To all workers of the plough and the hammer!
Revolutionary Insurgents of the Ukraine (Makhnovists)
To all workers of the plough and the hammer!
Brothers! A new and mortal danger is approaching all working people. All the dark forces that served the bloody Nicholas have united with the help of the Polish landlords, the French instructors and the traitors of the Petliurist movement in the Ukraine in order to establish an autocracy over us, to burden us with landlords, capitalists, Zemstvo leaders, policemen and other hangmen of the peasants and workers.
Comrades! The commissars and bosses of the Communist-Bolsheviks are good fighters only against the poor and oppressed. Their punitive detachments and Chekas can splendidly shoot peasants and workers and burn down villages and hamlets. But against the true enemies of the revolution, before the Denikinists and other gangs, they flee shamefully, like miserable cowards.
You, comrades, have not yet forgotten how last year the gold shoulder straps came close to entering Moscow and if it were not for the insurgents, the three-coloured flag of the autocracy would long since have waved over Revolutionary Russia.
So also now, comrades! The Red Army, which is being sold out every step of the way by its own generals and cowardly commissars, is fleeing the front in panic and surrendering region after region to the Polish landlords. Zhitomir, Kiev and Zhmerinka have long been occupied by the Poles; the white guard front is approaching Poltava and Kherson. And, in the Crimea, the Denikinists have been waiting for the last three months for an opportune moment to once again occupy our own territory.
Brothers! Is it possible you will quietly await the approach of the whites and, crossing your arms, hand over yourselves, your wives and children, to be torn apart by the generals and landlords?
No, this must not happen.
All, as one, in arms and in the ranks of the insurgents.
Together with us, the Insurgent Makhnovists, rise against all tyrants. In every hamlet set up detachments and join with us. Together we are driving out the commissars and the Chekas and together with the comrade Red Army men we will build an iron battle front against Denikin, Petliura and the Polish landlords.
Comrades! Time does not wait; put your detachments together immediately.
For the cause!
Death and destruction to all tyrants and landlords!
Let us begin the last and final battle for a genuine, free soviet system where there will be neither landlords nor masters!
To arms, Brothers!
Cultural-Educational Section of the Revolutionary Insurgents of the Ukraine (Makhnovist)
May 1920
Source: www.ditext.com [Peter Arshinov, History of the Makhnovist Movement, 1918-1921]
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