I'm more inclined to trust Goldman who lived in Russia than Parsons and Luxemburg who very much did not. That said, there isn't really good scholarship on the matter. There are accounts by participants which got embellished by Hagiographs like Voline, and there is the official position of the Bolsheviks. So I'm inclined to take arguments about the black army not as debates about established facts, but as political positions.
Parsons & Haywood definitely visited & lived in Russia during this time, and are writing from such a perspective
In fact, they call Goldman out directly on this matter, because Goldman talks out of both sides of her mouth to appease the capitalistic Western imperialist & anti-communist press:
"It is strange that Emma Goldman did not take issue with the Brest-Litovsk Peace before she left the United States. Perhaps she knew that criticising the Bolsheviki revolution would not give her the same opportunity for exploitation as the means she resorted to. At any rate, it is a long silence from March, 1917, until March, 1922. It may be that, knowing that she was to be deported to Russia, she felt that silence was golden, while her collections were mostly currency and silver.
If Emma Goldman had been describing the famine area, one could understand what she meant when she speaks of only having seen one child in Russia who laughed. Because it is true that in that vast territory comprising several provinces, hunger has daily counted its tolls of hundreds of once smiling and laughing children. Starving children can’t laugh. It is to be regretted that Emma could not have visited Sparrow’s Hill, and seen there the thousands of children, boys and girls, robust and rugged, rosy-cheeked and beautiful in their remarkable collective exercise. Or have spent days at Pushkino, or some of the many hundreds of similar communities throughout Russia, where the summer homes of the bourgeoisie are turned into children’s colonies. At one of these homes I saw between forty and fifty of these little tots just after their bath, romping and frollicking, laughing and full of glee, a sight that would please the heart of almost any man or woman. Too bad that Miss Goldman could not have visited the Moscow River within the environs of the city, where on summer days anyone could see the naked boys and girls at play enjoying a plunge in the water. She should have met the children that Mary Heaton Vorse had temporarily adopted while here. Little Demitrus and his friends would have been other laughing children to her credit. It is a great loss to think that she did not visit Children’s Town. There the babes are learning, as they do in play, the advantage of association and solidarity. It is possible that Miss Goldman might have learnt, even from the little ones, that rules of order, discipline and self-government are the essentials of a socialised community. Miss Goldman would mention in the same breath men of such splendid character and attributes as Lunaraharsky and Gorky, comparing them with that crooked little politician, Judge Linsay, who conducted the juvenile Court in Denver, Colorado, and who only by the efforts of the officials of the Western Federation of Miners was prevented from sending little boys, who for delinquency were dealt with in his court, to work in the beet fields of Colorado, there to take the place of Russian emigrants who seasonally migrated from industrial centres for that work.
Emma admits, “More and more I came to see that the Bolsheviki were trying to do all they could for the children, but that their efforts were being defeated by the parasitic bureaucracy their State had created.” She does not explain that the Soviet government, which is trying to do all it can for the child has been compelled to depend largely upon teachers of the old regime. These and their cohorts are the parasites of which she complains, but of them she makes no mention.
Lunarcharsky, the head of education, and hundreds of splendid Communist women, among them the wives of Zinoviev and Radek, are striving for the children’s sake to for ever entomb the “dead souls,” and to correct other detrimental influences. Miss Goldman knows, but she does not write about the hundreds of children that daily starve to death in the United States, the many thousands that go to school hungry every morning—this in a country with an abundance of food! Russia with one bountiful harvest, and the children of this great Republic will come into their own."
One thing that cannot be overlooked in these matters is Goldman's tacit Russophobia, which she even admits to having in her own personal writings
There is plenty of good scholarship on the matter including by Darch & Palij & others. Volin & Arshinov definitely did write unbelievable & effusive fanfic hagiographies that cannot be trusted
Established fact is that Makhno's Army, while perhaps not commanded by Makhno himself to do so, committed many pogroms & did so unabashedly
Makhno personally abhorred anti-Semitism and was recorded to have personally executed anti-Semitic elements of his forces on a few occasions. I’d say any pogroms committed by his forces can be attributed to their national character rather than any failings on Makhno or anarchism and he did as much as could be realistically expected to abate that as a trend.
That said, Makhno basically completely failed to implement any social revolution or class abolition in the free territories. Like you noted earlier, the ‘communes’ never really existed in any tangible way and the commercial agriculture economy of Ukraine with it’s dichotomy between the poor and rich peasants continued unabated.
While I think the characterization of Makhno as just a marauding bandit is reductionist, Trotskys flak in ending the ‘Free Territory’ is entirely undeserved and it’s inane that some people apparently think he and the Bolsheviks should have just let everyone in the Russian cities starve and the Soviets collapse to preserve what was essentially a Robin-Hoodesque peasant army that had repeatedly repressed Bolshevik Soviets in Ukraine and had made zero tangible strides in actually building any sort of sustainable anarchist or otherwise socialism project.
Regardless of Makhno's personal relatonships with Jewish people & outward condemnation of those pogroms, we can't functionally separate Makhnovism from the actions of the Makhnovists themselves, especially when considering the extent to which the Red Army had offered protection and, to an even greater extent than the Black Army's leaders, worked to crush anti-Jewish scapegoating in their ranks. To this end, I think you are underestimating the character of your own statement
If Makhnovists' pogroms reflect the Ukrainian cultural character more than they reflect anarchism, something I agree with, then it's not the anarchism that was to blame, it was the Makhnovism & anti-communism.
"Nestor Makhno certainly perpetrated numerous counter-revolutionary exploits. His secret police tortured and murdered many communists. His Ukrainian peasant followers committed frequent pogroms against Jewish petty shopkeepers and merchants... Ukrainian peasant antagonism to the overwhelmingly Russian and Jewish working class of the Ukrainian cities... . Grigorev had the worst record of murder, rape, torture and other atrocities committed against Jews of all the peasant bandit leaders ravaging the Ukrainian country-side during the Russian Civil War.
This alliance ended badly for Grigorev. Makhno murdered him, and Grigorev's peasant followers joined Makhno's rebel army—but continued to commit pogroms.
Makhno himself was not personally anti-Semitic, indeed there were Jews in his "collective." In a sense, it could be said that Makhno was simply following anarchist principle. If his secret policemen were torturing prisoners, and if his peasant followers were committing pogroms, what right did Makhno, as just one member of the "collective," have to object?"
Instead of falling over ourselves trying to be overly nuanced here, why can't we say the truth? Makhno's bandits were guilty of committing pogroms because they were never really there for the principled "anarchism" to begin with
"The National Secretariat of Ukrainian Jews' stated during the period of the pogroms: "A special place is held for the actions of the Makhno bands which waged complete destruction in the Yekaterinoslav-Pavlograd region."
The journal `Reshumot' (1920) refers to: "the well known wild animal Makhno who was known for his cruelty and his army which was drunk with blood."
`Jewish Agriculturalists in the Steppes of Russia' (Israel 1965)' states:" The Jewish colonies in the Yekaterinoslav province were situated in the centre of activity of the anarchist bands, Makhno. Almost all the colonies of Yekaterinoslav suffered from attacks. All the inhabitants of the colonies Trudoliubovka and Nechaevka, who numbered 1000 people - were murdered. The property was looted completely and since then no Jewish foot has entered those colonies."
Even Trotsky points out Makhno's rhetorical position vs. the reality of his armies' actions ""Without a doubt, Makhno provided de facto aid to Wrangel, as well as to the Polish gentry, since he fought at the same time as they did against the Red Army" (translated from "Makhno and Wrangel," 14 October 1920, Kak vooruzhalas' revolyutsiya [How the Revolution Armed], Vol. 2, Book 2 [1924]). "
I agree that Makhnovists failed to codify or enact the kind of real revolutionary class struggle in those areas that they may have envisioned. And though landlords were expropriated, it was precisely in this unwillingness to undo the larger ossified kulak-dominated agrarian social structure in these Eastern Ukraine areas that we can say Makhno in practice was a lot less effective than some of his biggest fans would lead us to believe.
Right, we have to look at the history of this situation in the aggregate & when doing so we can say that truth is in the unfolding of real events rather than any idealism or "statements" of intent.
Sailor Dmitry Urin wrote on March 5, in a letter to his father in the Herson province of Ukraine, “We dismissed the commune, we have Commune no more, now we have only Soviet power. We in Kronstadt made a resolution to send all the Jews to Palestine, in order not to have in Russia such filth, all sailors shouted: ‘Jews Out’...”
“A good sample of ‘revolutionary individual initiative’ is the Kronstadt affair. I have given it a little study since I saw you last. There is no question that if the Kronstadt affair had not been wiped out, it would have resulted in the downfall of the Soviet Power. There is no doubt that many of the participants who called themselves Anarchists and S.R.’s were sincere in their notions. Subjectively they were doubtlessly highly moral revolutionists. But objectively it was a filthy counter-revolution. I don’t give a damn for the moral values. The counter-revolutionary officers came over from Finland (protected by the Finnish Government!) and joined the anarchists and the S.R.’s and the Mensheviks. The French Navy lay outside the frozen area, waiting for the ‘Anarchists’ (who could compromise enough to associate with Cadet officers), to hold Kronstadt until the ice would break and let the French and British battleships fight for ‘Soviets without Bolsheviks! Yes, that is a fine example of free and easy ‘revolution’ without discipline. The fellows that did this crazy thing, killed thousands of the best and youngest and bravest of the soldiers that the revolution had. And yet there are people who call themselves ‘Anarchists,’ and ask me to pity the fellows who were responsible for the Kronstadt affair. Monks that ponder in their cells on the misfortunes of man in general can pity them, I have not time to pity such men.
“There are people calling themselves ‘Anarchists’ that are now saying that Kronstadt was the real ‘Revolution.’ If such people were to be allowed to operate with ‘free speech’ and ‘free demonstration’ within the circle that is held by the bayonets of the Red Army, the revolution would be dead now, and here would reign the ‘democratic freedom’ and pogroms of Capitalist Hungary, with Wrangel, Seminoff, Pilsudski, Harding, Briand, and Llovd George guaranteeing you your “freedom of revolutionary initiative.’”
we can't just look at this history as a series of "mistakes" that the Soviets are supposedly said to have made. And mutiny is definitely not leftism
I'm more inclined to trust Goldman who lived in Russia than Parsons and Luxemburg who very much did not. That said, there isn't really good scholarship on the matter. There are accounts by participants which got embellished by Hagiographs like Voline, and there is the official position of the Bolsheviks. So I'm inclined to take arguments about the black army not as debates about established facts, but as political positions.
Parsons & Haywood definitely visited & lived in Russia during this time, and are writing from such a perspective
In fact, they call Goldman out directly on this matter, because Goldman talks out of both sides of her mouth to appease the capitalistic Western imperialist & anti-communist press:
"It is strange that Emma Goldman did not take issue with the Brest-Litovsk Peace before she left the United States. Perhaps she knew that criticising the Bolsheviki revolution would not give her the same opportunity for exploitation as the means she resorted to. At any rate, it is a long silence from March, 1917, until March, 1922. It may be that, knowing that she was to be deported to Russia, she felt that silence was golden, while her collections were mostly currency and silver.
If Emma Goldman had been describing the famine area, one could understand what she meant when she speaks of only having seen one child in Russia who laughed. Because it is true that in that vast territory comprising several provinces, hunger has daily counted its tolls of hundreds of once smiling and laughing children. Starving children can’t laugh. It is to be regretted that Emma could not have visited Sparrow’s Hill, and seen there the thousands of children, boys and girls, robust and rugged, rosy-cheeked and beautiful in their remarkable collective exercise. Or have spent days at Pushkino, or some of the many hundreds of similar communities throughout Russia, where the summer homes of the bourgeoisie are turned into children’s colonies. At one of these homes I saw between forty and fifty of these little tots just after their bath, romping and frollicking, laughing and full of glee, a sight that would please the heart of almost any man or woman. Too bad that Miss Goldman could not have visited the Moscow River within the environs of the city, where on summer days anyone could see the naked boys and girls at play enjoying a plunge in the water. She should have met the children that Mary Heaton Vorse had temporarily adopted while here. Little Demitrus and his friends would have been other laughing children to her credit. It is a great loss to think that she did not visit Children’s Town. There the babes are learning, as they do in play, the advantage of association and solidarity. It is possible that Miss Goldman might have learnt, even from the little ones, that rules of order, discipline and self-government are the essentials of a socialised community. Miss Goldman would mention in the same breath men of such splendid character and attributes as Lunaraharsky and Gorky, comparing them with that crooked little politician, Judge Linsay, who conducted the juvenile Court in Denver, Colorado, and who only by the efforts of the officials of the Western Federation of Miners was prevented from sending little boys, who for delinquency were dealt with in his court, to work in the beet fields of Colorado, there to take the place of Russian emigrants who seasonally migrated from industrial centres for that work.
Emma admits, “More and more I came to see that the Bolsheviki were trying to do all they could for the children, but that their efforts were being defeated by the parasitic bureaucracy their State had created.” She does not explain that the Soviet government, which is trying to do all it can for the child has been compelled to depend largely upon teachers of the old regime. These and their cohorts are the parasites of which she complains, but of them she makes no mention.
Lunarcharsky, the head of education, and hundreds of splendid Communist women, among them the wives of Zinoviev and Radek, are striving for the children’s sake to for ever entomb the “dead souls,” and to correct other detrimental influences. Miss Goldman knows, but she does not write about the hundreds of children that daily starve to death in the United States, the many thousands that go to school hungry every morning—this in a country with an abundance of food! Russia with one bountiful harvest, and the children of this great Republic will come into their own."
One thing that cannot be overlooked in these matters is Goldman's tacit Russophobia, which she even admits to having in her own personal writings
There is plenty of good scholarship on the matter including by Darch & Palij & others. Volin & Arshinov definitely did write unbelievable & effusive fanfic hagiographies that cannot be trusted
Established fact is that Makhno's Army, while perhaps not commanded by Makhno himself to do so, committed many pogroms & did so unabashedly
Makhno personally abhorred anti-Semitism and was recorded to have personally executed anti-Semitic elements of his forces on a few occasions. I’d say any pogroms committed by his forces can be attributed to their national character rather than any failings on Makhno or anarchism and he did as much as could be realistically expected to abate that as a trend.
That said, Makhno basically completely failed to implement any social revolution or class abolition in the free territories. Like you noted earlier, the ‘communes’ never really existed in any tangible way and the commercial agriculture economy of Ukraine with it’s dichotomy between the poor and rich peasants continued unabated.
While I think the characterization of Makhno as just a marauding bandit is reductionist, Trotskys flak in ending the ‘Free Territory’ is entirely undeserved and it’s inane that some people apparently think he and the Bolsheviks should have just let everyone in the Russian cities starve and the Soviets collapse to preserve what was essentially a Robin-Hoodesque peasant army that had repeatedly repressed Bolshevik Soviets in Ukraine and had made zero tangible strides in actually building any sort of sustainable anarchist or otherwise socialism project.
Regardless of Makhno's personal relatonships with Jewish people & outward condemnation of those pogroms, we can't functionally separate Makhnovism from the actions of the Makhnovists themselves, especially when considering the extent to which the Red Army had offered protection and, to an even greater extent than the Black Army's leaders, worked to crush anti-Jewish scapegoating in their ranks. To this end, I think you are underestimating the character of your own statement
If Makhnovists' pogroms reflect the Ukrainian cultural character more than they reflect anarchism, something I agree with, then it's not the anarchism that was to blame, it was the Makhnovism & anti-communism.
"Nestor Makhno certainly perpetrated numerous counter-revolutionary exploits. His secret police tortured and murdered many communists. His Ukrainian peasant followers committed frequent pogroms against Jewish petty shopkeepers and merchants... Ukrainian peasant antagonism to the overwhelmingly Russian and Jewish working class of the Ukrainian cities... . Grigorev had the worst record of murder, rape, torture and other atrocities committed against Jews of all the peasant bandit leaders ravaging the Ukrainian country-side during the Russian Civil War.
This alliance ended badly for Grigorev. Makhno murdered him, and Grigorev's peasant followers joined Makhno's rebel army—but continued to commit pogroms.
Makhno himself was not personally anti-Semitic, indeed there were Jews in his "collective." In a sense, it could be said that Makhno was simply following anarchist principle. If his secret policemen were torturing prisoners, and if his peasant followers were committing pogroms, what right did Makhno, as just one member of the "collective," have to object?"
Instead of falling over ourselves trying to be overly nuanced here, why can't we say the truth? Makhno's bandits were guilty of committing pogroms because they were never really there for the principled "anarchism" to begin with
"
TheNational Secretariat of Ukrainian Jews' stated during the period of the pogroms: "A special place is held for the actions of the Makhno bands which waged complete destruction in the Yekaterinoslav-Pavlograd region."The journal `Reshumot' (1920) refers to: "the well known wild animal Makhno who was known for his cruelty and his army which was drunk with blood."
`Jewish Agriculturalists in the Steppes of Russia' (Israel 1965)' states:" The Jewish colonies in the Yekaterinoslav province were situated in the centre of activity of the anarchist bands, Makhno. Almost all the colonies of Yekaterinoslav suffered from attacks. All the inhabitants of the colonies Trudoliubovka and Nechaevka, who numbered 1000 people - were murdered. The property was looted completely and since then no Jewish foot has entered those colonies."
Even Trotsky points out Makhno's rhetorical position vs. the reality of his armies' actions ""Without a doubt, Makhno provided de facto aid to Wrangel, as well as to the Polish gentry, since he fought at the same time as they did against the Red Army" (translated from "Makhno and Wrangel," 14 October 1920, Kak vooruzhalas' revolyutsiya [How the Revolution Armed], Vol. 2, Book 2 [1924]). "
I agree that Makhnovists failed to codify or enact the kind of real revolutionary class struggle in those areas that they may have envisioned. And though landlords were expropriated, it was precisely in this unwillingness to undo the larger ossified kulak-dominated agrarian social structure in these Eastern Ukraine areas that we can say Makhno in practice was a lot less effective than some of his biggest fans would lead us to believe.
Right, we have to look at the history of this situation in the aggregate & when doing so we can say that truth is in the unfolding of real events rather than any idealism or "statements" of intent.
Interesting. What do you think of Kronstadt?
As a Jew, not to positively since:
(9) Ibid, vol. 1, doc. 58, p. 119.
I will again quote Haywood & Parsons here:
“A good sample of ‘revolutionary individual initiative’ is the Kronstadt affair. I have given it a little study since I saw you last. There is no question that if the Kronstadt affair had not been wiped out, it would have resulted in the downfall of the Soviet Power. There is no doubt that many of the participants who called themselves Anarchists and S.R.’s were sincere in their notions. Subjectively they were doubtlessly highly moral revolutionists. But objectively it was a filthy counter-revolution. I don’t give a damn for the moral values. The counter-revolutionary officers came over from Finland (protected by the Finnish Government!) and joined the anarchists and the S.R.’s and the Mensheviks. The French Navy lay outside the frozen area, waiting for the ‘Anarchists’ (who could compromise enough to associate with Cadet officers), to hold Kronstadt until the ice would break and let the French and British battleships fight for ‘Soviets without Bolsheviks! Yes, that is a fine example of free and easy ‘revolution’ without discipline. The fellows that did this crazy thing, killed thousands of the best and youngest and bravest of the soldiers that the revolution had. And yet there are people who call themselves ‘Anarchists,’ and ask me to pity the fellows who were responsible for the Kronstadt affair. Monks that ponder in their cells on the misfortunes of man in general can pity them, I have not time to pity such men.
“There are people calling themselves ‘Anarchists’ that are now saying that Kronstadt was the real ‘Revolution.’ If such people were to be allowed to operate with ‘free speech’ and ‘free demonstration’ within the circle that is held by the bayonets of the Red Army, the revolution would be dead now, and here would reign the ‘democratic freedom’ and pogroms of Capitalist Hungary, with Wrangel, Seminoff, Pilsudski, Harding, Briand, and Llovd George guaranteeing you your “freedom of revolutionary initiative.’”
we can't just look at this history as a series of "mistakes" that the Soviets are supposedly said to have made. And mutiny is definitely not leftism
I agree with you wholly.