Makhno
Looking back on the 1917-21 bloody revolution, you can see the figure of Nestor Makhno. He is a lone symbol of the century, a symbol of liberty and nationhood, a black soul combining a poet and a murderer, a handsome youth and a lover, a genius guerilla-warfare strategist, a “father” of Ukrainian anarchism, and an enemy of any authority.
Every nation strives to have a messiah of its own. Every person wants to see God in person. Makhno became in his lifetime a God for the peasants who used to meet him on the outskirts of villages as if he was a prophet, offering him bread and salt on the embroidered towels and bowing to him in the hope he might work miracles. They followed him as if he were the righteous one, making sacrifices that demanded blood.
A self-styled Christ, a heretic saint who broke Moses’ commandment “Thou shalt not kill”. He headed an army he formed himself. An army of rifles and sabers hidden in every village: in haystacks, attics and under every fence, the army of legends and despair, which could be mobilized and dismissed in a matter of hours.
He personified the peasant’s thousand-year-long hatred for authorities, his unflagging desire to be the master of his land, his blind faith in a supreme divine justice. He invented a special war vehicle, tachanka (a horse-drawn wagon with a machine-gun mounted on it), becoming an unsurpassed tactician of cavalry warfare and the incarnation of heroic romanticism, ardor, and revenge. Changing humans for leaden cartridges, he became a utopian, the only master of the depraved Huliay-Pole, and a truth-seeker in the heat of a revolution. He became a cruel avenger in the bloody history of the 20th century.
He was this kind of man when he left Ukraine. There was not any place in the state for the feelings that guided him. They were alien in the place ruled by slavery and the mentality of the defeated that were ready to obey. His army was free of the rigid discipline of commissars who were monotonously subjugating the people and dashing the naive hopes of peasants. He left this subdued Old-Testament world that would meekly believe, gradually die, and wait for the great famine of 1933 in order to become subservient forever, without having an idea of freedom or even a utopia. There still were isolated gunshots at the lying commissars, the remaining hotheads were still taking their revenge, only to flee then abroad - as for them there was no place in the world.
Makhno died poor in an alien city. All that is now impossible for him is quiet oblivion. Whether a knight or a robber and a synonym of anarchy, he has remained a mysterious part of the still unexposed universe of the past, beyond the limits of the accessible, a star that has burned away but mot yet finished its flight in space.
As the 20th century draws to a close, its geniuses and heroes become part of eternity, something that is inseparably bound with the past, with no hope to return to the present. Like a bird casting its shadow down to earth in the scorching sun, the spirit of revenge and justice breathes life into this image of a pale-faced fair-haired youth and challenges to the whole world and fate itself.
A human who has nothing to kill but idle time, a weak creature in a totally incomprehensible world, sometimes feels like punishing this world and challenging it to a duel, where wounded horses will be weeping and the early frosts will be closing the eyes of the dead.
