The Austro-Hungarian Revolutions
Chapter XIV – I believe in Yesterday
Above the Adriatic, March 15th, 1936
Nestor Makhno leaned back in his seat and sighed deeply as the decrepit old Ju-52 left the Adriatic coast behind, taking him out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire for the first time in almost a year. Bitter resentment made his throat ache. Five months earlier, the future had seemed so bright, the success of the revolution so certain. How he longed for the halcyon days of the advance on Prague, when victory had seemed just within grasp! Then it had all gone from bad to worse, and now, in the face of the latest string of Imperialist victories, the anarchist militias had gone over wholesale to the Communist Red Armies. When the militias crumbled after the battle of Kutna Hora, the North Slavic Peoples Army and the Soviet Hungarian Red Army of Bela Kun had joined forces to repel the Imperials from the last bastion of the North Slavic Peoples Republic, Presov. That victory, won mainly thanks to material sent by Trotsky, had finished to convince far too many militians that the Communist forces were the last best hope of the revolution, and despite the subsequent defeats that conviction had stuck. And yet there had been so many defeats! The intervention of the Poles in Galizia, trapping many of the North Slavic and Hungarian divisions there. The fall of Presov and final surrender of the North Slavic Peoples Republic. The dismal failure of Bela Kun’s grand offensive on Budapest. The gradual advance of the allied Austrian and Ustasha forces through Bosnia, Hercegovina and the Adriatic coast of Croatia until they stood at the very border of Serbia proper… and all the while the anarchist popular armies, once exuberant with revolutionary zeal, had congealed into ordered, uniformed communist rank and file until the two armies facing each other were almost carbon copies of each other, mirror images of oppression differentiated mainly by the colours they were flying. At this point, there was no longer any place for an anarchist icon. Only carefully prepared escape plans had allowed Makhno to evade the clutches of the NKVD across the front lines to stay-behind anarchists hiding from the Imperial occupation forces, and out of the country.
For a while Makhno had wondered were to go next – perhaps to China, but Mao and his Red Army were thoroughly Communist through and through, tools of Trotsky which would not hesitate to turn the Ukrainian Zapata over to the Russians. He then briefly considered Abyssinia, where the Italian Fascists, using poison gas and terror bombing had finally managed to capture Addis Ababa and closed in on Gondar, but while the plight of the Abyssinians was certainly a tragedy, inflicted by the most ruthless and naked of imperialist aggression, the regime of the Negus was if anything more reactionary than its Italian foes. Makhno had just about decided to go back to his home near the lower Dnepr and resume the decades old fight against the forces of the Hetmanate, when everything changed and the place of his next battle became clear to him.
Not far below, the surface of the Adriatic glistened grey in the gloom of an afternoon with heavy overcast. Comrades in Italy had prepared staging posts in outback airfields in the Apennines, on Corsica and then on Menorca in Spain. The final objective was Barcelona.
Makhno was weary, and deep in the blackest despair over this last, most unexpected defeat at the hands of Trotsky, but he didn’t give in to the luxury of apathy. Another battle was brewing; only the previous day, the Popular Front had won the general elections in Spain, signalling the commencement of the final stage of the revolutionary transition of the liberal bourgeoisie Republic of Spain to a Socialist society. The reactionary forces, so strong in Spain, were sure to react with violence, and Makhno had to get there, had to warn his anarchist friends before it was too late – there could be no cohabitation with the Communists. They had to be destroyed as soon as possible, or the libertarian revolution wouldn’t stand a chance. This was their last chance, their very last chance at a libertarian revolution. Makhno intended to make sure it wasn’t squandered.