Friday 17 September 2010

Свобода або Смерть (3)


A rare picture of Agafa (Galina), Yelena, and Nestor Makhno.
The pictures interspersed in this post will focus on the iconography of Makhno.


My peering into the life and character of Nestor Ivanovich Makhno has grown arms and legs, and the more it goes on the less I am able to grasp hold of truth, the more he becomes a wisp of smoke, a man whose legend seems more important than his reality. That reality retreats into iconography – can it be recaptured?

In the wake of my two recent blog posts (here and here) about Makhno a dialogue opened between myself and Ukraine-born Canadian writer/musician Dmitry Berger. Dmitry is originally from Nova Kakhovka, not a long drive from Huliaipole. His grandmother actually met Makhno, as did many other people Dmitry knew.

These are some of his initial observations, made via a third party: 


Marie Marshall tries in earnest to understand the phenomenon of Makhno and anarchism. There is no point in disputing or agreeing with her points. She had to do with what is available on the net and most of it falls into the narrow narratives of preconceived notions or misconceptions on all sides. I myself fell for the Hollywood swashbuckling angle of Makhno’s story before realizing how much more prosaic and tedious and real it was. But I have an unfair advantage. I was born in Tavria, met people who knew Makhno, lived in those villages, worked in the wide open steppe without which it is hard to understand what those Makhnovists felt inside. I had a chance to feel Makhno. My Jewish grandmother actually saw and respected him.

Makhno iconography 1: statue in Huliaipole

Yet Marie comes up with some quite splendid observations. Unfortunately the slogan “Freedom or Death” and the banner on the photograph are not really Makhnovist but close to Makhno’s sensibilities, which underlines how complex and interwoven the situation was then. German colonists, despite their professed Mennonite persuasion, did not hesitate to raise arms when felt like it. Religion was not very big in those times. We tend to see things through the prism of our time.

“Nine lives of Nestor Makhno” is a very bad film. Historically, ideologically, artistically and simply logically. A very lazy thinking on the part of its creators.


This is my open reply:

Dimitry is right, of course, inasmuch as I had to make do with what material there was. Even though I was writing something short-and-sweet, or so I hoped, for the benefit of an American friend who has lived in Germany and missed the ease with which Europeans could discuss leftist politics – no such ease exists in (her) America – I found myself ploughing through a large amount of material, most of it speculative and almost all of it highly partisan, and doing so in a short time in order to make a thumbnail portrait with as much accuracy as I could. The bulk and diversity of the available information is actually an interesting phenomenon in its own right, because it shows how the legend of someone like Nestor Makhno can be made, and legend-making is as interesting a phenomenon as the search for historical truth. Each site or blog I looked at had its own view of Makhno. For example some anarchist blogs (and I speak as an anarchist at heart myself) had an impossibly misty-eyed view of him. The communist blogs were dismissive, relying very much on the attitude of Lenin’s famous Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder to debunk anarchists and anarchism and Makhno in particular. I even found what I took to be a Soviet film from 1942[*] which portrayed Makhno as a wizened, gnome-like character, with a twisted grin, staring eyes, and a face that looked a good fifteen or twenty years older than he was during the Civil War. Equally the Mennonite sites had a legendary picture of Makhno, but this time as an evil monster; interestingly theirs were the only sites I could find which referred to primary sources – to the statements of Ukrainian-German Mennonites who witnessed the events – certainly sources which were partisan in their views but primary nonetheless. They left out any mention, however, of there having been any possibility of armed resistance by Mennonite colonists; their own self-image is as one of the traditional “peace churches”, and that’s that. One has to look elsewhere for mention of their lapses of pacifism. In the end I had to leave out a lot in order to concentrate on selected aspects of my subject. If I wanted to do more then maybe I should write a book. Or maybe Dmitry should.
[*] This was possibly the film Aleksandr Parkhomenko, and the actor playing Makhno was possibly Boris Chirkov, but I haven’t been able to confirm this yet.

I am used to this kind of thing of course. I live in a country which has made a legend out of an equally intangible figure – William Wallace. Like many people in Scotland who have a trace of an English accent, I was subject to abuse at the time that Braveheart was released, as the film raised Anglophobic sentiment. The film created its own legend; in Stirling a statue was raised to Wallace, in Mel Gibson’s likeness, with the word “Freedom” written large upon the pedestal (now there’s a word which has been appropriated, misused, and abused by every political and national movement!); on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile tourists can be photographed next to someone dressed as “Braveheart”; I have seen Scottish soccer fans tramping through a railway station, kilted, adorned with blue face-paint, chanting “We f*cking hate England, we f*cking hate England, we f*cking hate England”. Interesting though William Wallace is, I realise that when I consider him to be an ethnic cleanser who did not care whether he slaughtered men, women, or children, I am looking at him through the filter of my modern sensibilities. However, the fact of his civilian massacres is one thing I do fling in the teeth of many of my compatriots who would make some kind of saint or proto-Che out of him. Makhno is far from being the only historical figure to be mythologised, canonized, made into a kind of deity.

Makhno iconography 2: Makhno’s grave in Pére-Lachaise cemetery –
as much a place of pilgrimage as any other famous grave.

One thing we owe to people of the past, and in particular to people’s heroes and villains, is to be as honest as we possibly can be. We have to recognize and understand the cultural context of anything which is written about them, whether that context is contemporaneous or more contemporary. In a way we have to respect the bias of the writer, but in another way we have to try to penetrate it. The same goes – sorry Dmitry – for you. I think your view of Makhno is principally that – yours. You too make do with what you have. In your case, I admit, you have much more than I do, having connections with the place and time which I lack(ed); indeed your view expands greatly what I can see and I thank you for that. However it would have been good to see actual quotations from the speeches and writings rather than simply reading of their qualities; you knew people who met Makhno – it would have also been good to read what you recall of their words about him; you are intimately acquainted with “Tavria” where both you and Makhno were born and raised – it would have been good to read of what your direct experience of the landscape, people, and culture tells you about what made the man – you are a writer and a poet, you could make us feel it.

The philosophical arguments you introduce, in particular the question of the nobility of a bullet in the brain above the degradation of prison, are very interesting, requiring the reader to think outside the box of his or her own sensibilities, and that challenge is the kind of approach to the philosophy of historical study that makes me sit up and notice. It is startling and eye-opening to see Makhno the revolutionary likened to Jesus (in the eyes of the followers of each), his uncompromising ideals likened to Islam, his character described speculatively as “Mahatma Gandhi with a machine gun, the Dalai Lama with a sabre”. Nevertheless it was an analysis to which I directed readers of my blog without any comment (except “controversial”) or judgment on my part, for the plain reason that it is an analysis I greatly respect, and an argument in which I see a lot of power.

A word or two on some smaller issues raised. I wanted a short, snappy title for the piece. I seized upon the slogan Свобода або Смерть because of its brevity. I did not claim it to be Makhno’s slogan, as you can see from the footnote to the first half of my piece. In fact there is no documentary evidence for any such slogan. Where I got it was, as I said, from the Russian words Свобода или Смерть on a banner seen in the TV film The Nine Lives of Nestor Makhno. As for the larger banner, it existed in a photograph which looks contemporaneous with the Black Army; again in my piece I didn’t connect it directly to Makhno. However a facsimile (surely not the original, or is it?) of that banner hangs in the town museum at Huliaipole, and is displayed near a bust of Makhno and a Black Army tachanka.

Some of Dmitry’s reply direct to me is below, with a scattering of my answers as footnotes:


Of course if I were to write my comments regarding your article on Makhno directly to you, I would choose a slightly different approach and would measure my words more wisely. You are such a wonderful poet, you know how important words can be, you feel then the way others cannot. So, when I said I felt Makhno it was exactly in the same sense you feel language. It just happened and through no fault of my own.

I have always loved history, even worked a few seasons as an archaeologist, but am more interested in sieving through historical research and personal memoirs looking for gems to be used in my writings, than in merely compiling another list of verified and unverified quotations. You know they would be biased, I know would be biased, and therefore would posses little value as historical evidence unless scrutinized in a thick and dull scientific volume none of us would be willing to read in the first place. [1]

What would this story tell you: an old man in the village of Prishib, told me, “Right here, in this place the Red Latvians shot my father in 1920.”
“What for?” I asked expecting anything but the following answer.
“For being an elected chairmen of the local Soviet.”
To me it spoke volumes. To others, I suspect it would require a much wider context. [2]

That is why I have been writing a movie script for the last six years, in order to let others share my feel for the man and the events around him. A discovery of another Makhno, who now appears to be not some Braveheart reincarnate but rather Tomas Jefferson, a statesman without a state if you will. [3]

The problem with Makhno is that he became a legend almost instantly, his (in)fame boosted by the friends and foes alike, the way it stays now. As in the 60-s and 70-s the Beatles became synonymous with rock music (at least for us, the Soviet kids deprived of its richness), Makhno in his time became synonymous with various unrelated groups resisting the intrusion by the big government of any stripe.  [4]

You cite the museum in Huliaipole as a source [5]. But as they say in Russia (and Ukraine) history is the most unpredictable, so those in power invest much in ideological interpretation of history.

I do not see Makhno as a religious figure, I just point out that those who followed him sometimes did. And he is no less worthy such following than other religious figures. But personally I could not care less. I could be a religious figure. Anything to avoid working. [6]
  
But I do have my personal artistic vision, not view, of Makhno. It is reflected in the songs “Ballad of Liberty” and “Paris, 1934” from the CD “Red House Blues” on my website, or almost any anarchist site.


[1]  I think even the best historical works cannot avoid quoting from biased sources. Certainly the books on Stalin, Trotsky, Mao, and Mussolini that I have read do so. That didn't make them unreadable - no way!

[2]  That spoke volumes to me too, believe me!

[3]  Again a startling comparison, and I am not sure I can “buy” it right off. Famously Thomas Jefferson said “When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty”. Whilst this instantly reminds me of the Zapatista slogan "Esta usted en territorio Zapatista en rebeldia. Aqui manda el pueblo y el gobierno obedece", that is, I believe, where obvious similarities between Jefferson and any anarchist figure seem to end; Jefferson was a landowner (unlike Makhno), a slaveowner (obviously unlike Makhno) who had twinges of conscious but did not free his own slaves, an educated man (unlike Makhno), a theorist (unlike Makhno), a believer in statehood (unlike anarchists), a relative conservative (inasmuch as he was an American constitutionalist, the founding principles and great documents of the United States seem to embody, more than anything else, a kind of reformed-yet-conserved… England! Was Trotsky right, then, and did the anarchist of the Civil War actually want to preserve the state in some way, by "not touching it"?). Perhaps you can expand on your comparison of the Makhno and Jefferson – there’s a comment box below!

[4]  You almost make them sound like the Tea Party!

[5]  Actually I don’t cite it as an authoritative source – I just say that’s where you can see a banner like the one in the old photo. The actual significance of the banner, the bust, and the tachanka there is another matter.

[6]  I see no evidence of either of us avoiding working, Dima – we both seem addicted to it!

Makhno iconography 3: a bust in the Huliaipole Museum.
This bust reminds me greatly of the old Soviet “socialist realism”.
Makhno’s long hair seem to blow in the breeze…
 … like the tails of Lenin’s coat in countless Soviet statues.
His eyes are on the horizon, like the workers and peasants
in Maoist posters, or…
… like the idealized, retrospective portrait of the young Stalin.
Perhaps artists are still a little trapped in that era’s artistic mindset?

9 comments:

  1. [1] A quote even by an aesthete like Trotsky or Mao means little by itself when one searches for the historical truth. But it could be a masterpiece of poetry, as witnessed in the Chairman’s sayings.

    [3] The comparison of Makhno and Jefferson is not between the two men but their attempts to establish a new, completely different from the already existing ones society based on their understanding of what constituted liberty, democracy and common cause.
    Instead of appealing to the powers that were to change their ways, these men (and their brethrens of course) tried to create another way of doing things, giving us the Jeffersonian democracy and the Makhnovist movement.
    The most problematic for the Bolsheviks was not the military resistance of the Makhnovists but their ability to create a working, even under the extreme conditions of the never ending civil strife, libertarian society from scratch in an instant while enjoying the popular support.
    (Worth noting that during the 1917-1922 period only the communist controlled areas experience famine. Ideology trumps reason. As in the Soviet joke based on Lenin’s saying, “Communism is the final victory of Marxism over… reason.)


    [4] Yes, in a sense they were the Tea Party. The Zeleny movement, named after the Ukrainian ataman Zeleny (which means “green”), for example was not much different from the Tea Party, fighting for no government, no city involvement in their local self-governance, and exhibiting the similar racial intolerance towards Jews and often Russians (in Ukraine) thinly veiled as the resistance to the city oppression of the country toilers. They were the Tea Party of their time.

    [5] But you chose to use them to illustrate the article, thus giving them significance.
    I would chose this one:
    http://www.nestormakhno.info/images/makhno-berkman.gif
    I think this is the man, not his legend.

    [6] I see no evidence of either of us avoiding working, Dima – we both seem addicted to it!

    “It ain’t working, that’s the way you do it!..”

    Dmitry Berger

    ReplyDelete
  2. More on direct link between Makhno and Jefferson
    · Jefferson - The core political value of America is representative democracy; citizens have a civic duty to aid the state and resist corruption, especially monarchism and aristocracy.[1]
    · Makhnovists - basically the same.
    · Jefferson - The yeoman farmer best exemplifies civic virtue and independence from corrupting city influences; government policy should be for his benefit. Financiers, bankers and industrialists make cities the cesspools of corruption, and should be avoided.[2]
    · Makhnovists – almost word for word.
    · Jefferson - Americans had a duty to spread what Jefferson called the "Empire of Liberty" to the world, but should avoid "entangling alliances."[3]
    · Makhnovists – less so but acceptable.
    · Jefferson - The national government is a dangerous necessity to be instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security of the people, nation or community; it should be watched closely and circumscribed in its powers. Most Anti-Federalists from 1787-88 joined the Jeffersonians.[4]
    · Makhnovists – in time of extrimne danger, such as war, the same approcch, Hence the accusations of the Makhnovist etatism, as if you can run an army without using authoritive methods.
    · Jefferson - The wall of separation between church and state is the best method to keep religion free from intervention by the federal government, government free of religious disputes, and religion free from corruption by government.[5]
    · Makhnovists – the Russian orthodox church was a part of the Russian state. No state – no problem..
    · Jefferson - The federal government must not violate the rights of individuals. The Bill of Rights is a central theme.[6]
    · Makhnovists – same but an idividual means a toiler of any sort.
    · Jefferson - The federal government must not violate the rights of the states. The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 (written secretly by Jefferson and James Madison) proclaim these principles.[7]
    · Makhnovists – the local Soviet or Council is the alpha and omege of their bottom up structure of governance.
    · Jefferson - Freedom of speech and the press is the best method to prevent the tyranny of the people by their own government. The Federalists' violation of this idea through the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 became a major issue.[8]
    · Makhnovists – even more so, Allowed the hostile press to exist and agitate against them.
    · Jefferson - A standing army and navy are dangerous to liberty and should be avoided; much better was to use economic coercion such as the embargo.[9]
    · Makhnovists – the same. relied on the professional military core and the mass people’s militia instead of a huge standing army.
    · The United States Constitution was written in order to ensure the freedom of the people. A strict view of how the constitution was written is kept. However, "no society can make a perpetual constitution or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation."[10]
    · Makhnovists – the same sentiment essensially. There are certain basic priciples but commo sens e must prevail.
    · All men had the right to be informed, and thus, to have a say in the government. The protection and expansion of human liberty was one of the chief goals of the Jeffersonians. They also reformed their respective state systems of education. They believed that their citizens had the right and should be educated no matter their circumstance or status in life.
    Makhnovists – the same.

    ReplyDelete
  3. More on direct link between Makhno and Jefferson
    · Jefferson - The core political value of America is representative democracy; citizens have a civic duty to aid the state and resist corruption, especially monarchism and aristocracy.[1]
    · Makhnovists - basically the same.
    · Jefferson - The yeoman farmer best exemplifies civic virtue and independence from corrupting city influences; government policy should be for his benefit. Financiers, bankers and industrialists make cities the cesspools of corruption, and should be avoided.[2]
    · Makhnovists – almost word for word.
    · Jefferson - Americans had a duty to spread what Jefferson called the "Empire of Liberty" to the world, but should avoid "entangling alliances."[3]
    · Makhnovists – less so, but acceptable.
    · Jefferson - The national government is a dangerous necessity to be instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security of the people, nation or community; it should be watched closely and circumscribed in its powers. Most Anti-Federalists from 1787-88 joined the Jeffersonians.[4]
    · Makhnovists – in time of extreme danger, such as war, the same approach. Hence the accusations of the Makhnovist statism, as if you can run an army without using authoritarian methods.
    · Jefferson - The wall of separation between church and state is the best method to keep religion free from intervention by the federal government, government free of religious disputes, and religion free from corruption by government.[5]
    · Makhnovists – the Russian Orthodox Church was a part of the Russian state. No state – no problem..
    · Jefferson - The federal government must not violate the rights of individuals. The Bill of Rights is a central theme.[6]
    · Makhnovists – the same but an individual means a toiler of any sort.
    · Jefferson - The federal government must not violate the rights of the states. The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 (written secretly by Jefferson and James Madison) proclaim these principles.[7]
    · Makhnovists – the local Soviet or Council is the alpha and omega of their bottom up structure of governance.
    · Jefferson - Freedom of speech and the press is the best method to prevent the tyranny of the people by their own government. The Federalists' violation of this idea through the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 became a major issue.[8]
    · Makhnovists – even more so, Allowed the hostile press to exist and agitate against them.
    · Jefferson - A standing army and navy are dangerous to liberty and should be avoided; much better was to use economic coercion such as the embargo.[9]
    · Makhnovists – the same. Relied on the professional military core and the mass people’s militia instead of a huge standing army.
    · The United States Constitution was written in order to ensure the freedom of the people. A strict view of how the constitution was written is kept. However, "no society can make a perpetual constitution or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation."[10]
    · Makhnovists – the same sentiment essensially. There are certain basic priciples but commo sens e must prevail.
    · All men had the right to be informed, and thus, to have a say in the government. The protection and expansion of human liberty was one of the chief goals of the Jeffersonians. They also reformed their respective state systems of education. They believed that their citizens had the right and should be educated no matter their circumstance or status in life.
    Makhnovists – the same.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Dmitry, I enjoyed the comparison between Jefferson and Makhno that you presented in greater detail - you definitely made some arguable points. Some, like the rights and responsibilities of the States and the rights and responsibilities of local soviets don't really stand up to comparison due to scale; most States even in revolutionary America were bigger than some European countries, and I don't think Makhnovists would have even contemplated the constitutional supremacy of something that large.

    On your first set of comments I can offer the following.

    1] I disagree that quotations from any historical character can "mean little" - each quote gives an insight into the person's mindset, or perhaps the way that he wanted to project himself, and this is as important as anyone e;se's "objective" view - but perhaps you meant that the quotations have context and should be viewed in context. That is a given in the way that I work.

    4] I can see the Green/Tea Party comparison when you express it like that. (Ha! The "Green Tea Party"! The mind boggles!)

    5] Mainly because it was a striking image. I'm trying to make people want to keep reading. Okay that's kinda cheating, but it's good psychology! I'll have to take you up on something: Makhno the "Legend", particularly the "Legend in his own lifetime" is, to me, an integral part of Makhno the man. It has to be. People who were attracted to him because of their perception of him and of what he stood for caused, in a very real way, that legend, that perception to become part of reality. The legend had a practical and immediate effect, making it "real". I think instantly of, say, Winston Churchill, as a British example of the same phenomenon.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hi Marie,

    I found your blog on the Makhno and his partisan movement quite intriguing. I particularly identified with your statement that the more you investigate Makhno the less you are able to "grasp hold of truth, the more he becomes a wisp of smoke, a man whose legend seems more important than his reality. That reality retreats into iconography – can it be recaptured?"

    I have studied Makhno for more than five years now - having completed one thesis and currently working on a second - and also feel the slip into legend from historical reality the longer I study this topic. Despite an abundance of primary sources, from across the spectrum, the man and his movement alludes a simple narrative. Simultaneously a saint to many modern anarchists and a plague of biblical proportions to the Mennonite diaspora. Makhno is equally a symbol of profound freedom and dictatorial terror. While identifying as an anarchist, he was immortalized as a peasant-tsar. Indeed, according to Alexander Berkman, some peasants regarded Makhno as an incarnation of Pugachev (the great 17th c. peasant rebel and tsar-pretender).

    For me the missing piece the puzzle of the character of the Makhno movement lay in the perspective of the Ukrainian peasantry. Most of our primary sources are from dyed in the wool Makhnovist-anarchists or Mennonite victims of the Black Terror. Unfortunately, there is extremely little written from this angle. We know he is perceived today, in and out of Ukraine, but I have come to a dead end regarding how he was received in his own time.

    Clearly there was a popular element to his movement but how did this manifest itself? And how did the peasantry's attitude toward Makhno evolve over the course of the civil war?

    I would very much like to enter into a dialogue with you concerning Makhno. If you wish I could send you some of the research I have been conducting.

    Thank you for you insightful blog. It is truly inspiring.

    Sincerely,
    Sean Patterson

    ReplyDelete
  6. Thank you for this comment, Sean. I would love to read your research and discuss this topic with you.

    You might consider (if you haven't done so already) communicating with Dmitry Berger (see above). He has very forthright views about Makhno and an understanding of the time and place. Sometimes his forthrightness takes over a wee bit (I hope he won't mind my saying so), but so far he has proved to be the most interesting source I have found.

    One thing Dmitry said to me was that out of all the pictures of Makhno that exist the one which is probably closest to "the real Makhno" is the one of him in a bathing suit, standing next to Berkman.

    As a person who hopes for a better way of doing things than we have at present, my so far rather superficial studies into anarchism have been very valuable to me. I am a believer in Beckett's famous "fail better" advice. Any further insight you can give would be greatly appreciated.

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  7. Hi Sean.
    As Marie indicated I am a self-appointed expert on Makhno.
    There is an ample evidence of the Ukrainian peasantry's attitude toward Makhno, in my opinion. However, it is scattered around in many little fragments not translated from Ukrainian or Russian.
    Maxno.ru site has those little documents including what is quoted on its forum. But it is not an easy task to sieve through it.
    If you contact me directly at dberger@primus.ca I can provide whatever assistance I can muster.

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  8. Hi Marie and Dmitry,

    Thank you both for your responses. I will definitely email you both some of the work I have done. I'm very encouraged that there is material out there from the peasantry's view.

    Marie, what is an email address I can send my material to you?

    ReplyDelete
  9. Hi Sean - try Ms_Marie_Marshall{a}hotmail.com

    ReplyDelete