Golovanov’s article was the starter’s flag for a whole series of sensational publications. We might focus on that from Sergei Seymanov, the last Soviet historian to have shown an interest on the topic, through a mischievous piece back in 1968.15 Under the title Underneath the Black Flag, the Life and Death of Nestor Makhno, he tells of the lengthy correspondence and conversations that he had with Makhno’s widow, Galina Kuzmenko, and his daughter, Lucie. He might have been better advised to publish this only in an edition with commentary in the margin, because it is of tortuous construction and endlessly intercut with personal thoughts of the most maudlin sort and the whole thing makes for a difficult read. Even so, let us draw out the substance of it. Following publication of his article, he received a letter dated April 4, 1968 from the town of Dzhambula in Kazakhstan, from Galina Kuzmenko who gave him a lengthy account of everything that she had been through, not merely as an emigrd in France but also inside the USSR to where she had been deported from Germany in 1945, along with her daughter. Let us take a look at the main new information on ofiFer: Galina offers a precise description of Nestor’s last days and final hours in the Tenon hospital; she confirms that his real year of birth was 1888, a year earlier than the date shown on the official records, the purpose being to put off his being called to the colors (this being something that played a crucial role in the commuting of Makhno’s death sentence to one of imprisonment for life —precisely because of his tender years). She recalls how his father’s real surname had been Mikhnienko who, being nicknamed Makhno, had adopted this surname instead and registered all his children under it. Galina confirms the authenticity of her “celebrated diary,” seized by the Reds in 1920, wherein she gave a day by day account of the activities of the core Makhnovist group from February 19 to March 26, 1920. Written in Ukrainian, translated into Russian, this text has been reprinted many times over since then. All in all, it has the ring of truth, except in the passages where she has Nestor — a drunken Nestor at that — dancing to his own accordion accompaniment! Remember that Makhno himself challenged this “diary,” supposedly kepr by his spouse, certain passages of which had been used by Soviet historians to discredit him. As Vassili Golovanov wrote us, only handwriting analysis could establish its authenticity. *7 The main point to emerge is just how extremely severe Makhno and his comrades were, not shrinking from on-the-spot execution of all insurgents guilty of extorting money from or bullying the populace. They were not ones to bandy words about revolutionary ethics!
Seymanov makes a passing reference to the fate of Leon Zadov, “executioner” of many Bolsheviks, bodyguard to Makhno and the man who carried the wounded Makhno in his own arms into Romania. Of Jewish extraction (which puts paid to any charges of anti-Semitism levelled against Nestor, not to mention all of the protracted rebuttals offered Makhno himself or by others!), Zadov was later recruited by the GPU! He worked for the GPU up until 1937 when he was “purged,” as
Were virtually all protagonists of the civil war. Seymanov notes with amazement that Zadov’s son made a glittering career for himself in the Soviet navy under his father s real name of Zinkovsky before retiring with the rank of rear-admiral. Seymanov wonders — without however advancing anything to substantiate his thesis — whether Zadov might not have been “planted” inside the Makhnovist movement right from the outset by the “organs,” which is to say, the Cheka. The argument may be a bit raw but Seymanov argues that the Cheka was capable of anything. Galina continues her tale; with Nestor and a dozen other insurgents she was evacuated to Romania, before moving on to Poland in the spring of 1922, where she was jailed with Nestor for fourteen months in Warsaw, charged with having fomented an armed uprising in eastern Galicia (then part of Poland). There she gave birth to her daughter Elena on October 30, 1922. On their release all three of them moved on to Danzig where they were rearrested by the German authorities on charges of having persecuted German settlers in the Ukraine. She was freed shordy after that and made her way to Paris with her daughter, As for Nestor, he then made his escape “like something out of a novel”: a rope made of torn blankets, bars sawn through yith a file, etc. without giving her the full details, in accotdance, no doubt “with the rules of revolutionary conspiracy” at that time. Among the other intriguing details offered by Galina — although Seymanov explains that she was cautious in her choice of words, this being in 1968 when she had not yet been “rehabilitated” by the regime and was therefore still “under surveillance” — we have confirmation that Swartzbard, member of a Yiddish anarchist group, was well known to Makhno in Paris. Makhno did not agree with his holding “Petliura responsible for anti-Jewish pogroms carried out in the Ukraine, because Petliura had in fact opposed them,” even though “Makhno had no great liking for him.” Galina stresses that Swartzbard’s defence lawyer, Henry Torres, helped Nestor and her smooth over their “difficulties with the French police” (probably to overturn proceedings to have them expelled from French soil). Their daughter Elena (pet name Lucie in French) was often taken in by French anarchist families, never learned Ukrainian and even forgot her Russian. Galina worked fitfully for a variety of Ukrainian organizations in France. Conscripted under the STO (Compulsory Labor Service) scheme, her daughter was sent to Berlin in 1943 and Galina went with her. On August 14, 1945, they were both arrested by the Soviet authorities and repatriated to Kiev. Galina was sentenced to eight years in a labor camp in Mordovia. Curiously enough, there she met the wives of Yakir — the man who persecuted the Makhnovists back in 1919 — and of General Vlassov (“turned” by the Germans during the Second World War and handed over to Stalin by the British and Americans, before being hanged in Moscow along with Shkuro, Krasnov and other generals). She must have had a hellish time there for she wound up in the “invalids’” section of the camp. She was freed on May 7, 1954 and assigned residence in Dzhambula in Kazakhstan, where her daughter was also assigned. When they met at the railway station they did not
Recognize each other, such were the changes in their appearances! It was only later on that they were reunited. Which leads Seymanov, “a young, unassuming citizen” in 1968, “moved” by this picture, to say that Galina was worthy of featuring in a play by Homer, Shakespeare or in Quiet Flows the Don.
The impression she made upon Seymanov, after their many encounters, was that of a “strong and extraordinary character”; the ordeals to which she had been subjected had not broken her nor her “dogged common sense,” the “suspicion-driven caution” which, according to him, was a legacy from the ghastly times in which she had lived. Seymanov notes here that the “misfortunes she had endured had not steered Galinas spirit in the direction of God” and that she was, from her younger days through until she breathed her last, a “dyed-in-the-wool atheist” as well as a “genuine, robust revolutionary.” He was not afraid that this might not quite square with his “graphological” reading of Galinas handwriting which identified “ambition, bordering even upon despotism,” plus a degree of “dissimulation” discernible in the formation of the letters a, o, b and l! As we see it, the overriding impression was that she had remained true to herself, to Nestor and to the movement in which she had played a large part. Hats off! (She died in 1978.)
Seymanov also offers us information as to the fate of Lucie (Elena) Makhno. Banished to the middle of the Asian steppes, under police surveillance, she was only able to survive by turning her hand to a range of exacting manual trades: canteen worker, factory worker, piggery employee, etc. from which she was often fired once the identity of her father was discovered, and this went on for many a long year. When Seymanov met her in 1968 she was not yet married nor a mother but was living with a civil aviator. She had reluctantly agreed to the rendezvous: she was “edgy, irritated and trusted no one.” To him she seemed still young and elegant with her dark eyes and dark hair and bore a stunning resemblance to her father. He found her very much the “Parisienne,” as he imagined one at any rate. Her Russian was still heavily overlaid with a French accent. In her mothers presence, she declared to Seymanov that she had always despised politics, that she remembered her father well and recalled that his house had always been filled with people and newspapers. Way back then she had pledged that she would take no interest in politics or newspapers. She reckoned that she had no homeland and could not bring herself to regard either France or Russia as such [...] Many men had shown an interest in her but on learning whose daughter she was they had promptly made themselves scarce, sometimes properly, sometimes in a cruder or more craven fashion, thereby exposing their own true natures. “I never wanted children. Bring more wretches into this world? So that they might share the same fate as me? When I was in France I knew nothing of my father s part in your history. When I found myself incarcerated in Kiev, one of my fellow prisoners, discovering whose daughter I was, asked me if he was the renowned bandit? I took offence at that and slapped her.”
At the end of their meeting, she asked Seymanov to send her some French newspapers as they just could not be had where she was living.
It has to be said that Seymanov in no way retracts any of the comments regarding the negative views expressed in his 1966 study of the Makhnovist movement. Quite the opposite. His text closes bizarrely with his imploring “the Lord to forgive his servants Galina and Nestor, for they knew not what they were doing,” and calling upon Him to “forgive all of us poor sinners” [he probably means all Russians]. As for himself and in spite of the belated onset of compassion, he never lifted a finger to help Galina and her daughter back in 1968. What hypocrisy. Lucie (Elena) Makhno died an untimely death in 1993 at the age of 71, still confined to Dzhambula. We can only suppose that she had had to grapple with the straits caused by the break-up of the Soviet empire and visited upon the Russian and Ukrainian minorities by the Kazakh nationalist authorities.
World History
