This is a persistent myth that is shared amongst anarchists and RadLibs alike that the Soviets betrayed the Makhnovists by reneging on their so-called alliance with the Black Army, turning on them immediately after the defeat of the White Army.
This furnishes the anarchist persecution fetish and common narratives about how communists will always betray “the true revolution” and how Lenin was a tyrant.
The historical facts, however, paint a significantly different picture.
For one, you do not sign pacts with your allies. There was a military pact that was signed but, like the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, this is something that occurred between two parties that were constantly at odds with each other and the pact was signed out of conditions where the interests of both parties were temporarily aligned. This simple fact escapes the historical revisionists constantly but, unsurprisingly, only when it serves their arguments.
Secondly, Makhno himself knew that this pact was only temporary. Upon the signing of the pact he had this to say in The Road to Freedom, the Makhnovists’ mouthpiece, in October 13, 1920:
"Military hostilities between the Makhnovist revolutionary insurgents and the Red Army have ceased. Misunderstandings, vagueness and inaccuracies have grown up around this truce: it is said that Makhno has repented of his anti-Bolshevik acts, that he has recognized the soviet authorities, etc. How are we to understand, what construction are we to place upon this peace agreement?
What is very clear already is that no intercourse of ideas, and no collaboration with the soviet authorities and no formal recognition of these has been or can be possible. We have always been irreconcilable enemies, at the level of ideas, of the party of the Bolshevik-communists.
We have never acknowledged any authorities and in the present instance we cannot acknowledge the soviet authorities. So again we remind and yet again we emphasize that, whether deliberately or through misapprehension, there must be no confusion of military intercourse in the wake of the danger threatening the revolution with any crossing-over, ‘fusion’ or recognition of the soviet authorities, which cannot have been and cannot ever be the case."
[Source: Nestor Makhno: Anarchy’s Cossack by Skirda and Sharkey, pp. 200-201]
Clearly these are not the words that allies speak about one another.
At the successful Seige of Perekop, whereby the Red and Black Armies successfully broke the back of Wrangel’s White Army forces and brought the Southern front to a conclusion, Makhno’s aide-de-camp Grigori Vassilevsky, pronounced the end of the pact, proclaiming:
“That’s the end for the agreement! Take my word for it, within one week the Bolsheviks are going to come down on us like a ton of bricks!”
[Source: Nestor Makhno: Anarchy’s Cossack by Skirda and Sharkey, p.238]
The fact is that USSR furnished the Black Army with much-needed military supplies without which they would have been unable to continue fighting and Makhno was no pluralistic leader who was open to Bolsheviks; in fact, his army incorporated Bolshevik forces which defected to the Black Army and Makhno set his military secret police force, the Kontrrazvedka, to at first surveil the former Bolshevik military leaders along with the rising Bolshevik influence that had developed particularly around Yekaterinoslav, and then later summarily executed the Bolshevik leaders when they posed too much of a threat to his power due to commanding some of the strongest units in his army.
But that’s a topic which deserves its own post…
Fine, you’re going to go there. What’s your source for the USSR attempting to strong-arm the CNT-FAI into not being anarchist?
You’re literally engaging in genocide denialism right now.
Pointing out the rank hypocrisy of expecting peaceful coexistence from the Bolsheviks towards the Makhnovists when the Makhnovists neither extended this to the Bolsheviks nor to the Mennonites is whataboutism? I’m asking you to account for why your concern for this only ever goes one way. I never said “but the Makhnovists attacked other people!!” in defense of the actions of the Bolsheviks. That’s what whataboutism is. Asking you to reconcile the inconsistencies in your own position is not whataboutism, unless that’s an implicit admission on your behalf of the fact that you think that this is somehow irrelevant.
This is exactly where these discussions with anarchists always go to. Now it’s a pity that you didn’t go all-in and accuse me of spreading Bolshevik propaganda but that’s just how it is.
So I take it that eyewitness testimony from Volin counts as “propaganda” in your eyes?
The genocide denier who is justifying the extrajudicial execution of Black Army officers for holding Bolshevik sympathies and who is handwaving genocide as “propaganda” is claiming that they aren’t pushing a narrative. Right. Sure thing.
This really isn’t painting yourself in the light that you think it is.
You’re really doubling down on these whole propaganda accusations, aren’t you?
By “someone who agrees with me” I take it that you agree with people who supports Makhno’s penchant for gang rape and what is at the least his turning a blind eye towards genocide?
I’m responding to you in the tone that you’re taking with me. I get that you think that you’ve got the moral high ground and that you’re justified in what you do but to call foul on me when you go sticking words in my mouth and I don’t respond to that with a charitable attitude that you clearly couldn’t manage to extend to me.
You completely ignored the points that I made in my post and went straight ahead reasserting a claim without directly addressing why I refuted that point. You’re not going to get a patient response out of me if you don’t bother reading the post you respond to.
No. It’s not an “own”. You’re putting words in my mouth and you’re speaking from a place of ignorance.
If you want to explain to me how your low-key gaslighting and your attempts to speak for my opinions is somehow in line with your principles then go right ahead.
This hostility that you’re bringing to bear and this readiness to abandon your own principles because you’re speaking with someone who you’ve decided is your enemy is one of the reasons that I don’t bring up when I tell people what made me stop being an anarchist but believe me when I say that it’s very familiar to me.
Look at exactly where the conversation took a turn. You decided to bring the heat and then I responded in kind and now you’re calling foul.
Are you really going to make the that anarchists are aware of what Makhno wrote in The Road to Freedom?
Are you seriously going to disregard Volin’s work as propaganda?
Don’t piss on my boots and tell me that it’s raining.
I know this dance. The next reply is going to be you demanding sources for every little point I’ve made, which is fine—I have them all and I’m going to provide them for you if you ask—but you are going to ignore where I’ve called you to account for your own sources.
Then I’m going to ignore your next reply and state that you haven’t provided me with any sources which I have sparingly requested (it’s one direct and about two indirect requests) where I have asked for them and that if you’re going to make me go to the effort of quoting a series of sources and you want a reply from me then you can start with providing me with the sources I requested from you multiple comments ago.
Then the conversation takes on its end phase.
This is where people bail from the exchange because they can’t be bothered to find a bare couple of sources, they provide some tertiary source blogpost or opinion piece that would make a first year uni student blush, or they skim something to come up with a refutation for a couple of sources that I’ve provided to try and debunk my sources (at which point I bring my knowledge to bear and lay it down really hard because it’s easy to tell when someone is cherry-picking from a source they aren’t familiar with and I have no patience for that sort of point-scoring nonsense.)
I could be wrong though. Who knows? The world is full of surprises.
You’re speaking for me again. This is a consistent pattern in your replies and it’s wearing very thin.
This is an absolutely pitiful strawman.
You’re denouncing me for a lack of familiarity with anarchism, you claim that I’m speaking about anarchism from a place of ignorance, and all in order to win an argument.
What seems to be lost on you is the bitter irony that you are assuming my level of knowledge of anarchism, you are speaking from a place of ignorance about my knowledge thereof, and you doing this all to win an argument yourself.
If you had done a little research on me, you would have realised that I have recently commented stating that I was a long-term anarchist and that my politics only changed recently. You would have noticed that I was an anarchist long enough to have outlived at least one anarchist comrade, that I was embedded enough in the Reddit anarchist scene that I recognised this user by their distinctive writing style across multiple accounts, that I noticed this user stopped posting around the same time that word got around through my networks of an anarchist in Portland dying a violent death.
You would be able to quickly find that this comrades’ account was active at least ten years ago, often in slapfights with Denny_Craine, although that account has been deleted. If you do some quick math, assuming that they went through multiple accounts and that I had been a part of the anarchist community long enough to build up a familiarity with their posting style and to build up networks to receive news through, that this would put me somewhere in the vicinity of being an anarchist for longer than some anarchists have been on this earth for.
If you want more receipts, instead of obfuscating some of the details like I tend to for the sake of plausible deniability, another of Kealiher’s more recent accounts was u/AllThePostLeftists. There’s a post out there on reddit stating that the user of this account was sentenced to 15 days in prison. There are details that can be found at Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office in Portland where Sean Kealiher was also in custody for 15 days. (Sean was still a kid back then so there’s very few details about this however.)
So tell me, have you been an anarchist long enough to be embedded in the anarchist community? Long enough to recognise users by their writing style that if their account was deleted and they sprang up with a new one and didn’t announce their name or reach out to you to identify themselves you’d still be able to recognise them? Have you been an anarchist long enough that you’ve had comrades pass away?
On what basis do you dare to speak for my knowledge of anarchism if you haven’t even bothered to familiarise yourself with some recent comments of mine?
There’s a little quote from Mao that MLs take seriously and that anarchists would benefit from doing the same: