A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

became a major region of peasant revolt just at the height of the Denikin offensive. Nestor Makhno was the Pancho Villa of the Russian Revolution. He was born in 1889 in Hulyai Pole, the centre of his peasant insurrection. During 1905 he had joined the Anarchists and, after seven years in the Butyrka jail, returned to Hulyai Pole in 1917, where he formed the Peasant Union — later reformed as the Soviet — and organized a brigade, which carried out the seizure of the local gentry's estates. During the civil war Makhno's partisans fought almost everyone: the Rada forces; Kaledin's Cossacks; the Germans and the Hetmanates; Petliura's Ukrainian Nationalists; the rival bands of Grigoriev and countless other warlords; the Whites; and the Reds. The strength of his guerrilla army lay in the quality and the speed of its cavalry, in the support it received from the peasantry, in its intimate knowledge of the local terrain and in the fierce loyalty of its men. Makhno's alleged exploits, which included drinking bouts of superhuman length, gave him a legendary status among the local peasants (they called him 'Batko', meaning 'father'). It was not unlike the myth of Stenka Razin as a peasant champion of truth and justice who was blessed with supernatural powers. Under the black flag of the Anarchists, Makhno stood for a stateless peasant revolution based on the local self-rule of the free and autonomous Soviets that had emerged in the countryside during 1917. When the Whites advanced into the Ukraine Makhno put his 15,000 men at the disposal of the Reds. In exchange for arms from Moscow, his troops became part of the Third Division under Dybenko, although they retained their own internal partisan organization. Trotsky made a point of blaming their lack of discipline for the Red defeats.* In June he ordered the arrest of Makhno as a 'counter-revolutionary' — his anarchist conception of a local peasant revolution was inimical to the Proletarian Dictatorship — and had several of his followers shot. Makhno's partisans fled to the forests and turned their guns against the Reds. Most of the peasants in the south-east Ukraine supported his revolt.

From Tsaritsyn, on 3 July, Denikin issued his Moscow Directive. The three main White forces were to converge on the capital in a gigantic pincer movement along the main railways, thus cutting off its main lines of supply. Wrangel's Caucasian Army was to march up the Volga from Tsaritsyn to Saratov, and turn in from there to Penza, Nizhnyi Novgorod and on to Moscow; General Sidorin and the Don Army were to advance north via Voronezh; while Mai-Maevsky's Volunteer Army was to march from Kharkov via Kursk, Orel and

* It is true that Makhno's partisans often broke down under pressure from the Whites. But given how poorly they were supplied by the Reds, this was hardly surprising. They certainly did not deserve the vilification they received from Trotsky. This in fact had less to do with Makhno than it did with Stalin. By laying the blame for the Red defeats on the guerrilla methods of Makhno's partisans, Trotsky could attack the 'guerrilla-ism' of the Military Opposition and thus reinforce his argument for military discipline and centralization.

Tula. It was an all-or-nothing gamble, counting on the speed of the White cavalry to exploit the temporary weakness of the Reds. Wrangel bitterly opposed the Directive. He called it the 'death sentence' of the White Army. In his view it ran the risk of advancing too far and broadly without adequate protection in the rear in the form of trained reserves, sound administration and lines of supply to maintain the offensive. Wrangel preferred to concentrate the troops and advance more slowly in one sector — namely his own on the Volga. But when he put this to Denikin, the latter exclaimed: 'I see you want to be the first man to set foot in Moscow!'²¹

With hindsight it is clear that the Directive was a disastrous mistake: it cost the Whites the civil war. Denikin himself later admitted that the Front became much too broad, mainly because the cavalry commanders, whom he could not control, took it upon themselves to expand the territory under their occupation. It was a case of too many generals and not enough authority. As the Front grew, so too did the need for fresh troops and supplies. Yet the frontline units were by this stage several hundred miles from their bases in the rear. They resorted to violent requisitioning and conscription from the local population, thereby alienating the very people they were supposed to liberate. Denikin had always said that the advance on Moscow would depend on a 'national uprising of the people against the Soviet regime'; but the effect of his armies' actions was to rally them behind it.²²