INTRODUCTION

«Atamans» – leaders or «warlords» to use a somewhat anachronistic term – were an important feature of the Russian Civil War. In the years from 1917 to 1921 they and their troops controlled large parts of the territory of the former Russian Empire. These men and their detachments shaped the reality of the war before Denikin’s «Volunteer army» challenged Bolshevik rule, and were still active when the last counterrevolutionary dream had faded.^[1] In a certain sense they were the true sons of the conflict that emerged from the collapse of the empire. The subject of this article, the actions of atamans and their armies, is much in line with the topic of this issue of Ab Imperio – «Vandalizing the Garden» – as that is precisely what the atamans were doing. To speak of these actors is to speak of violence. In this article I argue that violence was not just a result of certain factors, but an integral part of ataman leadership – a mode of behavior resulting from a way of living that can be called a «culture of violence.»
In general, the Russian Civil War is associated with utmost cruelty, atrocities, and violent excesses, which are exemplified in photographs^[2] or in descriptions such as the following: In 1918 after a struggle with troops of the Ukrainian Hetman a group of captured soldiers was brought before Nestor Makhno, one of the most famous atamans of the Civil War. Makhno waited silently for a time, then suddenly raised his arm and yelled: «Tear them apart . . . and be done with it!» His men went to work with their sabers and killed the captives by hacking off parts of their bodies. It was like «chopping cabbage» (slovno srubaia kochany kapusty), the author wrote.^[3]
This account comes to us from the White Guard officer Gerasimenko. Reading his book about Nestor Makhno one might think that excessive violence and cruelty are, above all, idiosyncratic phenomena, outcomes of the fact that power had been in the hands of persons affected by mental illness and pathological desires. Memoirs have a tendency to personalize violence; historiography, on the other hand, shows some preference for rationalization. Violence can be considered an indicator of the degree of severity of conflicts. The Russian Civil War is merely a notable example. Hence, phenomenological inventories of violent acts are usually just collected, without the inclusion of any deeper analysis of the violence itself.^[4]
Ideology or, more specifically, extreme ideologies were and are a common explanation for atrocities and excesses. On the one hand, White ideology saw not only the Bolsheviks but also the Jewish population of the former empire as evil and guilty of causing the revolution.^[5] On the other hand, Red ideology entailed the justification for and even suggested the necessity of exterminating the representatives of the ancien régime.^[6] Ideology, indeed, may have been a reason for violence in its various forms, but this assumes that elites and masses shared ideologies to a great extent. While anti-Semitism of the elites and popular anti-Judaism may indeed have shared many features, they were not the same. So it is premature to say that anti-Semitic ideology alone was the reason for the pogroms of the Civil War. This suggestion also loses some plausibility if we consider military recruitment techniques and the overwhelming number of deserters on both sides.^[7] It is clear that many Red and White soldiers had no interest whatsoever in politics or ideology. Thus, the extent to which ideology can explain violence and atrocities committed by various «Green» or ataman armies is questionable. I will not argue that ideology was not among the causes of atrocities and excesses but rather that it was just one factor among many and, perhaps, not the most important one.

SOME CONCEPTUAL REMARKS

Sociology turned violence from a secondary into a primary object of research. In particular, the work of Wolfgang Sofsky drew attention to the idea that violence might not be only a result of circumstances, but a central feature of society and culture.^[8] One need not agree with Sofsky in every detail of his argument. Indeed, some findings of his work have been subject to serious criticism.^[9] On the whole, however, we can learn from Sofsky that violence tells us something about perpetrators, their relationships to each other, their feelings and psychology as well as the conditions and dynamics of violent processes. Violence more often than not has a meaning of its own. Therefore, violence should be understood rather than explained.^[10]
Some important aspects of violence have only recently received more systematic attention. One such aspect is communication. Jan Philipp Reemtsma has drawn attention to the fact that violence as social action always has a triadic structure, which means that it involves third persons. Violence usually is directed not only at a concrete physical object, but perhaps even more at others witnessing the violent act. The bullet hitting the person standing next to me in the trench always talks to me, as Reemtsma put it simply at a conference.^[11]
Furthermore, violent acts are not only directed against enemy objects. They also have a communicative function for the community committing this violence and its members. Violent actions can be understood as representations of power relations, hierarchy, and identity. So violence must be taken, at least potentially, as a kind of communication between enemies and members of the same group.
Returning to the incident cited at the beginning of this article, while we are confronted with a cruel act, we can also try to read it as a meaningful action that tells us something about the community of perpetrators and their conditions. Due to the communicative dimension of violence we can interpret violent acts as elements of a set of rules that ascribe meaning to actions and behavior under certain conditions. In the case of the Russian Civil War, we are dealing with a situation that can be described as a kind of social anomie^[12] – the breakdown of state order in 1917 led to a power vacuum in which people and communities had to find new means of orientation in a dramatically changing environment. This is a breeding ground for cultures of violence because the rules in question are characterized by the central importance of violence as a point of reference and values.^[13]
Under the concept of culture, I wish to denote a set of rules that allows people to interpret, understand, and act in their environment. These rules can shift dramatically in a changing environment.^[14] New sets of rules need not replace the older system completely because different cultures can exist simultaneously. However, older sets of rules may be put aside because they do not aid the people in finding effective solutions to problems in a given situation. This is, in a certain sense, a question of timing. Cultures of violence may emerge in a changing environment when the set of actions needed to adapt to a given situation changes. As practices change in reaction to external events, the criteria for «normality» in human imagination, thinking, and acting also change. In this case, practices shift toward a culture of violence. This new or different conceptualization of one’s self, society, and environment has repercussions for the construction of reality. This mechanism may be strong enough to reinforce itself and lead to escalations of violence. The environment of social groups disposing of such mechanisms are, however, more complex than the groups themselves. Consequently, other factors may change the situation and can fundamentally alter the context in which cultures of violence take shape. Cultures of violence, as I understand them, may be ephemeral, emerging spontaneously and disappearing depending on external conditions.^[15] It seems to me that such a concept can help one to understand the escalation of violent processes in the Russian Civil War.
Compared to its theoretical framework the scope of this article is rather humble. It deals simply with one aspect of cultures of violence, namely, leadership in ataman armies, which is exemplified with reference to one great ataman of the Russian Civil War – Nestor Makhno. Nevertheless, the theoretical background of the present interpretation is necessary to be able to provide «thick descriptions» of violence committed by ataman armies.

SOCIAL AND CULTURAL SUBSTRATE OF ATAMAN ARMIES

Under conditions of social anomie in the Russian countryside in 1917 a realm of almost unlimited possibilities was evolving, creating opportunity but also unleashing fear and anxieties. One possible outcome was a Hobbesian situation of bellum omnium contra omnes. Satisfying one’s own desire was as likely as falling victim to the violence of others. Consequently, violence, a social menace that became a means to its own end, emerged as an increasingly important factor of social life.
At first, the deadly consequences of the spread of such practices seemed to be less obvious than the opportunities they promised. To put it frankly, the peasant communes were not particularly unhappy that state authority was vanishing. In contrast to the cities, the villages were self-sufficient. They made the best of the situation and took what they had considered theirs for a very long time – the gentry land. It may very well be that in tsarist times peasants sometimes went to court to defend their rights, as Jane Burbank has shown,^[16] but this process of civilization or modernization did not go so deep as to change or even to challenge traditional conceptions of common law. Chernyi peredel was a correction of a situation imposed by a system of law alien to peasant culture. This redistribution of land went hand in hand with the destruction of any sign of gentry culture. Manors were set on fire and furniture, whole libraries, and other items of high culture were burned to ashes.^[17] Whatever civilizing and modernizing effects in the countryside might have taken place, by 1917 not much was left of them.
The younger peasants who returned from the front, the frontoviki, played an important role in this process. The frontoviki were fed up with a political system and a social order that treated them like animals and cannon fodder. They brought into the villages not only their anger and militancy but also military skills and sometimes political knowledge, not to mention weapons, including rifles, machine guns, and even artillery.^[18] Frontoviki usually opted for more violent actions against representatives and structures of the old order than did the older peasants. In addition, they challenged the authority of their fathers and, thus, the traditional power relations of the villages. This challenge was due to the fact that the outer world of the villages changed dramatically in 1917. Under conditions of such societal atomization, the experiences of the older generation often no longer suited the situation. Hence, traditional authority was challenged. Nonetheless, the breakdown of societal order on a macro level strengthened order on the micro level. This was true for numerous gangs that emerged as kinds of self-help communities of social outsiders as well as for village communes.
Confronted with the demands of new powers and regimes much more alien to the villages than the tsarist one had been, many of them chose to protect themselves by force. Collective violent action had always been an integral part of peasant village culture. Violence took the form of collective fistfights between parts of villages or whole villages against each other, defense against bandits, punishment of delinquents (samosud) and, last but not least, violence broke out in the course of communication with representatives of the state. «Women’s revolts» (bab’i bunty) had been a classical device of tempered use of violence to protect the interests of the village.^[19] I do not intend to postulate a specific connection between emerging cultures of violence and the village, or to say that village culture was a culture of violence. The phenomenon of «Green» and ataman armies, however, is clearly unique to rural spaces and was in many ways tied to the villages. This was true above all for the Ukrainian part of the tsarist empire. These territories were the main battlefields of the Civil War, where front lines and zones of control sometimes changed daily, and nothing comparable to state order existed. Moreover, the peasantry in these regions had been more independent and economically stronger than in other parts of the empire, except for the Cossacks, who had been a kind of armed free peasantry for centuries. So the preconditions for independent peasant warfare were very favorable in Ukraine.^[20]
The influence of the frontoviki may have been essential in decisions to opt for violent resistance against any intruders. In Ukraine, villages even fought against units of the Imperial German Army. Sometimes peasants had considerable success, especially when several villages cooperated. In such cases peasants often entrusted military leadership to former officers of the tsarist army or teachers.^[21] A typical example is the following story:

“In June 1918 a Bolshevik grain procurement detachment came into the village of Khvorostan in the province of Voronezh. The Bolsheviks not only came to collect grain but also to find and kill enemies and last, but not least, to feed themselves. Oscillating between dissatisfaction and wrath, a young teacher by the name of Krasikov channeled the discontent of the peasants into organized resistance. Under his leadership the peasants killed the commissar and all the men of the detachment. Some time later, when the Bolsheviks sent a detachment of sailors (matrosy) to punish the village, the peasants were able to beat them back. This was due to the almost military organization and discipline Krasikov had been able to introduce. The Bolsheviks were completely surprised and lost the battle, though they even had an armored car with them. The car was intended for use in firing on retreating peasants, but instead it was isolated and paralyzed. The soldiers in the car were forced to surrender. The peasants immediately killed them or, more precisely, they «tore them apart» (komanda bronevika byla rasterzana tolpoi), as the author described the situation.”^[22]

A number of other sources confirm the brutality of such armed clashes. Wounded soldiers were beaten to death with sticks, buried or burned alive.^[23] It may very well be that it was only a small step from the collective lynch justice inherent in peasant culture up to the twentieth century in response to the atrocities of the Civil War. More important, I think, was the context. Threatened by bandits, Red and then White detachments, all requesting grain and food from them, and making them choose between the threats of severe punishment and starvation, many peasant villages reacted accordingly and fought back as hard as they could.
The peasantry, however, was not homogeneous in its reaction to attacks from the outside, and the peasants did not share identical attitudes about how to handle the situation. A substantial part of the peasantry just wanted to be left alone and continue their agricultural lifestyle. They had taken possession of gentry land and for them this alone would have been a significant result of the revolution. They had no need or use for a state or any other central power. A good deal of Nestor Makhno’s appeal for the peasants was that his «anarchism» was designed exactly along the lines of a «free peasantry.» This freedom, however, was challenged almost daily and nearly always with a fight.
There were also peasants, mostly frontoviki, who had been cut off from their roots during several years of military service. In the trenches of the front they not only lost confidence in the tsar but also often in religion and the entire world they had left behind. Socialist and revolutionary agitation also played a role. For many of these men, the silent village life was no longer attractive and they wanted to take their chances in a situation of almost unlimited possibilities, which, from a certain point of view, the Civil War presented. It might have been that some of them were attracted by the idea of a free Ukraine, free of Bolsheviks and Jews as Petliura promised. But the opportunity to be able to do whatever they wanted and have unlimited freedom may also have been an attractive proposition.^[24] There was also the obvious conclusion: for many residents of villages being a peasant often meant being a passive victim of the more powerful, while being in the army of an ataman enabled self-empowerment.

ATAMAN AND «GREEN» ARMIES

As was already mentioned, the Russian Civil War was not only a conflict between «Reds» and «Whites.» In a sense, the battles between these two forces were only a minor part of the war. No less active participants in this war were the armies of the atamans or the Green armies. It is difficult to define both categories. The term «Green army» is usually reserved for peasant armies consisting mostly of deserters. They are called «Green» simply because of the fact that they hid in and operated out of the woods. Ataman armies, on the other hand, were phenomena of greater importance and include forces such as the troops of Semenov in Siberia and Grigor’ev and Makhno in Ukraine. An ataman was not just a leader of numerous gangs. In some ways he also resembled a politician. The number of less important Green armies may be estimated in the thousands and ataman armies in the hundreds. Some atamans played significant roles in the Civil War.^[25] Here we are dealing with the phenomenon of atamanshchina on a large scale. The movement linked to Nestor Makhno (photo no. 1) falls within this category.

<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/makhno1.jpg>

Photo 1. Nestor Makhno.

Whether small or large, the structure of these fighting communities was quite simple. A charismatic leader with a core group of devoted lieutenants dominated a gray mass of followers.^[26] Sometimes these structures were able to mobilize an astonishingly large number of people. In the eastern part of Ukraine around the small city of Guliai-Pole, a whole region was united as a kind of territorial political organization under the leadership of Nestor Makhno.
His army was said to have had at times more than 80,000 fighters.^[27]This was probably an exaggeration due to the fact that it was difficult to discern fighting from nonfighting personnel. Besides this, there were times when other atamans and their men joined forces with Makhno. They remained independent, however, and often left as fast as they came. Alliances were frequently agreed upon, but easily broken. To illustrate this it may be enough to remember that Nestor Makhno, before he became a bête noire for the Bolsheviks, had an alliance with the Red Army for some time and was officially recognized as a «Red Commander» (kombrig). After that he cooperated for some time with Grigor’ev, another important ataman of the Civil War and deadly enemy of the Bolsheviks. This cooperation ended in style: Makhno killed Grigor’ev and took over the greater part of his army.^[28]
During the high tide of the peasant movement of eastern Ukraine, Makhno controlled probably no more than 1,000 fighters. There was, however, a good deal of organization. In 1919, when the Makhno army held its home territory, the movement printed its own newspapers and, at least in theory, every soldier had a registration book containing general instructions and information about its owner (photo no. 2).

<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/makhno2.jpg>

Photo 2. Soldier’s book.

In 1919, Makhno’s army controlled with various degree of success the territory around Guliai-Pole, a little town 100 kilometers northwest of Zaporozhie, and administered the population in the manner of a state. It was called «Makhnovia» in the vernacular – Guliai-Pole itself was even referred to as «Makhnograd.»^[29] Congresses of peasant soviets were held.^[30] This hybrid form of anarchistic peasant realm was soon to be terminated, however, and in the following years Makhno and his army were forced to maneuver between Reds and Whites. This kind of wandering, robbing, and pillaging army was quite typical for the Russian Civil War and somewhat resembled the marauding soldiers of the Thirty Years’ War.^[31]
For some time, other Green armies were also of similar size, including those of Grigor’ev, Struk, Zelenyi, and Angel’.^[32] These armies, however, grew weaker with time. The longer the Civil War lasted and the more the White forces deteriorated, the more the Bolsheviks came to control the situation. This was not so much due to Red military successes as to the fact that the atamans successively lost what little support they had among the population. At the beginning of the war they were often seen as an alternative to the central powers, but over time peasants learned that they were equally mistreated by both sides. A 1921 survey gives some insight into the structures of the independent ataman armies – or «bandits,» as the Bolsheviks preferred to call them. The number of fighters was seldom greater than 100 men. Often they consisted mainly of cavalry with only some infantry. Sometimes they had machine guns. The ability to move very fast, not only to escape but also to carry out surprise attacks, was of utmost importance. There were also detachments without horses operating only in the dense woods.^[33] By the end of the Civil War, most ataman armies resembled large robbing and pillaging gangs. Many atamans were killed in battle, but a considerable number put down their weapons and profited from the general amnesty in 1921. Some of them even remained untouched until the 1930s.^[34]

ATAMAN LEADERSHIP

What made a man an ataman and how did the atamans keep themselves in power? The thesis of this article is that violence played a crucial role and, furthermore, that this was due to a culture of violence evolving as a specific way of life in communities that were engaged in fighting in the Civil War. This needs to be analyzed in more detail.
First of all, after the revolution and breakdown of imperial order there was an urgent need for regional or even local leadership. This was because the environment for most people had become uncertain and insecure. The situation was favorable for those who were ready and willing to take power, but this alone was not sufficient. A very important precondition was the possession of close relationships with certain networks. These could be villages or family ties, but sometimes also political organizations. Makhno had prewar connections with members of anarchist groups.^[35] On the other hand, there were also old friends in Guliai-Pole whom he had known for a long time, in some cases since his youth. Reviving these ties when he returned to Guliai-Pole in 1917, he was able to create a mafia-like group that terrorized local power groups by beating them up and murdering them until nobody risked raising a voice against Makhno.^[36] The German Imperial Army ended its rule over the town at the beginning of 1918, but the network remained intact, thus enabling Makhno to take control again when the last German soldier had abandoned the eastern part of Ukraine.^[37]One of his companions was Aleksey Chubenko, whose diary is one of the most important sources for the history of the Makhno movement. Another was Fedor Shus, an ataman who in the early period of the war acted independently and in 1919 became one of Makhno’s most loyal deputies.^[38] In a certain sense, one may speak of a men’s society tied together not only by fate and circumstances but also by passion and friendship. At least this is what can be derived from photographs showing Makhno and his men in poses that are almost romantic (photo no. 3).

<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/makhno3.jpg>

Photo 3. Makhnovites.

Makhno and his men were very fond of taking photographs of themselves. No other ataman army in the Civil War is as well photographed as Makhno’s.^[39] While many photographs show Makhno with his fellow men, there are also individual portraits of his soldiers with their companions. Fedor Shus, in particular, was photographed several times (photo no. 4).

<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/makhno4.jpg>

Photo 4. Ataman Fedor Shus with his men.

Almost all of these group photographs or individual portraits have something in common. The men pictured, as a rule, wield their revolvers or sabers in such a way as to draw more attention to the weapons than to themselves. The weapon, a symbol of power, freedom, and manhood, is presented as an integral part of the person, and this cult-like way of dealing with weapons is one indicator of a culture of violence.
Another important element of an ataman is knowledge – not the kind of knowledge, however, that is taught in schools and universities, but that derived from practical experience. First of all, it was important to know how to speak to the peasants and how to sway their opinions. It was important to speak to peasants in their language and to know their interests. Makhno had this kind of sociocultural knowledge and the peasants regarded him as one of themselves. In his violent and uncivilized behavior as well as in his heavy drinking, peasants saw themselves in Makhno and this added to his political capital.
Practical knowledge of politics was also important. Only those who were acquainted with competing political forces and their programs were able to direct the politics of their own group effectively and to guide the masses. Ideology – it must be said once again – was of minor importance. A leader had simply to point at the enemy. Nothing, not even a common aim, brings people as closely together as a common enemy. Taking Makhno as an example, it was presumably not so easy for peasants to imagine his ideal of a society of free villages living and trading in free relations with each other. It was, however, much easier to imagine what would happen if the Whites were allowed to bring back the gentry. Thus the ability to present the world in understandable terms was one of the most important qualities of an ataman.
Political regimes and their armies were not the only parties in the Civil War. Makhno, for example, directed the rage of the peasants against the cities as centers of the exploiters of the rural population and as places of wealth.^[40] He provided his soldiers with justification for looting and de facto offered them the opportunity to rob, rape, torture, and even kill – in a word, to do whatever they wanted. The inhabitants of Ekaterinoslav lived through a six-week nightmare, when Makhno’s troops took over the city in 1919.^[41] Desire is a very strong force, and every ataman had to reckon with it. However, other psychological mechanisms have to be taken into account, including those that might not always be completely understood by a leader, but that are nevertheless utilized intuitively. The unleashing of violence may be not only an expression of emotion but also a demonstration of power and might that reduces one’s sense of powerlessness and helplessness. Moreover, acts of collective violence bound people together. Common guilt and common action are powerful forces of social cohesion. There is no place here for speculation regarding unconscious psychological processes, but obviously to talk about violence and perpetrators of violence is also to talk about psychology.^[42] Atamans, so to speak, had to manage not only material conditions of their armies but also the emotions and emotional state of their followers.
Under the conditions of the Russian Civil War, combatants acted with almost no restraints, but equally arbitrary were their chances of falling prey to aggression themselves. Not unlike other civil wars, someone’s victory and survival was unconceivable without the annihilation of the enemy.^[43] There was no place for the «rules of war.» Captured soldiers were often killed on the spot, especially officers, who were sometimes tortured before being killed. There was, of course, a grim rationality in this practice, as neither the Reds nor the Whites, and especially not the Greens, had the facilities to keep prisoners of war, let alone to feed them. So in the Civil War the risk of being killed or suffering torture and pain was paramount. This mode of behavior and attitude influenced the actions of the belligerents.
Mass slaughter of enemy soldiers may have some rationality, but there are other forms of massacre and collective violent action, such as pogroms, which cannot be explained by rationality alone. Human behavior under conditions of nearly unlimited possibilities can only be understood in terms of group psychology and the sociocultural dynamics framed by the circumstances. While Makhno was turning against cities and urban life, Grigor’ev and other atamans resorted to popular anti-Semitism and turned against the Jews. The reasons were the same as in Makhno’s case, but the criteria for the selection of the enemy were different. Pogroms have to be put in the context of the fighting groups and communities committing them. There were many reasons and motivations for anti-Jewish pogroms, but it is doubtful that the extinction of the Jewish population was an end in itself.^[44] The mass perception of the opening possibilities (or rather of the vanishing constraints) reinforced the culture of violence that demanded victims. In the Russian and Ukrainian contexts, the Jews, of course, were ideal victims. As a minority they were traditionally stigmatized, and easily identifiable by language, custom, and often even by appearance. Other ethnic minorities including Greek, German, or Bulgarian settlers were also singled out.^[45] Thus understood, pogroms were more a reward for the fighters of the ataman armies than a goal of any ethnic cleansing program. Atamans often had little choice but to tolerate the dark instincts of their men, not least because of the somewhat precarious status of ataman leadership itself.
Ataman leadership, of course, rested partially on disciplinary power. In principle, atamans were able to punish soldiers for disobedience or crimes, and they often did so. There was, however, an important difference from the disciplinary power of a modern army. The army discipline is an integral part of the general social structure, and a disobedient solder violates not just the military regulations but the very principles of the social order. On the contrary, in an ataman army, discipline rested on the personal charisma of the leader,^[46] and had few structural elements on which to rely.
There was definitely no legal or traditional basis of ataman leadership – the latter has to be stressed, because the term «ataman» (or Hetman) is of quasi-ancient origin and characterized Cossack leaders up to the eighteenth century.^[47] Since that time, the term had been used for Cossack officials (senior military commanders or, in Ukraine, village elders). Skoropadskii as well as Petliura referred to the older tradition, naming themselves «Hetman» or «Great Ataman» of Ukraine. The atamanshchina of the Civil War, however, had no more in common with the Hetmanate legacy than with the pretension for ruling over the whole of Ukraine.
As was stated above, the role of an ataman placed a higher value on certain personal characteristics and abilities, although the presence of these traits alone did not guarantee one’s success as ataman. More important was the belief of the followers in the charisma of the leader, to refer to the model of Max Weber.^[48] Atamans needed to demonstrate concrete success to the followers, in order to assure their men that under their leadership further successes would follow. In cases of misfortune and consequent doubts about the legitimacy of his leadership, an ataman and his core group, of course, were able to resort to violent repression, but this was a means of limited efficiency.
A more effective strategy was to orchestrate an outburst of violence toward outsiders, whoever they were. Escalation of violence, however, can develop a momentum of its own, when perpetrators get accustomed to a certain level of aggression and seek to intensify it in order to receive the same satisfaction from violence that they used to receive. Whatever the psychological mechanisms involved, an ataman had to be a good intuitive psychologist with an acute sense of group dynamics. Sometimes this meant making use of the spiral of violence. How violence in its various forms could be instrumentalized by a skillful leadership is illustrated in the next section.

VIOLENT PRACTICES CONSTITUTING LEADERSHIP AND SOCIAL COHESION

I focus here on Makhno and make only sporadic references to other atamans. This is because no ataman and army are as well-documented as Makhno’s. There is, however, a problem with the sources on Makhno. The most vivid and dense descriptions we have are in memoirs and diaries. We have to rely on these sources if we want to obtain better insight into the internal structure of fighting communities and the behavioral logic of both leaders and followers. Most stories, however, are not corroborated by other sources; almost every story is unique, written down by only one chronicler, who in most cases probably did not even witness the event. So there is the question not only of the adequacy of the available accounts, but even of their very plausibility. Sometimes it is simply hard to believe that certain people could have lived through the events they were writing about. While the problem of the credibility of sources is inherent in historical scholarship, in this particular case, by juxtaposing different sources, we can verify not the concrete facts but the style (logic, poetics) of leadership. In reading different stories about Makhno, an image of «the Bat’ko» with certain characteristics emerges.^[49]
Different sources report that Makhno frequently risked his own life and often put himself in the line of fire. Appearing drunk, cursing, standing on a tachanka (a peasant cart, pulled by horses, on which a machine gun was installed – this peasant variant of an «armored car» was an effective weapon under the conditions of the Civil War), shooting constantly, and in this way driving entire enemy detachments into retreat – this was a typical description of «mad» Makhno.^[50] Already during his lifetime an aura of power and invulnerability surrounded him. Gerasimenko tells a story illustrating this: Makhno’s revolver was unlocked all the time – once he was climbing a staircase and he touched the revolver– a shot was fired accidentally. The bullet, however, did not hurt Makhno, though there was smoke coming out of his pocket.^[51] Descriptions of Makhno often resemble folktales and they should not be taken too seriously in every detail. It is possible, but not probable, that this image has nothing to do with any past events – at least not the way events actually took place. Even if some stories are simply fairytales they nevertheless give an image of the Bat’ko that suggests the behavior and actions of the real Nestor Makhno, his leadership and the violence he unleashed.
First of all, violence, of course, was applied as a disciplinary, if not terrorist, means of internal control. In her memoirs the writer Anna Saksaganskaia, who for some time had been forced to accompany a detachment of Makhno’s army, reported on the inner circle of Makhno’s men, whom she called «oprichnina.» They suppressed every form of disobedience with brute force. Peasant-soldiers who attempted to desert were killed.^[52] The same was true of commanders if they disobeyed orders, abused their powers, or were suspected of making plots against the Bat’ko.^[53] Generally Makhno’s commanding style was violent. He was often enraged and drunk, threatening to kill his deputies with the gun in his hand. Orders were usually given with added comment «. . . otherwise I will kill you!»^[54] This is confirmed by Anna Saksaganskaia. She reported that Makhno «loved» to scare his men with threats and demonstrative brutality.^[55] This was his idea of directing, if not controlling, his men, an assortment of creatures more resembling the reign of animals than of human beings, as Saksaganskaia wrote.^[56]
Threat alone was not enough. As a leader, Makhno also had to perform as judge, jury, and executioner in one person. Sentencing and punishing went hand in hand. As a rule, there was nothing like a juridical procedure – those found guilty by Makhno were punished on the spot and usually killed. Typical of this is a scene Chubenko described in his diary: two railway workers asked for his help because a cavalryman of Makhno’s army had taken personal documents and 2,000 rubles from them. The cavalryman was found and it turned out that the railway workers were telling the truth, as the documents and the money were found in the man’s pockets. Makhno happened to be passing by, he was attracted by the crowd of people encircling Chubenko, the cavalryman, and the railway workers. He asked what was the matter and Chubenko told him. After Chubenko had briefed him, Makhno took his revolver out of his pocket and shot the soldier immediately. This incident was not unique.^[57]
White officer A. V. Bipetskii described another telling incident in his memoirs. (Bipetskii got into the hands of Makhno’s men during the retreat of the Volunteer army from Orel in 1919. As a prisoner of war he obtained significant insight into the inner life of the Makhno army.) When Makhno’s soldiers captured eighty officers of the «Volunteer army»^[58] they were told they would all be shot in a couple of minutes. After this pronouncement, some officers demanded to see «the Bat’ko» because they wanted to see «what kind of a man he was.» There is little reason to believe that they hoped for mercy from Makhno, it was more a kind of provocation – at least as Makhno himself seems to have understood it. He came and showed them what kind of a man he was. In Bipetskii’s words: he began to shoot the officers. Makhno stood very close to the victims. This can be derived from the fact that one officer managed to slap Makhno in the face and curse him.^[59] Carrying out executions with his own hands he exercised and utilized his power as well as his ability and readiness to commit violent acts. Makhno’s authority rested to a great extent on such demonstrative performances and embodiments of lethal power.
Another revealing story took place at the Orekhovskaia railway station. Here Makhno murdered a priest in a terrifying manner. The priest was suspected of spying, but more important from Makhno’s point of view is that priests were hardly different from government agents helping to bring the peasants back under state authority as in tsarist times. In his milieu, people with smooth hands were believed to have lived off the work of others – which meant off the work of the peasants. Therefore all nonpeasants falling into the hands of Makhno’s men were in great danger, as the inhabitants of Ekaterinoslav had learned the hard way.^[60] The captured priest, indeed, had very smooth hands, as Makhno’s deputy Chubenko remarked in his diary. This fact alone sealed his fate. Makhno did not just kill him, but forced him to climb aboard the train engine. The priest was literally cooked to death in boiling water. As Chubenko tells us, Makhno commented by saying: «So, father, here you have the real hell! You threatened the people with this hell in your preaching – now have a taste of it yourself!»^[61] This was not just a murder, an act of utmost sadism, but also and above all a symbolic destruction of the old regime.
Such examples of violent action should not be seen as unique to Makhno. Another example comes from part of the Green army, the detachment of the ataman Ananii Volynets, who in 1919 was operating in the western part of Ukraine near the little town of Gaisin. Volynets paid lip service to the cause of Petliura, but, as many other «secondary atamans» of the «Great Ataman» Petliura, he mostly played his own game in the Gaisinshchina. We have a remarkably dense report of events in Gaisin left by former officer of the tsarist army Govorukhin, who later emigrated to Bulgaria.^[62]
Govorukhin describes a scene in front of the house in which Volynets was residing where a large, angry group of his men had gathered. Govorukhin did not know why the soldiers were upset, but obviously Volynets was in some trouble and faced loss of control and authority over his men. In this situation, Volynets accused one of his deputies, standing to his right on the balcony of the house, of being guilty for all his problems. When the crowd only got louder, Volynets took out his revolver and shot the deputy. Immediately the crowd calmed down. The corpse of the deputy was later bound to the back of a horse and dragged through the city. Govorukhin concluded that Volynets had to kill his deputy to restore his own authority.^[63]
Reading this report one cannot but be astonished by how the lethal action immediately calmed down all the tensions. The crowd was satisfied by the swift justice, and got an opportunity to partake in the vengeance by humiliating the corpse. The ataman had demonstrated his authority. One might suppose that through events like this people experienced not only fear of being executed but also reassurance of their ataman’s leadership capability.
There are some indications that as ataman Makhno held a certain monopoly over exercising deadly violence on a mass scale. When Fedor Shus, one of his closest lieutenants, rampaged a German settlement and murdered the settlers as «bourgeoisie,» Makhno flew into a rage and threatened him. It is unlikely that Makhno felt pity for the settlers, on one occasion he himself ordered that three captured German settlers be shot, believing them to be spies.^[64] It is more plausible to suggest that Makhno feared losing control over the use of lethal force in his army and consequently his leadership position.
Of course, Makhno did not always do the bloody work himself. Killing with one’s own hands was an important gesture, but to let others kill at will was also a crucial element in demonstrating power. The incident cited at the beginning of this article is a good example. Makhno’s men started their bloody work only after he had given them the signal (and thus, permission) to start. He was in control of the situation and the whole action can be understood not only as a practical application but also as a symbolic demonstration of this power. This symbolic act had resonance for the future as well. Its message was simple, but impressive – Makhno was in command and would destroy his enemies. Surprising as it may seem, one captured soldier managed to save his life in this situation through violent action of his own. This soldier while awaiting the blow of the saber from one of Makhno’s men managed to kick his would-be executioner in the stomach just as the former raised his weapon to deliver the fatal blow. The kick was so powerful that the soldier could not breathe for several moments and lost hold of his saber. Makhno was so impressed by the soldier’s boldness that he spared his life and took him over to his own side.^[65] In this case, politics and ideology were simply overruled by audaciousness. The incident was not accidental. It revealed Makhno’s power to grant mercy as well as the values of the fighting community. Men such as this audacious soldier were the substrate of a successful struggle for survival. His inclusion in the Makhno army can be taken as evidence for the practices of a culture of violence. In this context, ideology became redundant.
There has always been the question of a special ideology binding the Makhno army. Some members of the core group, who in tsarist times had belonged to anarchistic circles alongside Makhno and survived the Civil War, later claimed anarchism to have been this uniting bond. Other witnesses, however, expressed doubts in the political motivations of Makhno. Bipetskii claimed not to have heard mention of any political or ideological aims at all. Robbery and thirst for blood seemed to him to be the basic motivation of the Makhno army.^[66] Anna Saksaganskaia made very similar observations. She cited a commander of the Makhno army, to whom she had been quite close for some time, who stated, «There is no anarchism, there is just robbery-ism» (Kakoi tam anarkhizm, prosto grabizm). And the commander added that the only reason to follow Makhno for him, and many others, was to escape the boredom of village life and to «live at the expense of others» (pozhivitsia).^[67] This way of life, of course, implied power and violent action.
That Makhno embodied these virtues was confirmed by another commander of the Makhno army, a Latvian and former officer of the tsarist army, who first served the Provisional Government, then after its collapse went to the Greens and finally to Makhno. In a conversation with Saksaganskaia, he declared that he believed in the power of the Bat’ko, his instincts and will for power. And he added that this is exactly what attracted the peasants.^[68] This commander was somewhat educated and hence a rare example in Makhno’s army, but it seems that he – a nonpeasant – quite well understood the feelings of the peasants. His observations are confirmed by Bipetskii, who reported ordinary soldiers of the Makhno army listening to legendary stories about the Bat’ko. «I saw their cheeks glowing and the exaltation in their eyes. They believed in Makhno, his power and good fortune.»^[69] Bipetskii observed that storytelling and readings (sometimes even of Shevchenko’s poems) to the often illiterate soldiers were an integral part of the inner life of the detachments.^[70] The stories were about astuteness and practical justice, but foremost about the power – or more accurately «force» – of the Bat’ko.^[71] This «aura,» of course, was not self-sustaining. It had to be affirmed and reproduced by action and success.
Belief in the power of the Bat’ko was central to social cohesion and stability of the Makhno army. Yet violent actions also produced this effect of social cohesion, for instance, mass executions of captives. Bipetskii, who survived captivity because he managed to hide his status as an officer, once witnessed an execution of White officers. The execution was conducted by Makhno himself. It should be noted that there was generally a great deal of hostility among the rural and sometimes even the urban population toward the «Volunteer army» and especially «bearers of golden epaulettes» (zolotopogonniki), as officers were called in slang. This was due to the political aims of the Whites as well as to the personal experiences of many former soldiers of the tsarist army. As a rule, while privates faced «only» humiliation and maltreatment, White officers were put to death.^[72] The hatred was so great that even seriously injured and mortally wounded officers were tortured. Bipetskii gives some examples of such incidents, which, as he wrote, he would never be able to forget. Apart from all the cruelty of the execution, he also claimed to have observed that Makhno very closely monitored the effect of the execution on the crowd.^[73] This suggests the ataman’s awareness that in such situations the death of enemies contributed to the vitality of his own community – or in more analytical terms, that the community reproduced itself in the medium of violence.
This mechanism also worked with peasants who were not members of the army, but only sympathizers. In her diary Galina Kuz’menko, the wife of Nestor Makhno, wrote that peasants who witnessed an execution of captured Bolsheviks were «very satisfied to see them die one after another.» These young and healthy men, as Kuz’menko pointed out, had been members of a punitive expedition and had been living at the expense of the peasants. To extort accommodation the Bolsheviks had beaten and flogged the peasants.^[74] Executions of hostages and shooting of peasants for having supported the other side were common during the Russian Civil War. The struggle between the Red Army and ataman troops to a great extent consisted of acts of revenge. Every instance of bloodshed was answered with more bloodshed. Executing enemies, therefore, always deepened hostility and enhanced the threat of revenge and by this tied perpetrators and even their passive witnesses more closely together. By this rationale, escalation produces certainty and order, which in this case provided clarity about who was friend, and who was foe.
Besides, participation in collective violent actions or even passive witnessing of them produces a sense of collective guilt. This in turn enhances the probability that all members of the group will remain united. If people in a group commit actions, which under normal conditions are considered to be crimes or morally condemnable, and the moral framework becomes malleable, then it is easier for every individual to adhere to a mainstream set of values and to continue operating according to this shared moral framework than to resist.^[75] In such cases a culture of violence justifies actions that under normal conditions are recognized as crimes; it ascribes meaning to the hitherto meaningless and brings order to chaos.

CONCLUSION

Ataman armies were an important factor in the process of vandalizing the empire. This was especially true for the «Army in the Name of Bat’ko Makhno.» Makhno and his men fought against anything that represented the old regime or even the nonpeasant world. If there was an ideology of the Makhno movement it was purely negative. Above all, they fought for their own survival and advantage, especially when they lost their original social basis around Guliai-Pole and were forced to be constantly on the move. The more the Makhno army was compelled to move from one point to another the more it transformed into a kind of marauding, pillaging gang. For this community of fate, violence became a central feature of life or even the essence of existence. The set of rules ascribing meaning to the action, behavior, interpretation, and perception of the people involved in this movement can be described as a culture of violence. Against the background of this theoretical framework violence is more than just a by-product of warfare or a mode of fighting. Violent acts must also be comprehended as a mode of communication, as a medium of representation of hierarchy, order, and identity. Collective violence against enemies is a highly effective way to say «we» amid the disintegration of the social fabric, under conditions of social anomie, when society is nothing and community is everything.