Machine translation of the interview with Hélène Chatelain about Nestor Makhno, peasant from Ukraine
Source: http://chroniques-rebelles.info/spip.php?article291

Interview with Hélène Chatelain for her documentary film Nestor Makhno, peasant from Ukraine

Nestor Makhno, peasant from Ukraine, documentary by Hélène Chatelain (1996 - 52mn).
Broadcast on Arte on February 26, 1997 on history Wednesdays.

Sunday June 22, 2008

by ps

Revolutionary and peasant, Nestor Makhno was at the origin of the libertarian emancipatory movement in Ukraine from 1917 to 1921. Born in Goulaï-Polié, he took part very young in the revolution of 1905 and was arrested in 1908. First sentenced to death, his sentence is commuted to forced labor for life because of his age. Released in 1917, he returned to his city where he organized the peasants and the workers: the land of the big landowners was distributed to the poor peasants, the workers ran the factories. After the Soviet abandonment of Ukraine in 1918, the Makhnovist movement took up arms to defend this libertarian society.

"Freedom cannot pass through the submission of the people", disturbing words, an unacceptable revolt which escapes state control...

Makhno, peasant from Ukraine is a legend, a controversial legend according to official historians, to the Soviet authorities who perverted it, and sometimes even to libertarians [1]. Hélène Chatelain's film [2], Makhno, a peasant from Ukraine, is a real investigation into memory, an investigative work on the manipulation of the image and its consequences. An hour full of information, emotions, testimonies, comparative analyzes of positive and negative images, an hour that passes too quickly...

Is Makhno the unknown and unrecognized memory of Ukraine? Why this manipulation of history? What are the means which imposed the reshaping of history by the Soviet authorities and this concealment of the anarchist movement in Ukraine? Is his memory still alive today in Ukraine after years of total Soviet concealment? Is this film a way to restore the memory of Nestor Makhno and his struggle, so long eradicated? A rehabilitation of the author of "Workers of all countries, look deep in your soul, this is where the truth is?"

Christiane Passevant: From the first images, you talk about his diary that he started in 1923 in Berlin.

Hélène Chatelain: His diary [3] is completely fascinating because we find things that do not exist in any writing. for example, the beginning of his story is not the same as that found in the three volumes - only one has been translated so far. There is the chapter on the Jewish question that I have not seen anywhere. This is the newspaper of the Russian anarchists in Berlin, in Russian, which they published as soon as they set foot there. This is the wonder of libertarians. These are the first archives that I found here, which begin to unfold its history: "Before the revolution, my father was a former serf of the owner Chabilsky who lived in Goulaï-Polié..."[4] And he continued his story from which I left until the end, thirteen years later. And we follow up on this man who wrote this, who arrived there and who is the image of the film of the 1950s. The classic image of the psychopath.

CP: The image of a monster having fun shooting in the crowd.

Hélène Chatelain: This is the image that has been spread everywhere [5]. He was a bloodthirsty man, a monster worse than the image of the Bolshevik with his knife between his teeth, a madman. It was shown everywhere because it is the film on the civil war. Everything is coded in this story. We can talk about these codes, but we must also give ourselves the means to talk about the substantive issue. It is true that Makhnovtchina poses in relation to now a question that only this movement has posed. It is not a question of strategy. The libertarian movement has always fought with its back to the wall since everyone attacked it. And so he always defended himself [6]. However, the defense position is not always the best to think about. Basically, there are two kinds of libertarians, the wanderers - Malatesta, Durruti, Berneri - who went from place to place, and then there is Makhno who took root like a tree. He fed on that, not on a thought that was responsible for fertilizing a soil. He took it in himself and planted himself in his soil. What produces an approach infinitely more readable in the background, as in Aragon thereafter. But there it is stronger and more explicit with regard to the notion of story telling. It is not only the refusal to take power.

The Russian anarchists published more than seventy or eighty numbers with very beautiful articles, when Voline was there, which I could not read all. The newspaper was published at the time of the civil war, in Ukrainian and Russian. There is a fundamental reflection on the movement, on the importance of libertarian thought which was strongest at the beginning of the century, the bearer of revolutionary thought. this reflection must be sought because it is true that the language of the time is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek. Bolshevik thought did not exist except in congresses. We must not forget that the CGT was an anarchist. And there, Makhno only read that. The Archinovs and the others, those who created the Zaratoustra group, went to Vienna where things were moving. The police chased them.It was the generation that preceded him, who was 25-30 years old in 1905. All the books then were libertarian books. We read Marx, but not much. We especially read the confrontation between the two. Why one or the other. We read what is the juice of libertarian thought, that is to say a reflection on what is really a cultural fact, what is a thought.

I was shocked to discover that they had started by creating a study group on what they were most passionate about: the history of culture and the appearance of man on earth, astronomy and the stars. That's how they made the revolution too. Afterwards, they thought about how to make the revolution. This is their incredible strength. And why this movement which led this reflection, at the time when the revolution was made, or at least a social movement which made that it had abolition of the privileges, why this libertarian movement disappeared?

CP: Is that coming back to the question of falsification of memory?

Hélène Chatelain: No, it's almost mechanistic to say that a memory is falsified, that there is a real memory somewhere. There is no real memory somewhere. It is like the socialists who say that there is a real culture and that it is enough to give the keys to the people and that they open the suitcase. Intelligence is a work of thought. So there is no true and false memory. memory is an organic thing, a fabric of interrelations, like the molecules that make up matter. It's nothing else and all that too. Everything that tends to want to seek an evangelical or angelic narrative which would finally be true memory, is doomed to total deadlock. This can only give back a deterministic, modelable version. And that is the question posed by the Makhnovtchina, without formulating it thus while sensing it.

Makhno is a man among others, but it turns out that he had an inordinate energy and that he had this confidence given because he was a maquis and resistant. A resistance led alone which meant almost a year of continuous speaking and continual reflection between them. And few have had the chance to have this experience. This reflection on why the libertarian movement disappeared in favor of the Bolshevik model. Was it more suited to the questions asked at the time by almost everyone? The libertarian movement which did not actually pose the problem of power had freed itself from this question. Makhno does not speak of happiness, but says: "Create a society that is not humiliation, a society of responsibilities, [This is fundamental.] Where the freedom of each would be the responsibility of all. It is therefore not something to conquer, it is a fabric of social relations in which the politician will then be put. And I have rarely seen this in the heat of the moment. This reflection took place in full action, during the civil war, for four mind-blowing years.

When he speaks of the third revolution based on awareness, it is a long, difficult process, with repercussions, which he returns to repeatedly. Compared to all the models which come to us from Newton, they are not criminals, a crooked little bald, or a mad criminal who made Bolshevism, or the socialist or communist model as he has seized power. To say that there is a modeling of the story. To say that history, at one time, was no longer a narrative like until Voltaire and became a science, subject to the laws of that time, of the 18th or 19th century, linked to classifications and models. That, the Makhnovtchina makes it readable for people for whom it is essential: for the humiliated.

The great utopia of Makhno is due to the fact that he is deeply Rousseauist, the man is basically generous. His people, the humble, the poor, that's how he saw them. And I can't be against it. It's an incredible bet on humans. And from there, how we build relationships, hence the federative side that we find in the Jura for example. The why we know is infinitely more powerful than the how. Some texts say that it was always a question of taking power first and that we would see after, but we can think of it differently. And it is really current when we see the debacle of the parties. And get back to listening to this emergence of thought, deeply possibilistic, which is not deterministic thinking. The civil war is a civil war of words past and which continues.

CP: The film you made lasts an hour, but there are actually five hours of footage. These five hours of film, will we have the chance to see them soon?

Hélène Chatelain: Finishing a film is a lot of work. He has models, sometimes interrupted, bits, unfinished sequences, but I dream of doing what we call with Gatti an exhibition of places, which would be a physical walk in a thought where I could then put all my rushes, like that. Do not make a huge linear object of four hours since I finished this first film, which is a preface, a pretext. [7]

CP: In your film, there are times when you feel frustrated, when you want to go deeper, when you want to know more, especially about the witnesses who speak. When you give the workers in the factory to read Makhno's texts, they start to read and some people say "but I didn't know it was him", it is overwhelming and we feel that it is completely spontaneous. [8]

Hélène Chatelain: I didn't know what it could give and I hadn't foreseen their reactions when they discovered these texts. I also ran out of time there. After the interviews, there are a lot of pretty things going on. It would take me a year on the spot, taking the time to formulate the questions, to seize all the moments of grace like the one where Tollie said "I did not know that it was he who could write that". The preparation of the banner, we worked on it together, this banner for the first of May.

The first May of Goulaï-Polié were no longer just folklore and since I was there for the film, we thought of something else. but it was not obvious because we did not know what the authorities' reactions would be, even if this is a rather particular period. Finally, the police also helped me for this filming, the collective farm had loaned me three horses. The meeting for the preparation of the banner is very pretty. Fabric was needed and Ukraine is very poor. Where to find the fabric? The costumes ? One of the participants said that we could use any garment, another said that we needed costumes, and the first replied: "Did you see what they have in the photos! We don't need a uniform. It was the work of several small groups. Perhaps it would have been more efficient to get everyone together and prepare for the shoot. But I wanted to be careful at the start, I was not sure how people could react. The museum was empty. But they made this banner and carried it.

Each character is a story, often funny. The umpire and dumbbell trainer, his story is great. He is passionate about books, a reader. One training day, someone brought him a notebook and it was the second volume of Makhno's memoirs. What at the time interested no one, especially with a few lines of Solzhenitsin, we risked six years in prison. He started reading and it rocked him. He found himself on a train to go to arbitrate a competition in Leningrad with, in his wagon, a person in charge of all the military archives. And the only ones who continued to write about Makhno were the generals who fought against him because they had such strategic respect, they did not understand how it was possible.The soldiers knew Makhnovtchina perfectly because they studied this case well. Makhno made incredible shots, because he had such confidence in his own and thanks to his energy. And on this train, the trainer and the soldier sympathized. When the soldier knew where he came from, he asked him if he was a Makhnovist and if he knew Makhno, and he told him about the Makhnovtchina throughout the trip. He did not dare to write down, but tried to keep everything in mind and, on his return, intrigued, and he told her about the Makhnovtchina all the way. He did not dare to write down, but tried to keep everything in mind and, on his return, intrigued, he made all the villages. In 1991, he was notified of a search and he burned everything. And in fact, he was not targeted. He knew a lot. He is not libertarian, with a rather Bolshevik way of thinking, but Ukrainian, and at the same time very curious.

The actor, his story is wonderful. Television had projected a remake, an eight-episode series, and contacted him to play Makhno in the 1970s. It was already another era and the secret funds of the Lenin library were opened to him for documentation. to play his character. He began to read and discovered not only the history of Makhnovtchina, but the history of the civil war and especially the overturned official history. He therefore fought on the set to make a character who is closer to reality, who does not correspond to the image of Alexis Toltoï. “Then I received a letter from Goulaï-Polié. I never received a letter like this. For the first time, Makhno was a human being. Correspondence was established and Makhno's little nephew came to Moscow. They have photos where they are on the red square, but this actor never came to Goulaï-Polié. I brought him to Goulaï-Polié for the shooting, and his arrival in the family was exciting.

CP: One of the witnesses to the film said: "Looking back, the anarchists were right." [9]

Hélène Chatelain: He's a teacher. However, one could only be a teacher as in all state systems if one was a party. He is 70 years old and retired. He was passionate about the history of his region which was put to fire and blood by the Austro-Hungarians, who suffered a huge repression, and where the maquis formed and where Makhno became Batko. When he taught, all the official history overshadowed this period, but the children heard the real story at home. So he had to talk about it without doing it.

For him, this was a real discovery. And since he was an honest guy, when he read the anarchist program, he said, "They were right." They were indeed right in the method. And yet he is passionate about Napoleon. They are contradictory characters and that is what is great. It suddenly put things back together things he knew, but dared not formulate. He obviously could not, without risking losing his place, speak of this when he was teaching. And he loved to teach and kids, he educated three generations.

CP: How did you find these archives where we see Makhno and his companions on a station platform?

Hélène Chatelain: It's a stroke of luck. I had heard that Makhno had been filmed alive, but I did not know where. I came across a film made by a director from Saint Petersburg, which showed a reel which came from Romania, a scoop, and suddenly I saw this scene. And thanks to friends from Moscow who know the archives well, I was able to find the footage that had been repatriated from Romania. It was the first alliance between Bolsheviks and insurgent peasants and the front camera was there. There is a typology there to make on the images of the peasants, but I could not treat it in this version. He has the peasants before the revolution either to say that it was horror, or to say that it was good. Then, there are the peasants who listen, it is the decree on the land. All the peasants are attentive and a guy reads.And finally the peasants discuss, it is the NEP.

There are also the market plans because the cameramen like to take pictures. It is also interesting to see how we frame and what is done. And this film with Makhno, the first time we saw it, we went for a coffee because it was overwhelming. And we realize that many photos are actually prints of this film. There are archives everywhere. Notes that are mine.

There is also the story of his wife, Galina, who was told worse than hanging because immigration is what she is. I am the daughter of immigrants. Whether it's complicated and a common cause becoming intimate personal relationships, I know what it is. There was the problem of Galina. Makhno is dead. We lost track of Galina, her daughter who was first among the libertarians of Lyon. Skirda doesn't call her by her real name. And about fifteen years ago, a letter arrived in Goulaï-Polié where at the time we thought that Makhno had died in Turkey - we knew nothing - a letter signed Galina Gousminko who asked for a certificate as what she had been teacher for three years at Goulaï-Polié to obtain her retirement.

And this letter came from Kazatskan, Tchimkent. And Makhno's little nephew, a factory worker, who is honest about his story and refuses lies about his uncle, went to Kazatskan and recorded Galina. The cassette is technically bad, but you can hear Galina. I couldn't believe my ears. Makhno's wife recounting the capture of Goulaï-Polié by the reds. She tells about the leak, her problem with her boots, that she had a gun and that the last bullet was for her. Quite a story.

Then she came to Goulaï-Polié when her daughter, Hélène, never wanted to come. She stayed almost two months with him. The authorities did not come. There were still former students who knew her. She therefore made a salute to the former companions of the Makhnovtchina of which she is totally part and that is what she chose to say before dying. Then she left. It's endless stories. I thought at the beginning that the memory would have faded, but do you think! The human brain works very well and in an exciting way. At first I did not speak enough Ukrainian to decipher everything, I had the impression that they did not know. But people know despite systematic erasure.The model of revolutionary society was incapable of bearing this gaze while the serfs and libertarians who found themselves among the politicians or the arrested Bolsheviks were difficult, complicated partners, Iroquois.

Now reread the new texts by Marcos, from Chiapas, it's a proximity that gives chills in the back. Marcos knows what responsibility for the word is, and why the word is important, and why there is a civil war of words; it is really one language against another. It is a fight that we are only starting to formulate in a way that is possible to know on which front we are. When we read how he got rid of his deterministic tinsels and how he understood that the Indian language was carrying something that we really had to listen to, not to listen to it but because the formulation of analog type which is not an explanatory or commentary type formulation in which we are stuck, it is a fertilizing formulation of thought.When Makhno says - he has been in all workers' meetings - "I saw them, the workers, fascinated and gullible, thinking that the fact of creating their power and their dictatorship, could help you create your destiny. I have not read great politicians saying such strong things, to believe that supporting a program will make you think. It doesn't make you think. In addition, as he says, when you support something, you have no more hands to plow.

CP: It's common sense.

Hélène Chatelain: It is common sense and profound accuracy in life. And that's what saved the Makhnovtchina. They know that it is a movement completely rooted on the side of life and not on the side of death. The rest were often rooted on the side of death. It was all the thinking he did on the libertarian communities he found in Moscow that shocked him a little. He did not see it as the fault of the libertarian movement and he began to develop a criticism. But he was not a thinker, he was a man of action.

When the libertarians of Moscow came to ask him for money in Goulaï-Polié to make a university in Kiev and that he looked at them, hallucinating, saying but it is here that it is necessary to make it the university. He always wanted people to know to come and learn for themselves, to exchange real knowledge. the origin of the word knowledge is sapor, what has no taste is not knowledge and that he knew when he said that the big libraries were orchards that grew well and that it had to be opened like libraries for people to come and see how it grows and books. when the grandmother says that on his return from prison, he empties his bag which contained only books and newspapers. It keeps coming back,but I didn't want to repeat it so that no one would think that I was making a film to the glory of Makhno. Yet it is true that he read all the time. And it's the fact that you have to get to know. It's a real step. And again, Marcos is Makhno's brother.

[1] First a farmer, then a worker. Very young engaged in the revolution (1905). In 1907, he was wanted. Demonstrations are prohibited. He meets Voline (who joins the movement later) and Archinov. Released after ten years in prison in 1917 (death sentence, commuted to prison sentence because of his age). He was 28 years old in 1917 and was granted an amnesty.

[2] Hélène Chatelain, director of the film Nestor Makhno, a peasant from Ukraine, is a writer and filmmaker. His filmography is important:

Prisons too (1973)

The Lion, his cage and his wings (1975)

One Poem, five films (1980)

We Are Not Historical Figures (1985)

Ireland, Promised Land (1982)

Now it's okay (1987)

Why do Birds Sing, Who Am I? (1991).

[3] Makhno began his journal, The Anarchist Messenger, in 1923 in Berlin. Political refugee in France in 1925. An extradition request was refused, he risked being sentenced to death, he and his wife. Part of the family is killed (visit to the Goulaï-Polié cemetery).

[4] The population of Goulaï-Polié was 16,000 inhabitants at the time.

[5] Manipulation of the history of Ukraine in the antimakhno films shown to children: humiliation of Ukraine. Scene from the Soviet film where he is shown as a killer shooting the crowd from a merry-go-round, anti-anarchist propaganda. The part of cards where one of the players plays his role. Charges of anti-Semitism. Makhno and his Jewess by Joseph Kessel, fabric of lies.

[6] In his untranslated texts, there are reflections on the why of the crushing of the anarchist movement

[7] Production and distribution: Thirteen productions 01 40 26 06 97, La parole errante.

[8] A story found with the writings that Hélène relates to Goulaï-Polié. Discovery and emotion of the workers by reading the texts of Makhno which they do not know.

[9] The witnesses:

“When he returned to Goulaï-Polié, he emptied his bag when he arrived, and there were only books and newspapers."

“He was the first to organize a commune."

“He defended the poor."

"We have put a lot of crimes on his back."

"The anarchists were right if we look back"

"Makhno was good, unlike nowadays."

"I did not even know that he was the author of this sentence: "Workers of all countries, look deep in your soul, this is where the truth is."