Edit for clarity: I’m not asking why the Tankie/Anarchist grudge exist. I’m curious about what information sources - mentors, friends, books, TV, cultural osmosis, conveys that information to people. Where do individuals encounter this information and how does it become important to them. It’s an anthropology question about a contemporary culture rather than a question about the history of leftism.
I’ve been thinking about this a bit lately. Newly minted Anarchists have to learn to hate Lenin and Stalin and whoever else they have a grudge against. They have to encounter some materials or teacher who teaches them “Yeah these guys, you have to hate these guys and it has to be super-personal like they kicked your dog. You have to be extremely angry about it and treat anyone who doesn’t disavow them as though they’re literally going to kill you.”
Like there’s some process of enculturation there, of being brought in to the culture of anarchism, and there’s a process where anarchists learn this thing that all (most?) anarchists know and agree on.
Idk, just anthropology brain anthropologying. Cause like if someone or something didn’t teach you this why would you care so much?
Makhno is a pretty sordid example from a modern perspective (with the abuse he facilitated). It doesn’t seem like the most intelligent shake for anarchism considering the “arming people with little oversight” produced pogroms. Idk, it’s like one of us holding up Gonzalo or one of those. Can I suggest KPAM or something? You still get a stabbed-in-the-back-by-commies narrative.
On the other hand I also wouldn’t hold up Sankara as a shining example because he definitely did some cool things and had some cool ideas, but ultimately he was installed by a non-communist in a military coup and then deposed by the same non-communist in another military coup a few years later.
This is literally Zenz style gossip if you look at any modern studies of the period.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230610081318/http://www.ditext.com/voline/687.html
Offhand example. ctrl f “The second fault of Makhno” for the part I’m thinking of. It’s a highly sympathetic source and still contains things like that. Is this testimony debunked?
Haha I actually have to hand this one to you, because I was sure you were talking about the mythology of Makhno the Jew Killer given the progroms bit. The Pogroms bit is the one that’s Zenz style gossip given modern appraisals. Voline was correct.
From a modern perspective most of this period is quite literally horror. The Reds were not much better on this front, in fact quite worse given the way the Red Army sourced soldiers and what those soldiers did in turn. The Whites and Ukrainian Nationalists were the absolute worst.
No, the pogrom thing was Makhno recklessly handing out guns in the name of, uh, autonomy, I assume, and then some of those people getting together (independent of any direction from Maknho) going and doing ethnic cleansing on whichever ethnicity they disliked before Makhno’s people circled around to putting down the rightwing death squad that they were responsible for. I know Makhno personally targeting ethnicities isn’t a true story, I just think that he was immensely negligent and idealistic on the issue of arming populations and it resulted in some of the most needless deaths imaginable in vulnerable communities.
Could you elaborate on the Reds being worse? I know about the mythology a bit later in WW2 where it was part of their “Asiatic hordes” image that they did such things more than the other armies, but I don’t know about claims from this time. I bear some skepticism that such things would be worse under Lenin, since he was pretty progressive on gender equality, compared to someone who is implied to have personally engaged in gangremoved.
Are you referencing the pogroms of Menonite colonists who literally came up from Germany to settle Ukranian land for their lebensraum?
Sure so Narimanov quite literally sent Lenin letters while he was the head of the Azerbaijan Soviet complaining that the Red Army was literally SAing women out there.
Another good example is Tryapitsyn, who literally commanded murder rape battalions who committed so many atrocities that culimnated in the Nikolayevsk incident. Japan after hearing of it (because his forces slaughtered Japanese in much of that point in time) sent a letter to the Central Committee telling them to put a leash on their dog. The Central Committee did put a leash on their dog, but Japan was the nail in the coffin not of a campaign of murder/SA that the Central Committee knew about but the fact that he was also an annoying little fucker who liked to question orders and complain about Soviet policy. So they killed him by firing squad.
Much of this information comes from the scholarship of the last release of Soviet archives that the Russian Federation released, and is compiled by Alexey Tepylyakov (RU Link) in his 2017 paper “Hundreds of Girls Became Women”: Mass Sexual Violence by the Partisans of Siberia and the Far East 1918-1920" (RU Link).
They were a group, yes, but just like Israelis today, killing “civilian” settlers is acceptable collateral damage for useful military actions, but just slaughtering them is barbaric. If they’re on someone else’s land, kick them out, jail them, but there’s usually not a good reason to kill them. Secondly, it wasn’t just them, it was Jews too (remember, we’re talking about actions not done on Makhno’s direct orders) and I presume Roma and other heavily disenfranchised minorities.
https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/makhno-nestor-ivanovich/
On the Reds, I appreciate the information, though from what I can tell Tryapitsyn was killed because of the massacres (not intrinsically but as a concession to Japan), as is even said on the second paragraph of the Wikipedia page you linked.
So in terms of anarchism generally this is actually one of the hard problems of anarchism: What’s the moral way to deal with resource competition?
I’d also like to point out that this issue of people going rogue and the study of anarchism in practice in the Maknovischia lead to the development of organizational platformism by Peter Arshinov as a direct response to how to prevent such things from occuring.
Makhnovischna was anarchism before platformism, which often had a lot of problems with keeping everyone on the same page.
The massacre you referring to is this. I’d suggest you read the history of it because it’s not as clear cut as “Makhno loyalists murder innocent Menonites”. There were steps taken before and escaalations and reprisals which is literally just the history of this time and place, but ultimately there was a massacre.
As for Jews, here’s some reading, it’s very muddy on if these things happened, but I would not be surprised if they did:
https://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/colonies_of_ukraine/pogroms/ukrainianpogroms.htm
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/makhno-nestor/works/1927/11/anti-semitism.htm
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/nestor-makhno-to-the-jews-of-all-countries
As for Roma. I 100% believe it happened, and 100% believe nobody spoke of it ever again except through rumor.
Didn’t Makhno himself work on developing platformism in his exile in France? I guess I wouldn’t be surprised if what he wrote wasn’t really taken seriously since, for most of the end of his life, all he seemed to do was alienate people and bicker until he died in squalor.
Anyway, I appreciate the conversation and the resources.