"The bolsheviks in Moscow complain about the uncommunistic spirit of the Ukrainian peasants. They came to the conclusion that such an un-communistic spirit existed from the fact that the peasants revolt against the Soviet republic. They call the peasants "kulaks." Kulak is in Russia the name for the richer peasants who are against the abolition of private property and oppose the introduction of communism. It is said that the peasants band together and fight and kill communists. The people who talk so have not the slightest idea of the events that took place in Ukraine, to which events the present situation can be traced. "When the peasants under the leadership of the socialrevolutionaries, anarchists, maximalists, bolsheviks, etc., fought against the oppression by Skoropadski, the Germans, the Austrians, Kaledin, etc., they were very inadequately supplied with arms. Thus for instance I was in a battle, in which 500 peasants had only 200 rifles. For each rifle there were two cartridges. The enemy was over 1000 strong. The 500 peasants stood in one troop, the 200 who were armed with rifles stood in the front ranks. The numerically superior enemy was very well supplied with the most modern arms. They had machine guns, we had nothing. All knew that the foremost ranks must fall first and that the turn thereafter would come to the others. And, still, nobody left his place. On the contrary, each man waited until his front man had fallen, in order that he might then take his rifle.
"Such a blind courage could spring only from extreme despair and from the most mortal hatred, conjured up in the hearts of the peasants through the draconic measures of a most inhuman reaction.
"Those who lived through such things, and who have seen the butchering of the peasants and their desperate struggle, only they can understand the state of the Ukrainian peasant's soul, and shall find it possible then to understand that the peasants now also combat the bolsheviks and reject the bolshevik theories, which are strange to the peasants. But they will never approve of the tactics of the Central Russian bolsheviks towards the Ukrainian peasants, which show an absolute lack of understanding of the life of the peasants; a lack of understanding which brands all the efforts of the peasants as counter-revolutionary risings of "kulaks" who wish to defend their private property."
Thus my informant, a Russian who before the war had spent five years in America, ended his story. This man's name is Baron. He is at present one of the most active members of the anarchist federation of Ukraine, which calls itself "Nabat."
These reports place us to some extent in a position to understand the psychology of the Ukrainian peasants. People who have for some time lived in this atmosphere feel as though they were transplanted to a different world when they read columnlong articles in humanistic papers on the theory of force and on the use of force, and where force is treated as a problem. For the people of Eastern Europe, particularly of Ukraine, force is no problem, but a fact, a matter of course, a principle of life. It may be admitted that matters have reached this point of development only through the war and the revolution, but force would never have spread to such a great extent, if it had been foreign to the life of the people. Not only in world wars and civil wars, not only in class struggles, or in periods of the social revolution, but also in common every-day life, hostilities, yes, even differences of opinion are settled by primitive people principally through resort to the law of might. How can one wonder, then, that under such conditions as existed in Ukraine, force was made the all-powerful principle and the deciding factor, which took the place of every kind of justice, agreement or nego^tiation.