3.
Nestor Makhno was born on October 27) 1888 in Gulyai-Polye, a sizable town crossed by the Gaichur River and belonging to the Alexandrovsk district of the Ekaterinoslav province. Gulyai-Polye means “fair green, walking green” and the name derives from the fact that, from time immemorial fairs frequent and of high repute in the region have been held there. Some Zaporog Cossacks had settled there over two centuries before, which accounts for the town’s being divided up along military lines into rotas or centuries. When Catherine II had ordered the destruction of the Sitch, many Zaporogs, rather than submit, had gone into exile; those who had not had the opportunity or time to do so had been enslaved. The ones from Gulyai-Polye had been awarded to one Shabelsky on the whim of some favorite of the empress.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Gulyai-Polye boasted nearly 10,000 inhabitants and by 1917 the figure was nearly 25,000h a cantonal capital and the residence of the cantonal police superintendent, the communal magistrate and the rural agent, it possessed two orthodox churches, a synagogue, three schools, a rural first-aid post and a posts and telegraph office. Two factories, Krieger and Kerner, churned out farm implements and employed cheap local labor. There were also two steam mills, several artisan workshops and some small undertakings. The bulk of the land belonged to the big landlords while the peasants owned only 45 percent of the arable land; the poorest of them — the batrakis — worked for the big landlords who also hired seasonal workers who poured in from the provinces of Poltava and Chernigov at harvest times. Seven kilometers away lay the town’s railway station, located on the Sinelnikovo-Chaplino—Berdiansk railway connection. Heavy traffic passed along the road that linked Gulyai-Polye to the station where there were convoys delivering loads of wheat and flour, farm machinery and from where coke and ore for various local firms were brought back.
Nestor was the fifth son of Ivan Makhno and Evdokia Makhno n& Perederi. His parents had been serfs of the Seigneur Shabelsky prior to their being given their freedom when Tsar Alexander II abolished serfdom in 1861. Their plot of land being insufficient to feed their family, the father went on working at his former
Master’s place as a stable boy. When Nestor was born, his father was taken on as a coachman by a wealthy Jewish industrialist, Kerner, who owned a farm-machinery plant, a steam-driven mill, a large store and 500 hectares of land leased out to some German settlers. A short time later, with Nestor scarcely eleven months old, his father died leaving his widow utterly unprovided for and with five young boys to care for.
In these circumstances, Nestor’s early childhood was marked by great poverty and by an absence of the games and gaiety that befit such tender years. His mother was reduced to entrusting him to a couple of well-to-do but childless peasants who intended to adopt him. She took him back after several weeks at the insistence of his older brothers because he was unhappy with the couple. At the age of eight, he entered the secular municipal school. To begin with he was a good pupil, then he began to play truant spending his days along with about a hundred urchins of his own age “studying” skating and all sorts of games. These “parallel classes” continued for weeks at a time until one fine day the ice gave way and Nestor was only just saved from drowning in the icy waters. This incident must have been at the root of the weakness in his lungs which subsequently proved fatal to him, for this soaking froze his clothing, and he stayed like that for a time, before seeking the shelter of his uncle’s home and getting help. .
His mother “tended” him by means of a memorable thrashing. He went back to school where he again became a good pupil until the summer arrived; then he had himself taken on as the handler of a team of oxen on the land of a comfortably off peasant, Janssen, at the daily wage of 25 kopecks. His greatest delight was to race the seven kilometers to his maternal home to hand over his daily pay to his mother. It was only with that thought in mind that he was able to hold out all summer, despite two lashes from a whip doled out for some minor offense by the under-manager, a brute. In all this work brought the nine-year-old Nestor some 20 rubles, and these first earnings were handed over in their entirety to his mother to whom he was at all times to display the greatest attachment.
His brothers also worked as farmhands, and they helped their mother who was in dire need. If one is to credit the memoirs of Anatol Gak, a Gulyai-Polye peasant who subsequently fled to Canada, Makhno’s house on the edge of the town’s fairground was extremely poor; neither pig nor any of the usual amenities of a Ukrainian khata were to be seen in their courtyard or farmyard, he stipulates.
Nestor went back to school that autumn and was revealed as a good pupil in arithmetic and especially in reading, the first inkling of his future gifts as an orator. Unfortunately, that was the sum total of his studies for, at the end of the school year, his family’s circumstance became so straitened that he had to carry on working throughout the year, although only ten years old. This sad circumstance aroused in him a “sort of rage, resentment, even hatred for the wealthy property-owner” on whose holding he worked, and above all for his progeny: “For these young idlers
Who often passed close by him, all fresh and neat, with full bellies and in cleanest clothes, reeking of perfume while he, filthy and in rags, barefooted and stinking of dung, scattered bedding for the calves. ”2
It was at this point that he began to awaken to social injustice although he still thought like a resigned slave, reckoning that “that is how things are”: the landlord and his were the “masters,” whereas he was paid for the unpleasantness of “reeking of dung.”
The years passed. Nestor moved on from calves to horses, accepting his fate willy-nilly until one day he witnessed a scene that was to leave its indelible mark upon him. The landlord’s sons, the manager and his under-manager were wont to give the stable lads a drubbing for the slightest peccadillo. The “dark recesses of his mind” made Nestor accept this craven spectacle and “. . . like a real slave, he strove just like the others about him to avert his eyes and pretend he saw and heard not a thing.” However, his mother had told him how, under serfdom, corporal punishment was quite commonplace and how she herself as a child had on two occasions been birched, merely because, quite within her rights she had refused to perform the corvee. She had had to present herself on the steps of the seigneur’s big house to receive 15 strokes of the birch in the presence of the “master.”
His mother had also told him of the epic struggles of their Zaporog Cossack forebears against enemies on every side in order to safeguard their freedom.
Thus, one summer’s day in 1902 the young Nestor, thirteen years old, was present at a run-of-the-mill scene: the landlord’s sons, his manager and his assistant set about insulting then raining blows on the second stable boy in the presence of all the other stable hands... “half dead from fear at the wrath of their masters.” Nestor could take no more and off he ran to alert the head stable boy, Batko Ivan, who was busy in a cowshed trimming the horses’ tails. Learning of what was afoot, Batko Ivan, an elemental force, burst, like a man possessed, into the room where the “chastisement” was underway, pitched into the “young nobles” and their acolytes and sent them rolling in the dirt with swathing punches and kicks. The attackers, attacked, fled in disarray, some through the window, some through the nearest doorway. This was the signal for revolt; all of the day laborers and stable boys were outraged and went off in a body to demand an explanation. The old landlord took fright and in conciliatory tone besought them to forgive the “idiocy of his young heirs,” to remain in his service and even undertook to see that nothing of the sort would ever happen again.
Batko Ivan related the episode to young Nestor, treating him to the first words of rebellion he had ever heard in his life: “... No one here should countenance the disgrace of being beaten... and as for you, little Nestor, if one of your masters should ever strike you, pick up the first pitchfork you lay hands on and let him have it—” This advice, at once poetic and brutal, left a terrible mark upon Nestor’s young soul and awakened him to his dignity. Henceforth he would keep a fork or some other tool within reach, meaning to put it to good use.
One year later, Nestor quit his job as a stable boy and, at the prompting of his older brothers, had himself taken on at a local foundry as an apprentice. There he learned the “art of casting harvester wheels.”
Meanwhile the family’s situation had changed considerably. His' three elder brothers, Karp, Savva and Emilian, after marrying set up homes of their own. That left only Nestor and his younger brother Grigori in their mother’s care. After a time, Nestor left the foundry and worked as a sales assistant for a wine merchant. Nauseated by his job, he gave it up after three months. Perhaps it was in the wake of this experience that he was to retain an aversion for wine and alcohol; that aversion was very real, despite all the fairy tales peddled latter about his alleged inebriate tendencies.
Then he tended his mother’s four hectares of land, which he worked with their lone horse. He worked by fits and starts, especially to lend a helping hand to his brothers; for instance, he signed on with a painting and decorating firm, for just long enough to pay for the cart needed to transport his brothers’ wheat.
In 1904, one of them, Savva, was called up and set off for the Russo-Japanese front. Along came the 1905 revolution. He was enthused by events, and it induced him to read some clandestine political literature. At first he fell under the spell of the Social Democrats, won over by their “socialist phraseology and their phony revolutionary ardor.” He distributed their tracts in massive numbers. However, at the beginning of 1906, he made the acquaintance of anarchist peasants from Gulyai-Polye and soon became a sympathizer of their group. This group had been organized by Voldemar (Vladimir) Antoni and Prokop Semenyuta. Antoni, the son of immigrant Czech workers and a lathe operator himself, exercised a decisive influence over Nestor by “... ridding his soul once and for all of the lingering remnants of the slightest spirit of servility and submission to any authority.”
Gulyai-Polye’s peasant libertarian communist group operated in difficult circumstances for the Tsarist repression was at its height; a state of siege had been proclaimed nationwide, the court martial was taking a heavy toll and military expeditions were gunning down “alleged” troublemakers. A detachment of Don Cossacks stationed in Gulyai-Polye to counter any eventuality set about gratuitous bullying of peaceable inhabitants. Anatol Gak describes one scene when he saw a teacher dragged along by two Don Cossacks with sabers at the ready, while a third beat him with rifle butt, shrieking with each blow; “Take that, you wastrel, for your revolution!”3
Despite this oppressive atmosphere, the town’s anarchist group met regularly at least once each week and sometimes more often, with its lO-to-15 members. A melancholy Makhno recalled those meetings: “For me such nights (we most often would gather to meet by night) were filled with light and joy. We peasants, with our meager learning, would assemble in winter at the home of one of us, in summer in the fields, near a pond, on the green grass, or, from time to time, in
The broad daylight like young folks out for a stroll. We would meet to debate the issues that move us.”
From then on, Nestor threw himself wholeheartedly into the struggle for social revolution.
World History
