The "Makhnovitsi" appeal to their Brethren in the Red Army
Stop!
Read!
Reflect!
Red Army comrade!
You have been despatched by your commissar-commanders to fight the makhnovitsi insurgents and revolutionaries.
On the order of your commanders you will bring ruination to peaceable areas, you will carry out searches, make arrests and murder folk whom you personally do not know, but who will have been pointed out to you as enemies of the people. You will be told that the makhnovitsi are bandits or counter-revolutionaries. They will order, not ask, but make you march like a humble slave to your commander. You will arrest and you will kill! Who? Why? On what grounds?
Reflect, Red Army comrade! Reflect, toilers, peasants and workers forcibly subjected to the new masters who go by the ringing title of the "worker-peasant authorities"!
We are the makhnovitsi revolutionary insurgents, peasants and workers like you, our Red Army brethren!
We have risen up against oppression and degradation; we fight for a better and more enlightened life. Our ideal is to atain a community of toilers, with no authority, no parasites and no commissars.
The government of the Bolshevik-Communists sends you to mount punitive expeditions. It is a hurry to make peace with Denikin and with the wealthy Poles and other White Army scum, so that it may the more easily harass the popular movement of revolutionary insurgents, of the oppressed risen up against the yoke of authority, all authority.
But the threats from the White and the Red commands do not scare us! We will answer violence with violence!
If need be, we, a tiny handful of men, will rout the divisions of the government's Red Army. Because we are free and enamoured of liberty! We are insurgent revolutionaries, and the cause we champion is a just cause.
Comrade! Reflect upon whose side you are on and against whom you fight. Do not be a slave. Be a man!
The Makhnovitsi Revolutionary Insurgents
Source: Daniel Guérin, No Gods, No Masters
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