Chaos and Utopia: the anarchists in the Russian revolution and civil war.

AuthorMentzel, Peter C.
PositionEssay

Visionary Utopians, the anarchists paid scant attention to the practical needs of a rapidly changing world; they generally avoided careful analysis of social and economic conditions, nor were they able or even willing to come to terms with the inescapable realities of political power.

--Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists

The extraordinary achievement of the Bolsheviks lay in checking the elemental drive of the Russian masses toward a chaotic utopia.

--Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists

Paul Avrich's assessment of the role of the anarchists during the Russian Revolution and Civil War has been more or less dominant ever since he published his classic work The Russian Anarchists (1967). Avrich concluded his study by arguing that the inability of the different anarchist factions to reconcile their differences ultimately left them defenseless against the Bolsheviks, who eventually succeeded either in co-opting, killing, or exiling the anarchists and destroying the movement.

The (admittedly small) body of scholarly work on the subject has followed a similar line of argument. Interestingly, even during the revolution and civil war, many Russian anarchists themselves recognized (and decried) their lack of unity and incessant infighting. The anarchists were very good at assisting the Bolsheviks, the Socialist Revolutionaries, and other leftist, radical elements in their fight against the Provisional Government and later the White armies, but they were utter failures when it came to carrying out or even articulating plans for a future reorganization of Russian society along anarchist lines.

An important research question that has developed out of this history is whether these weaknesses among the Russian anarchists grew out of anarchist ideology itself or if there was something idiosyncratic about the way the Russians interpreted anarchist theory. Or, to put it another way, why were the anarchists unwilling or unable "to come to terms with the inescapable realities of political power" (Avrich 1967,253)? Although it is easy to locate this allergy to power, especially organized political power, in anarchist theory itself, Avrich himself seems largely agnostic on the point as to the importance of anarchist political philosophy in the anarchists' impotence. About two decades after Avrich's book was published, John W. Copp, like Avrich, argued in his masterful dissertation on the Russian anarchists that "because they eschewed both hierarchical and charismatic authority, [they] were almost always unable to act in concert" (1993, 25). Yet he maintained that the problems the Russian anarchists faced were not the result of anarchist ideology: "In other words, the Russian anarchists were not disorganized merely because they were anarchists" (26 n. 21). As part of his argument, he pointed out that a decade after the end of the Russian Civil War the Spanish anarchists were able to organize themselves into highly effective, well-disciplined groups that during the Spanish Civil War played a tremendously important political and militan' role.

Copp did not need to travel as far afield as Spain to find a counterexample, however. In fact, the history of the Russian Civil War itself provides an interesting case of an anarchist movement that built a highly effective military and political organization in the Ukraine: the Makhnovshchina, a movement organized and led by the Ukrainian anarchist Nestor Makhno (1889-1935). Makhno and his movement represent an intriguing case, for there was and continues to be debate about whether they were anarchists at all. Much of this argument also involves different understandings of the place of power and authority in anarchist theory.

Makhno was able to build up a unified and robust movement, so the existence of the Makhnovists backs up Copp's thesis that the Russian anarchists' relative impotence was not due simply to the fact that they were anarchists. However, I do not think that it can be denied that the highly ambivalent attitudes and even definitions of authority and power in anarchist theory did in fact present important problems for the Russian anarchists to solve. Although Copp discussed the Makhnovists in his dissertation, he (like Avrich) did not seem to see them as offering an alternative account of anarchists in the Russian Revolution and Civil War. Indeed, he, like many others, was dubious as to the anarchist credentials of the Makhnovist movement (1993, 49 n. 7).

This brief paper suggests some ways in which we might see the Makhnovist episode not only as complicating our understanding of the experience of anarchists during the tumultuous time of the Russian Revolution but perhaps also as providing an opportunity to ask some questions about what anarchist theory really says about power and authority.

The Russian Anarchist Movement on the Eve of Revolution

This is certainly not the place for a detailed examination of anarchist theory or the history of the Russian anarchists before 1917, but a few brief comments are probably in order.

All of the various Russian anarchist groups were heavily, indeed overwhelmingly, influenced by the writings of the two great anarchist thinkers of the nineteenth century, both of whom happened to be Russians: Mikhail Bakunin (1814-76) and Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921). Of the two, Kropotkin was the more systematic thinker and theorist, whereas Bakunin championed the idea of spontaneous action on the part of...

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