors and Bozhenko took Kyiv from the Petliurists, Grigoriev recaptured Nikolaev and Kherson, where, after a 3-hour artillery duel, the Greeks and French were beaten by him, who started an intervention, after which he also took Odessa. Makhno held back the advance of the whites in the southeast and, although he did not achieve much success, the barrier seemed to put up a reliable one, asking, like all partisans, for only one thing: weapons. Viktor Belash, who had come specially to knock out rifles and cartridges in Kharkov, was treated kindly by Antonov-Ovseenko and left full of hope. Together with him, a group of anarchists of the Nabat federation went to Gulyai-Pole to organize the work of the cultural enlightenment department. Makhno, having received the brigade commissar Ozerov, officially became a red brigade commander, subordinate to the commander of the 2nd Ukrainian army, comrade Skachko. True, he honestly admitted that there were never other units in the army besides the Makhno brigade.
Of course, none of the Bolsheviks expected such a fortunate combination of circumstances. While the partisans were fighting on the fronts, they could calmly build up their power, start a Cheka, send food detachments to the village and generally feel at home, while scolding the partisans and discussing whether it was time, say, to “remove” Makhno because of several unsuccessful battles. ? In addition, on April 10 in Gulyai-Pole, the third congress of “free councils” incomprehensible to the Bolsheviks took place, which announced mobilizations into the Insurgent Army and ended with rather harsh political declarations: “Down with the commissar power and appointees!” - "Down with the Chechens - modern Okhrana!" "Long live the freely elected Workers' and Peasants' Soviets!"

The Kharkiv Izvestiya, the main newspaper of red Ukraine, immediately responded with an article: "Down with the Makhnovshchina!" Mentioning the Makhnovist congress, the author of the editorial demanded that an end be put to the "disgrace" that was happening in the "kingdom of Makhno", and for this, to send agitators, "wagons of literature" and instructors for the organization of Soviet power to the region. Although no one knew what was going on in the "kingdom of Makhno", because, of course, not a single newspaper clicker was there.
At this moment, Antonov-Ovseenko decided to pay an inspection visit to the “kingdom of Makhno”. On April 29, at the Gulyai-Pole station, the front was met by a troika. In the village, troops lined up at the front broke out the "Internationale". Towards Antonov came “a short, youthful, dark-eyed man in a hat on one side. Saluted: brigade commander Batko Makhno. We are doing well at the front. There is a battle for Mariupol." A face-to-face conversation followed, after which Antonov-Ovseenko sharply wrote to the editors of Izvestia: “The article is full of factual lies and is directly provocative ... Makhno and his brigade ... deserve not the swearing of officialdom, but the fraternal gratitude of all revolutionary workers and peasants.

Commander-2 Skachko - on the same occasion: “Allocate money for the brigade, uniforms, trench tools, at least half the staff of telephone equipment, camp kitchens, cartridges, doctors, one armored train on the Dolya-Mariupol line.” Never before had Makhno been so interested in an alliance with the Bolsheviks as after the visit of Antonov-Ovseenko. Never with any of them had he established comradely relations on such a level. He was waiting for help, which would testify to one more thing: trust in him.

But absolutely nothing of what Antonov-Ovseenko asked for was done. The newspaper persecution of the Makhnovists did not stop. They did not receive weapons. What can you do? The Bolshevik strategists of Denikin's main attack were waiting for Tsaritsyn, but he struck at Makhno, rushed through the Ukraine straight to Moscow. And it was then that the morally beaten commander-2 Skachko blabbed, justifying himself that he did not supply Makhno with weapons on purpose and, therefore, thousands of people were sent for slaughter on purpose, thinking that it would do. Of course, all this double-dealing policy should have ended in disaster, but for the time being everything went well. Speaking on April 1 at the plenum of the Moscow Soviet, Trotsky assured the audience that the Southern Front would soon face decisive changes, which he painted in exceptionally rosy colors. Victory over the Whites seemed close and inevitable when a catastrophe broke out: Grigoriev’s division, returning from Odessa, found food detachments mercilessly operating in their native villages and flared in revolt in half of Ukraine.

A telegram from Grigoriev to Makhno was intercepted: “Father! Why are you looking at the communists? Beat them! Ataman Grigoriev. Makhno did not answer. On May 17, Shkuro's cavalry cut through the front at the junction of the Makhno brigade and the 13th Army of the Southern Front and in one day traveled about fifty kilometers. There was nothing to close the gap. In the reserve of the 2nd Army there was one "international" regiment of 400 bayonets. After a week of fighting, Skachko melancholy stated: "Makhno actually does not exist."

Indeed, the brigade, deprived of firearms, was turned into some kind of bloody scum, in which, however, the hooves of the horses of the Caucasian division Shkuro still continued to tangle. Makhno began to retreat, than his fate was decided: he was instantly ranked among the rebels, and on May 25, at the apartment of H. Rakovsky, the second red prime minister of Ukraine, a meeting of the Council of Workers 'and Peasants' Defense took place with the agenda: "Makhnovshchina and its liquidation." Note that nothing has happened yet. Moreover, the Makhnovists managed to literally stop the advance of the Whites with bayonet attacks. It would seem that a simple sense of self-preservation should have prompted the Bolsheviks that they should not fight Makhno's fictitious rebellion, but, on the contrary, support it! So no, and the sense of self-preservation is gone! Why? None of the Bolsheviks, apparently, had any idea what forces Denikin had concentrated on the front by that time. But on May 26, VUTsIK adopted a regulation on socialist land use, that is, on the socialization of land for state farms. And in this light, the Fourth Congress of "Free Soviets", scheduled for June 15, was completely unnecessary to the Bolsheviks.

To top it all off, Comrade Trotsky arrived in the Ukraine before the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic. Hurrying, on the train, in his personal newspaper "On the Road" he publishes the article "Makhnovshchina", reprinted on June 4 by the Kharkov "Izvestia". In it, all the failures of the Red Army are pushed onto Makhno. “Scratch a Makhnovist and you will find a Grigorievian. And most often there is no need to scrape: a frantic fist barking at the Communists or a petty speculator sticks out. It's in the trenches - kulaks and speculators?! The defensive remarks of Antonov-Ovseenko and Skachko were useless: the Ukrainian Front had 2 weeks left to exist, the 2nd Army was transformed into the 14th, Skachko was removed, Voroshilov took his place, who dreamed of "getting Makhno" in order to do revolutionary justice over him. ..

Makhno did not know what to do. He did not want to die and wanted to leave behind the place of a revolutionary. On June 9, from the Gaichur station, he sent Trotsky (copies to Lenin, Kamenev) two long messages in which he asked to be relieved of his command: “I perfectly understand the attitude of the central government towards me. I am absolutely convinced that this government considers the insurrectionary movement incompatible with its state activities. She also believes that this movement is connected personally with me ... It is necessary that I leave my post.

Suddenly, with a detachment of horsemen of several hundred people, mostly old rebels of 1918, Makhno appears in Aleksandrovsk and surrenders his command affairs, not responding to requests to protect the city. It passes to the right bank of the Dnieper and dissolves in the deserted spaces of the red rear.

On June 14, making sure that Makhno had left and it would not be possible to lure him into an armored train, the enraged Voroshilov gave the order to shoot the commissar of the Ozerov brigade and the commander of the sapper units of the brigade, the "beautiful soul of the young idealist" Mikhalev-Pavlenko. Makhnovist units are poured into the 14th Army. On July 7, Trotsky wrote in the capital's newspaper Izvestiya Narodnogo Commissariat po militarnykh delo: "Denikin was on the brink of death, from which he could only be separated by a few days, but he correctly guessed the scum of boiling kulaks and deserters." The catastrophe of 1919 ended with the failure of the Red Front all the way to Tula. Comrade Trotsky did not want to take responsibility. Comrade Trotsky remained clean.

Meanwhile, at the Novopomoshchnaya station, Makhno waited for the development of events. The Reds, leaving Ukraine, bypassed him, fearing that some units, not wanting to part with their homeland, would “stick” to him. After the retreat from the Dnieper to the Novy Bug, the whole of his former brigade and some red units actually went over to Makhno. They were ready to fight to the end. After the front went north, the Whites formed 2 divisions against Makhno under the command of General Slashchev and decided to crush him. At this time, even the legend of Colonel Kleist, the German genius Makhno, was born among the whites. He, a German colonel, was not ashamed to lose battles, but the “partisans”, the “rabid peasant” were ashamed. In early September, the Whites made their first attempts to knock Makhno off his positions: as a result, he almost occupied Yelisavetgrad, saved at the cost of a heroic officer counterattack. Perhaps the Makhnovists would have won the battle if they had ammunition. Only having rolled back under Uman and, by secret agreement, handed over the wounded to the Petliurists, they received a certain amount of ammunition in addition, which helped them to withstand the next battle. The Petliurists were afraid of the Whites and were ready to supply cartridges to anyone, just to delay the moment of meeting with Denikin's men. On September 25, Makhno suddenly announced that the retreat was over and that the real war would begin tomorrow morning. With some supernatural instinct, he determined that he had one chance to save the army: to attack the core of the pursuers and destroy it.

The Battle of Peregonovka is one of the strangest events of the Civil War. Several memoirs have been preserved about him (Arshinov, Volin, several White Guard officers), from which it is clear that you cannot call it a major military operation. It was just a furious, brutal battle, where they really fought not for life, but for death. And at the same time, the outcome of this battle influenced the entire further course of the war. Three and a half thousand partisans escaped from the encirclement. But it turned out that they escaped into the outer space of history.

The reconnaissance sent to Pyatikhatki, Yekaterinoslav and Aleksandrovsk did not find the enemy. The rear garrisons of Denikin were extremely weak: over the Dnieper, from Nikolaev to Kherson, there were no troops, in Nikolaev - 150 state guard officers. Naturally, in such an environment, Makhno resurrected like a Phoenix, once again flying to Guyai-Pole and Berdyansk. Having crushed the port through which the supply of the Volunteer Army went and shredded all the railways that came to hand, he actually paralyzed Denikin's rear. “This uprising, which took on such broad dimensions, upset our rear and weakened our front in the most difficult time for it,” admitted A.I. Denikin. But Makhno, having secured the victory for the Reds, tried to his own ruin. True, he counted on something else: that his heroism would finally be judged according to their merits. He wanted to serve the revolution. He just could not be a meek executor of someone else's will. And that's why, like Oedipus, he was doomed to go from one disappointment to another. However, at first Makhno reveled in triumph.
He again commanded the army and was the only owner of the vast territory on both sides of the Dnieper. Aleksandrovsk, late, but still warm autumn, solemn entry into the city: he is with "Mother Galina" in the sky-colored landau, accompanied by all his picturesque retinue ...

The surprise of the townsfolk: something will happen?

Announcement of liberties to the population ...

In Alexandrovsk, Makhno finally realized what he had dreamed of all his life: the Congress of Independent Free Councils of all the territory subject to him. Not long before the congress, Comrade Lubim from the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries came to see Volin. An interesting conversation took place.

— You are convening a congress of workers and peasants. It will make a huge difference. But what are you doing? No explanation, no propaganda, no list of candidates! And what will happen if the peasantry sends reactionary deputies to you who demand to convene a Constituent Assembly? What will you do if the counter-revolutionaries fail your congress?

Volin felt the responsibility of the moment:

“If today, at the height of the revolution, after everything that has happened, the peasants send counter-revolutionaries and monarchists to the congress, then—you hear—my life’s work was a complete mistake. And I have no choice but to blow my brains out of the revolver that you see on the table ...

"I'm serious," Lubim began.

"And I'm serious," Volin answered.

Makhno opened the congress, but refused to preside. This surprised the peasants, but gradually they got used to it and in 3 days they gradually developed and approved the principles of the “free Soviet system”, which for Makhno sounded sweeter than the ode “To Liberty”.

Meanwhile, the Whites came to their senses and decided to put an end to Makhno after all. As a result, the rebels were forced to leave Aleksandrovsk and move the "capital" of their republic to Yekaterinoslav, fenced off from the whites by the Dnieper and the front, stretched between the two bows of the Dnieper, like a bowstring. Slashchev, again moved against the partisans, realized that, having mastered the territory, Makhno had lost his main quality - maneuverability. Therefore, without dispersing his strength, he strikes in one place, along the Pyatikhatki-Yekaterinoslav railway. The front is breaking. The capital Makhno is in the hands of the Whites. From the suburban mud, the dad counterattacks eight times, trying to recapture the city - in vain! It ruins all his plans. He dreamed of meeting the Reds as the owner of an anarchist free republic with the capital in the largest city of eastern Ukraine, but once again he turned out to be the commander of a seditious partisan detachment, which was also fairly battered by the whites.

On January 1, the long-awaited meeting took place. A wave of joint victorious rallies swept through. On January 4, Commander-14 Uborevich issued a secret order to destroy all Makhno's gangs. But to start open action against the rebels, a pretext was needed. He didn't have to wait long. On January 8, the Makhnovist headquarters in Aleksandrovsk received a categorical order to move the Insurgent Army to the Polish Front. The army did not obey either Uborevich or any red commander, either formally or in fact. The Reds knew about it. Moreover, they counted on the fact that the Makhnovists would not obey the order, which Uborevich let slip to Yakir.

But the Makhnovists not only disobeyed the order. The Revolutionary Military Council of the insurgents issued a Declaration, which the Bolsheviks could not perceive otherwise than as an attempt to snatch the political initiative from them. It was colossal audacity. A year before the Kronstadt rebellion, the declaration formulated all the basic postulates of the most hated heresy for the Bolsheviks - "For Soviets without Communists." In addition, as expected, the Makhnovists’ refusal to go to the Polish front came to Uborevich’s headquarters, primarily because “50% of the fighters, the entire headquarters and the army commander were ill with typhus.”

The answer completely satisfied the Bolsheviks. On January 9, F. Levenzon's brigade and the troops of the 41st division, who, together with the Makhnovists, occupied Aleksandrovsk, made an attempt to capture Makhno's headquarters, located in the best hotel in the city. The headquarters cut through the city along with the "father's hundred", and Makhno himself, dressed in a peasant dress, left the city in a cart, unnoticed by anyone. The reward for him was another declaration of "outlaws" ...

From typhus and military failures Makhno moved away only in the spring of 1920. According to the detachment, one by one, the "army" gathered - this time a small, five thousand, detachment of well-armed people, certainly mounted. One of the bloodiest campaigns began, the mechanism of which, debugged in previous years, worked with depressing clarity.

Communists were killed. The communist organizations were destroyed. In one village, in another, in a third. Carts. Leaflets. Blood. There is nothing romantic about this. Moreover, there is no hope. But there is one undoubted truth in this - the truth of resistance.

“To die or to win—that is what is now facing the peasantry of Ukraine... But we cannot all die, there are too many of us, we are humanity, therefore, we will win,” this is how Makhno experienced this feeling of enormity. 1920 is the year of continuous peasant uprisings, the last war of the peasantry for their rights. The peasants lost it. Lost on the fields of decisive battles, lost politically. And although the NEP - a kind of peace protocol - was signed, it seemed, with the interest of the peasantry, in the 29th, when they again began to take away land for collective farms, it turned out that everyone had completely lost. There is no one to defend the rights before the government, and there is no one to rise up in revolt.

Makhno was the last who tried to provide his descendants with at least some kind of "right", which in the revolution is obtained only by force.

In June, Wrangel withdrew from the Crimea, and Russia's "last and decisive battle" broke out in the south of Ukraine for its future. The package of laws adopted by the Wrangel government would undoubtedly have become a healing medicine for the country in 1917, but in 1920 the pill had to be pushed through by force: so the battles were of such intensity that the Civil War had not known before. All summer, Makhno's army dangled in the red rear, methodically destroying it: disarming units, destroying food detachments (which it succeeded in, food requisitioning in the "Makhnovist" areas was completely failed). And only in the fall, when a bullet shattered Makhno's ankle in the battle near Izyum, the army stopped for a whole month, occupying Starobelsk at the very border with Russia, where truly extraordinary things began to happen.

First, a representative of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries ("minority" - that is, those who recognize cooperation with the Bolsheviks) arrived at Makhno and hinted that in the face of such a counter as Wrangel, true revolutionaries should forget all differences and unite. The Makhnovists immediately realized that the messenger was choosing the opinion of certain Bolshevik circles. A meeting of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Army was held, at which even the most "red" among the Makhnovists, Kurylenko and Belash, spoke in the sense that the fight against the Bolsheviks should not be stopped.

Makhno did not resist: he adhered to the line of the most severe agrarian terror, which, after all, was also an argument in politics. He made it clear that this time you won’t get off with talk about “reconciliation” - he found a scythe on a stone, and that if negotiations, then seriously - with seals, publicity and guarantees.

And in this his calculation turned out to be correct: only the fear that at the moment of a decisive attack on Wrangel the Insurgent Army would again move off and go to smash the red rear, forced the Bolsheviks to negotiate. In September, Ivanov, authorized by the RVS of the Yuzhfront, arrived in Starobelsk, no longer disguised as Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. On September 29, the Central Committee of the CP(b)U, represented by Rakovsky, confirmed the decision to negotiate with Makhno.

Question: What was Makhno counting on when concluding an agreement with the Bolsheviks? After all, he knew them well. No worse than they are. And yet he hoped that this time he had finished, and that they would have to reckon with him, at least in the face of Wrangel. Well, who knew that the "black baron" would be defeated so soon! Perekop fortifications were considered impregnable. And that the wind will drive water out of Sivash ...

On October 2, the agreement was signed. Unprecedented was not only its meaning, which implies, for example, an amnesty for anarchists and freedom of anarchist propaganda, but also the very formula of consent concluded by the Insurgent Army and the government of Ukraine. Apparently, Makhno himself was blinded by the results of his victory: after 8 months of damned banditry, the long-awaited peace came. His wound was treated by Moscow professors, his fighters rested up in full-time Red Army hospitals!

And most importantly, the army finally received a supply of weapons, which seemed to be the height of confidence. Makhno did not yet know that his elite units, the 5,000-strong “Karetnikov Corps,” would have to play almost the main role in forcing the Sivash. Which without weapons would hardly be possible. But as soon as Wrangel fell, everything was over: all the clauses of the “Agreement” were instantly annulled, the Makhnovist delegates were arrested in Kharkov, Makhno was “outlawed”. He did not expect such a meanness. Now he had only one thing to do - to wait for his best parts - the Krymchaks, in order to talk seriously with the traitors. The meeting was to be held on December 7 in the village of Kermenchik. Yellow frosty dust swirled in the air. Old Man saw two hundred exhausted horsemen. Marchenko galloped up to him with a crooked grin on his face:

- I have the honor to report that the Crimean army has returned ....

Makhno was silent. Looking at the faces of his comrades, Marchenko concluded:

— Yes, brothers, now I know what communists are...

Makhno's raids of 1921 are interesting to follow except for the historian: drawn on the map, they resemble the repetitive dance of some kind of insect. Obviously, this kind of interest was shown by Frunze's deputy R. Eideman, before he realized that Makhno was walking along strictly laid routes, changing horses here, leaving the wounded here, replenishing stocks of weapons here ... Having calculated the trajectory of the detachment, on June 21st Eideman for the first time, he abandons the tactics of pursuit and inflicts a counter blow on Makhno. And then there was just agony, which lasted another 2 months.

Makhno was doomed. He lived as early as 1919, and the year 1921 has already come. The revolution has won. The winners enjoyed its fruits with might and main. Learned new positions. Trying on new jackets. The ebullient, crazy time of NEP was approaching - the time of the market and the ephemeral luxury of being ...

Makhno, on the other hand, was banditry with a handful of the same, who had lost everything and were ready for anything partisans. What the war taught them was no longer needed by people and became dangerous for them. The Makhnovists had to disappear. The safest thing is to die. But Makhno could not reconcile himself. The war gave him everything - love, comrades, human respect and gratitude, power ... The war chained him to itself with revenge: it killed all his brothers, burned his home, accustomed his heart to indifference and ruthlessness ... He was left alone: ​​the war destroyed almost all of his friends. He knew why they fell, why they did not reconcile, he knew the law of battle: bow your head - they will put you on your knees. But he knew only his own truth, not wanting to know the truth of the changed time: during this time a new generation had grown up who wanted to live, not fight. For such is the law of youth, the law of life. And he, with his 19th year, in his heart became contrary to this law.

He was overstark and carried death in himself and was no longer needed. During the persecution of the last Makhnovists by armored cars, the peasants - for the first time in the entire war! - they pointed out the direction to the extermination squads ... Looking at the haggard, half-mad faces of the rebels, the peasants also understood: uh-uh, but what good can you look for from these. Enough. Bad, naughty, cursed - nothing will come of them but restlessness and thinness....

At the crossing over the Ingul, a bullet hit Makhno in the back of the head and exited his cheek, opening his face like a saber scar. This was his last, 14th, wound, which was supposed to put an end to his fate, similar to those that were placed in the fates of almost all of his comrades.

But Makhno survived. Probably, the Lord decided to test him to the end: to drag him through all the bitterness of loss and outcasts, emigration, betrayal of friends, poverty...

In 1934, the flu, superimposed on chronic tuberculosis, resolved him from earthly fetters in a provincial Parisian hospital. The incomparable partisan to the end drank the cup of earthly existence.

What did most of us until recently know about Nestor Makhno, better known as Makhno's "father"? Perhaps only that he was the commander of the army of anarchists or simply the chieftain of bandits who instilled fear in the Ukrainian townsfolk with their raids, robberies, senseless murders, with their confrontation with both whites and reds. We knew about Makhno, about the Makhnovist freemen, from several films, from a few books in which he was by no means assigned the main role. For the first time, the caricature image of Makhno appeared on the screen in the silent film "Red Devils". Later there were films "Alexander Parkhomenko", "Walking through the torments", more than once filmed based on the novel by Alexei Tolstoy. Makhnovshchina, banditry, generated by unrestricted freemen under the black banners of anarchism, could also be seen in "His Excellency's Adjutant", in the film "Two Comrades Served" and, of course, in "The Elusive Avengers".
And everywhere we saw the same thing: rampant violence on the part of the Makhnovists in relation to peaceful inhabitants, robberies, murders. And everywhere Nestor Makhno appeared before the audience or readers as a cunning, cowardly, treacherous leader of a huge gang.
Nestor Ivanovich Makhno looks completely different in the new series of the First TV Channel “The Nine Lives of Nestor Makhno”. It seems that the image of the leader of the anarchists could arouse sympathy among viewers. Yes, and how not to sympathize with the "disinterested fighter for the will" of the Ukrainian villagers, especially since we are not facing the sinister "father" that we remember, but a fighter for the people's, village happiness, a talented commander, an almost disinterested, unpretentious person in everyday life. A sort of Ukrainian Robin Hood.
The decisive merit in creating such an attractive image of the "father" Makhno undoubtedly belongs to the leading actor in the film, actor Pavel Derevyanko. In my opinion, he completely succeeded in the role of a person whose fate and formation as an extraordinary personality, and later his complete collapse, we trace from the age of twenty to death in a foreign land at forty-six years.
It is difficult for the viewer to judge how accurately the authors of the film described the true biography of Nestor Makhno and the events in which he was the main participant. Most likely, the series of events in the film is based largely on the notions of the writers. After all, the very image of the “father” Makhno, other heroes of the film, for example, Lev Zadov, often contradicts how they are depicted, for example, by Alexei Tolstoy in “Walking Through the Torments”. We must not forget that the image of Vadim Roshchin, who finds himself in Gulyaipole, the capital of the “republic” of Nestor Makhno, who sees the mores of an anarchist freemen, participating together with the Makhnovists in the battles for Yekaterinoslav, is written off from a person close to Tolstoy, from the former tsarist officer Yevgeny Shilovsky. But several key events in the life of Nestor Makhno are indicated quite accurately.
We first meet Nestor at the time of his baptism in 1888. The footage of the baptism of an infant with the cassock of the village priest who baptized Nestor (later Nestor would shoot this priest for betrayal, for violating the secrecy of confession) can be considered a prologue to the story of his life. The authors deliberately, as they say, point-blank show us that even on the threshold of life, fate predetermined the boy who was born to kindle a terrible fire in his native land.
The anarchist Nestor and his friends from the Ukrainian village of Gulyaipole began their “revolutionary activity” by robbing a mail coach carrying bank money. At the same time, Nestor himself kills the guard. In that rural gang, he does not play a major role. The gang is headed by his fellow villager Semenyuta, who, apparently, is more versed in the ideas of anarchism than his comrades.
This robbery is what the newly minted anarchists call expropriation. But if after the expropriations carried out at the beginning of the last century, for example, by such members of the RSDLP as Kamo, the money went to the needs of the party, then the Gulyai-Polye anarchists captured by them four hundred thousand remain in their hands. Later, when Makhno had already become the leader and commander of thousands of anarchists, his comrades-in-arms, old bosom friends, would not get rid of the habit of taking part of the loot for themselves. For the robbery of the Makhnovist "treasury" (now it would be called a common fund), one of Nestor's closest friends will be shot.
Throughout the film, the authors are trying to convince us of the disinterestedness of the "father", but something does not fully believe in his scrupulousness. Even if he himself tries not to get dirty with robberies, this does not make it any easier for those who are robbed by the Makhnovist bandits. Yes, and one does not really believe in his purity, if his friend, the “accountant”, is shot for stealing the Makhnovist “treasury”. The same "treasury" to accumulate, it was necessary to collect. And where did the valuables that his wife and fighting girlfriend Galya come from in front of Kotovsky’s horsemen, overtaking the “father” fleeing to Romania with the remaining few retinue? Well, this is how much gold you had to loot in order to throw them like that! Yes, and the villagers kill the Makhnovist friend Fedos the sailor with a pitchfork for an ordinary robbery. Looks like the Makhnovist freemen have baked very hard.
Is it possible to accuse the cinematic and genuine Nestor of cruelty if he genuinely experiences the death of children from a German colony, torn apart by grenades of their associates? He is no less annoyed by the accidental death of the father and daughter of the Danilevskys from a grenade thoughtlessly thrown by his comrade. "Batko" sincerely grieves for his murdered comrades-in-arms, not to mention how the death of his brothers tears his soul.
But it was he, who was so grieving both for friends and for other people's innocently killed children, casually, casually, gives the order to drown in the autumn river the officers going to the Don, and who did not want to take off their shoulder straps, awards and turn back. And the whole fault of those officers was that they could not sacrifice their honor. Just as routinely, he sends captured Red Army soldiers to their deaths.
Here we recall the furious accusations of gentlemen "democrats" and liberals against the Bolsheviks, who allegedly were the first to unleash "terror" in the vastness of Russia. Complete, gentlemen! The Bolsheviks, who took power in October 1717, released on parole both the members of the bourgeois government they had overthrown and the generals, who soon took up arms against the new government. And cruelty, sometimes reaching atrocities, is what the fratricidal war awakened in people, which began immediately after another, no less terrible world massacre, unleashed by no means by the Bolsheviks either. We must not forget that the Russian peasants first received lessons in cruelty and hatred in the trenches, on the fields of that imperialist slaughter.
No one will dispute the military talent of Nestor Ivanovich Makhno. The legendary machine-gun carts first appeared in the army of the "father". He also used non-trivial, bold, sometimes dashing actions on the battlefield. We can agree with the words of General Slashchev (the prototype of Bulgakov's General Khludov) attributed to him by the screenwriters: Makhno is a nugget. Many such nuggets went down in history during the years of the revolution. This is the countryman of the "father" Alexander Parkhomenko, who smashed his gangs and died in one of the battles with the Makhnovists. What about Chapaev, Shchors, Kotovsky, Kochubey, Budyonny? The overwhelming majority of these talented generals, who came from the people, sided with the Bolsheviks. It is understandable. If the same Makhno tried to defend the interests of only the villagers, and in their anarchist understanding, then the Bolshevik Party and those who sided with it in a bloody and merciless struggle for power defended the interests of the entire working people. From such nuggets, who managed to reveal their talents thanks to the revolution and Soviet power, marshals of Victory were formed during the Great Patriotic War. The vast majority of them, I note, were from the village. That village, which is now ruthlessly and indifferently killed by the current regime.
Nestor himself names one of the reasons that Makhno did not want to unite with the Bolsheviks: the Bolsheviks are for strong power, and the anarchists do not recognize power. Among the anarchists, as Dybenko explained to the Bolshevik, obedience rests on the authority of the elected commander. Here the "father" was cunning. Among the Bolsheviks, power also at first rested on the authority of leaders, leaders. Who would argue with the fact that at that time the authority of the Bolshevik leaders among the people was much more significant than the authority of dozens of Makhnos. It was only later, especially in the Khrushchev-Brezhnev era, that the careerists who found themselves at the top, and sometimes even made their way to power, held on to it with all their might, not allowing more worthy, more authoritative rivals to it. This, in my opinion, ruined the Soviet system.
At the time of the revolution and the civil war, the Bolsheviks supported leaders who emerged from the very bottom of the people, enjoying well-deserved authority among the masses. They were singled out, deservedly awarded. This is evidenced by the awarding of Nestor Makhno with one of the first orders of the Red Banner of Battle - the highest award of the young Soviet republic.
Yes, in the bloody battles of the civil war, mistakes, excesses and even crimes were made on the part of the Bolsheviks. Was it not a crime much of what Leon Trotsky did in relation to the same Makhno and his army, in relation to the Cossacks, and even in relation to the Red Army and some Red commanders. After all, it was Trotsky who introduced the so-called decimation - the execution for cowardice of every tenth. By the way, the image of Trotsky in the film looks like the notorious Berezovsky, who is now alive and actively intriguing against our state.
In the series you can see much of what we have witnessed and participated in seventy years after the time that the film tells. All these Skoropadsky petliuras did almost the same things with Ukraine that the Zhovtno-Blakyt gentlemen are doing today or quite recently. And the border check at the Cossack Lopan railway station with the requirement of a Ukrainian official for all passengers to speak exclusively in the Ukrainian language, with frank ripping off of passengers, with the small-town ambition of the new authorities - this is all we see and hear now. Even the border station between Russia and Ukraine has remained the same. Both in name and spirit.
Maybe, not wanting it themselves, the authors of the film convincingly show the audience that the chatter, under which our common great country was destroyed in those distant years, is very similar to the current "democratic" idle talk. Unless, they didn’t talk about human rights at that time.
The tragedy of Makhno and his associates, the tragedy of the best representatives of the White Guard movement who lost their homeland, is enormous. This, at the end of his life, must be understood by the aged, sick, almost forgotten Nestor Ivanovich himself. He realizes that thousands and thousands of lives were ruined by him in vain. But he does not find the strength to believe the Bolsheviks, who are actively building a mighty republic of Soviets. He dies in a foreign land as a free man who does not recognize power, a person who believes in anarchism.
We, viewers, understand the tragedy of this person, others who did not reconcile themselves to the new government or undeservedly, through malicious, cowardly slander, suffered from it. This tragedy can be understood, explained and justified by the gigantic successes and accomplishments that our common, united and indivisible country has achieved under the leadership of the Bolsheviks.
But how now to explain, to justify the immeasurable losses suffered by the peoples who inhabited our Great Motherland? After all, the state built by the labors and torments of several generations was destroyed, collapsed, plundered not for the smell of tobacco. We all have lost that great state, for the sake of the revival and prosperity of which truly honest, dedicated Russian people fought. Those multimillion-dollar sacrifices that were made in the civil war, during the years of building socialism, in the Great Patriotic War, were understandable and justified by the great Victory, the feat of Korolev and Gagarin, the greatness of the Soviet state. But how to justify the current devastation and the current victims? And the story about the life and tragedy of Nestor Makhno makes you think seriously about this.

L. BORISOV.

N. I. Makhno himself, respectfully called by his associates “dad” when he was barely 30 years old, did not even know when he was born until his death. Officially, the documents indicated October 28, 1889. But recently, according to the book of registration of acts of civil status of the Exaltation of the Cross Church of his native village, and now the district center of the Zaporozhye region, Gulyai-Polya (the very name of which recalls the old Cossack freemen), it was established that Nestor Makhno was born on October 26, 1888. Obviously, his mother, in order to delay the draft into the army, “rejuvenated” the short, frail boy for a year, which, as we will learn later, unwittingly saved his life.

Nestor was the fourth son in a large family. His father, a serf in his youth, served almost all his life as a groom for his former landowner. After his death, the family was in extreme poverty, but Nestor managed to finish primary school. From childhood, our hero was distinguished by his temper, quick-tempered, impudent and obstinate. From the age of 12 he went to the “people”, but his quarrelsome character did not allow him to stay long in one workplace. He worked longest in a small printing house, where he learned the craft of a typesetter. Later, already in France, these skills were unexpectedly useful to him ...

The revolution of 1905 turned the life of a seventeen-year-old boy who took the slogans of social struggle as his personal vocation. He joined a small group of anarcho-communists with the loud name "Union of Poor Grain Growers", which had barely appeared in Gulyai-Pole, and was headed by the brothers Semenyuki and Voldemar Anthony. Nestor liked the ideas of anarchism, the preaching of anarchy, equality and freedom for all. The anarcho-communists were not particularly interested in the theoretical side of their doctrine, but were eager to fight, considering terrorist actions against government officials and wealthy individuals as a natural form of struggle for people's freedom. In the same way, they accepted the idea of ​​"expropriating the expropriators" in the form of robberies of state institutions, landowners and entrepreneurs. In essence, they practiced the most ordinary criminality, but for the most part they sincerely believed that this was the struggle against the class of exploiters and the hated state. Successful actions brought considerable funds and merrily "washed", which contributed to the strengthening of the nervous young man's craving for alcohol.

Nestor from a young age was distinguished by his daring and reckless courage, which quickly won considerable prestige among his fellow anarchists. But a group of eccentric terrorists could not succeed for long. In 1907, after one of the night skirmishes, our hero was captured by the police. Thanks to the great efforts of his mother, in July 1908 he managed to get out of the prison of Yekaterinoslav (modern Dnepropetrovsk) on bail and immediately escape. A few days later, the authorities realized it and again began to search for the terrorist.

For the second time, they tried to seize him on July 28 of the same year at a safe house in Gulyai-Pole. During the arrest, a real battle broke out. There were dead and wounded on both sides. But Nestor with a group of associates managed to escape from the surrounded house and hide. Then the police lured him into a trap with a fake telegram. On August 26, 1908, he was arrested at the Gulyai-Polye station when leaving the train.

This time, the police had plenty of evidence. But Makhno did not fall into despair and prepared an escape scheduled for New Year's Eve from December 31, 1908 to January 1, 1909. However, the plan was issued by the closest fellow inmates. On March 22, 1910, the Military Field Court sentenced N.I. Makhno to death by hanging.

But in accordance with the metric, once corrected by the mother, until the age of majority - 21 years - six months were not enough. Therefore, capital punishment, with the personal sanction of Prime Minister P. A. Stolypin, was replaced by life hard labor in the Butyrka prison in Moscow, where he had to spend seven and a half years.

This conclusion played a big role in the ideological formation of N. I. Makhno. Despite the severity of the regime, political prisoners, among whom there were quite a few revolutionaries, communicated intensively, discussing topical problems and questions about the future "fair" world order. In addition, it was possible to receive books from the prison library, which contributed to the self-education of Nestor Ivanovich.

Almost all of his theoretical knowledge Makhno learned in the Butyrka prison, where fate brought him together with the prominent anarchist P. A. Arshinov the form in which they were formulated by the leading Russian theorists - M. I. Bakunin and P. A. Kropotkin.

The February Revolution opened the gates of prisons to the political (which at that time also included terrorists from revolutionary parties). In the first days of March 1917, N. I. Makhno found himself on the noisy, crowded with excited crowds, the streets of Moscow. Without delay, he immediately went to his native Gulyai-Pole. In the spontaneously formed local council, he soon took a leading role and, being quite versed in the theory of anarchism, turned it into a doctrine that was generally understandable for fellow villagers, expressing their natural desire for a peaceful, free, prosperous life on the basis of direct self-government in the spirit of the traditions of the Cossack freemen.

In the first months after returning from prison, Makhno completely surrenders to a passionate affair with Nastya Vasetskaya, with whom he corresponded while in prison. In May, they got married, and for a short time, Makhno, who had surrendered to personal happiness, almost retired from the struggle. But his associates, by blackmail and death threats, forced Nastya to leave Gulyai-Pole secretly from her husband. Not knowing the true reasons for the flight of his wife, N. I. Makhno had a hard time experiencing this blow of fate.

In the second half of 1917, Makhno, despite his relatively young age, became an indisputable authority - "father" - in Gulyai-Pole and the surrounding villages. His position was further strengthened thanks to an alliance with the dashing ataman, who, like him, considered himself an anarchist, Marusya Nikiforova, who terrified the peaceful inhabitants of Melitopol and Berdyansk with her raids and arbitrariness. Having joined their forces, in late 1917-early 1918 they disarmed and robbed trains coming from the front, releasing soldiers on all four sides, but shooting officers.

At that time, N. I. Makhno considered the Bolsheviks to be his natural allies in the class struggle, however, being elected by the people, he did not recognize their power over himself. Standing at the head of the Gulyai-Polye mini-republic, the “father”, without the sanction of any authority, began social transformations. Already in September 1917, he signed a decree on the nationalization of land in the territories subject to his council and its redistribution in favor of poor peasants. In conditions of rapid inflation and the collapse of the former system of economic relations, he introduced a direct barter in kind between producers of food and other categories of consumer goods. The experiments that historians associate with the Bolsheviks were carried out in Gulyai-Pole earlier and more decisively than by Lenin and his supporters in Russia...

Occupied with revolutionary transformations, N. I. Makhno did not even notice how a rather chaotic, but no less bloody struggle flared up throughout the entire space from the Don to the Dnieper at the beginning of 1918 between the Bolsheviks, who launched an offensive against Ukraine, and supporters of the Central Rada, which became after the fall of the Provisional Government, the only legitimate authority in Ukraine. Against the armies of the Central European states advancing to the east, both the Bolsheviks of Ukraine, and, moreover, the anarchists of the Sea of ​​\u200b\u200bAzov were powerless. Together with other local revolutionaries, N. I. Makhno, at the end of April 1918, went through the Lower Don to Tsaritsyn (now Volgograd), where he first encountered the realities of the new power established by the Bolsheviks. The bureaucracy surpassed everything that was under the tsarist regime. But in the face of the Germans and Austrians, who began, without the consent of the Central Rada that had called them, to restore the old order in Ukraine, only the Russian Bolsheviks could be a natural ally of the “father”. To discuss plans and prospects for a joint struggle with their leaders, N. I. Makhno went to Moscow. There he met with Ya. M. Sverdlov, and then with V. I. Lenin. Makhno appreciated the sharp mind and energy of the "leader of the world proletariat", but he decided to himself that the Bolsheviks, having created a powerful repressive bureaucratic apparatus to maintain power, had already become stranglers of people's freedom, and hence the revolution.

According to the false documents received in the Kremlin in the name of I. Ya. Shepel, Makhno safely returns to his native place. Walk-Pole. Here he could only be in an illegal position, but his return was not a secret for any of his fellow villagers, and a revolutionary-anarchist organization rapidly began to recover around him.

Carrying out his “revolutionary operations”, the “father” resorted to unknown military personnel, the tactics of swift raids spontaneously invented by him and his entourage, the passage of an armed detachment to the center of the village, which was planned to be captured, under the guise of a wedding cortege, dressing the main participants in the operation in officer uniforms and etc. The military-technical invention of the rebels N.I. Makhno, the legendary cart, soon adopted by the Reds and other participants in the civil war, also became surprisingly effective.

The attitude of N. I. Makhno to the Directory, headed by the left wing of the Ukrainian socialists, was very negative. He was disgusted by her inconsistency in solving social problems and the elements of nationalism that were growing stronger in her political rhetoric. The Bolsheviks were nevertheless closer to him because of both their "internationalism" and the fact that they affirmed the idea of ​​the power of the soviets. And N. I. Makhno was the leader of the Gulyai-Pole Council, who did not recognize the authority of any higher state body over himself. He and the Bolsheviks had common opponents - the forces of the Ukrainian Directory, as well as the white movement that began to raise its head. This was enough to bring the "father" closer to the Reds.

At the beginning of 1919, the situation began to take shape not in favor of the "anarchist republic" N. I. Makhno. Detachments of the strengthened Volunteer Army and the Don Cossacks advanced from the east, and in Kharkov and Poltava power passed into the hands of the Bolsheviks. The Red troops advancing on Yekaterinoslav were commanded by the former Baltic sailor P. E. Dybenko, with whom the envoy of the "father" met on January 26. The envoy on behalf of the Gulyai-Polye Council refused Dybenko's proposal to act by joint efforts against the Ukrainian Directory. However, an agreement was reached on a joint struggle with the Whites who had launched an offensive, despite the fact that the "dad", who was in dire need of ammunition, formally recognized himself as subordinate to the high command of the Red Army.

The Makhnovist forces managed not only to hold back the onslaught of volunteer troops, but also, by organizing a counteroffensive, captured Mariupol at the end of March. At the same time, N.A. Grigoriev, who went over to the side of the Bolsheviks with his troops, captured Nikolaev and Kherson, and then Odessa, abandoned to the mercy of fate by the French who fled in a panic.

For some time, the resistance of the Whites was broken throughout the entire space from the Don to the Dniester. However, the Bolsheviks immediately began arbitrariness and violence against the peasantry of southern Ukraine, which caused mass indignation. No one wanted to give bread according to the "surplus appraisal" they were introducing. But these peasants, who for the first time actually encountered communist methods of management, were part of the “ataman” Grigoriev and the “father” Makhno. In addition, both of these leaders of the local formations of the Black Sea and Azov regions were outraged by the shameless desire of the Bolsheviks to take their detachments, moreover, themselves - "revolutionary heroes" - under direct commissar control.

However, the “ataman” and “father” acted differently in this situation. N. A. Grigoriev in the spring of 1919 deployed his troops against the Bolsheviks and, having occupied Ekaterinoslav, led them to Kyiv. But N. I. Makhno, with whom this speech was not agreed, did not respond to the call of the "ataman" for joint action. While remaining loyal to the Bolshevik leadership, he took a wait-and-see attitude, at the same time knowing full well that there was no reason to trust the Bolsheviks. These actions of the "father" saved the Bolsheviks from the complete collapse that threatened them in Ukraine. It would seem that they should have been grateful to N. I. Makhno, who remained loyal to them at a critical moment and held the front against the Whites in the Sea of ​​\u200b\u200bAzov at the cost of incredible efforts. However, having barely suppressed the rebellion of the Grigorievites, they immediately decided to liquidate the independent “father”.

The Makhnovists refused to respond to the demand of the Red Command for the resignation of N.I. Makhno as commander of the rebel detachments loyal to him. Makhno was immediately declared an enemy of the revolution, and the forces of the Red Army were deployed against him from the north. But the main blow came from the east: in early June, the White Guard Corps of General Shkuro overturned the defenses of the Makhnovists and captured Gulyai-Pole, while shooting one of the Makhno brothers.

By this time, Galina Kuzmenko became the wife of the "father". Born into a poor peasant family in 1894, she studied at the gymnasium for six years, then graduated from the women's teacher's seminary with a gold medal and was sent to teach at the Gulyai-Pole elementary school. Combining rare beauty with a natural mind, unbending will and independent disposition, she became for N.I. Makhno a reliable life partner and invariably enjoyed the respect of the entire "father's" environment.

But back to combat events. The connection of the “father” weakened by the detachment with the remnants of the “ataman” forces, despite the fact that the troops of A.I. Denikin pressed the Reds on the Left Bank, saved both for a while. However, the bottom of the rebel leader did not trust each other. A personal meeting between N. I. Makhno and A. N. Grigoriev in the village of Sentovo in the Kherson region on July 27, 1919 turned into a bloody showdown between them and their entourage, during which the “ataman” was shot dead. After that, most of the Grigorievites joined the army of N.I. Makhno. But by this time, the Volunteer troops had already occupied Kharkov and Yekaterinoslav, and then Odessa and Kyiv. N. I. Makhno was forced to retreat all this time. By mid-September, he was pressed against the forces of S.V. Petliura in the Uman region.

N. I. Makhno and S. V. Petlyura did not feel any sympathy or trust for each other. However, in the face of the superior forces of the Volunteer Army, they had to negotiate. But the “father” was not going to remain sandwiched between Denikin’s and Petliur’s troops for a long time. Having broken through the Denikin line of defense south of Uman in the last days of September, the detachments of N.I. Makhno rushed along countless roads in the direction of Gulyai-Pole. The white military leaders failed to unravel the plan of the "father", and the appearance of his forces that had already managed to join at dawn on October 5, 1919 at the Kichkas bridge came as a complete surprise to them. And on October 7, the “father” broke into Gulyai-Pole, which was immediately renamed Makhnograd. Then, in a matter of days, Berdyansk, Mariupol and Nikopol were taken, where huge stocks of weapons, ammunition, ammunition and food were concentrated, destined for the Volunteer Army advancing on Moscow.

At this time, Denikin's front at Orel, Voronezh and Kursk collapsed, and the Reds launched an offensive against Kharkov, after which they returned to Kyiv. The demoralized remnants of the Volunteer Army rolled back to Odessa, the Crimea and Novorossiysk. However, they continued to wage stubborn battles with the Makhnovist detachments in the vicinity of Yekaterinoslav. The Makhnovists did not master the intricacies of positional warfare, and in late November-early December 1919, military happiness changed N. I. Makhno.

On December 8, the Whites, under the command of General Ya. A. Slashchev, launched a general assault on Yekaterinoslav, and the "father", having suffered significant losses, was forced to leave the city. The difficult circumstances in which the Makhnovists found themselves were immediately taken advantage of by the Bolsheviks advancing from the north and already in contact with the insurgent detachments. In an effort to eliminate the Makhnovist movement, they offered its participants to join the ranks of the Red Army, disarming, and even shooting those who did not agree to go over to them. They shot the prisoners, including the wounded Makhnovists. Among them, the brother of N.I. Makhno, Grigory, was also killed.

The situation was complicated by the fact that a typhus epidemic was raging in the Makhnovist army. In January 1920, the disease also mowed down the "father", who for several weeks was on the verge of life and death. Since he was at that time hidden in a little-known farm, a rumor spread about his death, and the fighters of the rebel detachments, squeezed in a vice between the Reds and Whites, for the most part considered it best to return to their villages, hiding the weapons they had in their hands. From yesterday's still formidable army, numbering tens of thousands of fighters in its ranks, it would seem that there was no trace left. But as soon as the “father” got better and began to travel around the villages, the situation immediately changed. The flames of guerrilla warfare flared up again throughout the south of Ukraine. The rebel army quickly recovered and the Makhnovists again managed to take Gulyai-Pole with a fight.

To suppress the uprising, the Bolsheviks threw their best forces into the Sea of ​​\u200b\u200bAzov, including the 1st Cavalry Army. On April 29, 1920, dashing Budenovites attacked Gulyai-Pole with superior forces. Having once again demonstrated miracles of personal fearlessness, N. I. Makhno had to retreat. The next two months the struggle continued with varying success. The Makhnovists made swift raids throughout the steppe Left Bank and the Azov Sea, crushing the Red detachments, but not having the strength to keep the occupied settlements from their superior forces. This state of affairs was skillfully used by the whites dug in in the Crimea. With all the defeat they experienced, even after the loss of Nikolaev, Kherson and Odessa in early 1920, they managed to gather sufficient forces here, headed by General, Baron P. N. Wrangel. Taking advantage of the struggle unfolding between the Reds and the Makhnovists on the outskirts of the Crimea, he tried to conclude an agreement with the rebels. However, his messenger was hanged by order of N.I. Makhno. The “father” was not going to make any agreements with the whites. But he also shot mercilessly the Red commissars and agitators who were taken prisoner.

The summer of 1920 passed in bloody skirmishes with the Red troops. Meanwhile, the Whites, having gathered their strength and using the chaos that reigned in southern Ukraine, went on the offensive in early September. "Old Man" again found himself sandwiched between the whites from the south and the reds from the north. Fighting them at the same time was unthinkable. After prolonged hesitation, N. I. Makhno concluded an armistice agreement with the command of the Red Army units located in Ukraine in the last days of September.

Deep distrust remained between the Makhnovist headquarters and the command of the Red Army. However, thanks to the coordination of their forces in mid-October, the White troops were stopped near Nikopol and Kakhovka, and by the beginning of November they were driven back beyond Perekop. The Reds, commanded by M.V. Frunze, together with the forces of N.I. Makhno, began to prepare for the capture of the Crimea. According to the developed plan, the Makhnovist troops were to overcome the rotten Lake Sivash and go to the rear of the Whites, who were defending their positions at Perekop. Further, it was planned to develop the offensive deep into the Crimea with the forces of the cavalry.

On November 8, under the fire of the Wrangel troops, the rebel detachments crossed the Sivash, and the next day they repulsed a powerful (and already the last) counterattack of the Wrangel forces, skillfully using machine-gun carts against the cavalry that rushed at them. On November 13, the Makhnovist horsemen broke into Simferopol, and two days later they reached Sevastopol.

Concluding an agreement with the Bolsheviks, N. I. Makhno did not expect that the Wrangel troops would be finished off so quickly. The final defeat of the Whites put the Makhnovists in a hopeless situation. It was clear to them that the next victim of the Bolsheviks would be themselves. And already on November 23, M.V. Frunze demanded that the "father" begin the reorganization of his forces and the regular troops of the Red Army. The next day, the order was repeated already in the form of an ultimatum, and on November 26, the Red forces launched an operation to destroy the Makhnovist detachments.

Gulyai-Pole was surrounded and attacked on the same day. However, the "father", who was waiting for the start of hostilities, managed to break through the ring and withdraw most of his forces into the open steppe. It was not possible to destroy other Makhnovist detachments, which were notified in time about the offensive of the Bolshevik forces. Brave raids and bloody battles began again. Makhno was elusive. However, he had no chance of winning ...

Divisions of the 1st Cavalry Army were thrown against the Makhnovists, and on March 5, 1921, they came under bombardment from aircraft. The fighters, not seeing the point of further struggle, massively began to scatter around their native villages. In one of the battles, the “father”, firing back from a machine gun, was seriously wounded and unconsciously taken away from the position.

Having barely recovered from his wound, in April N.I. Makhno moved the center of the partisan struggle to the Poltava region. On May 18, he managed to defeat the red cavalry, which was personally commanded by S. M. Budyonny, who barely escaped on the horse of his orderly. The rebel forces again began to increase rapidly due to the peasants pouring into their ranks. But in general, the position of the "father" remained hopeless. In July, the operation to liquidate the Makhnovist movement was headed by M. V. Frunze. The commanders clashed face to face, but the winner of Wrangel miraculously managed to escape. However, the forces of the peasantry of the steppe Ukraine were exhausted.

Then the indefatigable "dad" decided on a desperate raid on the Volga, hoping to lead the population of these places. But he did not manage to advance further than the Don. Makhno again received a serious, already the eleventh in the Civil War, wound. The red units pressed and pursued him from all sides, and there was no longer any strength to fight them off. The only salvation was the care of the Dniester, to Romania. And on August 28, a small Makhnovist detachment, led by a wounded "father", with a fight overcoming the border outpost of the Reds, broke through to the Romanian side of the river.

Together with N. I. Makhno, his wife also managed to escape abroad, fighting with her husband and his fighters shoulder to shoulder. The demand of the Soviet government to extradite Makhno was rejected by the Romanians. But in order to continue the struggle, the "dad" with his wife and closest associates preferred to move to Poland in April 1922, the government of which also refused to hand him over to the Bolsheviks for reprisal. In the summer of this year, his daughter was born, who was named Elena.

N. I. Makhno did not lose hope for the continuation of the armed struggle against the Bolsheviks and openly spoke about this to the journalists besieging him. But by doing so, he put the Polish government in an awkward position, since the Riga Peace Treaty with Soviet Russia had already been signed. Soon he had to move through Danzig (modern Gdansk, then having the status of a “free city”) and Brussels to Paris, where Galina and her daughter had already settled.

In the suburbs of the French capital, Vincennes, N.I. Makhno and his family lived for 10 years in dire poverty. Galina worked as a laundress in a nearby boarding house, and the "father", as in his youth, changed professions - he was a painter, worked in a printing house. Ironically, his closest friend in those years was the former white officer Ya.F. Korban. Close people convinced Makhno to write memoirs, the first volume of which was published in 1927, and the other two after the death of their author. Life was slow and quiet. Diseases bothered me, old wounds ached, tuberculosis of the bone developed ...

In June 1934, N. I. Makhno was taken to the hospital in a serious condition, where he died on July 25 of this year. He was cremated and buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, once the last defense site of the Paris Communards.

N. I. Makhno left a bright and remarkable mark in the history of Ukraine. Sincerely considering himself a follower of anarchism, he was, in fact, the last exponent of the original spirit of the Cossack freemen, who raised the Ukrainian people to revolt against the oppressors throughout its history. Such uprisings were invariably accompanied by terrible bloodshed. However, when evaluating the heroes and leaders of such uprisings, one should pay tribute to their courage, courage and resourcefulness, personal heroism and the ability to lead the masses. In this regard, N. I. Makhno can be compared with few in world history.

Vasily Golovanov

INCOMPARABLE PARTISAN

Magazine "Around the World", 2003, No. 1 (2748)

The name of Nestor Makhno is so odious that in itself it makes it difficult to determine the scale of his personality: whether he was an ordinary anarchist partisan, or a figure incomparably more significant, standing, if not in the first, then in the second row of participants in the Civil War so tragic for Russia . In other words, one of those who could influence its course.

Behind all the myths with which the name of Makhno has grown, it is most difficult to see that this is so. In any case, along with the leaders of the rebellious Kronstadt, Makhno, with his Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army, was the most outstanding representative of the "people's" opposition to Bolshevism.

If Kronstadt was crushed for a month, then Makhno held out in the ring of the Civil War for 3 years, having managed to make war with Hetman Skoropadsky's haidamaks, Germans, whites, reds - and still stay alive. He alone managed to achieve what no popular movement opposed to the Bolsheviks had achieved: in 1920, the Insurgent Army and the Council of People's Commissars of Ukraine signed an agreement on political loyalty, on freedom of speech and the press (within the "socialist" frequency band), as well as on free election to the councils of representatives of all socialist parties ... If Wrangel had held out in the Crimea a little longer, it may turn out that Makhno would have demanded from the Council of People's Commissars the territory for the creation of a "free Soviet system." Of course, for the mature Bolsheviks of the 1920 model, all the clauses of the agreement were just a tactical cunning and all the "free councils" would have been crushed the very next day after the whites laid down their arms. And yet ... The Bolsheviks never stooped to negotiations with the insurgent people, suppressing any uprisings with exceptional cruelty. Makhno forced the ruling party of the first totalitarian state of a new type in the 20th century to reckon with the people. For this alone he earned posthumous fame.

He was the fifth, youngest child in a poor family of a coachman who served with Mark Kerner, the owner of an iron foundry in Gulyai-Pole, a small town in the Azov steppe, the very name of which seems to be an echo of the epic Zaporozhye times. What is true: from the island of Khortitsa on the Dnieper, from where the Zaporizhzhya Sich squandered its liberty and robbery, to Gulyai-Pole is hardly fifty miles, and that the Cossacks walked here, and in the battles with the Krymchaks they laid their forelocks, in the place of which their villages later grew numerous descendants - no doubt.

In 1906, at the age of minority (17), Makhno landed in prison for hard labor, which, of course, was also due to the circumstances of the place / time. The seeds sown by Narodnaya Volya and the Socialist-Revolutionary Party sprouted in luxuriant growth. Russia raved about the revolution. In the history of the first Russian revolution, what is most striking is the self-forgetfulness with which people rushed "into terror", whom it is not so easy to imagine behind the stuffing of home-made bombs: some workers, high school students, employees of railways and post offices, teachers. Age-old tyranny demanded revenge. The explosion of the bomb was tantamount to the execution of the judgment of the Court of the Righteous. "Draught terror" in Russia in 1906-1907 has no analogues in world history. But from within itself, this phenomenon looks terrible and ordinary. And the activities of the Gulyai-Polye group of anarchists, which included young Makhno, did not go beyond this mediocrity: they got revolvers, made bombs, robbed, for starters, the owners of the iron foundry, where a good half of the group worked, then someone else from the local rich , then a liquor store ... During a raid on a mail coach, a bailiff and a postman were killed. They fell under the suspicion of the police. Arrested. Court. Sentence: 20 years. Moscow Butyrki.

Later, none of the participants in the amusements of carefree youth became either a close associate of Makhno, or just an ordinary participant in the movement. When the tectonic layers of History begin to move, the bandits wash their hands of it. Makhno alone accepted her formidable challenge.

There he met Pyotr Arshinov, an "ideological" anarchist, whom, even as a commander of the Insurgent, he continued to call his "teacher". Then - February 17th, the abdication of the king, a general amnesty ... In seething Moscow, Makhno did not find a place or a job for himself. He did not like at all, did not understand cities. Twenty-eight years old, having neither a penny nor a traveling profession, he moved south, to his native Gulyai-Polye. And then suddenly he turned out to be in demand by time: around the crowd, rallies, vague premonitions, resolutions, meetings - and he is savvy, he knows what to ask, what to demand. He is pulled apart by five committees - and nothing, he is not lost, he presides. Mother, Evdokia Ivanovna, being proud of her youngest, wants to arrange his life, like people do, finds a wife, the beautiful Nastya Vasetskaya. The wedding buzzed for 3 days. But before his wife was he?

Already in July 1917, power in Gulyai-Pole passed to the Soviet. Makhno naturally became chairman. Now he is preoccupied with the creation of detachments and the extraction of weapons, so that by the autumn he will begin to confiscate land from the landowners. Makhno sometimes still flirts in search of his "theme" in the revolution: then he goes as a delegate to the Provincial Congress of Soviets in Yekaterinoslav, from where he returns disappointed with the inter-party struggle. Then he goes to Aleksandrovsk, where, together with the detachment of the Bolshevik Bogdanov, he disarms the Cossack trains, rolling back from the front to their native villages, and so he gets 4 boxes of rifles, but unexpectedly for himself, he turns out to be the chairman of the revolutionary committee's judicial commission, designed to sort out the cases of "enemies of the revolution". In this paper and punitive position, he finally cannot stand it and explodes: he is turned away by the arrests of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries - yesterday's "fellow travelers" in the revolution, but especially by prison. His first prison, where he sat, waiting for a hard labor sentence. "I repeatedly had a desire to blow up the prison, but not once I managed to get enough dynamite and pyroxylin for this ... Even now, I told my friends, it is clear that ... it is not the parties that will serve the people, but the people - the parties" .

In January 1918, he announced his withdrawal from the Revolutionary Committee and left for Gulyai-Pole to make his own revolution. It was this time in Makhno's memoirs that is painted in lyrical tones: he tells about the first communes created in the former landowners' estates, about the first kindergartens in Gulyai-Polye...

Nobody will ever know; what was left outside this idyll, what was going on during these dark winter months in the remote districts of the steppe Ukraine. God knows what happened in the cities. In Kyiv, after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the first government of independent Ukraine was imprisoned, headed by a third-year student Golubovich. However, the power of the Central Rada did not extend to such cities as Kharkov or Yekaterinoslav: revolutionary committees ruled here, in which the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs squabbled. The commissar of the Black Sea Fleet, the Left Social Revolutionary Spiro, responded to the proposal of the German command to flood the fleet in Sevastopol by declaring the Crimea a separate independent republic and appointing the mobilization of people and horses ... True, he was soon arrested for arbitrariness.

It all ended unexpectedly quickly: in March 1918, the Germans occupied Ukraine, placing "on the board" the hetman Skoropadsky devoted to them. Several anarchist and Bolshevik fighting squads tried to resist the invasion, but they soon ended up in Rostov - on the territory of Russia "reconciled" with the Germans.

Another "failure" in Makhno's biography is a trip through Tsaritsyn to Moscow. True, he made several correct conclusions about the nature of the central government maturing in the capital and met with the "apostle of anarchy" P. A. Kropotkin. And besides, in search of housing, he accidentally wandered into the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, which was located in the Kremlin and distributed warrants for rooms. There Sverdlov intercepted him and, catching the southern dialect of his interlocutor, began to ask about the state of affairs in Ukraine. Makhno spoke as best he could. Sverdlov suggested that he come in the next day and tell the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars about everything in more detail. Fantasy! In what other country could the search for a room end with a meeting with the head of government? However, nothing can be done: this is how Makhno's meeting with Lenin took place.

Lenin asked quick, specific questions: who, where, how did the peasants react to the slogan "All power to the Soviets", did they rebel against the Rada and the Germans, and if so, what was missing for the peasant riots to result in a widespread uprising? Regarding the slogan "All power to the Soviets," Makhno diligently explained that he understands this slogan precisely in the sense that power belongs to the Soviets. To the people.

In this case, the peasantry of your localities is infected with anarchism, Lenin observed.

But is it bad? asked Makhno. - I don't want to say that. On the contrary, it would be gratifying, as it would hasten the victory of communism over capitalism and its power.

Lenin, apparently, was satisfied with that conversation: he considered the anarchism of the peasants a temporary and soon curable disease, which, however, gave a chance on the shoulders of a peasant uprising to break into Ukraine and establish a Bolshevik order there. Makhno immediately received a false passport to return to his homeland and a chain of Bolshevik underground appearances. I took my passport. I did not use turnouts.

In order to be a full-fledged leader, so that his image was filled to the right extent with the power of charm, he needed a woman. And the point is not at all that he literally lost his wife, the beautiful Nastya, at some junction on the way to Tsaritsyn . He needed a fighting girlfriend who would not disgrace his title of dad. Galina Andreevna Kuzmenko, a 24-year-old teacher of one of the Gulyai-Polye schools, seemed to him like that for a long time. Makhno decided to get married. "... She was teaching a lesson, and suddenly a man in military uniform, small in stature, comes in, sits down at a desk and looks at her. Then he got up, and the students are all looking, "Let's go," she says, "let's leave the class." She told the guys who will soon return and went out with him into the corridor. He had a gun, he dropped it on the floor:
- Pick it up.
She is standing:
- Yours, you take it.
Makhno took her to the school director Alexei Korpusenko and took her away: "Here, this will be my wife." - "But what about the exams?" was the only answer he could find.
She followed him for a minute, and returned 50 years later, having gone through the war, exile, emigration, Kazakh camps and deportation to Dzhambul: perhaps only to cry enough with her surviving relatives and tell the story of this matchmaking ...

Leaving Moscow on June 29, Makhno arrived at his native place when the situation was tense to the limit. The hetman's authorities restored all the pre-revolutionary order, roughly punishing the troublemakers of 1917. Makhno, disguised as a woman, went to look at his native village. Gulyai-Pole was occupied by a Magyar battalion under the command of Austrian officers. The occupiers burned Makhno's house, they shot two older brothers only for their surname, although both were in no way involved in the rebellion. Not a trace remains of the "communes". I had to start all over again. But if in the 17th the main thing was to "push the speech" incendiary, now - why? It was necessary to act. To avenge, to kill, to let a red rooster, to raise an uprising - and in this case, no cruelty seemed excessive.

Makhno tracked down old brawlers hiding in the villages - Chubenko, Marchenko, Karetnikov, eight in all. With axes and knives, they crawled into the estate of the landowner Reznikov at night and massacred the whole family - because it had four brother officers who served in the hetman's police. So they got the first 7 rifles, a revolver, 7 horses and 2 saddles. Makhno triumphed: weren't these officers who killed his innocent brothers? He took revenge. Did anyone then think how many brothers would have to avenge their brothers if the knot of hatred was untied? No. Then everyone who had a weapon felt in strength, and in the right, and in the truth.

On September 22, the Makhnovists, dressed in the uniforms of the sovereign Varta (police), met Lieutenant Murkovsky on the road. Makhno presented himself as the head of a punitive detachment sent from Kyiv by order of the hetman himself. Murkovsky, not sensing a dirty trick, said that he was heading to his father's estate to rest for a day or two, to hunt for game and for seditious.

You, mister lieutenant, don't understand me, - the guard "captain" suddenly said in a voice breaking with excitement. - I am a revolutionary Makhno. Your surname seems to be fairly well-known?

The officers began to offer money to Makhno, but he contemptuously refused. Then the "hunters", like hares, rushed across the fields in all directions. They were shot at with a machine gun... Oh, Makhno loved provocation - classical, with desperate lies and masquerade - he was a hypocrite! He loved to see the horror in the eyes of his enemies when he suddenly announced his name to them. At that time, dozens or hundreds of tiny detachments, like particles of fiery phlogiston, circled around Ukraine, sowing fire and death everywhere. And only when the punishers, brutalized by partisan raids, began to burn villages, kill and torture peasants, the flame of popular anger flared in breadth. Detachments of several hundred people, armed with shotguns, pitchforks and "clubs", in fact, became the embryo of Makhno's Insurrectionary Army. But for this they had to be organized somehow.

JUNE 1919. BRIEF CHRONICLE OF EVENTS
June 4- The Ukrainian Front was abolished, Trotsky's order No. 1824 was issued, prohibiting the congress of the Makhnovist Soviets.
June 6- the call of the Presovnarkom of Ukraine to bring down the sword of red terror on the leaders of the kulak counter-revolution. On the same day, the White Cossacks broke through to the Gulyai-Pole area and, near Svyaodukhovka, cut down the regiment that had come out to meet them, led by Putilov B. Veretelnikov. The Bolsheviks are finally aware of the scale of the White Guard offensive.
June 7- Voroshilov and Mezhlauk leave for Makhno on the famous armored train "Rudnev" with a request "to hold on to the last." On the same day - Trotsky's order "Defectors to Makhno - execution."

When Viktor Belash, the future chief of staff of the army and one of Makhno's best strategists, arrived in Gulyai-Pole, occupied by the rebels, the first thing he did was to bring all the various detachments into normal regiments and convince their commanders of the need to follow the orders of the headquarters, because a new danger was approaching: from southeast, whites began to penetrate into the "free region". It was necessary to organize and hold the front. A real civil war was on the nose, but for the time being, under the canopy of night, one could find paintings that seemed to be written off from the Middle Ages. Let's say, near Orekhovo, Belash found a detachment of 200 people sitting around a fire. "In the middle, a stout middle-aged man squatted about. Long black hair hung down on his shoulders and fell over his eyes. "Lemons have scattered across the open field, get out, cadets, give us a b-o-o-ol!" he shouted.

This is our father Dermendzhi, - one of the rebels explained.

Suddenly machine guns and rifles crackled at the position. Two riders galloped all over the quarry and shouted "The Germans are advancing!".

"Father" shouted: "Well, sons, get ready ..."

"To the front, to the front, with an accordion!" the crowd roared. And they, stumbling and in a hurry, ran in disarray to the position.

Dermendzhi was a well-known person - he participated in the uprising on the battleship Potemkin. But detachments of personalities unknown to anyone were still spinning around - Zverev, Kolyada, Patalahi, Old Man-Pravda. Belash also saw the latter: he turned out to be a legless disabled person who, having entered the village on a cart, gathered people and shouted with half of his body: “Listen, guys!

It is surprising that out of all this half-drunk freemen, Makhno managed to create an absolutely disciplined and paradoxical in its maneuverability unit in a few months, which was noted by General Slashchev, whom Denikin instructed to conduct operations against Makhno.

Natalya Sukhogorskaya, who in 1919 unwittingly found herself in the epicenter of the Makhnovshchina, described Gulyai-Pole as follows: “When I was there, there were 3 gymnasiums, a higher primary school, a dozen parish schools, 2 churches, a synagogue, baths, many mills and oil mills, a cinema. Population "The overwhelming majority are Ukrainians. There are few Great Russians in Gulyai-Pole - more teachers and employees. On the contrary, there are a lot of Jewish merchants and artisans who live very friendly with the Ukrainian villagers."

Meanwhile, the situation changed again: before the news of the revolution in Germany reached Ukraine, another coup took place in Kyiv: the hetman fled, power passed to the Directory, headed by the very left-wing Ukrainian Social Democrat Vinnichenko, who, as a first duty, sent a delegation to Moscow to negotiate with the Bolsheviks about the world. By an evil irony of fate, while these negotiations were going on, the former Minister of War of the Directorate S. Petlyura seized power, and the Bolsheviks occupied Kharkov without any negotiations, where on January 4, 1919, Comrade Pyatakov, the first Prime Minister of Red Ukraine, received a military parade from the available forces. The trouble was that there were only 3 or 4 regiments of forces, because after the Brest Peace, when Germany, together with Ukraine, almost devoured half of Russia, none of the most courageous revolutionaries even thought that in an instant her omnipotence could collapse, and Ukraine will again "open up" to the revolution. However, it soon became clear that all the work on "clearing the territory" was carried out by Ukrainian partisans. No one knew what kind of people they were, they were afraid of them, suspecting them of nationalism, the kulaks, and in general, the devil knows what, but the well-known party freethinker V.A. And, in general, this strategy justified itself. Shchors and Bozhenko took Kyiv from the Petliurists, Grigoriev recaptured Nikolaev and Kherson, where, after a 3-hour artillery duel, the Greeks and French were beaten by him, who started an intervention, after which he also took Odessa. Makhno held back the advance of the whites in the southeast and, although he did not achieve much success, the barrier seemed to put up a reliable one, asking, like all partisans, for only one thing: weapons. Viktor Belash, who had come specially to knock out rifles and cartridges in Kharkov, was treated kindly by Antonov-Ovseenko and left full of hope. Together with him, a group of anarchists of the Nabat federation went to Gulyai-Pole to organize the work of the cultural enlightenment department. Makhno, having received the brigade commissar Ozerov, officially became a red brigade commander, subordinate to the commander of the 2nd Ukrainian army, comrade Skachko. True, he honestly admitted that there were never other units in the army besides the Makhno brigade.

Of course, none of the Bolsheviks expected such a fortunate combination of circumstances. While the partisans were fighting on the fronts, they could calmly increase their power, start a Cheka, send food detachments to the village and generally feel at home, while scolding the partisans and discussing whether it was time, say, to "remove" Makhno because of several unsuccessful battles ? In addition, on April 10, in Gulyai-Pole, the third congress of "free councils" incomprehensible to the Bolsheviks took place, which announced mobilizations for the Insurgent Army and ended with rather harsh political declarations: "Down with commissar power and appointees!" - "Down with the Chechens - modern secret police!" "Long live the freely elected Workers' and Peasants' Soviets!"

Kharkov "Izvestiya" - the main newspaper of red Ukraine - immediately reacted with the article: "Down with the Makhnovshchina!" Mentioning the Makhnovist congress, the author of the editorial demanded that an end be put to the "disgraceful things" that were happening in the "kingdom of Makhno," and for this, to send agitators, "wagons of literature" and instructors for the organization of Soviet power to the region. Although no one knew what was going on in the "kingdom of Makhno", because, of course, not a single newspaper clicker was there.

At this moment, Antonov-Ovseenko decided to pay an inspection visit to the "kingdom of Makhno". On April 29, at the Gulyai-Pole station, the front was met by a troika. In the village, troops lined up at the front broke out the "Internationale". "A short, youthful, dark-eyed man in a hat on one side, came out to meet Antonov. He saluted: brigade commander Batko Makhno. We are holding on successfully at the front. There is a battle for Mariupol." A face-to-face conversation followed, after which Antonov-Ovseenko sharply wrote to the editors of Izvestia: “The article is full of factual lies and is directly provocative ... Makhno and his brigade ... deserve not the swearing of officialdom, but the fraternal gratitude of all revolutionary workers and peasants".

Commander-2 Skachko - on the same occasion: "Allocate money for the brigade, uniforms, entrenching tools, at least half a staff of telephone equipment, camp kitchens, cartridges, doctors, one armored train on the Dolya-Mariupol line." Never before had Makhno been so interested in an alliance with the Bolsheviks as after the visit of Antonov-Ovseenko. Never with any of them had he established comradely relations on such a level. He was waiting for help, which would testify to one more thing: trust in him.

But absolutely nothing of what Antonov-Ovseenko asked for was done. The newspaper persecution of the Makhnovists did not stop. They did not receive weapons. What can you do? The Bolshevik strategists of Denikin's main attack were waiting for Tsaritsyn, but he struck at Makhno, rushed through the Ukraine straight to Moscow. And it was then that the morally beaten Commander-2 Skachko blabbed, justifying himself that he did not supply Makhno with weapons on purpose and, therefore, thousands of people were sent to the slaughter on purpose, thinking that it would do. Of course, all this double-dealing policy should have ended in disaster, but for the time being everything went well. Speaking on April 1 at the plenum of the Moscow Soviet, Trotsky assured the audience that the Southern Front would soon face decisive changes, which he painted in exceptionally rosy tones. Victory over the Whites seemed close and inevitable when a catastrophe broke out: Grigoriev's division, which had returned from Odessa, found mercilessly operating food detachments in their native villages and flared in revolt in half of Ukraine.

A telegram from Grigoriev to Makhno was intercepted: "Father! Why are you looking at the communists? Beat them! Ataman Grigoriev." Makhno did not answer. On May 17, Shkuro's cavalry cut through the front at the junction of the Makhno brigade and the 13th Army of the Southern Front and in one day traveled about fifty kilometers. There was nothing to close the gap. In the reserve of the 2nd Army there was one "international" regiment of 400 bayonets. After a week of fighting, Skachko melancholy stated: "Makhno actually does not exist."

Indeed, the brigade, deprived of firearms, was turned into some kind of bloody scum, in which, however, the hooves of the horses of the Caucasian division Shkuro still continued to tangle. Makhno began to retreat, than his fate was decided: he was instantly ranked among the rebels, and on May 25, at the apartment of H. Rakovsky, the second red prime minister of Ukraine, a meeting of the Council of Workers 'and Peasants' Defense took place with the agenda: "Makhnovshchina and its liquidation." Note that nothing has happened yet. Moreover, the Makhnovists managed to literally stop the advance of the Whites with bayonet attacks. It would seem that a simple sense of self-preservation should have prompted the Bolsheviks that they should not fight Makhno's fictitious rebellion, but, on the contrary, support it! So no, and the sense of self-preservation is gone! Why? None of the Bolsheviks, apparently, had any idea what forces Denikin had concentrated on the front by that time. But on May 26, VUTsIK adopted a regulation on socialist land use, that is, on the socialization of land for state farms. And in this light, the Fourth Congress of "Free Soviets", scheduled for June 15, was completely unnecessary to the Bolsheviks.

Even when the Makhno brigade was formed, Italian rifles were given to it in such a way that, in which case, it would be possible to leave them without cartridges. For neither German nor Russian cartridges, which could be obtained in battle, were suitable for Italian rifles ...

To top it all off, Comrade Trotsky arrived in the Ukraine before the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic. Hurrying, on the train, in his personal newspaper "On the Road" he publishes the article "Makhnovshchina", reprinted on June 4 by the Kharkov "Izvestia". In it, all the failures of the Red Army are pushed onto Makhno. "Scratch a Makhnovist and you'll find a Grigoryevite. And more often than not, you don't even need to scrape: a frantic fist barking at the Communists or a petty speculator sticks out." It's in the trenches - kulaks and speculators?! The defensive remarks of Antonov-Ovseenko and Skachko were useless: the Ukrainian Front had 2 weeks left to exist, the 2nd Army was transformed into the 14th, Skachko was removed, Voroshilov took his place, who dreamed of "getting Makhno" in order to do revolutionary justice over him. ..

Makhno did not know what to do. He did not want to die and wanted to leave behind the place of a revolutionary. On June 9, from the Gaichur station, he sends two long messages to Trotsky (copies to Lenin, Kamenev), in which he asks to be relieved of his command: “I perfectly understand the attitude of the central government towards me. I am absolutely convinced that this government considers the insurgent movement incompatible with its state activities. She also believes that this movement is connected personally with me ... It is necessary that I leave my post. "

Suddenly, with a detachment of horsemen of several hundred people, mostly old rebels of 1918, Makhno appears in Aleksandrovsk and surrenders his command affairs, not responding to requests to protect the city. It passes to the right bank of the Dnieper and dissolves in the deserted spaces of the red rear.

On June 14, making sure that Makhno had left and it would not be possible to lure him into an armored train, the enraged Voroshilov ordered the execution of the commissar of the Ozerov brigade and the commander of the sapper units of the brigade, the "beautiful soul of the young idealist" Mikhalev-Pavlenko. Makhnovist units are poured into the 14th Army. On July 7, Trotsky wrote in the capital's newspaper Izvestia Narodnogo Commissariat for Military Affairs: "Denikin was on the verge of death, from which he could only be separated by a few days, but he correctly guessed the scum of boiling kulaks and deserters." The catastrophe of 1919 ended with the failure of the Red Front all the way to Tula. Comrade Trotsky did not want to take responsibility. Comrade Trotsky remained clean.

Meanwhile, at the Novopomoshchnaya station, Makhno waited for the development of events. The Reds, leaving Ukraine, bypassed him, fearing that some units, not wanting to part with their homeland, would "stick" to him. After the retreat from the Dnieper to the Novy Bug, the whole of his former brigade and some red units actually went over to Makhno. They were ready to fight to the end. After the front went north, the Whites formed 2 divisions against Makhno under the command of General Slashchev and decided to crush him. At this time, even the legend of Colonel Kleist, the German genius Makhno, was born among the whites. He, a German colonel, was not ashamed to lose battles, but the "partisans", the "rabid peasant" were ashamed. In early September, the Whites made their first attempts to knock Makhno off his positions: as a result, he almost occupied Yelisavetgrad, saved at the cost of a heroic officer counterattack. Perhaps the Makhnovists would have won the battle if they had ammunition. Only having rolled back under Uman and, by secret agreement, handed over the wounded to the Petliurists, they received a certain amount of ammunition in addition, which helped them to withstand the next battle. The Petliurists were afraid of the Whites and were ready to supply cartridges to anyone, just to delay the moment of meeting with Denikin's men. On September 25, Makhno suddenly announced that the retreat was over and that the real war would begin tomorrow morning. With some supernatural instinct, he determined that he had one chance to save the army: to attack the core of the pursuers and destroy it.

The Battle of Peregonovka is one of the strangest events of the Civil War. Several memoirs have been preserved about him (Arshinov, Volin, several White Guard officers), from which it is clear that you cannot call it a major military operation. It was just a furious, brutal battle, where they really fought not for life, but for death. And at the same time, the outcome of this battle influenced the entire further course of the war. Three and a half thousand partisans escaped from the encirclement. But it turned out that they escaped into the outer space of history.

The reconnaissance sent to Pyatikhatki, Yekaterinoslav and Aleksandrovsk did not find the enemy. The rear garrisons of Denikin were extremely weak: over the Dnieper, from Nikolaev to Kherson, there were no troops, in Nikolaev - 150 state guard officers. Naturally, in such an environment, Makhno resurrected like a Phoenix, once again flying to Guyai-Pole and Berdyansk. Having shattered the port through which the supply of the Volunteer Army went and shredded all the railways that came to hand, he actually paralyzed Denikin's rear. “This uprising, which took on such broad dimensions, upset our rear and weakened our front in the most difficult time for it,” A.I. admitted. Denikin. But Makhno, having secured the victory for the Reds, tried to his own ruin. True, he counted on something else: that his heroism would finally be judged according to their merits. He wanted to serve the revolution. He just could not be a meek executor of someone else's will. And that's why, like Oedipus, he was doomed to go from one disappointment to another. However, at first Makhno reveled in triumph. He again commanded the army and was the only owner of the vast territory on both sides of the Dnieper. Aleksandrovsk, late, but still warm autumn, solemn entry into the city: he is with "Mother Galina" in the sky-colored landau, accompanied by all his picturesque retinue ...

The surprise of the townsfolk: something will happen?

Announcement of liberties to the population ...

In Alexandrovsk, Makhno finally realized what he had dreamed of all his life: the Congress of Independent Free Councils of all the territory subject to him. Not long before the congress, Comrade Lubim from the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries came to see Volin.

An interesting conversation took place.

You are calling a congress of workers and peasants. It will make a huge difference. But what are you doing? No explanation, no propaganda, no list of candidates! And what will happen if the peasantry sends reactionary deputies to you who demand to convene a Constituent Assembly? What will you do if the counter-revolutionaries fail your congress?

Volin felt the responsibility of the moment:

If today, in the midst of the revolution, after everything that has happened, the peasants send counter-revolutionaries and monarchists to the congress, then - you hear - my life's work was a complete mistake. And I have no choice but to blow my brains out of the revolver that you see on the table ...

I'm serious, - Lubim began.

And I'm serious, - answered Volin.

Makhno opened the congress, but refused to preside. This surprised the peasants, but gradually they got used to it and in 3 days they gradually developed and approved the principles of the “free Soviet system”, which for Makhno sounded sweeter than the ode to “To Liberty”.

Meanwhile, the Whites came to their senses and decided to put an end to Makhno after all. As a result, the rebels were forced to leave Aleksandrovsk and move the "capital" of their republic to Yekaterinoslav, fenced off from the whites by the Dnieper and the front, stretched between the two bows of the Dnieper, like a bowstring. Slashchev, again moved against the partisans, realized that, having mastered the territory, Makhno had lost his main quality - maneuverability. Therefore, without dispersing his strength, he strikes in one place, along the Pyatikhatki-Ekaterinoslav railway. The front is breaking. The capital Makhno is in the hands of the Whites. From the suburban mud, the dad counterattacks eight times, trying to recapture the city - in vain! It ruins all his plans. He dreamed of meeting the Reds as the owner of an anarchist free republic with the capital in the largest city of eastern Ukraine, but once again he turned out to be the commander of a seditious partisan detachment, which was also fairly battered by the whites.

On January 1, the long-awaited meeting took place. A wave of joint victorious rallies swept through. On January 4, Commander-14 Uborevich issued a secret order to destroy all Makhno's bands. But to start open action against the rebels, a pretext was needed. He didn't have to wait long. On January 8, the Makhnovist headquarters in Aleksandrovsk received a categorical order to move the Insurgent Army to the Polish Front. The army did not obey either Uborevich or any red commander, either formally or in fact. The Reds knew about it. Moreover, they counted on the fact that the Makhnovists would not obey the order, which Uborevich let slip to Yakir.

But the Makhnovists not only disobeyed the order. The Revolutionary Military Council of the insurgents issued a Declaration, which the Bolsheviks could not perceive otherwise than as an attempt to snatch the political initiative from them. It was colossal audacity. A year before the Kronstadt rebellion, the declaration formulated all the basic postulates of the most hated heresy for the Bolsheviks - "For Soviets without Communists." In addition, as expected, the Makhnovists' refusal to go to the Polish front came to Uborevich's headquarters, primarily because "50% of the fighters, the entire headquarters and the army commander were ill with typhus."

The answer completely satisfied the Bolsheviks. On January 9, F. Levenzon's brigade and the troops of the 41st division, who, together with the Makhnovists, occupied Aleksandrovsk, made an attempt to capture Makhno's headquarters, located in the best hotel in the city. The headquarters cut through the city along with the "father's hundred", and Makhno himself, dressed in a peasant dress, left the city in a cart, unnoticed by anyone. The reward for him was another declaration of "outlaw" ...

From typhus and military failures Makhno moved away only in the spring of 1920. According to the detachment, one by one, the "army" gathered - this time a small, five thousand, detachment of well-armed people, certainly mounted. One of the bloodiest campaigns began, the mechanism of which, debugged in previous years, worked with depressing clarity.

Communists were killed. The communist organizations were destroyed. In one village, in another, in a third. Carts. Leaflets. Blood. There is nothing romantic about this. Moreover, there is no hope. But there is one undoubted truth in this - the truth of resistance.

"To die or to win - that's what is now facing the peasantry of Ukraine ... But we cannot all die, there are too many of us, we are humanity, therefore, we will win" - this is how Makhno experienced this feeling of immensity. 1920 is the year of continuous peasant uprisings, the last war of the peasantry for their rights. The peasants lost it. Lost on the fields of decisive battles, lost politically. And although the NEP - a kind of peace protocol - was signed, it seemed, with the interest of the peasantry, in the 29th, when they again began to take away land for collective farms, it turned out that everyone had completely lost. There is no one to defend the rights before the government, and there is no one to rise up in revolt.

Makhno was the last who tried to provide his descendants with at least some kind of “right”, which in a revolution is obtained only by force.

The peasantry did not want to live according to Bolshevik laws. They did not want to turn into an "agricultural proletariat". It, despite all the losses of the Civil War, was still too strong, too independent. It defended its rights before the whites with weapons in their hands. It was still huge and conscious of its immensity.

In June, Wrangel withdrew from the Crimea, and Russia's "last and decisive battle" broke out in the south of Ukraine for its future. The package of laws adopted by the Wrangel government would undoubtedly have become a healing medicine for the country in 1917, but in 1920 the pill had to be pushed through by force: so the battles were of such intensity that the Civil War had not known before. All summer Makhno's army dangled in the red rear, methodically destroying it: disarming units, destroying food detachments (which it succeeded in, food requisitioning in the "Makhnovist" areas was completely failed). And only in the fall, when a bullet crushed Makhno's ankle in the battle near Izyum, the army stopped for a whole month, occupying Starobelsk at the very border with Russia, where truly extraordinary things began to happen.

First, a representative of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries ("minority" - that is, those recognizing cooperation with the Bolsheviks) arrived at Makhno and hinted that in the face of such a counter as Wrangel, true revolutionaries should forget all differences and unite. The Makhnovists immediately realized that the messenger was choosing the opinion of certain Bolshevik circles. A meeting of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Army was held, at which even the most "red" among the Makhnovists, Kurylenko and Belash, spoke in the sense that the fight against the Bolsheviks should not be stopped.

Makhno did not resist: he adhered to the line of the most severe agrarian terror, which, after all, was also an argument in politics. He made it clear that this time you won't get off with talk about "reconciliation" - he found a scythe on a stone, and that if negotiations, then seriously - with seals, publicity and guarantees.

And in this his calculation turned out to be correct: only the fear that at the moment of a decisive attack on Wrangel the Insurgent Army would again move off and go to smash the red rear, forced the Bolsheviks to negotiate. In September, Ivanov, authorized by the RVS of the Yuzhfront, arrived in Starobelsk, no longer disguised as Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. On September 29, the Central Committee of the CP(b)U, represented by Rakovsky, confirmed the decision to negotiate with Makhno.

Question: What was Makhno counting on when concluding an agreement with the Bolsheviks? After all, he knew them well. No worse than they are. And yet he hoped that this time he had finished, and that they would have to reckon with him, at least in the face of Wrangel. Well, who knew that the "black baron" would be defeated so soon! Perekop fortifications were considered impregnable. And that the wind will drive water out of Sivash ...

On November 3, 1920, the Whites locked themselves in the Crimea. Already on November 5, Karetnikov's corps received an order from Commander Kork to cross the Sivash and take up positions on the Lithuanian Peninsula. Karetnikov was against the agreement with the Bolsheviks. He understood that the corps was being put on the rampage and tactfully refused, citing intelligence data. Only blood shed on equal footing could seal the cause in this alliance. Therefore, after waiting for the approach of the 52nd and 15th divisions, on the night of November 8, he goes with them to storm, surprisingly becoming the savior of the Reds, when General Barbovich's cavalry fell on them, entrenched on the edge of the Crimean coast. The Makhnovists used their usual maneuver: leaning towards the "lava", they suddenly went in different directions, leaving 200 carts with machine guns lashing with fire in the enemy's path. After the capture of Simferopol, Karetnikov's corps was withdrawn to the Evpatoria region. Bad rumors spread. There was no connection with Gulyai-Pole. Therefore, "summoned to a meeting" Karetnikov galloped - and was killed on the way. The corps, left without a commander, thanks to the sympathy of the red units, left the Crimea without loss. But on the mainland, fresh units that did not take part in the defeat of Wrangel were waiting for him, which practically destroyed him during the week-long battles.

On October 2, the agreement was signed. Unprecedented was not only its meaning, which implies, for example, an amnesty for anarchists and freedom of anarchist propaganda, but also the very formula of consent concluded by the Insurgent Army and the government of Ukraine. Apparently, Makhno himself was blinded by the results of his victory: after 8 months of damned banditry, the long-awaited peace came. His wound was treated by Moscow professors, his fighters rested up in full-time Red Army hospitals!

And most importantly, the army finally received a supply of weapons, which seemed to be the height of confidence. Makhno did not yet know that his elite units, the 5,000-strong “Karetnikov Corps,” would have to play almost the main role in forcing the Sivash. Which without weapons would hardly be possible. But as soon as Wrangel fell, everything was over: all the clauses of the "Agreement" were instantly annulled, the Makhnovist delegates were arrested in Kharkov, Makhno was "outlawed." He did not expect such a meanness. Now he had only one thing left to do - to wait for his best parts - the Krymchaks, in order to talk seriously with the traitors. The meeting was to be held on December 7 in the village of Kermenchik. Yellow frosty dust swirled in the air. Old Man saw two hundred exhausted horsemen. Marchenko galloped up to him with a crooked grin on his face:

I have the honor to report that the Crimean army has returned... Makhno was silent. Looking at the faces of his comrades, Marchenko concluded:

Yes, brothers, now I know what communists are...

Makhno's raids of 1921 are interesting to follow except for the historian: drawn on the map, they resemble the repetitive dance of some kind of insect. Obviously, this kind of interest was shown by Frunze's deputy R. Eideman, before he realized that Makhno was walking along strictly laid routes, changing horses here, leaving the wounded here, replenishing stocks of weapons here ... Having calculated the trajectory of the detachment, on June 21st Eideman for the first time, he abandons the tactics of pursuit and inflicts a counter blow on Makhno. And then there was just agony, which lasted another 2 months.

Makhno was doomed. He lived as early as 1919, and the year 1921 has already come. The revolution has won. The winners enjoyed its fruits with might and main. Learned new positions. Trying on new jackets. The ebullient, crazy time of NEP was approaching - the time of the market and the ephemeral luxury of being ...

Makhno, on the other hand, was banditry with a handful of the same, who had lost everything and were ready for anything partisans. What the war taught them was no longer needed by people and became dangerous for them. The Makhnovists had to disappear. The safest thing is to die. But Makhno could not reconcile himself. The war gave him everything - love, comrades, human respect and gratitude, power ... The war chained him to itself with revenge: it killed all his brothers, burned his home, accustomed his heart to indifference and ruthlessness ... He was left alone: ​​the war destroyed almost all of his friends. He knew why they fell, why they did not reconcile, he knew the law of battle: bow your head - they will put you on your knees. But he knew only his own truth, not wanting to know the truth of the changed time: during this time a new generation had grown up who wanted to live, not fight. For such is the law of youth, the law of life. And he, with his 19th year, in his heart became contrary to this law.

He was overstark and carried death in himself and was no longer needed. During the persecution of the last Makhnovists by armored cars, the peasants - for the first time in the entire war! - pointed out the direction to the extermination squads ... Looking at the haggard, half-mad faces of the rebels, the peasants also understood: uh-uh, but what good can you look for from these. Enough. Bad, naughty, cursed - nothing will come of them, except for anxiety and thinness ....

At the crossing over the Ingul, a bullet hit Makhno in the back of the head and exited his cheek, opening his face like a saber scar. This was his last, 14th, wound, which was supposed to put an end to his fate, similar to those that were placed in the fates of almost all of his comrades.

But Makhno survived. Probably, the Lord decided to test him to the end: to drag him through all the bitterness of loss and outcasts, emigration, betrayal of friends, poverty...

In 1934, the flu, superimposed on chronic tuberculosis, resolved him from earthly fetters in a provincial Parisian hospital. The incomparable partisan to the end drank the cup of earthly existence.