The Anarchism of Nestor Makhno, 1918-1921: An Aspect of the Ukrainian Revolution byMichael PalijReview by: R. C. ElwoodThe American Historical Review, Vol. 83, No. 2 (Apr., 1978), pp. 491-492Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1862443 .

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Modern Europe 491

latter-day disciples, who are obliged to present the Bolsheviks as absolutely consistent friends of all "toiling" peasants.

Kostrikin's ideological stance deprives his thesis of any claim to be considered seriously. His work's significance lies in the factual data it contains on the land committees' organization and activities. We are given a statistical analysis of the measures taken by o,o88 of them (only one-fifth of the total, for reasons not satisfactorily explained), but unfor- tunately the loose categories employed detract from the value of this table. More serious is the failure to relate these measures (e.g. rent control, land seizures) to the local socioeconomic context, and so to clarify their actual cause and effect. This task could have been attempted on the basis of the archival material consulted here, but alas, party dogma rules that class affiliation alone is of con- sequence. Instead, Kostrikin is content to amass evidence indiscriminately from various regions in order to illustrate the peasants' militancy, and then to hail this as proof of popular support for Bolshevism. This study, a characteristic product of present-day Soviet historical scholarship on the Russian Revolution, is much inferior in quality to works published in the 1920s.

JOHN KEEP

University of Toronto

V. P. VERKHOS'. K^rasnala gvardiia v Okiabr'skoi revo- liutsii [The Red Guard in the October Revolu- tion]. Moscow: Izdatel'stvo "Mysl'." 1976. Pp. 262. ir. I lk.

One trend in the writing of Soviet history of the post-Stalin era has been to focus more attention on the role of lesser figures and on a greater variety of social groupings and organizations. The result has enriched Soviet histories and made available source materials which allow Western writers also to get away from focusing overmuch on the most prominent figures. This has been especially true in the study of the Russian Revolution of 1917, where the past decade and a half has seen an increase in books devoted to the study of the workers, various lower-level organizations, and the Revolution in the provinces. The Red Guard has been the sub- ject of several specialized works: V. I. Startsev's study of the Petrograd workers' militia and Red Guard is one of the best Soviet studies on the Revolution. Now V. P. Verkhos' has undertaken to provide a summary history of the Red Guard across all of Russia.

Verkhos' work is rather more tendentious than the best recent Soviet historical writing. He appar- ently belongs to that school of Soviet historians who feel the need constantly to assert Bolshevik leadership and influence, even more than required

by Soviet rules of historical writing. That, how- ever, is common enough to be readily coped with. More important is how Verkhos' tries to deal with the problem of writing the history of one group or phenomenon across the diverse face of Russia. He opts for an eclectic approach which draws a bit of information here, a bit somewhere else, yet an- other piece elsewhere, in order to patch together a collage portrait. It does not work well. The result is that the Red Guard fails to come alive, the sense of development and growth is lost, local variations are smoothed over, and one does not get a picture of the real, actual Red Guard. The eclectic ap- proach is especially difficult when dealing with a phenomenon which was local in origins and lacked any centralized structure or leadership, and Ver- khos' fails to pull it together adequately.

The book does, however, provide some useful data on the Red Guard and provides some sense of the breadth of the movement. The factual data are generally reliable, if incomplete, but one must be cautious in using the conclusions Verkhos' draws. The book contains the usual denigration and dis- tortion of the role of other political, especially so- cialist, parties. One special warning: the charts at the end seriously undercalculate the total size of the Red Guard. His figures are too low for some cities (Saratov for instance), and there are none given for October for some provinces with major cities that certainly had Red Guard detachments. Nor is allowance made for Red Guard units that existed but about which no records survive. As this is the most impressive effort to bring together in one place the data on size, even if based on an assortment of inadequate sources, it will be tempt- ing for historians to use his totals uncritically. One hopes that will be avoided.

REX WADE

University of Hawai

MICHAEL PALIJ. The Anarchism of NMestor AMakhno, 1918-1921. An Aspect of the Ukrainian Revolution. (Publications on Russia and Eastern Europe of the Institute for Comparative and Foreign Area Stud- ies, number 7.) Seattle: University of Washington Press. 1977. Pp. xii, 428. $14.50.

The Ukrainian Revolution of 1917-21 was a com- plex, confusing, and ultimately tragic sequence of events that usually defies rational and systematic exposition by the historian. Following the collapse of tsarist authority, the left-of-center, reform- minded Central Rada sought to establish Ukrai- nian independence only to fall victim to Soviet and then German intervention in April 1918. The more conservative Hetmanate regime of General Skoro- pads'kyi lasted only as long as its German pro- tectors were involved in the greater events of the

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492 Reviews of Books

World War. In I)ecember i918 it too was over- thrown by a coalition Directory which sought to pursue ill-defined nationalist and socialist objec- tives in face of renewed Bolshevik, White Russian, French, and Polish intervention. It is not surpris- ing that this lack of firm central authority and the obvious need for protection against outside in- vaders gave rise to numerous armed partisan bands whose allegiance shifted with military for- tunes and their own changing self-interests. The most important of these partisan movements was led by Nestor Makhno, who at one time controlled an area in southeast Ukraine the size of the Neth- erlands and, with an army of twenty-five thousand men, played a decisive role in the defeat of the White Generals I)enikin and Wrangel.

Michael Palij's book is the first major Western study of the Makhno movement and is based on a thorough reading of Soviet, emigre, and Western literature. His one hundred fifty pages of notes and annotated bibliography, which represent the most valuable part of the book, will be of very consid- erable use to future scholars of the Ukranian Revo- lution. As the title of his book implies, Palij seeks to examine three facets of the movement. First, he is interested in Makhno's "anarchism," but soon comes to the conclusion that "he was not of much account as an anarchist theorist" (p. 6i). Indeed, he "had no positive goal" and never "worked out a plan for . . . a stateless society" (p. 252). Thus his "anarchism," unless it is defined solely as his ac- tivity as a bandit leader and sometime assassin, becomes something of a nonsubject. On a second level, this is a biography of Makhno hiinself, con- centrating on his military exploits during the pe- riod from his return to the Ukraine after the Feb- ruary Revolution to his defeat by the Red Army in 1921. Here, too, the subject undermines the au- thor. The lack of material on Makhno's childhood in the Ukraine and his early manhood in a Mos- cow prison limits his pre-i9i8 biography to a scant three pages. A similar (and insufficient) number of pages is devoted to Makhno's unhappy life after 192 I when he wandered from Romanian interment to Polish imprisonment to Paris emigration and death in 1935. On a third level, Palij tells in more detail than is necessary the familiar if confusing story of the birth and death of the Ukranian state. In this context, he faults Makhno for his lack of national consciousness, his failure to understand the aspirations of the republic, and his indirect contribution "to the triumph of bolshevism" (p. 252).

The tripartite nature of the author's undertaking leads at times to further confusion and to repeti- tion. His prose does not always clarify matters (e.g. "Although in the early days of the coup the hetman 'had a clear intention to give the govern- ment a national Ukrainian character,' by inviting

the leaders of parties to enter the government and administration, they chose to form an opposition rather than to accept the hetman's invitation" [p. I 17].). In sum, this is a conscientious doctoral dissertation whose very subject probably pre- cluded its being turned into a truly successful book.

R. C. ELWOOD

Carleton University

Z. V. STEPANOV. Kul turnaza zhlzn ' Leningrada 20-kh- nachala 3o-kh godov [The Cultural Life of Leningrad in the Twenties and Early Thirties]. Leningrad: lzdatel'stvo "Nauka," Leningradskoe otdelenie. 1976. Pp. 286. I r. 5o k.

"Art to the masses" has been a recurring motif in Soviet cultural policy over the past sixty years. But, while mass accessibility has always been a criterion of artistic success, the judgment on acces- sibility has usually been intuitive; and it has been related to a value judgment on the ideinost' (liter- ally, "idea-content") of the given work of art.

Western scholars have tended, rather mis- leadingly, to equate the Soviet ideinost' requirement with an ideological imperative. In fact, it often has little to do with ideology, and a great deal to do with traditional Russian assumptions about cul- ture and kul'turnost', or cultural respectability. A Tchaikovsky symphony scores high on ideinost', while a James Bond movie scores very low. The Soviet public has never been exposed to such basic ingredients of Western popular culture as pornog- raphy, violence, or even True Romance (this is one of the ma jor, though least remarked, achievements of Soviet censorship). But, in the hypothetical situ- ation in which Soviet censors had to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable forms of pornographic literature, they would surely use the criterion of ideinost' as an almost exact equivalent of our "socially-redeeming value."

In Soviet terms, Z. V. Stepanov's book is un- usual because it focuses not only on the makers of cultural products but also on the consumers. He seeks to describe and, where possible, measure audience response to the theater, music, art exhib- its, cinema, and radio programs available in Len- ingrad in the 1920s and early 1930s. He tries to establish the social composition of the audience and, in particular, the degree of working-class in- terest in different forms of art.

Stepanov is not so much writing a history of popular culture in the Western sense as a history of the popular response to high culture. Like all Soviet writers, he distinguishes between "culture," which is good and at least ought to be popular, and "kkhaltura " (cheap or low-brow culture), which is popular but bad. Khaltura lacks the ideinost' of

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