Néstor Makhno, Paysan D'Ukraine (1996) - full transcript
13 PRODUCTION
and
LA PAROLE ERRANTE
present
In cooperation with
La Sept—ARTE
and
UKR TELEFILM
NESTOR MAKHNO
Peasant of Ukraine
a film by
Hélène CHATELAIN
One day a man arrives in a city,
suitcase to emigrate in hand.
It was long ago.
In the year 1925.
The city was Paris. Here, the rails
coming from the east converged:
Berlin, Warsaw, Bucharest.
And then, the train from the
furthest land, Russia.
The gauge of the rails was different.
The man arriving in Paris that day
was Nestor Ivanovich Makhno.
Nestor, son of Ivan. A peasant in his
country called Ukraine.
He arrived here after three years
as a wandering refugee in Roumania,
prison in Poland, [...] trials,
pursued by an
extradition request.
It was refused,
as a diplomatic note said,
If he returns to his country,
he together with...
his wife and daughter risk
the death penalty.
The Anarchist Message,
first issue.
With address 14 Paradis Road in
Berlin. July 1923.
We start today the publication
of memories
of Nestor Makhno, a document of
exceptional value for all who are
interested in the personality of
the author and the role
that his movement
plays in Ukraine within the
Russian revolution.
Chapter one. Some episodes of
my life before the 1917 revolution.
My father was a former serf
on properties in Minsk
and lived in a second property
to this sphere.
This story started in Berlin.
Nestor Makhno will pursue
him here in Paris until his
death following nine years
of nocturnal writing
behind the narrow windows of
makeshift rooms.
He abode behind the windows of the
Tenon hospital near the Père Lachaise cemetery.
This story is about the insurrectionary
Makhnovist peasant movement
from Ukraine, commonly called the
Makhnovshchina,
who from February 1917 until the end
of the Russian civil war in 1921
succeeded to embrace over two million
men and women in a territory
half the size of France
between the Don and the Dniepr,
the two rivers of the
legendary Cossacks.
In 1957, Mosfilm studios
released the screen adaptation
of the famous Tolstoy novel
"The Path of Suffering".
It became the official version of the civil war.
Third episode, a dark morning.
We are in Ukraine in 1918.
The October revolution lasted
one year until autumn.
The great war is over, but the civil war
is already a threat everywhere.
It's market day in Gulyai-Polye.
The peasant chief:
Nestor Makhno.
Batko Makhno,
he was having fun and drinking.
Few people understood
he was buying time.
He had to make a decision.
The enemy was advancing.
In the Krim,
Denikin,
in the north,
the Bolsheviks,
and on the Dniepr,
Petlyura's army.
Who to turn the guns to?
More than half a century later,
market day in Gulyai-Polye.
We know one thing.
He defended the poor
like a mountain.
Understand?
Then, he disappeared.
Everyone was after him.
Gulyai-Polye was a republic.
They stole land with their bayonets.
They turned on their gramophone.
They danced on our fathers.
Yes, it was Makhno.
Makhno is good,
unlike nowadays.
Youri A. Makhno
(grand-nephew of Nestor Makhno)
I work.
I live.
I tend a garden.
I grow onions.
What else?
It's ok.
Life goes on.
Everything's rolling, as they say.
I'm not married yet.
My grandmother wants me to,
but I don't feel like it.
My mother would tell
that he was not a bandit,
as he was called.
Yes, as he was depicted.
He never shot anyone over nothing.
He was the first who organised
a commune, in Gulyai-Polye.
He took cows and horses
from the rich for the commune.
For the poor who had nothing.
But the commune
didn't last long.
The revolution was
on and all that...
Viktor I. Ialanski
(grand-nephew of Nestor Makhno)
There, during the war my mother
buried documents
Then she gave them to me.
Five brothers, all broke by history.
The two elders Karpa and Emilian were shot in front
of their house because their names were Makhno.
The two youngest,
Sava and Gricha, killed while fighting
asides Nestor the younger.
There is a Makhno square
in the Gulyai Pole cemetery.
Here at the day of the dead,
which is also the day of spring,
it is not the living who
come to greet the dead.
It is the dead returning,
to share a meal with the living.
Here rests his older
brother Karpa.
There, his son.
There is neither uncle Sava,
nor Gricha.
Nor uncle Nestor.
The only monument in the region carrying
the name of Nestor Makhno
is 20 km from Gulyai Pole.
Here, buried are among red army
soldiers killed during the
civil war by the hand of
Nestor Makhno in 1920.
Serious words, engraved for eternity.
The words we speak blow in all directions
and everything then starts moving.
They took the grandmother.
They were inside and
soldiers guarded the door.
My mother pushed them around
and she returned home.
The chief sits screaming at grandmother,
banging his fist on the table.
My mother looks at him en tells him:
"Listen Mykola..."
She recognised him.
He was with Makhno.
They made a wedding
together in the village.
"Why at the time
did you not tell him..."
who was on
the wrong track?"
If there would be the Makhnovshchina
I would go headfirst into it.
It's true
Life is so boring.
During my youth I was a coach.
I did competitions.
We'd all heard about it,
we'd seen him in films.
Michail Mykoloavitch our [...]
has for ten years been
roaming the villages,
collecting cross-cutting testimonies,
This is Makhno.
Makhno and the insurrection
That's what we need
to talk about.
It's a very important topic.
Even the children of Gulyai Pole
price shooting is linked to
the history of Makhno - his version.
Just ask the right questions.
Three colours: red, white and
the black target.
What is it?
What makes the mills turn?
What falls asleep [...]
There is even the poem cat
everyone here knows by heart.
He wore a gold chain.
It goes right and the song starts.
He goes to the left
and the story is told.
In the beginning a word.
The earth. As immense as the word.
So rich that the invaders
take it by whole carriage.
Ukraine. On the verge.
If we cross and meet
and trace the invaders.
That of ancient Cossack republics.
And that of the Cossacks
who became mercenaries.
That of peasant revolts.
That of colonists, that
imperial powers sent
people and the steppes
that were called [...],
The wild fields domesticated,
who are crossed across languages
different in name, and the earth and
the sky which it borders.
In Polish, in German, in Russian,
in Greek, in Yiddish, in Ukrainian.
In the centre a village called Gulyai-Polye,
meaning the free field.
The one we know but that we [...]
Fairgrounds and a large peasant market.
At the beginning of the century
Gulyai-Polye counted 16.250 inhabitants.
Three churches, including one with
three bell towers, a synagogue,
five agricultural schools, three high schools
a German school, two Jewish schools,
a library, a theatre.
There were three mills,
foundries, of which the largest was
the Kerner plant.
Ivan Radenovic Makhno, Nestor's father,
when freed from serfdom committed himself
as coarse from Mr. Kerner the owner.
Then he died, leaving a widow and
five landless growing sons.
Nestor the younger works
as an apprentice in this factory,
where before being a worker,
all here were peasants.
It is also in this factory that at
lunch break in a traditional section
brought back from Paris
texts by Nestor Makhno,
discovered for the very first time
by whom those had been written for.
It's the history of Ukraine.
What else would you want?
My eyes hurt from reading.
-See what you understand.
Are there images?
I will read aloud
The Makhnovist insurrection in Ukraine.
"I want to warn the reader..."
"that the absence of
certain resolutions..."
"by the Peasants Union
of Gulyai Pole..."
"by Soviet peasant
and worker deputies..."
[...] always attached with admirable consistency
in bringing together the peasants and
workers in this region, explaining to them
the meaning and scope of events.
The exposition of workers in
general and that of anarcho-communists
that resembles the mentality
of peasants in particular.
"Unfortunately I don't have photographs
of these unknown revolutionaries."
"My peasant friends arose from the most
deep of the Ukrainian people."
"They were genuine peasants,"
"not knowing how to lie or deceive,
it was hard to convince them."
"But once they had grabbed the idea
and had verified it with their"
"own reasoning, they exalted this
new ideal everywhere, at every occasion."
"My only regret: that their memoires
never emerged in Ukraine."
"The fault were circumstances I
couldn't do anything against."
Nestor Makhno,
Paris, 1926
I was a history teacher,
here at this school.
I taught for over thirty years.
During all these years
I practised my profession,
I collected documents about
the civil war in our region.
This file contains the most
interesting documents:
the programme of
the anarchist movement.
Today it appears to us not
as it was presented to us,
but as it actually was.
We are at the very beginning
of the century,
at the new Kerner factory.
Nazar Zuichenko is an apprentice [...].
He is fourteen years old.
His story was preserved
miraculously and passed on
from father to son.
In Gulyai-Polye we had a very advanced amateur
theatre group that I was part of.
One day a young Nestor Makhno came to see me
at the workshop to ask me if he could join.
I was a little surprised
by his minute size.
And that's how we met.
The workers factory,
land of the peasants.
Land of the peasants!
is already a modern phrase.
There is an other, older phrase,
born in the last century.
[...] wrenching how to serfdom.
Land and,
and what..?
How to translate the word used
[russian word] that means both freedom,
free will and limitless space.
I will read aloud documents
from the period of
the 1905 revolution
in our region.
"I have the honour of
informing your Excellency"
"that according to my information
on the lands of the owner Masaracki"
"they are illegally distributing
flour and fodder."
In Gulyai-Polye the Union of
Poor Peasants (SBH) is founded around
the young peasant Valdemar Antoni
of Czech parents,
who had lived an urban life and upon returning
had joined a group of anarchists.
Revolution. The apprentice hall with
the whole theatre group of the factory
joins the movement.
Among them is Nestor Makhno.
He is 16.
Zarathustra. This is how we called
Antoni who brought us books,
food and also weapons for
the revolutionary battle.
Nearly every evening we peasants
having little knowledge,
we would gather in a meadow or
in a farm, in a barn for books and
For me the evenings were full of light and joy.
We read everything:
Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin,
the history of culture.
Above we are all passionate about
astronomy, the planets, the stars and
the story of the
appearance of man on earth.
The owners responded by creating
the union of genuine people.
Its workers too were genuine.
Their slogan was simple.
"Kill the Jews, save Russia",
and they organised pogroms.
Halt!
Late and against the odds we
decided to fight them.
The genuine Russians returned home.
It was our first victory.
May 1, 1907. A day of banned
demonstrations in Gulyai-Polye.
All persons here are
wanted by the police.
This is their first souvenir photo.
Then, on event after the other.
The repressive order is restored.
Clandestinity, denunciations,
shootings, arrests, death sentences.
Fifty days pass.
The majority are descended in the grave.
The death penalty for Nestor Makhno
is commuted to a life sentence.
He writes: I swim [...]
he incessant demarches of my mother.
The rails those years cross between
but meets them again the destinies of
whole generations
In the north a student
revolutionary Vsevolod Eikhenbaum (Voline)
level sailing line freedom stopped escapes.
To the south a locksmith
Peter Arshinov
of art china the measure of the earth
made stop
He is transported to the same
political prison of Moscow
to which the peasant Makhno
is transferred.
They would be three,
each writing in their own way
The [...] Makhnovist.
Nestor Makhno, footwork,
tuberculous and
a political prisoner,
in a place of books.
The prison library is powered by
the [...] and the rich.
I've read everything:
history, geography,
and especially mathematics.
It's through the books that
Nestor Makhno meets Peter Arshinov
and his unbreakable dream,
a libertarian printing press.
The texts of the Makhnovist movement
have not completely disappeared
thanks to him and his
ink-stained fingers.
Germany and its allies declare war.
Russia mobilises.
1915, 1916, 1917.
The February revolution
The czar abdicates.
The prisons open.
Sometimes they burn.
Amnesty for politicals,
who leave in the day
in processions still under escort.
Without doubt Nestor Makhno
is present,
among the 'returned from
the dead' as they are called.
Eight days to relearn to walk
without shackles.
Moscow walks free.
Streets [...]
words looks at itself as if it were alive
Arshinov stays in Moscow.
Makhno takes the train
back to Gulyai-Polye.
He is 28.
Ten years of detention
had not shaken my faith in the
creative force of free labour
founded on equality, solidarity.
With this conviction I returned home to
Gulyai-Polye where i was born,
where I had left so many loved ones and where
I felt I could be useful
amongst a big peasant family.
The place where many years ago
our first group was formed.
Those who knew said:
"Nestor arrived!"
They told the grandmother.
And he arrives, with his jacket,
his bag on his shoulder.
When he arrives in
front of the house,
he empties his bag.
Nothing but books
and newspapers!
With those he left prison.
All the decrees from Petrograd
arrived late.
Always late.
Then, the change of power
created a vacuum.
For people it was
hard to understand.
This appeal to take charge
was complicated.
I was preoccupied by a theoretic understanding of
the immense problem the revolution posed us.
I knew this was the case nine out of ten times
within the backgrounds that were ours.
We were living through an event
utterly exceptional. [...] intimately
convinced that we needed not
only work to raise our own ideal,
but above all to not prevent
its development with others.
For this, we the group of communist
anarchists of Gulyai-Polye were alone.
According to our ideology
anarchist-communist is incompatible.
I am talking about our
ancient communist ideology,
it was incompatible.
Anarchists on one side,
communists on the other.
This symbiosis is all theory.
At the start of 1917,
in the towns and villages,
there was hardly any
party representative,
no Bolshevik or transit law.
A few socialist revolutionary (sr)
groups in our towns.
This solitude and the determination of
a few would be the hallmark of what
will develop here for the nine
months between February with the disappearance
of the old power and October
with the establishment of a new power,
speaking in the name of
the revolution.
The spring of history,
spring in Ukraine.
The first for Nestor Makhno after an
endless descent to the bottom of the dungeons.
The provisional government
from Petrograd
with its cortege [...]
leaving the hallways is in the middle of here.
No-one still remembers the man.
combine it in reality within a
same sentence, the words revolution or
workers, peasants and the old soviet word
which means advice.
They put together a
bunch of documents
about everything concerning
the land of the region.
Who were the proprietors,
how many people worked there.
It wasn't random at all.
They did it very seriously.
They discussed it with the people
who, in their almost totality,
welcomed them with sympathy.
We were ten in the family.
There was a blacksmith,
a tailor, a carpenter...
We could do anything.
Our family belonged to
the Polish family Jawicki.
My great-grandmother had bought it
against the greyhounds.
The other village was free.
On the other side of the river
no-one could touch us.
My brother Sacha was deported,
and two brothers-in-law,
at Makhno's house.
Why were they deported?
Because they were
with Makhno.
Mayday 1917.
It has been ten years
since I participated in this workers' party
and I happily prepare myself.
At night I sleep on a table, in the day
I run from factory to village meetings.
Meetings with teachers, or delegates
as we see the campaigners, to inform themselves.
Within a few weeks of overflowing activity
in the town new elections are organised.
Should we control them and how?
A union of peasants was created
by workers and metallurgists of the Kerner factory,
of which Makhno was
appointed president.
Then discussions that would multiply:
what is a cooperative? What is a commune?
A union? A delegate?
The role of soviet organs of power:
An organ of power or a liaison?
Should we take the land?
What does it mean
to take the land?
We were told he
was an anarchist,
understand?
Actually, he wanted
independence,
how to say,
for the poor,
for the people.
He was for the people,
that's it.
Read here the basics.
"Workers of the world,
immerse yourselves"
and search for the truth,
create it."
"You will not find it
anywhere else."
That is the prophecy of
the Russian revolution.
Interesting!
What are you talking about!
You can revolt,
and then what?
There's nothing we can do.
They have the army and the police,
we have nothing but a trade union.
I don't answer to anything.
If I would be responsible for anything,
if I felt like someone
a master of something.
But now I'm nothing.
What should one do
to be someone?
A revolution.
Long before the
big October revolution,
he instituted a people's power
in Gulyai Polye.
It's still important.
August 1917
White general Kornilov marches on Petrograd.
Premise of the civil war.
The morning of August 29.
There are meetings in the squares of Gulyai Polye
where drivers bring the news of
[...] of the revolution.
[...] one success of the day was
the decision given the urgency to create
a committee to defend the revolution
and for which Makhno was made responsible.
Then without thought the
decision to disarm proprietors.
The abolition of privileges
and to apply
the first decree on the land
as was discussed here
for months in the villages,
in the workshops.
This was the first time
in the Russian empire.
History must know this.
On his own initiative he
gathered all official papers,
property deeds
of land, of domains,
and so on.
He burned it all.
He cast anathema on the past
and started creating
something new.
Now is the time to realise the secular dream.
The people are sovereign over their
land and we peasants we have the
responsibility to perform such act.
The sharing of the reclaimed land was done
in autumn because it was urgent
to organise [...] and sowing.
It was planned to give each family
irrelevant of importance one or two
pairs of horses, one or two cows and
essential tools.
Four municipalities were organised around
Gulyai Polye and and others further than
I know less because I don't have there
participated
Joint participation was voluntary.
Peasants who decided to
to become communards grouped by
family or affinity.
There were some anarchist peasants
but the majority was not.
There were many discussions on the choice [...]
The teaching issue was also debated.
The municipalities do did not want to restore the old model.
The choice stopped at the
libertarian schools of Francisco Ferrer
about which we had read
reports in brochures.
Like a teacher was unaware,
we decided to
look for the most qualified
in the towns and in the first year
we brought in people who were
the most capable of teaching.
The power award goes
to the Bolshevik party.
Workers of the world, unite.
Price: 15 kopeck.
Monday night edition
30 October (12 November) 1917.
Special issue.
Decree on the land.
First gala workers' deputy soviet meeting
soldiers on October 26 until 2 a.m.
First point.
Abolition of private land
with no financial compensation.
This is precisely
what Makhno writes.
What is the difference?
The difference?
The methods we used
were different.
Makhno was against
all coercion,
against all violence.
But then,
we have been abused...
Who was right?
From the new documents we have now,
the anarchists were right.
I can confirm that during the first two
months when Ukrainians gathered around
in councils rejoiced in the October coup.
They recognised that at the basis was
the principle of a real revolution,
coming from the depths of the villages and
workshops that finally woke up.
Everyone remained vigilant when the first
commissioners arrived with
the first directives,
the first inspections.
Peasants came to see us. We are obscured, they say.
We have to explain ourselves.
They arrive, shout, and go.
Then they say that the peasants
are against the power of the soviet.
Creating a free and revolutionary life
of the people is a immense question,
profound, limitless like the ocean.
All power that takes on itself the
boldness to create this life by demanding
the submission of the people,
is locked in an insoluble problem.
We the children
of this revolution,
children of the working people, who
created our destiny here,
in our villages and our [...].
We develop a solution that is not worn
as a humiliation, but as a responsibility.
Peasant communes, free unions
of city workers prefigure
a true working community.
We pass commissioners and other
exceptional powers we just need to
strengthen the awareness of our
approach and apply it forcefully to
all areas of our life.
February
German offensive against
Soviet Russia.
The people's commissioner Leon Trotsky
signs a peace treaty with Germany.
In return Russia gives up Ukraine.
German troops occupy Kiev and
in their wake bring back
former owners.
They form a Ukrainian national
government of collaboration.
In Gulyai Polye groups are
formed to defend the town.
Nestor Makhno leaves in search for Bolshevik
troops who are still stationed in Ukraine.
In April Gulyai Polye is occupied.
On a platform of a passing station I
learned about the occupation of Gulyai Polye.
The flight of revolutionary
forces was all around me.
Something incomprehensible and lure me
squeeze the heart such anguish that
I lay there on the platform
without thought of leaving.
This is the exodus the insurgents of
Gulyai Polye became clandestine again,
manage to get the message across:
see you in three months.
Until then everyone tries
to understand what appears for all to see,
a betrayal of the revolution.
I wanted to go return to Moscow
and meet the anarchists of the
capital and take measures of
intentions of a new power.
To get here Makhno had wandered
from one station to another.
It is from one image to another that in
this city he will walk.
On the one hand that of this power that it is
plus six months was peasant worker.
He decides to to give up Ukraine
on the other the image of the
Petrograd prison. Burnt down during the
February days during which
captives were liberated.
It is in this space, window to window
we're going to take the measure of
the distance between the words of taste
the Gulyai Polye.
Of those who now here
will fight to occupy the pages of a
book, like occupying a land at all times.
The first window.
Visits to revolutionary circles.
Second window.
Visit to Peter Kropotkin, who writes
Makhno warmly welcomes us
with tenderness and warmth.
Third window.
Visit to Peter Arshinov, an old companion.
With him we attended every meeting, every
discussion, conferences, meeting and
I reflected about what I had
observed in factories or [...] the
thought so prevalent among workers and
fascinated and gullible that everything was
devoted to creating not their destiny but their
power and their dictatorship.
A dictatorship that separates me
from them because neither me
nor my peasants working brothers
were proletarians
and this word pressed as long as I decided
to leave without waiting.
But for occupied Ukraine now needed
passes and that's how
almost by chance i found myself
at the Kremlin
Fourth window, the most
improbable.
One that opens the meeting between
the libertarian peasant
Nestor Ivanovich Makhno and
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin,
the professional revolutionary.
[...] world vision strategy
One founded on the model of [...],
the other on that
of an affirmed approach
The staging of the meeting of the
Bolshevik and the anarchist did
is one of the classics.
Even if the version the
Makhno character relented on
The place: the Kremlin [...] Gulyai Polye
The story now of supporters
The subject: the negotiation of an alliance
The issue: based on impossibility
historical and logical and even
strategic of such an alliance
Everything here is emblematic.
Red and black cards
on a white background.
Four players: the Russian sailor,
bearer of the October revolution,
of an order determined by laws and
history, that is.
Nestor Makhno the peasant, bearer
of an order that escapes its laws.
To the right of the theorist's sailor
[...] and responsible anarchy at
To the left, the white officer, betraying his class of the
homeland
In Paris, we had started the debate
with the Bolsheviks,
They are far from being over.
No one has yet proven
that Lenin was right.
Replace a bourgeois feudal state
with a workers 'and peasants' state.
Change the masters
clothes for blouses,
and thus obtain a
classless society.
Then what?
No Gods, no masters?
But behind the cliched script there are shots
are the costs of what was said
almost by chance about the Kremlin
or have a voice at
Chapter 18
My meeting with Lenin.
Lenin welcomed me fatherly
and invited me for the evening.
He started questioning me as specific
as possible about organisation.
The question: how the peasants
with an island the watchword all the
power to the soviets in place there me
asked three times.
I replied that for
the peasants that meant that the
power should be aligned with the
conscience and will of
the peasants themselves.
Lenin answered me thus:
your peasants are
contaminated with anarchy.
Is this an evil?, I responded.
Lenin then asked me the question of
red detachments from their heroic struggle
against the occupier and the
lack of farmer's support.
I'm afraid, comrade Lenin,
you are badly informed answered.
Your group stays away from roads
and don't fight in the countryside.
How do you see the villages
supporting each other?
Lenin started laughing.
You anarchists, you write
about the future
unable to think of the present.
I answer that I was an illiterate peasant,
that it was difficult for me to discuss a
point this important but I tell you say, comrade Lenin
in Ukraine, in South Russia,
as you Bolsheviks say,
we are immersed in the present.
It is because of him that
we are trying to get closer to the
future, or that it's true we think
and we think very seriously.
We no longer support Moscow.
This futile and noisy Moscow where
the revolution is slowly dying in
[...] power politics.
Moscow is lost.
I started to hate it.
Permitted by hundreds of lawful
of the cause those of the parties
winners of the party and the others who
lost to seek in anarchy a kind of
perfection that
didn't belong in life.
And an overwhelming desire to find myself
in Ukraine, with villagers
and there, with them, to understand
what had not been accomplished.
Fighting against what was,
dying, or liberating Ukraine.
Makhno learns about the death
of his two brothers,
shot dead by the occupier.
He finally receives a detailed account
from his companions on
how Gulyai Polye was conquered
and disarmed in April.
"My dear Mr Ivanovich.
"All members of the revolutionary committee,
workers and peasants are arrested and
"are waiting to be executed.
"Three hours before the occupation,
"the Jewish companion betrayed us and
"defected to enemy troops.
"All peasants are depressed,
"there is great hatred
towards the Jews."
Chapter 6
The Jewish question
Jews, breathe freely.
The time of the czars and lords more
once you were kicked out from land and
peaceful hamlets.
You are far away from home,
without tenderness and consolation.
You are exhausted.
Rest and be free,
like all other peoples.
With these words in 1917 in Hulyai Polye
I spoke to the Jews,
when the crowd threw down to me:
'You Ivanovich, how do you view
do you consider all these Jews with
which you jointly sit in the city committee.
I never curtailed his words in
following events, neither in my activity.
In the fight against anti-semitism the Makhnovist movement
aims to bring it down tirelessly,
outside and inside its ranks.
For there will be nearly sixty thousand
Jews massacred -exact figures are unknown-
during the civil war in Ukraine.
It was one of the fiercest and the most troubled.
The way to freedom, the daily revolutionary
insurgents Makhnovist newspaper
appears in Ukrainian and Russian.
Issue 42.
Price 2,50 rubles, 3 rubles in the railway station
THE NEXT CONGRESS
POWER AND NO POWER
THEATRE MEETING
UNEMPLOYED MEETING
SHAME!
Shame on those who let pass
the mistreatment of a Jew.
Shame on those who pretend
to be Makhnovist and
tarnishes the honour
of the movement.
Shame on those who soil it
[...] their interests.
Signed, Volin.
The former libertarian Jewish student who
would be a senior responsible for
the Makhnovist cultural commission.
At the Père Lachaise his funeral plaque
adjoins that of Nestor Makhno.
The accusation of anti-Semitism was and remains
one of the most pernicious by those who
targeted and targets the Makhnovist movement.
Nestor Makhno, the anarcho-bandit-anti-semite.
What makes him and all
his movement for [...] and all around
not an enemy, but a nuisance.
For now everything is simple and
infinitely dangerous at the same time.
The occupiers [...] their own banknotes in
a language which often is also [...]
the owners who return burning,
destroying and ransacking.
Ukraine must be liberated.
The first resistance groups are formed,
without links to each other,
each leading actions on
their own territory.
In 1918,
two detachments
gathered here.
That of Shchuss,
sailor from the Black Sea,
who was hardly significant,
and that of
Nestor Ivanovich Makhno.
Shchuss, about whom
was said,
came from Kronstadt,
and returned home
a revolutionary.
Right at the beginning
they were barely twelve.
One time they were together,
they took to the streets
shooting up all over the place
and howling like this...
The Austrians
massed there.
Then they pounced them,
threw everything at them.
Shovels, pitchforks,
anything they could find.
Even those by the
river were killed.
On the night of the first partisans' victory
the peasants name Makhno 'Batko',
the 'father', and place him at
the head of the insurgent movement.
We said 'Batko' because
he defended us.
He defended freedom,
So we called him
'Batko Makhno'.
It was strange and upsetting for me
to hear 'Batko Makhno' instead of 'comrade'.
Sometimes even 'comrade Batko Makhno'.
It was this [...] my name it turns
went from peasants to a peasant of children to
children and the words Batko Makhno
became inseparable.
With a strange respect and a love that
I had trouble understanding
and a pride would spread
from village to village
throughout almost all of Ukrainian [...]
The name was taken up by insurgents
and groups that were getting
called Batko Makhno battalion,
without me even hearing about it,
without me even
knowing them either.
Makhno arrived
with the groups.
Accordeons,
wearing chapkas.
All the children
ran after him.
And he passed,
with the cavalary
and music.
Marie the daughter [...]
Who is under the veil?
Makhno is at the market,
where is he?
[...] the rabbit
Makhno [...], he is everywhere
He wears a skirt and wigs
and cycles about,
hears everything because
we tell him everything,
just under [...] we wait
for the message who saw my [...]
Signed, Nestor Makhno.
[Laughs]
In Gulyai Polye a group of supporters fled.
One of the most important coming from the
south will be that of [...], Viktor Belash.
Viktor Belash alongside Nestor Makhno will take
responsibility to federate this composite army.
Correspondingly they will preserve as much
possible the founding principles.
Self-discipline, volunteering,
electing the officers.
This is the second souvenir photo.
The staging of a story of which
each can be a possible character
November 1918
November 1918
Revolution in Germany.
Occupation forces evacuate.
To the west a new nationalist power is forming.
In the east the
White army advances.
In the north Bolshevik
troops regroup.
In all of Ukraine an anxious and [...] a wild weather
A wild and crazy time arrives.
A time of shooting
the peasants Gulyai Polye,
who always declined
the stories that are passed on
There were three sons. The richest, the
most educated and the most daring.
There were three paths.
To the right you lose your life, to the left death.
Straight ahead [.....]
People called this oak
"the oak of death".
In name of the makhnovtchina
many small bandits
agitated here.
It wasn't Makhno.
Makhno couldn't see everything.
Some committed massacres
and framed him.
He didn't know.
A time of clashes without precautions
or nuance, legend against legend,
According to the [...] rule of
dominoes from the Gulyai Polye factory.
Spring 1919
In the face of increasingly massive emergence of the
White general Denikin the first
military alliance between
insurgent troops and Bolshevik troops.
The train in Gulyai Polye brings
the first images from the front.
Detailed press releases about
political differences and
ideological differences between the Bolsheviks
and Makhnovist peasants are considered
and in no way can be an
obstacle to the union of [...].
The Bolshevik authority make clear that the
peculiarities of the insurgency must stay inviolable.
Spring 1919.
Spring of the first alliance where we see
reds and insurgent peasants.
Why these images exist is because
official service cameras
of front cinema are present.
The camera films and suddenly...
It used to be:
"Workers of the world,
"go to the depths of your soul,
"for only there you
will find the truth."
Something along
those words.
Do these words still
make sense to you today?
Not only today,
before also,
they made sense to me.
I ignored that he
said those words.
But deep down,
every one of us has it,
every one.
What are you doing, fellas?
We are preparing for Mayday.
Preparing for Mayday that year,
meant people being lent
by the collective farm,
a tachanka and horses
for the Gulyai Polye parade in
Nestor Makhno's words and shoulder
read in the books.
Andrei Mykoloavitch,
where are you from?
From Gulyai Polye.
Bondarenko Andrei
Mykoloavitch, born 1926.
My father is from here,
my grand-father also.
We all lived here.
I will make the
horses look nice.
Bondarenko, like Igor from the
first souvenir photo taken on May 1, 1907
was shot at the collective farm
in Gulyai Polye.
One the first souvenir
photo in the back.
That of an [...] Makhnovist army major
and peasant [...]
from the times of the civil war.
This is the photo of
Makhno's staff.
Nestor and his
wife Galina Andreievna.
Chief of the general staff
Viktor Belach,
his brothers Savelli
and Grigori Makhno...
They are all there.
Photographed this time not by the photographer
but right in the street, at home.
This is the third souvenir photo.
[...] story written by Makhno where the
everyone's freedom would be there
everyone's responsibility
Behind the photo, Gulyai Polye and
the municipality of Makhno
as they remained in the
memory and as it appears
in the images of the films, with its
rides because he likes his markets, his
theatre evenings, their songs,
the black flags,
troops coming in or out
Behind this Gulyai Polye
the map drawn by hand by Arshinov.
who had rejoined Makhno the
will leave more.
The influence zone of
the Makhnovist movement, which
goes from Gulyai Polye extends
extend to all eastern Ukraine,
once again becoming
the wilderness of civil war
There are the words: [...]
workers of the world.
February 1919
massive attack of the Whites
Makhnovist troops are sent
to hold the southern front.
In Gulyai Polye the first
regional Soviet congress,
bringing together delegates from
over a million insurgent peasant workers.
The [...] and dilemma between the weight of a
party and that of an owner.
A general mobilisation,
but voluntary and determined to relieve
groups that have been
fighting for months
and to ensure the sowing.
March. In Kharkov the 1st congress
peasants from all over Russia is held.
Objective: to vote for nationalisation of land.
Delegates from Gulyai Polye
speak about the problem of land
is the most dangerous.
It should be viewed with the greatest precaution,
as work is creative that the commons
works you have to help them, not disorganise them.
The Bolsheviks don't leave [...]
April.
The battles at the front intensify.
Second congress of
the regional soviet in Gulyai Polye.
Delegates of 72 districts representing
over two million men and women
take part in the debate.
At the end of the congress there is a dispatch.
The congress squares against the
revolutionaries and its
organisers are outlawed.
Signed, Dybenko.
Like in the Bolshevik divisions.
Response: small [...] laws allowing
a few people to outlaw
a more revolutionary people than
Signed, the revolutionary council
of Gulyai Polye.
Makhno is no longer in Gulyai Polye.
He is on the frontline.
The promised weapons no longer arrive
and men are fighting [...]
It's a butchery, writes Makhno.
June. Urgent [..] considering the emergency the revolutionary council
didn't want them convince for the 15th
Third congress calling on the farmer delegates
insurgents, workers, red soldiers appears
in the official journal of a jacket ya
to the article titled The makhnovshchina,
signed by the chairman of the board
military of the republic Leon Trotsky.
intermittent china in Russian and
derogatory
For the first time on
Makhnovist movement is called
a bunch of bandits, assassins, looters,
small owners, counter-revolutionary.
Makhno appeals.
Brothers, opening a front
inside the revolutionary movement
is a crime never yet accomplished
From Moscow comes order 1,824.
If [...] under the watchword down with
makhnovshchina we suppress the war
of ideas against anarchists.
Now they say: down with the makhnovshchina.
Even if to beat them you have to
use iron and fire.
Because in fact what the machine-gun is [...]
but a typographic sign the
lighter and more needy pull it
He was an anarchist [...] communist.
This is the name to say to yourself and that will
gallop the Makhnovist cavalary quickly during
elusive two years on any
the extent of Arshinov's map, where
often we will switch history.
At the head of this army that goes from the
rifle plow the peasant Nestor Makhno
whose exploits foiling all
strategies all forecast and
will create the epic.
Three times facing the common enemy,
the Reds will propose the alliance them by three times line is
pushed back he has names.
An impossible alliance and
at the same time essential because
for the makhnovist peasant-worker
movement comes or that
another alliance is historically possible.
The last alliance is ends here in Crimea
where the two black and red cavalry fork
the general's white troops together
vang there are no more external walls
The civil war is over the next day.
the red cavalry takes the cavalry
Makhnovistist late to the gun room the
delegates coming to discuss a
possible federation.
In the north February 21 north the common free soviet
Kronstadt is wiped out.
Lenin installs the new economic policy,
nationalisation of land is
suspended, [...] villages are turned away.
For thirteen years I dedicated to a social revolution
and I will continue so.
You chose to believe in the winner,
as is your right.
In stitches and injured he crossed
the border and left for Paris
where he would live for thirteen years.
Communism we were striving for implies
the freedom of the individual, equality,
self-determination, initiative,
creation and abundance.
We formulated our ideal of this third
revolution based on taking
conscience of the humiliated people.
We had the opportunity to throw the
basics of a society on principles of anarchy.
But what we had in
opposite of us we left us
neither time nor space.
They turned the struggle of ideas into
a fight between people.
The Makhnovist army is not an anarchist army.
The ideal of anarchist life cannot be defended by
any army.
With regard to the construction and
trust and creation,
she is absolutely helpless and harmless.
But every Makhnovist is a
possible anarchist.
And when war will be over
he will go home.
A builder of the future.
Thank you all.
PICTURE
Jean-Louis PORTE (Ukraine)
Claire BAILLY-DUBOIS (Paris)
SOUND
Jean-François PRIESTER
DIRECTOR
Dimitri PLIOUCHTCH
In the role of MAKHNO
Alexei KRICHENKOV
EDITORS
Hélène CHATELAIN
Iossif PASTERNAK
PHOTOS
Jacqueline SALMON
MIXAGE
Georges LAFITTE
Marie BOSSY
POST-PRODUCTION
SYLICONE
TELETOTA
MUSIC
Music school of Gulyai Polye
All rights reserved
A FILM BY
Hélène CHATELAIN
and
LA PAROLE ERRANTE
present
In cooperation with
La Sept—ARTE
and
UKR TELEFILM
NESTOR MAKHNO
Peasant of Ukraine
a film by
Hélène CHATELAIN
One day a man arrives in a city,
suitcase to emigrate in hand.
It was long ago.
In the year 1925.
The city was Paris. Here, the rails
coming from the east converged:
Berlin, Warsaw, Bucharest.
And then, the train from the
furthest land, Russia.
The gauge of the rails was different.
The man arriving in Paris that day
was Nestor Ivanovich Makhno.
Nestor, son of Ivan. A peasant in his
country called Ukraine.
He arrived here after three years
as a wandering refugee in Roumania,
prison in Poland, [...] trials,
pursued by an
extradition request.
It was refused,
as a diplomatic note said,
If he returns to his country,
he together with...
his wife and daughter risk
the death penalty.
The Anarchist Message,
first issue.
With address 14 Paradis Road in
Berlin. July 1923.
We start today the publication
of memories
of Nestor Makhno, a document of
exceptional value for all who are
interested in the personality of
the author and the role
that his movement
plays in Ukraine within the
Russian revolution.
Chapter one. Some episodes of
my life before the 1917 revolution.
My father was a former serf
on properties in Minsk
and lived in a second property
to this sphere.
This story started in Berlin.
Nestor Makhno will pursue
him here in Paris until his
death following nine years
of nocturnal writing
behind the narrow windows of
makeshift rooms.
He abode behind the windows of the
Tenon hospital near the Père Lachaise cemetery.
This story is about the insurrectionary
Makhnovist peasant movement
from Ukraine, commonly called the
Makhnovshchina,
who from February 1917 until the end
of the Russian civil war in 1921
succeeded to embrace over two million
men and women in a territory
half the size of France
between the Don and the Dniepr,
the two rivers of the
legendary Cossacks.
In 1957, Mosfilm studios
released the screen adaptation
of the famous Tolstoy novel
"The Path of Suffering".
It became the official version of the civil war.
Third episode, a dark morning.
We are in Ukraine in 1918.
The October revolution lasted
one year until autumn.
The great war is over, but the civil war
is already a threat everywhere.
It's market day in Gulyai-Polye.
The peasant chief:
Nestor Makhno.
Batko Makhno,
he was having fun and drinking.
Few people understood
he was buying time.
He had to make a decision.
The enemy was advancing.
In the Krim,
Denikin,
in the north,
the Bolsheviks,
and on the Dniepr,
Petlyura's army.
Who to turn the guns to?
More than half a century later,
market day in Gulyai-Polye.
We know one thing.
He defended the poor
like a mountain.
Understand?
Then, he disappeared.
Everyone was after him.
Gulyai-Polye was a republic.
They stole land with their bayonets.
They turned on their gramophone.
They danced on our fathers.
Yes, it was Makhno.
Makhno is good,
unlike nowadays.
Youri A. Makhno
(grand-nephew of Nestor Makhno)
I work.
I live.
I tend a garden.
I grow onions.
What else?
It's ok.
Life goes on.
Everything's rolling, as they say.
I'm not married yet.
My grandmother wants me to,
but I don't feel like it.
My mother would tell
that he was not a bandit,
as he was called.
Yes, as he was depicted.
He never shot anyone over nothing.
He was the first who organised
a commune, in Gulyai-Polye.
He took cows and horses
from the rich for the commune.
For the poor who had nothing.
But the commune
didn't last long.
The revolution was
on and all that...
Viktor I. Ialanski
(grand-nephew of Nestor Makhno)
There, during the war my mother
buried documents
Then she gave them to me.
Five brothers, all broke by history.
The two elders Karpa and Emilian were shot in front
of their house because their names were Makhno.
The two youngest,
Sava and Gricha, killed while fighting
asides Nestor the younger.
There is a Makhno square
in the Gulyai Pole cemetery.
Here at the day of the dead,
which is also the day of spring,
it is not the living who
come to greet the dead.
It is the dead returning,
to share a meal with the living.
Here rests his older
brother Karpa.
There, his son.
There is neither uncle Sava,
nor Gricha.
Nor uncle Nestor.
The only monument in the region carrying
the name of Nestor Makhno
is 20 km from Gulyai Pole.
Here, buried are among red army
soldiers killed during the
civil war by the hand of
Nestor Makhno in 1920.
Serious words, engraved for eternity.
The words we speak blow in all directions
and everything then starts moving.
They took the grandmother.
They were inside and
soldiers guarded the door.
My mother pushed them around
and she returned home.
The chief sits screaming at grandmother,
banging his fist on the table.
My mother looks at him en tells him:
"Listen Mykola..."
She recognised him.
He was with Makhno.
They made a wedding
together in the village.
"Why at the time
did you not tell him..."
who was on
the wrong track?"
If there would be the Makhnovshchina
I would go headfirst into it.
It's true
Life is so boring.
During my youth I was a coach.
I did competitions.
We'd all heard about it,
we'd seen him in films.
Michail Mykoloavitch our [...]
has for ten years been
roaming the villages,
collecting cross-cutting testimonies,
This is Makhno.
Makhno and the insurrection
That's what we need
to talk about.
It's a very important topic.
Even the children of Gulyai Pole
price shooting is linked to
the history of Makhno - his version.
Just ask the right questions.
Three colours: red, white and
the black target.
What is it?
What makes the mills turn?
What falls asleep [...]
There is even the poem cat
everyone here knows by heart.
He wore a gold chain.
It goes right and the song starts.
He goes to the left
and the story is told.
In the beginning a word.
The earth. As immense as the word.
So rich that the invaders
take it by whole carriage.
Ukraine. On the verge.
If we cross and meet
and trace the invaders.
That of ancient Cossack republics.
And that of the Cossacks
who became mercenaries.
That of peasant revolts.
That of colonists, that
imperial powers sent
people and the steppes
that were called [...],
The wild fields domesticated,
who are crossed across languages
different in name, and the earth and
the sky which it borders.
In Polish, in German, in Russian,
in Greek, in Yiddish, in Ukrainian.
In the centre a village called Gulyai-Polye,
meaning the free field.
The one we know but that we [...]
Fairgrounds and a large peasant market.
At the beginning of the century
Gulyai-Polye counted 16.250 inhabitants.
Three churches, including one with
three bell towers, a synagogue,
five agricultural schools, three high schools
a German school, two Jewish schools,
a library, a theatre.
There were three mills,
foundries, of which the largest was
the Kerner plant.
Ivan Radenovic Makhno, Nestor's father,
when freed from serfdom committed himself
as coarse from Mr. Kerner the owner.
Then he died, leaving a widow and
five landless growing sons.
Nestor the younger works
as an apprentice in this factory,
where before being a worker,
all here were peasants.
It is also in this factory that at
lunch break in a traditional section
brought back from Paris
texts by Nestor Makhno,
discovered for the very first time
by whom those had been written for.
It's the history of Ukraine.
What else would you want?
My eyes hurt from reading.
-See what you understand.
Are there images?
I will read aloud
The Makhnovist insurrection in Ukraine.
"I want to warn the reader..."
"that the absence of
certain resolutions..."
"by the Peasants Union
of Gulyai Pole..."
"by Soviet peasant
and worker deputies..."
[...] always attached with admirable consistency
in bringing together the peasants and
workers in this region, explaining to them
the meaning and scope of events.
The exposition of workers in
general and that of anarcho-communists
that resembles the mentality
of peasants in particular.
"Unfortunately I don't have photographs
of these unknown revolutionaries."
"My peasant friends arose from the most
deep of the Ukrainian people."
"They were genuine peasants,"
"not knowing how to lie or deceive,
it was hard to convince them."
"But once they had grabbed the idea
and had verified it with their"
"own reasoning, they exalted this
new ideal everywhere, at every occasion."
"My only regret: that their memoires
never emerged in Ukraine."
"The fault were circumstances I
couldn't do anything against."
Nestor Makhno,
Paris, 1926
I was a history teacher,
here at this school.
I taught for over thirty years.
During all these years
I practised my profession,
I collected documents about
the civil war in our region.
This file contains the most
interesting documents:
the programme of
the anarchist movement.
Today it appears to us not
as it was presented to us,
but as it actually was.
We are at the very beginning
of the century,
at the new Kerner factory.
Nazar Zuichenko is an apprentice [...].
He is fourteen years old.
His story was preserved
miraculously and passed on
from father to son.
In Gulyai-Polye we had a very advanced amateur
theatre group that I was part of.
One day a young Nestor Makhno came to see me
at the workshop to ask me if he could join.
I was a little surprised
by his minute size.
And that's how we met.
The workers factory,
land of the peasants.
Land of the peasants!
is already a modern phrase.
There is an other, older phrase,
born in the last century.
[...] wrenching how to serfdom.
Land and,
and what..?
How to translate the word used
[russian word] that means both freedom,
free will and limitless space.
I will read aloud documents
from the period of
the 1905 revolution
in our region.
"I have the honour of
informing your Excellency"
"that according to my information
on the lands of the owner Masaracki"
"they are illegally distributing
flour and fodder."
In Gulyai-Polye the Union of
Poor Peasants (SBH) is founded around
the young peasant Valdemar Antoni
of Czech parents,
who had lived an urban life and upon returning
had joined a group of anarchists.
Revolution. The apprentice hall with
the whole theatre group of the factory
joins the movement.
Among them is Nestor Makhno.
He is 16.
Zarathustra. This is how we called
Antoni who brought us books,
food and also weapons for
the revolutionary battle.
Nearly every evening we peasants
having little knowledge,
we would gather in a meadow or
in a farm, in a barn for books and
For me the evenings were full of light and joy.
We read everything:
Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin,
the history of culture.
Above we are all passionate about
astronomy, the planets, the stars and
the story of the
appearance of man on earth.
The owners responded by creating
the union of genuine people.
Its workers too were genuine.
Their slogan was simple.
"Kill the Jews, save Russia",
and they organised pogroms.
Halt!
Late and against the odds we
decided to fight them.
The genuine Russians returned home.
It was our first victory.
May 1, 1907. A day of banned
demonstrations in Gulyai-Polye.
All persons here are
wanted by the police.
This is their first souvenir photo.
Then, on event after the other.
The repressive order is restored.
Clandestinity, denunciations,
shootings, arrests, death sentences.
Fifty days pass.
The majority are descended in the grave.
The death penalty for Nestor Makhno
is commuted to a life sentence.
He writes: I swim [...]
he incessant demarches of my mother.
The rails those years cross between
but meets them again the destinies of
whole generations
In the north a student
revolutionary Vsevolod Eikhenbaum (Voline)
level sailing line freedom stopped escapes.
To the south a locksmith
Peter Arshinov
of art china the measure of the earth
made stop
He is transported to the same
political prison of Moscow
to which the peasant Makhno
is transferred.
They would be three,
each writing in their own way
The [...] Makhnovist.
Nestor Makhno, footwork,
tuberculous and
a political prisoner,
in a place of books.
The prison library is powered by
the [...] and the rich.
I've read everything:
history, geography,
and especially mathematics.
It's through the books that
Nestor Makhno meets Peter Arshinov
and his unbreakable dream,
a libertarian printing press.
The texts of the Makhnovist movement
have not completely disappeared
thanks to him and his
ink-stained fingers.
Germany and its allies declare war.
Russia mobilises.
1915, 1916, 1917.
The February revolution
The czar abdicates.
The prisons open.
Sometimes they burn.
Amnesty for politicals,
who leave in the day
in processions still under escort.
Without doubt Nestor Makhno
is present,
among the 'returned from
the dead' as they are called.
Eight days to relearn to walk
without shackles.
Moscow walks free.
Streets [...]
words looks at itself as if it were alive
Arshinov stays in Moscow.
Makhno takes the train
back to Gulyai-Polye.
He is 28.
Ten years of detention
had not shaken my faith in the
creative force of free labour
founded on equality, solidarity.
With this conviction I returned home to
Gulyai-Polye where i was born,
where I had left so many loved ones and where
I felt I could be useful
amongst a big peasant family.
The place where many years ago
our first group was formed.
Those who knew said:
"Nestor arrived!"
They told the grandmother.
And he arrives, with his jacket,
his bag on his shoulder.
When he arrives in
front of the house,
he empties his bag.
Nothing but books
and newspapers!
With those he left prison.
All the decrees from Petrograd
arrived late.
Always late.
Then, the change of power
created a vacuum.
For people it was
hard to understand.
This appeal to take charge
was complicated.
I was preoccupied by a theoretic understanding of
the immense problem the revolution posed us.
I knew this was the case nine out of ten times
within the backgrounds that were ours.
We were living through an event
utterly exceptional. [...] intimately
convinced that we needed not
only work to raise our own ideal,
but above all to not prevent
its development with others.
For this, we the group of communist
anarchists of Gulyai-Polye were alone.
According to our ideology
anarchist-communist is incompatible.
I am talking about our
ancient communist ideology,
it was incompatible.
Anarchists on one side,
communists on the other.
This symbiosis is all theory.
At the start of 1917,
in the towns and villages,
there was hardly any
party representative,
no Bolshevik or transit law.
A few socialist revolutionary (sr)
groups in our towns.
This solitude and the determination of
a few would be the hallmark of what
will develop here for the nine
months between February with the disappearance
of the old power and October
with the establishment of a new power,
speaking in the name of
the revolution.
The spring of history,
spring in Ukraine.
The first for Nestor Makhno after an
endless descent to the bottom of the dungeons.
The provisional government
from Petrograd
with its cortege [...]
leaving the hallways is in the middle of here.
No-one still remembers the man.
combine it in reality within a
same sentence, the words revolution or
workers, peasants and the old soviet word
which means advice.
They put together a
bunch of documents
about everything concerning
the land of the region.
Who were the proprietors,
how many people worked there.
It wasn't random at all.
They did it very seriously.
They discussed it with the people
who, in their almost totality,
welcomed them with sympathy.
We were ten in the family.
There was a blacksmith,
a tailor, a carpenter...
We could do anything.
Our family belonged to
the Polish family Jawicki.
My great-grandmother had bought it
against the greyhounds.
The other village was free.
On the other side of the river
no-one could touch us.
My brother Sacha was deported,
and two brothers-in-law,
at Makhno's house.
Why were they deported?
Because they were
with Makhno.
Mayday 1917.
It has been ten years
since I participated in this workers' party
and I happily prepare myself.
At night I sleep on a table, in the day
I run from factory to village meetings.
Meetings with teachers, or delegates
as we see the campaigners, to inform themselves.
Within a few weeks of overflowing activity
in the town new elections are organised.
Should we control them and how?
A union of peasants was created
by workers and metallurgists of the Kerner factory,
of which Makhno was
appointed president.
Then discussions that would multiply:
what is a cooperative? What is a commune?
A union? A delegate?
The role of soviet organs of power:
An organ of power or a liaison?
Should we take the land?
What does it mean
to take the land?
We were told he
was an anarchist,
understand?
Actually, he wanted
independence,
how to say,
for the poor,
for the people.
He was for the people,
that's it.
Read here the basics.
"Workers of the world,
immerse yourselves"
and search for the truth,
create it."
"You will not find it
anywhere else."
That is the prophecy of
the Russian revolution.
Interesting!
What are you talking about!
You can revolt,
and then what?
There's nothing we can do.
They have the army and the police,
we have nothing but a trade union.
I don't answer to anything.
If I would be responsible for anything,
if I felt like someone
a master of something.
But now I'm nothing.
What should one do
to be someone?
A revolution.
Long before the
big October revolution,
he instituted a people's power
in Gulyai Polye.
It's still important.
August 1917
White general Kornilov marches on Petrograd.
Premise of the civil war.
The morning of August 29.
There are meetings in the squares of Gulyai Polye
where drivers bring the news of
[...] of the revolution.
[...] one success of the day was
the decision given the urgency to create
a committee to defend the revolution
and for which Makhno was made responsible.
Then without thought the
decision to disarm proprietors.
The abolition of privileges
and to apply
the first decree on the land
as was discussed here
for months in the villages,
in the workshops.
This was the first time
in the Russian empire.
History must know this.
On his own initiative he
gathered all official papers,
property deeds
of land, of domains,
and so on.
He burned it all.
He cast anathema on the past
and started creating
something new.
Now is the time to realise the secular dream.
The people are sovereign over their
land and we peasants we have the
responsibility to perform such act.
The sharing of the reclaimed land was done
in autumn because it was urgent
to organise [...] and sowing.
It was planned to give each family
irrelevant of importance one or two
pairs of horses, one or two cows and
essential tools.
Four municipalities were organised around
Gulyai Polye and and others further than
I know less because I don't have there
participated
Joint participation was voluntary.
Peasants who decided to
to become communards grouped by
family or affinity.
There were some anarchist peasants
but the majority was not.
There were many discussions on the choice [...]
The teaching issue was also debated.
The municipalities do did not want to restore the old model.
The choice stopped at the
libertarian schools of Francisco Ferrer
about which we had read
reports in brochures.
Like a teacher was unaware,
we decided to
look for the most qualified
in the towns and in the first year
we brought in people who were
the most capable of teaching.
The power award goes
to the Bolshevik party.
Workers of the world, unite.
Price: 15 kopeck.
Monday night edition
30 October (12 November) 1917.
Special issue.
Decree on the land.
First gala workers' deputy soviet meeting
soldiers on October 26 until 2 a.m.
First point.
Abolition of private land
with no financial compensation.
This is precisely
what Makhno writes.
What is the difference?
The difference?
The methods we used
were different.
Makhno was against
all coercion,
against all violence.
But then,
we have been abused...
Who was right?
From the new documents we have now,
the anarchists were right.
I can confirm that during the first two
months when Ukrainians gathered around
in councils rejoiced in the October coup.
They recognised that at the basis was
the principle of a real revolution,
coming from the depths of the villages and
workshops that finally woke up.
Everyone remained vigilant when the first
commissioners arrived with
the first directives,
the first inspections.
Peasants came to see us. We are obscured, they say.
We have to explain ourselves.
They arrive, shout, and go.
Then they say that the peasants
are against the power of the soviet.
Creating a free and revolutionary life
of the people is a immense question,
profound, limitless like the ocean.
All power that takes on itself the
boldness to create this life by demanding
the submission of the people,
is locked in an insoluble problem.
We the children
of this revolution,
children of the working people, who
created our destiny here,
in our villages and our [...].
We develop a solution that is not worn
as a humiliation, but as a responsibility.
Peasant communes, free unions
of city workers prefigure
a true working community.
We pass commissioners and other
exceptional powers we just need to
strengthen the awareness of our
approach and apply it forcefully to
all areas of our life.
February
German offensive against
Soviet Russia.
The people's commissioner Leon Trotsky
signs a peace treaty with Germany.
In return Russia gives up Ukraine.
German troops occupy Kiev and
in their wake bring back
former owners.
They form a Ukrainian national
government of collaboration.
In Gulyai Polye groups are
formed to defend the town.
Nestor Makhno leaves in search for Bolshevik
troops who are still stationed in Ukraine.
In April Gulyai Polye is occupied.
On a platform of a passing station I
learned about the occupation of Gulyai Polye.
The flight of revolutionary
forces was all around me.
Something incomprehensible and lure me
squeeze the heart such anguish that
I lay there on the platform
without thought of leaving.
This is the exodus the insurgents of
Gulyai Polye became clandestine again,
manage to get the message across:
see you in three months.
Until then everyone tries
to understand what appears for all to see,
a betrayal of the revolution.
I wanted to go return to Moscow
and meet the anarchists of the
capital and take measures of
intentions of a new power.
To get here Makhno had wandered
from one station to another.
It is from one image to another that in
this city he will walk.
On the one hand that of this power that it is
plus six months was peasant worker.
He decides to to give up Ukraine
on the other the image of the
Petrograd prison. Burnt down during the
February days during which
captives were liberated.
It is in this space, window to window
we're going to take the measure of
the distance between the words of taste
the Gulyai Polye.
Of those who now here
will fight to occupy the pages of a
book, like occupying a land at all times.
The first window.
Visits to revolutionary circles.
Second window.
Visit to Peter Kropotkin, who writes
Makhno warmly welcomes us
with tenderness and warmth.
Third window.
Visit to Peter Arshinov, an old companion.
With him we attended every meeting, every
discussion, conferences, meeting and
I reflected about what I had
observed in factories or [...] the
thought so prevalent among workers and
fascinated and gullible that everything was
devoted to creating not their destiny but their
power and their dictatorship.
A dictatorship that separates me
from them because neither me
nor my peasants working brothers
were proletarians
and this word pressed as long as I decided
to leave without waiting.
But for occupied Ukraine now needed
passes and that's how
almost by chance i found myself
at the Kremlin
Fourth window, the most
improbable.
One that opens the meeting between
the libertarian peasant
Nestor Ivanovich Makhno and
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin,
the professional revolutionary.
[...] world vision strategy
One founded on the model of [...],
the other on that
of an affirmed approach
The staging of the meeting of the
Bolshevik and the anarchist did
is one of the classics.
Even if the version the
Makhno character relented on
The place: the Kremlin [...] Gulyai Polye
The story now of supporters
The subject: the negotiation of an alliance
The issue: based on impossibility
historical and logical and even
strategic of such an alliance
Everything here is emblematic.
Red and black cards
on a white background.
Four players: the Russian sailor,
bearer of the October revolution,
of an order determined by laws and
history, that is.
Nestor Makhno the peasant, bearer
of an order that escapes its laws.
To the right of the theorist's sailor
[...] and responsible anarchy at
To the left, the white officer, betraying his class of the
homeland
In Paris, we had started the debate
with the Bolsheviks,
They are far from being over.
No one has yet proven
that Lenin was right.
Replace a bourgeois feudal state
with a workers 'and peasants' state.
Change the masters
clothes for blouses,
and thus obtain a
classless society.
Then what?
No Gods, no masters?
But behind the cliched script there are shots
are the costs of what was said
almost by chance about the Kremlin
or have a voice at
Chapter 18
My meeting with Lenin.
Lenin welcomed me fatherly
and invited me for the evening.
He started questioning me as specific
as possible about organisation.
The question: how the peasants
with an island the watchword all the
power to the soviets in place there me
asked three times.
I replied that for
the peasants that meant that the
power should be aligned with the
conscience and will of
the peasants themselves.
Lenin answered me thus:
your peasants are
contaminated with anarchy.
Is this an evil?, I responded.
Lenin then asked me the question of
red detachments from their heroic struggle
against the occupier and the
lack of farmer's support.
I'm afraid, comrade Lenin,
you are badly informed answered.
Your group stays away from roads
and don't fight in the countryside.
How do you see the villages
supporting each other?
Lenin started laughing.
You anarchists, you write
about the future
unable to think of the present.
I answer that I was an illiterate peasant,
that it was difficult for me to discuss a
point this important but I tell you say, comrade Lenin
in Ukraine, in South Russia,
as you Bolsheviks say,
we are immersed in the present.
It is because of him that
we are trying to get closer to the
future, or that it's true we think
and we think very seriously.
We no longer support Moscow.
This futile and noisy Moscow where
the revolution is slowly dying in
[...] power politics.
Moscow is lost.
I started to hate it.
Permitted by hundreds of lawful
of the cause those of the parties
winners of the party and the others who
lost to seek in anarchy a kind of
perfection that
didn't belong in life.
And an overwhelming desire to find myself
in Ukraine, with villagers
and there, with them, to understand
what had not been accomplished.
Fighting against what was,
dying, or liberating Ukraine.
Makhno learns about the death
of his two brothers,
shot dead by the occupier.
He finally receives a detailed account
from his companions on
how Gulyai Polye was conquered
and disarmed in April.
"My dear Mr Ivanovich.
"All members of the revolutionary committee,
workers and peasants are arrested and
"are waiting to be executed.
"Three hours before the occupation,
"the Jewish companion betrayed us and
"defected to enemy troops.
"All peasants are depressed,
"there is great hatred
towards the Jews."
Chapter 6
The Jewish question
Jews, breathe freely.
The time of the czars and lords more
once you were kicked out from land and
peaceful hamlets.
You are far away from home,
without tenderness and consolation.
You are exhausted.
Rest and be free,
like all other peoples.
With these words in 1917 in Hulyai Polye
I spoke to the Jews,
when the crowd threw down to me:
'You Ivanovich, how do you view
do you consider all these Jews with
which you jointly sit in the city committee.
I never curtailed his words in
following events, neither in my activity.
In the fight against anti-semitism the Makhnovist movement
aims to bring it down tirelessly,
outside and inside its ranks.
For there will be nearly sixty thousand
Jews massacred -exact figures are unknown-
during the civil war in Ukraine.
It was one of the fiercest and the most troubled.
The way to freedom, the daily revolutionary
insurgents Makhnovist newspaper
appears in Ukrainian and Russian.
Issue 42.
Price 2,50 rubles, 3 rubles in the railway station
THE NEXT CONGRESS
POWER AND NO POWER
THEATRE MEETING
UNEMPLOYED MEETING
SHAME!
Shame on those who let pass
the mistreatment of a Jew.
Shame on those who pretend
to be Makhnovist and
tarnishes the honour
of the movement.
Shame on those who soil it
[...] their interests.
Signed, Volin.
The former libertarian Jewish student who
would be a senior responsible for
the Makhnovist cultural commission.
At the Père Lachaise his funeral plaque
adjoins that of Nestor Makhno.
The accusation of anti-Semitism was and remains
one of the most pernicious by those who
targeted and targets the Makhnovist movement.
Nestor Makhno, the anarcho-bandit-anti-semite.
What makes him and all
his movement for [...] and all around
not an enemy, but a nuisance.
For now everything is simple and
infinitely dangerous at the same time.
The occupiers [...] their own banknotes in
a language which often is also [...]
the owners who return burning,
destroying and ransacking.
Ukraine must be liberated.
The first resistance groups are formed,
without links to each other,
each leading actions on
their own territory.
In 1918,
two detachments
gathered here.
That of Shchuss,
sailor from the Black Sea,
who was hardly significant,
and that of
Nestor Ivanovich Makhno.
Shchuss, about whom
was said,
came from Kronstadt,
and returned home
a revolutionary.
Right at the beginning
they were barely twelve.
One time they were together,
they took to the streets
shooting up all over the place
and howling like this...
The Austrians
massed there.
Then they pounced them,
threw everything at them.
Shovels, pitchforks,
anything they could find.
Even those by the
river were killed.
On the night of the first partisans' victory
the peasants name Makhno 'Batko',
the 'father', and place him at
the head of the insurgent movement.
We said 'Batko' because
he defended us.
He defended freedom,
So we called him
'Batko Makhno'.
It was strange and upsetting for me
to hear 'Batko Makhno' instead of 'comrade'.
Sometimes even 'comrade Batko Makhno'.
It was this [...] my name it turns
went from peasants to a peasant of children to
children and the words Batko Makhno
became inseparable.
With a strange respect and a love that
I had trouble understanding
and a pride would spread
from village to village
throughout almost all of Ukrainian [...]
The name was taken up by insurgents
and groups that were getting
called Batko Makhno battalion,
without me even hearing about it,
without me even
knowing them either.
Makhno arrived
with the groups.
Accordeons,
wearing chapkas.
All the children
ran after him.
And he passed,
with the cavalary
and music.
Marie the daughter [...]
Who is under the veil?
Makhno is at the market,
where is he?
[...] the rabbit
Makhno [...], he is everywhere
He wears a skirt and wigs
and cycles about,
hears everything because
we tell him everything,
just under [...] we wait
for the message who saw my [...]
Signed, Nestor Makhno.
[Laughs]
In Gulyai Polye a group of supporters fled.
One of the most important coming from the
south will be that of [...], Viktor Belash.
Viktor Belash alongside Nestor Makhno will take
responsibility to federate this composite army.
Correspondingly they will preserve as much
possible the founding principles.
Self-discipline, volunteering,
electing the officers.
This is the second souvenir photo.
The staging of a story of which
each can be a possible character
November 1918
November 1918
Revolution in Germany.
Occupation forces evacuate.
To the west a new nationalist power is forming.
In the east the
White army advances.
In the north Bolshevik
troops regroup.
In all of Ukraine an anxious and [...] a wild weather
A wild and crazy time arrives.
A time of shooting
the peasants Gulyai Polye,
who always declined
the stories that are passed on
There were three sons. The richest, the
most educated and the most daring.
There were three paths.
To the right you lose your life, to the left death.
Straight ahead [.....]
People called this oak
"the oak of death".
In name of the makhnovtchina
many small bandits
agitated here.
It wasn't Makhno.
Makhno couldn't see everything.
Some committed massacres
and framed him.
He didn't know.
A time of clashes without precautions
or nuance, legend against legend,
According to the [...] rule of
dominoes from the Gulyai Polye factory.
Spring 1919
In the face of increasingly massive emergence of the
White general Denikin the first
military alliance between
insurgent troops and Bolshevik troops.
The train in Gulyai Polye brings
the first images from the front.
Detailed press releases about
political differences and
ideological differences between the Bolsheviks
and Makhnovist peasants are considered
and in no way can be an
obstacle to the union of [...].
The Bolshevik authority make clear that the
peculiarities of the insurgency must stay inviolable.
Spring 1919.
Spring of the first alliance where we see
reds and insurgent peasants.
Why these images exist is because
official service cameras
of front cinema are present.
The camera films and suddenly...
It used to be:
"Workers of the world,
"go to the depths of your soul,
"for only there you
will find the truth."
Something along
those words.
Do these words still
make sense to you today?
Not only today,
before also,
they made sense to me.
I ignored that he
said those words.
But deep down,
every one of us has it,
every one.
What are you doing, fellas?
We are preparing for Mayday.
Preparing for Mayday that year,
meant people being lent
by the collective farm,
a tachanka and horses
for the Gulyai Polye parade in
Nestor Makhno's words and shoulder
read in the books.
Andrei Mykoloavitch,
where are you from?
From Gulyai Polye.
Bondarenko Andrei
Mykoloavitch, born 1926.
My father is from here,
my grand-father also.
We all lived here.
I will make the
horses look nice.
Bondarenko, like Igor from the
first souvenir photo taken on May 1, 1907
was shot at the collective farm
in Gulyai Polye.
One the first souvenir
photo in the back.
That of an [...] Makhnovist army major
and peasant [...]
from the times of the civil war.
This is the photo of
Makhno's staff.
Nestor and his
wife Galina Andreievna.
Chief of the general staff
Viktor Belach,
his brothers Savelli
and Grigori Makhno...
They are all there.
Photographed this time not by the photographer
but right in the street, at home.
This is the third souvenir photo.
[...] story written by Makhno where the
everyone's freedom would be there
everyone's responsibility
Behind the photo, Gulyai Polye and
the municipality of Makhno
as they remained in the
memory and as it appears
in the images of the films, with its
rides because he likes his markets, his
theatre evenings, their songs,
the black flags,
troops coming in or out
Behind this Gulyai Polye
the map drawn by hand by Arshinov.
who had rejoined Makhno the
will leave more.
The influence zone of
the Makhnovist movement, which
goes from Gulyai Polye extends
extend to all eastern Ukraine,
once again becoming
the wilderness of civil war
There are the words: [...]
workers of the world.
February 1919
massive attack of the Whites
Makhnovist troops are sent
to hold the southern front.
In Gulyai Polye the first
regional Soviet congress,
bringing together delegates from
over a million insurgent peasant workers.
The [...] and dilemma between the weight of a
party and that of an owner.
A general mobilisation,
but voluntary and determined to relieve
groups that have been
fighting for months
and to ensure the sowing.
March. In Kharkov the 1st congress
peasants from all over Russia is held.
Objective: to vote for nationalisation of land.
Delegates from Gulyai Polye
speak about the problem of land
is the most dangerous.
It should be viewed with the greatest precaution,
as work is creative that the commons
works you have to help them, not disorganise them.
The Bolsheviks don't leave [...]
April.
The battles at the front intensify.
Second congress of
the regional soviet in Gulyai Polye.
Delegates of 72 districts representing
over two million men and women
take part in the debate.
At the end of the congress there is a dispatch.
The congress squares against the
revolutionaries and its
organisers are outlawed.
Signed, Dybenko.
Like in the Bolshevik divisions.
Response: small [...] laws allowing
a few people to outlaw
a more revolutionary people than
Signed, the revolutionary council
of Gulyai Polye.
Makhno is no longer in Gulyai Polye.
He is on the frontline.
The promised weapons no longer arrive
and men are fighting [...]
It's a butchery, writes Makhno.
June. Urgent [..] considering the emergency the revolutionary council
didn't want them convince for the 15th
Third congress calling on the farmer delegates
insurgents, workers, red soldiers appears
in the official journal of a jacket ya
to the article titled The makhnovshchina,
signed by the chairman of the board
military of the republic Leon Trotsky.
intermittent china in Russian and
derogatory
For the first time on
Makhnovist movement is called
a bunch of bandits, assassins, looters,
small owners, counter-revolutionary.
Makhno appeals.
Brothers, opening a front
inside the revolutionary movement
is a crime never yet accomplished
From Moscow comes order 1,824.
If [...] under the watchword down with
makhnovshchina we suppress the war
of ideas against anarchists.
Now they say: down with the makhnovshchina.
Even if to beat them you have to
use iron and fire.
Because in fact what the machine-gun is [...]
but a typographic sign the
lighter and more needy pull it
He was an anarchist [...] communist.
This is the name to say to yourself and that will
gallop the Makhnovist cavalary quickly during
elusive two years on any
the extent of Arshinov's map, where
often we will switch history.
At the head of this army that goes from the
rifle plow the peasant Nestor Makhno
whose exploits foiling all
strategies all forecast and
will create the epic.
Three times facing the common enemy,
the Reds will propose the alliance them by three times line is
pushed back he has names.
An impossible alliance and
at the same time essential because
for the makhnovist peasant-worker
movement comes or that
another alliance is historically possible.
The last alliance is ends here in Crimea
where the two black and red cavalry fork
the general's white troops together
vang there are no more external walls
The civil war is over the next day.
the red cavalry takes the cavalry
Makhnovistist late to the gun room the
delegates coming to discuss a
possible federation.
In the north February 21 north the common free soviet
Kronstadt is wiped out.
Lenin installs the new economic policy,
nationalisation of land is
suspended, [...] villages are turned away.
For thirteen years I dedicated to a social revolution
and I will continue so.
You chose to believe in the winner,
as is your right.
In stitches and injured he crossed
the border and left for Paris
where he would live for thirteen years.
Communism we were striving for implies
the freedom of the individual, equality,
self-determination, initiative,
creation and abundance.
We formulated our ideal of this third
revolution based on taking
conscience of the humiliated people.
We had the opportunity to throw the
basics of a society on principles of anarchy.
But what we had in
opposite of us we left us
neither time nor space.
They turned the struggle of ideas into
a fight between people.
The Makhnovist army is not an anarchist army.
The ideal of anarchist life cannot be defended by
any army.
With regard to the construction and
trust and creation,
she is absolutely helpless and harmless.
But every Makhnovist is a
possible anarchist.
And when war will be over
he will go home.
A builder of the future.
Thank you all.
PICTURE
Jean-Louis PORTE (Ukraine)
Claire BAILLY-DUBOIS (Paris)
SOUND
Jean-François PRIESTER
DIRECTOR
Dimitri PLIOUCHTCH
In the role of MAKHNO
Alexei KRICHENKOV
EDITORS
Hélène CHATELAIN
Iossif PASTERNAK
PHOTOS
Jacqueline SALMON
MIXAGE
Georges LAFITTE
Marie BOSSY
POST-PRODUCTION
SYLICONE
TELETOTA
MUSIC
Music school of Gulyai Polye
All rights reserved
A FILM BY
Hélène CHATELAIN