Simon Karetnik

Semen Mykytovych Karetnyk (; 1893 – 1920) was a Ukrainian anarchist and a commander of the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine (RIAU). He often replaced Nestor Makhno as supreme commander of the Black Army in 1920. Karetnyk gained a reputation for his central role in defeating the White Army in Crimea in November 1920.

Biography

Semen Karetnyk was born into extreme poverty, growing up a poor peasant in the small southern Ukrainian town of Huliaipole. He worked as a hostler until the outbreak of World War I, upon which he was drafted into military service and worked his way through the ranks until he became an ensign. By the time of the Russian Revolution, Karetnyk had gained much military experience, which he utilized upon his return to Ukraine, when he became a leading partisan of the Makhnovshchina. Karetnyk's strong anarchist convictions brought him into the favor of the local revolutionary leader Nestor Makhno, with Karetnyk going on to become the second-in-command of the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine.

Upon Makhno's return from Russia in July 1918, Karetnyk and his brother attended a meeting with other local anarchists in order to figure out how they could acquire weapons. They resolved to carry out surprise attacks against the local authorities, seizing 44,000 rubles in a bank robbery at Zherebets, and increasingly harassing the occupying Austro-Hungarian Army. Despite earlier successes, the insurgents were driven out of the region by the occupation forces. They were surrounded by Hungarian forces at , where half of them were killed and Karetnyk himself was wounded. They then regrouped at Orikhiv and on 27 November, they decisively retook Huliaipole. Back in their hometown, the local anarchists established a general staff for the Insurgent Army, which Karetnyk joined. On 20 December, Karetnyk led a detachment to Synelnykove, as part of a 300-to-500-strong insurgent battalion, and then on to , arriving on Christmas. The following day they attacked the city, capturing it from the Ukrainian People's Republic by 28 December.

When the first Bolshevik-Makhnovist alliance was broken in June 1919, Karetnyk was among the anarchists of Huliaipole that accompanied Makhno's small detachment in a retreat to right-bank Ukraine. Following the formation of a temporary alliance with Nykyfor Hryhoriv's green army, Semen Karetnyk and Oleksiy Chubenko were two members of the insurgent staff that called for Hryhoriv to be disposed of and played a role in carrying out his assassination. According to the historian Clarence Manning, it was Karetnyk himself that killed Hryhoriv.

In the wake of the insurgent offensive after the battle of Peregonovka, the Oleksandrivsk Regional Congress of Peasants, Workers and Insurgents elected Karetnyk to the Third Military Revolutionary Council. On 4 December 1919, after a conference of the insurgent command in Katerynoslav, Karetnyk participated in the arrest and execution of a number of local Bolsheviks that had participated in the Polonsky conspiracy.

On 5 January 1920, Karetnyk entered into talks with the Red Army for a truce. But the agreement between the two proved stillborn after Ieronim Uborevich ordered the insurgents to transfer to the Polish front and integrate themselves into the 12th Army. When talks between the Makhnovists and the Bolsheviks resumed in August 1920, Dmitri Popov and Semen Karetnyk were two of the insurgent command staff that argued against the proposed alliance. However, an insurgent vote on the matter secured a majority for an alliance with the Bolsheviks. On 6 October, Semen Karetnyk, Dmitri Popov and Viktor Bilash met the Bolshevik negotiator at Starobilsk to sign their provisional agreement. By the following day, they had arranged an armistice and decided that a final draft of the "Political-Military Alliance" would be agreed upon in Kharkiv

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases