Читать книгу In the Name of the People - Liaisons - Страница 16

On a warm summer evening in Kiev, my friend told me a story about his grandfather. The story takes place during World War II in Ukraine. As a peasant, his grandfather found himself in German-occupied territory after yet another German offensive. His grandfather wanted to fight Nazis, but needed to figure out how. There were two options: he could stay in occupied territory and look for a partisan unit, or could try to join the Red Army. He decided to find the partisans, which is how he stumbled upon a strange unit fighting the Germans. The story doesn’t mention how, but he figured that these were Makhnovists.¹ My friend told me how his grandfather would vividly recount how he decided to stay as far away from them as he could, because those people would be crushed by both the Nazis and the Reds. The chances of survival in such a battalion were virtually non-existent.

Very little is known about this battalion today, but it was likely led by Ossip Tsebry—a well-known Makhnovist who fled from the Bolsheviks in 1921. In 1942, Tsebry returned to Ukraine in an attempt to build an anarchist partisan movement to fight both Nazis and Bolsheviks. While little is known about it, this unit did exist and was eventually defeated by the Nazis. Tsebry was captured and ended up in a concentration camp, then was liberated in 1945 by the Western Allies, and subsequently managed to escape the Bolsheviks once again.

We remembered Tsebry at the dawn of the fall of 2014. Russia had already annexed Crimea and was advancing troops in Donbass. At that moment, no one would have been surprised to hear that Russian tanks were moving on Kharkov, Odessa, or even Kiev. I had just arrived from Saint Petersburg, where I had seen how Russian society would actually fully support the invasion. There was no antiwar movement in sight, and as we exchanged words of remembrance among friends, our emotions matched the intensity of the situation.