But the assertion of the bolsheviks is wrong. On the contrary, the Ukrainian peasants take at least a sympathetic stand towards the social revolution and the new-construction of Ukraine, even more so than the peasants in Russia, where the great mass of the peasants became conservative as soon as they had taken the land away from the estate owners. The peasants are in no way unfriendly to socialism, but even show quite outspoken communist tendencies.
The whole peasantry is opposed to the "pomeschtschiks" (large land owners). They do not want the estate owner back under any conditions. They fight desperately against all counterrevolutionary generals, who defended the system of large estates. They chased away Petljura, Kaledin, Denekin, Grigorjev and Wrangel. And still Wrangel had drawn a lesson from the fate of his predecessors and came before the peasants with an agrarian program, in order to gain them over to his side. No land owner was to be allowed to own more than 200 Dessiatins of land. (1 Dessiatin equal to 2.7 acres.) Wrangel expected to gain greater sympathies with this than had come to the share of Denekin and his predecessors. He believed that they would succeed in pulling the peasants over to his side, just as the Roumanian government had pacified the peasants and understood how to keep them from revolution through a similar agrarian policy. But while the Roumanian bo jars (land owners) succeeded in saving themselves with a few sacrifies of land, the Ukrainian peasants, who had become more far-sighted through their long struggle, could see through Wran gel's purposes, and, although Wrangel was able to fool part of the peasants, he had the progressive part of them against him.
In the long run Wrangel could not have held out even if he had not been annihilated by the Red Army and Machno.
The peasants were opposed to the 200 Dessiatin program of Wrangel's. But they are also opposed to the 50 Dessiatin program of the bolsheviks. The bolsheviks do not want to come into conflict with the better situated peasants. They need the peasants and cannot afford to have them against them. Hence, they have established the rule that no* peasant can have more than 50 Dessiatins of land. But the peasants have in their congresses taken a stand against this norm. Particularly in this regard we note the above mentioned congress, which was called by Machno and Wollin (in Alexandrovsk, October, 1919). They said that this maximum is too high; it is a bourgeois norm. By that method they would again create pomeschtschiks.
The Marxian theorists of bolshevism-communism, from their theoretical viewpoint, brand the Ukrainian peasants as anti-communists and as defenders of private property; particularly those of them who fight against Machno. But my investigations in the Ukraine have given the result that almost the opposite is the case. The bolshevik-communists decree a more extensive private ownership in land than the peasants themselves. The bolshevik-commuists, who pretend to be the only representatives of communism, are less communistic than the peasants, whom they designate as non-communists.
But the peasants would not by far be communists if they only stood for a smaller maximum parcel of land than the bolshevikcommunists. This would at most prove that they are more communistic than the communist bolsheviks. But this is only speaking comparatively. About the positive communism of the peasants it would give us no information.