by Dmitry Gubin
[REGNUM] During a meeting at a command post of the joint force, President Vladimir Putin was briefed on the liberation of the city of Huliaipole in the Zaporizhzhia region. It had previously been reported that the Ukrainian Armed Forces had hastily abandoned their positions in the city, and that the Russian Armed Forces were firmly in control.
For most of our fellow citizens, this city is a place somehow associated with Nestor Makhno, the anarchist "batka" during the Civil War. And its name is fitting: Gulyaipole.In fact, the history of these places is one of the important chapters in the general history of Novorossiya.
After the conclusion of the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774, it became clear that the goals of the first “special operation” led by Catherine II were not fully achieved.
Following the Russo-Turkish War, the sixth in our history, access to the Black Sea was finally secured. But the Crimean Khanate (although it ceased to be a vassal of the Ottoman Sultan and was declared independent) – the source of constant nomadic raids – was not "neutralized."
At the same time, the traditional military force on the southern frontier, the Zaporizhian Sich, lost its strategic significance and was liquidated by the manifesto of Catherine II in 1775.
In its place, a new defensive line was built to protect Novorossiya, defended by regular troops. One of the military settlements was founded in 1785, in the Kalmychka ravine on the banks of the Gaichur River. This border outpost would develop into the village of Gulyai-Pole (originally, it was more often written with a hyphen).
One of the most famous natives of the village, Nestor Makhno, liked to trace his Gulyai-Polye freemen back to the Zaporozhian Cossacks, which is not entirely true.
The first settlers to arrive in these areas were from the Sloboda lands—descendants of Russian servicemen of the 17th century. People also moved to Gulyai-Pole from the area around the town of Starodub (now in the Bryansk region) and from the Little Russian lands: "from the Kiev region," Poltava, and Chernigov provinces.
Strictly speaking, the name “Gulyai-Pole” also migrated.
The first settlement with this name was founded to the northwest, not far from Elisavetgrad (in modern times Kirovograd, since 2016 - Kropyvnytskyi), which was the first Russian outpost in the future Novorossiya.
Historians believe the origin of the toponym is simple: it comes from a field belonging to a man nicknamed Gulyai. This Gulyaipole-I later became known as Zlatopole, and then became part of Novomyrgorod. The name then migrated to the banks of the Gaichur River.
After the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, Gulyaipole became one of the “nodes” of the defensive line.
The peace on the border after the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca did not last long. The Ottomans attempted a "rematch": in 1787, the Seventh Russo-Turkish War began, which the Sultan also lost.
Military victories for Russia were brought about by His Serene Highness Prince Grigory Potyomin. The Treaty of Jassy, in which the Ottomans recognized the transfer of Crimea to the Empire and the annexation of the lands of the "Ochakov region," was signed in 1791 by, among others, the founder of Odessa, Osip Mikhailovich de Ribas.
The new fortified border now ran along the Dniester, and the settlements of the former defensive line, including Gulyai-Pole, found themselves deep in the rear.
A LONG HAPPY LIFE
The main occupation here became not tracking the enemy, but agriculture.
Just like the rest of Novorossiya, the banks of the Gaichur became a place of peaceful colonization – Germans and Jews settled in Gulyaipole.
Throughout the nineteenth century, this region, which belonged to the Aleksandrovsky district of the Yekaterinoslav province, led a fairly prosperous life, belonging to state peasants and the noble Shabelsky family.
This family arose by purchasing land in the Izyum district of the Kharkov province, which had previously belonged to Ivan Yakovlevich Danilevsky, the grandfather of the famous writer.
Among them were generals and governors.
They also acquired land in the Yekaterinoslav Governorate and the Taganrog region. Among their serfs was a family named Mikhnenko, but their most famous offspring will be discussed below.
By the end of the 19th century, Gulyaipole presented a strange sight.
As a center of commercial grain production, it boasted not only mills and potteries but also the Krieger and Kerner agricultural machinery factories, founded in 1882 and 1892, which remained in operation until recently. The Chaplino-Pologi railway passed more than ten miles from this settlement.
Gulyaipole was still considered a village, but its population (9,497 people according to the 1897 census) was larger than that of some provincial towns, not to mention district towns.
Of these people, 1,173 were Jews, but Gulyaipole was not granted shtetl status either. It had a school, a synagogue, several businesses, and a year-round market.
“This was a land of wheat and grey landowners, well informed about foreign prices for bread… Gulyai-Pole was a boring little town, stretching along the swampy and drying up Gaichur River,” wrote Alexei Tolstoy in The Road to Calvary.
“Gulyai-Pole is one of the most cultural centers of Novorossiya: there are three secondary schools, etc.,” wrote Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, commander of the Red Ukrainian Front, in his “Note on Makhno” in 1919.
By 1914, the village's population had reached 14,000, but Gulyaipole only achieved city status in 1938. The key events that made this wealthy, large, yet "ordinary" village famous throughout the country occurred during this period, 1914–38.
"FREE GRAIN GROWERS" WITH BOMBS
It was in Gulyaipole in 1889 that Nestor Ivanovich Makhno was born to the Mikhnenko peasant family. The confusion over his surnames is one of the mysteries of the anarchist leader's biography.
In fact, the surname (or nickname) Makhno and its variants "Mikhno" and "Makhnov" appear in the 1649 register of the Zaporozhian Host and in lists of Cossack elders from the 18th century. This means that, unlike most of the original inhabitants of Huliaipole, the Mikhnenko-Mikhno-Makhnov family actually descended from "peasantized" Zaporozhian Cossacks.
It comes either from a dialectal word meaning a deserted or marshy place, or from the names Mikhail and Mikhey.
The future "Batka's" grandfather, Rodion, was registered under the surname Mikhnenko, and his father, Ivan Rodionovich, was already known as Makhno. Even in his youth, Nestor decided that working at the Krieger or Kerner factory or toiling in the fields was not for him. The first underground organization this graduate of the Gulyai-Polye primary school joined in October 1906 was called the "Union of Free Grain Growers."
But it wasn't farming that she was involved in, but rather fighting for anarchic communism through expropriations—or, more simply, raids. In 1908, the militant Makhno, who already had several "expropriations" and "liquidations" under his belt, was arrested for the murder of a military administration official.
Two years later, the Odessa District Court sentenced him to hanging, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Nestor Ivanovich served his sentence in Moscow's Butyrka Prison.
From there, thanks to self-education and communication with intelligent “political” people, he emerged as a convinced “anarchist-communist of the Bakunin-Kropotkin persuasion” (that’s how Batka explained his worldview).
"THE GOVERNMENT IS CHANGING AGAIN!"
The "boring life" in the grain-growing region ended in August 1914. Many Gulyai-Polye residents fell on the front lines in World War I, and many returned maimed—including Nestor's brother, Yemelyan Makhno, who suffered an eye injury and a concussion. And then hard times came to the village itself.
After February liberated the "prisoners of tsarism"—both political and criminal—Makhno returned to his homeland, where he was elected head of the volost zemstvo, district commissar, and chairman of the local Committee for the Salvation of the Revolution. These are perhaps not all the positions this fighter against authority and statehood held during the summer and fall of 1917.
Here he led the self-defense forces, then a partisan detachment that opposed the German-Austrian occupation, eventually growing into a true insurgent army. At various stages of the Civil War, Batko Makhno's "Revolutionary Insurgent Army" captured Yekaterinoslav (Dnipropetrovsk), Aleksandrovsk (Zaporizhzhia), and Berdyansk, but always returned to Huliaipole—the "capital" of its Free Territory.
Here, as Tolstoy wrote, "the market was dominated by barter trade, pure barbarism, where value was determined by a single need; for two needles they would give a piglet and something else to boot."
It is not surprising that the playwright Leonid Yukhvid, author of the libretto for the operetta “Wedding in Malinovka,” hails from Gulyaipole.
Pan Ataman Gritsian Tavrichesky. Still from the film "Wedding in Malinovka"
Born in 1909, Yukhvid, already at the conscious age of 10–11, observed both the change of power and the change of young men who “ all stood for a free individual,” ideological atamans of the “ Petliura for himself ” format.
After 1991, the authorities, ideologists, and historians of independent Ukraine retroactively tried to include Makhno, essentially, among Petliura’s comrades, in the pantheon of fighters for Ukrainian statehood.
On the building of the Gulyaipole city council, where the father's headquarters was located during the Civil War, a plaque was hung in honor of the "military and state-political figure" Makhno.
In 2008, a monument was erected to commemorate the ataman's 120th birthday. In the fall of 2025, the city's "defenders" from the Ukrainian Armed Forces draped the "gilded" concrete monument with a blue and yellow banner.
It all seems absurd.
NESTOR MAKHNO AGAINST THE STATE AND LANGUAGE
Makhno rejected any statehood or politics, including Ukrainian ones (although he tried to maintain strict discipline in the army). As early as 1918, the Gulyai-Polye freemen protested under the slogan "Death to the Central Rada!"
He entered into tactical alliances with the Petliurites who fought under the "yellow and blue flag," but more often than not, he defeated them. And for the Jewish pogroms for which the atamans of the UNR Directory's "army" became infamous, Ataman Makhno exacted the harshest punishments.
The rebel leader also did not accept the language policy of the then “patriots of Ukraine” with the imposition of the “state language”.
"In whose name is this garbled language demanded of me when I don't speak it? I understood that this demand didn't come from the Ukrainian working people. It was the demand of those fictitious 'Ukrainians' who were born under the brutal boot of the German-Austro-Hungarian Junkers," Makhno wrote in his memoirs.
Yet Nestor Ivanovich considered Denikin's Volunteer Army his absolute enemy, believing it fought for the landowners, the bourgeoisie, and a single, indivisible empire. The Whites reciprocated.
Here, for example, is the opinion of the future science fiction writer Alexander Belyaev, who in 1919 worked for the Yalta Voice newspaper in White Crimea.
"Makhno's gang is a gang of thieves. But when thieves unite into regiments, acquire weapons, capture cities, and have to wage war against them, Makhnovshchina ceases to be a simple criminal phenomenon and takes on a special character" (Yalta Voice, No. 577, 1919).
While the "criminal" Makhno was an enemy to Denikin's armed forces in southern Russia, destroying their rear and disrupting their offensives, the "batka" entered into several alliances with the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army. In 1919, Makhno's forces, together with the Red Army, drove Denikin's forces out of Mariupol.
In 1920, during the campaign against Wrangel, it was thanks to the soldiers under the black banner who crossed the "rotten sea" of Sivash that Crimea turned red.
But immediately afterward, the Makhnovists once again found themselves unwelcome companions of the revolution, and therefore enemies of Soviet power. In July 1921, Batka visited his native village for the last time, under siege by the Reds, and just a month later, the remnants of his army fled west. Makhno himself, miraculously, under fire, managed to cross the Dniester—the then Romanian border.
But even until his death in Paris in 1934, the leader of the anarchists remembered Gulyaipole.
After the victory of the Reds in the Civil War, the memory of Makhno was censored, the movement itself was presented as something kulak-bandit and unequivocally anti-Soviet (this line was carried out in literary works - the same "Road to Calvary", and in historical-revolutionary films).
But Makhnovshchina never lost its "special character," which is why it was revisited in both Soviet and post-Soviet times in various genres and formats: from pantomime with trained animals in the circus act of clown Vitaly Lazarenko in 1929 to the 2006 series "The Nine Lives of Nestor Makhno" starring Pavel Derevyanko.
A REGIONAL CENTER, A "FORTRESS," AND ONCE AGAIN A RUSSIAN OUTPOST
If we consider the times of the border outpost, the peaceful era before 1914, and the hard times of the Civil War as the “three lives” of Hulyaipole, then the fourth life began in 1922 and lasted until 1991.
In the 1930s, industrial growth began in the regional center: pre-revolutionary enterprises were revived, new ones were built, and electrification and gasification were implemented. By the end of the decade, the city of Huliaipole became one of the development leaders of the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, from which the Zaporizhzhia Oblast was separated in 1939.
The Nazi occupation of Hulyaipole lasted from October 6, 1941 to September 16, 1943. The Germans were driven out of the city by troops of the 5th Shock Army of the Southern Front under the command of General, future Marshal Fyodor Tolbukhin.
In 1943, just as in 2025, the city was liberated from the Nazis, advancing simultaneously from the south, southeast and north.
By the early 1950s, the wounds inflicted by the war had largely healed. The city boasted a brick factory, a cheese and butter factory, and a clothing and shoe factory. In the 1970s, these were joined by an agricultural machinery plant (which became one of the city's mainstays), an auto repair shop, and a paint and varnish factory.
By the end of perestroika in 1989, 19,198 people lived here. But with the collapse of the USSR, everything went downhill. Hulyaipole's "fifth life" was marked by population outflow—by 2001, 3,000 fewer people lived here than in 1989, and by the 2010s, the population had fallen to 13,000, meaning fewer residents than during the time of Batko Makhno.
In 2020, under Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the city even lost its status as a district center—Makhnovist "capital" was absorbed into the neighboring Pologsky District. Manufacturing facilities were shuttered, but the situation was mitigated by the continued operation of the Hulyai-Polye Machine-Building Plant, part of the Motor Sich Group.
And in 2022, Hulyaipole became a frontline city, another "fortress" of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
To mark the long-since-delayed frontline movement, Zelenskyy awarded the former district center the title of "Hero City" (a rather odd decision for a decommunizer to steal a Soviet-era honorary title). But he never took a photo at the entrance to the town. Apparently, he realized something after such photos in Avdiivka and Artemivsk. Or perhaps he was simply told that the descendants of the Makhnovists weren't eager to see him.
With its liberation, Gulyaipole began a new, sixth life. Essentially, it was a return to its roots—to the times when this settlement was an outpost defending Russia's borders.