Order No.1824 

of the Military Revolutionary council of the republic

June 4, 1919, Kharkov

To all military commissars and all executive committees in the Alexandrovsk, Mariupol, Berdyansk, Bakhmut, Pavlograd and Kherson districts.

The Gulyai-Polye executive committee, in concert with Makhno's brigade staff, is attempting to schedule a congress of soviets and insurgents from the Alexandrovsk, Mariuopol, Berdyanski, Melitopol, Bakhmut and Pavlograd districts for the fifteenth of this month. Said congress is wholly an affront to soviet power in the Ukraine and to the organization of the Southern Front, to which Makhno's brigade is attached. That congress could not produce any result other than to (...) deliver the front to the Whites, in the face of whom Makhno's brigade does nothing but fall further and further back, thanks to the incompetence, the criminal tendencies and treachery of its commanders.

1. The meeting of that congress, which will in any case not take place, is hereby forbidden.
2. The entire peasant and worker population must be warned by the spoken and the written word that participation in said congress will be regarded as an act of high treason towards the Soviet Republic and the fronts.
3. All delegates to said congress must be placed under arrest forthwith and brought before the revolutionary court martial of the 14th (formerly the 2nd) Army of the Ukraine.
4. Persons circulating calls from Makhno and the Gulyai-Polye executive committee must be placed under arrest.
5. This present order acquires the force of law once issued by telegraph and must be publicized widely everywhere, posted up in all public places and passed on to representatives from the cantonal and village executive committees, as well as to all representatives of the soviet authorities, and to the commanders and commissars of troop units.

Signed: 

Trotsky, Chairman of the Military Revolutionary Council of the Republic
Vatzetis, Commander in Chief
Araloff, member of the Military Revolutionary Council of the Republic
Kochkareff, Military Commissar of the Kharkov region

Source: Daniel Guérin, No Gods, No Masters; Volin, The Unknown Revolution