The Russian Revolution in Ukraine

And the more this mental anguish tormented me, the more I was moved to search out the most out-of-the-way corners of the countryside, together with my comrades, to tell the peasants the truth about their situation and about the state of the Revolution. I was willing to set aside all commitments in Gulyai-Pole for the moment, to carry this message to the peasants, for unless they threw their fresh energies into the struggle, the Revolution was doomed.

This work kept me away from Gulyai-Pole for several days. At this time I was cheered by the imminent return of P. A. Kropotkin to Russia, knowing he would draw the attention of the comrades to the oppressed countryside. And who knows? — maybe our old mentor, Uncle Vanya (Nikolai Rogdaev), who had been so active in Ukraine in tsarist times, would also return, along with other comrades less well-known but very active in the old days. Then our activity would get a real boost. The toiling masses would receive thoroughgoing replies to the questions which tormented them. The voice of anarchism would be heard everywhere in the oppressed countryside and would collect and group under its banner the toiling masses to do battle with the pomeshchiks and factory owners for a new world of freedom, equality, and solidarity among all the people.

I believed in this project to the point of fanaticism, and on its behalf I became more and more absorbed in the everyday life of the peasants and workers. I strongly urged the Gulyai-Pole Anarchist Group to do the same.

Chapter 8 The Workers’ Strike

Early in June the anarchists of Aleksandrovsk invited me to a conference being held to unify all the local anarchists into a federation. I came immediately to help the comrades come to an agreement. The Aleksandrovsk anarchists were all manual or intellectual workers. Formally they were divided into anarchocommunists and anarcho-individualists, but in reality they were all revolutionary anarcho-communists. All of them I esteemed as the closest of friends and I did my best to help them set up a federation. After organizing themselves, they began to organize the workers and for a time had a great ideological influence on them.

When I returned from Aleksandrovsk, the workers of the Gulyai-Pole Union of Metal and Carpentry Workers invited me to help them set up their union and sign up as a member myself. And when I did this they asked me to direct their impending strike.

Now I was completely absorbed, firstly by the affairs of the Peasant’s Union, secondly by the workers. However, among the workers there were comrades with a better grasp of workplace problems than myself, for which I was grateful. I undertook to lead the strike, hoping to win over these fine comrades and draw them into our Group. One of them — V. Antonov — was sympathetic to the S-Rs. The others were non-party. Of these especially energetic were Seregin and Mironov.

Before declaring the strike, the workers of both foundries, all the mills, home workshops, blacksmith’s and joiner’s shops held a meeting. The upshot was that I was asked to formulate their demands and present them through the union executive to the owners of the enterprises. While this was going on it became clear to me that comrades Antonov, Seregin, and Mironov had been working as anarchists for quite some time in the workshop committees. In fact Antonov had been elected chairman of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies. These comrades had not joined our Group only because they were overloaded with their work in the shops. Naturally I was against this. From the day of my return from prison I had insisted on the necessity of our Group being well-informed about the work of all our supporters among the peasants. So I strongly urged these comrades to join the Group immediately and in future to coordinate with us their own work in the workshop committees and among the workers generally. The comrades entered the Group and then joined with me in summoning the proprietors of all the enterprises in order to present them with the workers’ demands, which reduced simply to: a wage increase of 80 to 100 percent.