Within a month of the coup d'etat that brought the Bolsheviks to power in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg), Lenin had opened formal armistice talks with the German government. The Allies knew that a separate peace with Russia would free hundreds of thousands of German troops for use on the Western Front, or worse, allow German troops to transit Russian territory and attack India. The British and French governments decided to support organized resistance to Bolshevik rule inside Russia. One of the first formal organizations to attract notice was the "Volunteer Army" (VA) forming on the territory of the Don Cossacks to the east of Rostov. The VA had by the middle of January 1918 reached a strength of 3,500, almost all of them former officers in the Imperial Russian Army who had made their way across the country to join him. However, after a promising start, a revolt by the Don Cossack people deprived the VA of logistical support and it withdrew southwards to the province of Kuban, concentrating near Ekaterinodar (later Krasnodar). The French government realized it had an opportunity in the Ukraine to create another centre of resistance. The Ukraine had steadily distanced itself from Russian authority since the March 1917 revolution, and by the end of that year the Rada (Council) of the "Ukrainian Democratic Republic" had declared its independence from Greater Russia. The French military mission in Kiev, capital of the Ukraine, had some influence over the Rada and by extension over two powerful military organizations - the Czech Legion, made up of over 35,000 former prisoners of war, and the 1st Polish Army Corps, both of which had been working to suppress revolutionary activity and keep order on behalf of the Rada. Supporting the Ukraine would also allow Romania to stay in the war on the Allied side. However, the French plans collapsed when, in short order in the last ten days of January 1918: the Czech Legion refused to follow French orders and went neutral; Ukrainian delegates went on their own to join the peace talks as a separate nation; and the Bolsheviks invaded the Ukraine. By 7 February 1918 the Bolsheviks had taken Kiev and the Polish Corps had been forced into German territory, where it surrendered. On 9 February the Rada signed a separate peace treaty with the German in exchange for protecting the Ukraine against invasion from Russia. Although the Bolsheviks were in effective control of the Ukraine, they were not in control of the peace negotiations. Trotsky, as Foreign Affairs Commissar and head delegate, was as dissatisfied with the Germans' high-handed attitude as they were with his intransigence. The Germans took matters into their own hands on 18 February and ordered a general advance both east across the Ukraine and northeast through Estonia through Petrograd. In the Ukraine, the Germans met almost no resistance, advancing at rates of over 50 kilometers a day. After five days of this the Germans proposed a new and even harsher set of terms at the peace talks table. Lenin realized that another two or three weeks of German pressure would see the Bolsheviks out of power completely, got his government to accept the terms and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed on 3 March. This treaty took Russia out of the war as well as its ceding 34% of its prewar population (over 55 million people), 32% of its agricultural land, over half of its industrial plant, and 89% of its coal mines. The Ukraine was occupied all the way to Taganrog by 28 German divisions and at least as many Austro-Hungarian ones, over half a million troops in all. When the Rada (which had re-established itself in Kiev after the Bolsheviks left in March, and was now led by a Ukrainian nationalist named Simon Petliura) proved unable to supply the occupiers with 300 truckloads of grain a day, as it had agreed to do under its separate peace treaty, the German and Austrian troops collected it themselves from the peasants. A wave of revolts swept the countryside and at the end of April the Germans deposed the Rada and installed a puppet government under Hetman Skoropadsky. Makhno's Guerrillas Petliura withdrew to the central and southern Ukraine and began organizing resistance against the occupiers. Makhno was also busy raising guerrilla units in the eastern half of the Ukraine. In June he traveled to Moscow to meet with other Anarchist leaders and even had a short meeting with Lenin. Lenin had little patience with Anarchism and taunted Makhno that "all Anarchists are dreamers." (Although Trotsky wrote in his memoirs that he and Lenin had briefly considered setting aside a portion of the Ukraine as a form of Anarchist experimental colony, this is not borne out by the later behavior of these two men towards Makhno.) When he returned to Gulyai-Polye in July, he found that Austrian soldiers had burned his family home to the ground and shot his brother, who had been crippled in the war. From that point on he became an active guerrilla leader against the German and Austrian occupiers. His small bands of insurgents traveled by horse faster than the regular cavalry units send to capture him, and the popular support he got from the peasants let him stay free of any fixed logistical base. His troops would appear suddenly in small towns or estates, kill all the landowners, officers and security troops, and vanish again to reappear a 200 kilometers away two days later. When Makhno's troops captured German or Austrian troops, they would kill the officers and set the soldiers free, telling them to return to their countries and work for social revolution there. This was not as naive as it seems, as the soldiers usually complied - the divisions garrisoning Russia were all very low-quality ones, understrength, badly demoralized and shot through with subversion, just as Germany itself was on the brink of revolution. As the fall of 1918 approached, it became common knowledge that defeat for the Central Powers was just a matter of time and that Skoropadsky's government would collapse as soon as the occupiers withdrew. Makhno was becoming a regional authority in his own right. It was now normal for him to coordinate and even direct operation of other partisan bands in the Ukraine. In October, Makhno's forces, which amounted to several infantry and cavalry regiments, with large numbers of captured machine guns and a battery of field guns, had reached a size where he could capture Gulyai-Polye and hold it against an Austrian division. The Armistice of 11 November ended the First World War and effectively canceled the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. It took some time for the Germans and Austrians to withdraw from the Ukraine, but the last of them were gone by December. Skoropadsky promptly fled the country and Petliura occupied Kiev as the head of the "Ukrainian People's Republic." He gained nominal control over most of the Ukraine, but not in the region that was under Makhno's influence. He saw the government in Kiev as another confiscatory agency reaching for the peasants' land and bread, little different from ones in St. Petersburg and Moscow that had gone before, and soon his troops were fighting Petliura's forces. On 18 December, a brigade of troops from the French 156th Colonial Infantry Division landed in Odessa as the advance guard of an Allied intervention force that was supposed to total twelve French and Greek divisions. The city was under the control of Petliura's forces at the time, but they were driven off by a detachment of the Volunteer Army (which had been transported from the Kuban) with support from French naval guns. By January 1919 the Allied interventionist forces in the Ukraine would total 80,000 men, mostly French but with large Greek and Romanian contingents. The French also occupied Kherson and the Crimea, leaving the British free to intervene in the Don and Kuban regions where the majority of the VA (now under the control of General Denikin) was still located. The French intervention and the apparent weakness of Petliura's government led the Bolsheviks to invade the Ukraine again. Kiev fell on 3 February 1919 without a fight, Petliura fled to Galicia, and the Reds headed for Kherson and Odessa. The majority of the troops, 15,000 Red Cossack cavalrymen under Grigoriev, laid siege to Kherson and the Greek troops garrisoning the town withdrew at the end of February. By mid-March Odessa was under siege as well. The French troops there were demoralized and refused to fight, and by 5 April the Allies had withdrawn from the city. Shortly afterward the French also withdrew their detachments from the Crimea, leaving 10,000 White troops from the Volunteer Army to occupy the peninsula. This was the end of direct Allied intervention in the Ukraine: from now on the French would concentrate on supporting Poland as a centre of anti-Bolshevik resistance. While the Red forces were concentrating on the areas to the west of the Crimea, Denikin's Volunteer Army was pressing in from southeast of the Ukraine. In January 1919, White Cossack cavalry units began to probe beyond the Don River into Ekaterinoslav province. They were met by Makhno's forces, who were the only organized opposition to the Whites in the area. For four months, they would clash in a series of battles in the region between Mariupol and Taganrog. Both sides were highly mobile - the White forces were mostly cavalry and Makhno's infantry had by this time equipped themselves with tatchankas, small horse-drawn carts on springs that were common among the peasants and allowed them to move up to 120 kilometers a day. The conflict continued indecisively because Makhno was too weak to defeat the Whites, who at the time were making their main effort north towards Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad, still later Volgograd). Even so, Denikin was led to offer a bounty of half a million rubles for Makhno's head. As soon as it appeared that the western half of the Ukraine was secure, the Bolshevik forces swung east to meet Denikin. Makhno first met up with senior leaders of the Red Army in March 1919, when the 3rd Division of the 2nd Army entered the area under his control. At the time, he saw a greater threat in the advancing White armies than he did in the Bolsheviks, and agreed to place his force under Bolshevik command subject to the conditions that: it retain its internal organization and identity; that it receive only military, not political, direction from the Revolutionary Military Council; that it be supplied on the same scale as other Red Army units; and that it would not be removed from the Ukraine. Once concluded, Makhno's force joined as the 3rd Brigade of the 3rd Division, but later it would be called the First Revolutionary-Insurrectionary Ukrainian Division, the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of the Ukraine (Makhnovist), or just as "the Makhnovschina." This military alliance lasted only a few months. Trotsky, now President of the Military Revolutionary Council and therefore head of the Red Army, viewed the growing social and ideological influence of Makhnovist peasant anarchism with alarm. At its simplest level, Trotsky went out of his way to denigrate Anarchism in general and Makhno in particular because of his vision of the Soviet Republic as a modern industrial state with workers no less regimented, disciplined and centrally controlled than the professional Red Army soldiers who guarded them. Makhno's concept of a loose federation of peasant communes and his freebooting military methods were anathema to this vision. (Of course, Trotsky would revise his opinions later, just as Lenin and Stalin would revise their views on the militia-like citizen armies they then favored.) Anarchist activities had been officially discouraged and Anarchist papers had been shut down in most of the cities under Bolshevik control, but the southern Ukraine was the only place where Anarchism had both territory in which to operate and an army to back it up. During the early months of 1919, the Makhnovists had sponsored a series of "Regional Congresses of Peasants, Workers and Insurgents" in the areas under their control to discuss social and political reorganization and reconstruction. Makhno wished to rebuild society along the anarcho-libertarian theories he had learned from his old cellmate, Peter Arshinov (who rejoined Makhno in the Ukraine in April 1919). This meant that peasants would control their own farms and decide at the local level where their crops went, that workers would manage their own factories, and that civic authority would be based on locally elected free soviets that were not subordinate to a central government. These ideas were well received by the independent-minded peasants of the Ukraine and the Bolshevik Party found it difficult to do much meaningful political work in competition with them. After a series of provocative actions and publications by the Bolsheviks, the scanty supplies given to Makhno's Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army (RIA) were completely cut off and open conflict began between the Bolsheviks and Anarchists. The incident that Trotsky chose to start trouble with was the Third Regional Congress of local soviets from the Gulyai-Polye area that was planned for 15 June 1919. On 4 June Trotsky issued a telegram forbidding the congress, calling it an act of high treason by Makhno's brigade against the Soviet Republic and the Soviet Front and calling for the arrest of Makhno and everyone else involved with the congress. Three days later Trotsky declared in the Bolshevik press that Makhno had allowed Denikin's forces to pass through the front. This was of course not true - in fact, Red troops on the northern flank of the RIA had given way and let large amounts of Cossack cavalry through, taking Gulyai-Polye on 6 June. A day or two later the Reds sent Makhno an armored train and promises of further reinforcements as the gap in the front opened wider. Commissar Klim Voroshilov, then on the staff of the 14th Army, was on this train and had orders from Trotsky to arrest Makhno and the other leaders of the RIA. Makhno was warned in time and responded by formally resigning as the RIA's commander and vanishing into the countryside with a small guard of cavalry. He ordered his unit commanders at the front to remain under Red command, which they did. More Russian Civil War in the Ukraine Introduction The Civil War Begins The Whites Advance The Whites Retreat Betrayal An Anarchist Army? Armies of the Russian Civil War Summons (poem) Back to Cry Havoc #32 Table of Contents Back to Cry Havoc List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2000 by David W. Tschanz. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com