Did you click the link?

It’s not an unsourced quote, it’s a primary source. After Mahknov’s revolution failed Arshinov became a historian. The quote is from his 1923 book "History of the Makhnovist Movement (1918–1921) ".

Its evidence is “I saw it happen three years ago and if you ask anyone else in the area they can tell you they saw it to”. Given he was the first to write about it I’m not sure what you expected. He was far from the last to write about it though.

If you want a Trotsky source try Communism and Terror in which Trostsky classifies the peasantry as a reactionary class and argues that using terror tactics against them is necesary to establish and maintain a dictatorship of the proletariat. In his later life Trotsky walked back on this saying it was too harsh but indicative of his mindset at the time.

As for what these terror tactics meant in practice when used against the peasants we have Lenin’s infamous 1919 order:

After the expiration of the seven-day deadline for deserters to turn themselves in, punishment must be increased for these incorrigible traitors to the cause of the people. Families and anyone found to be assisting them in any way whatsoever are to be considered as hostages and treated accordingly.

The Black army was around 1 or 2 thirds Red Army deserters depending on the time period and were formally classified by the Bolsheviks as “bandits and deserters”. As for what “treated appropriately” meant, well, this is from a Cheka report:

Yaroslavl Province, 23 June 1919. The uprising of deserters in the Petropavlovskaya volost has been put down. The families of the deserters have been taken as hostages. When we started to shoot one person from each family, the Greens began to come out of the woods and surrender. Thirty-four deserters were shot as an example.

Execution of the Black Army’s (and any one else the Bolsheviks classified as deserters or “bandits”) families and “anyone found to be assisting them in any way whatsoever” were explicitly Bolshevik policy at the time and Trostky was a particularly ardent supporter of this policy. With this in mind, it should not come as a surprise to you that the Red Army under Trostky executed a shitload of Ukrainian peasants in the manner Arshinov described.

This indiscriminate violence was by no means a “both sides” issue. While the Mahknovists activities indisputably resulted in civilian casualties, they like the Bolsheviks, were engaged in a revolutionary purge of the bourgeoise and aristocracy. What they did not do was purge their fellow proletarians. This was to the extent that the Black Army was famous for immediately releasing all captured Red Army soldiers and giving them the choice of either defecting or handing over their armaments and returning home. The officers they only captured and held as prisoners of war, not torturing them or forcing them to engage in labour, until the Red Army began their mass executions of peasants at which point the Black Army changed its policy on officers to immediate execution by hanging or firing squad and kept its policy on line soldiers unchanged.

Trotsky and the article you quoted is precious about the Mahknovists not structuring their revolution SOLELY to benefit what they define as “the working class” from which they exlude the peasantry. It’s true that the Black Army and the Makhnovist support base was comprised mainly of peasants. Ukraine’s population at the time was comprised primarily of peasants. According to the 1926 census 81% of Ukraine’s population was rural. It’s far more valid to criticise Trotsky and the Bolshevik’s insistence that the peasantry was an inherently reactionary force (despite their attempts to… abolish currency and seize their means of production) which needed to be ruled by terror for a transitional dictatorship of the proletariat to be constructed and maintained if full communism was to be enacted. Even the article you quoted admits that a prime motivator of the peasant revolts was that the Ukrainian Bolsheviks wanted to keep the peasantry in bondage, replace the landlords with themselves and keep extracting the vast majority of the grain they produced and shipping it to Moscow in exchange for … Nothing? Refusing even to let them seize their means of production, the plots of land they worked. In the eyes of the Ukrainian Bolsheviks the peasantry (again, the vast majority of the population) were not entitiled to the fruits of their labour, self determination in their workplace or ownership of their means of production. How could any Marxist revolutionary accept this?

The Mahknovist economic policies that the article you quoted ridicules as “insane” were aboloishment of currency, refusal to construct a state to fulfill the employer role in the wage labour relation, and refusal for the military to take a role in negotiating productive relations beyond aiding workers and peasants in seizing their means of production and defending the revolution. but the article’s arguements that these policies are inherently insane and unworkable is at best naive and infantile and more likely (given they’re getting published in modern Marxist circulars and have almost certainly encountered anarchist theory) intellectually dishonest. The article’s argument is an argument by ridicule. It poses the questions how can a modern society possibly function without wage labour and pretends that there is no answer, even though this is a topic heavily discussed in anarchist and communist theory. In addition to this, it is an argument not only against anarchism in general but also the possibility of a “modern” fully communist society. As communists I hope we can dismiss this out of hand.

The article you quoted also claims Mahknovik’s methods descended to almost the levels of the Bolsheviks, which again, is ridiculous and argued in bad faith. They attempt to take three incidents a set them up as the norm. It claims that Mahknovik engaged in torture with its only source being third hand white propaganda. It claims that Mahknovik and the Black army wantonly executed communists of opposing creeds pointing to an incident where a local Bolshevik had convinced two of five Black army regiments in defect and take arms against the other three regiment and the other three regiments upon discovering this summarily executed the two regiments and that cities Bolshevik. The article ignores that for this incident to have played out like it did demonstrates clearly that Bolsheviks were allowed to peacefully and freely coexist in cities the Black Army unless those specific Bolsheviks took up arms against the Black Army. In contrast to the articles claim, the Black Army was famous for being unwilling to kill proletarians. This was to the extent that defeated Red Army soldiers were given a choice of defecting or surrendering their arms and (unsupervised!) being allowed to return home. Only officers were imprisoned and up until the mass executions of peasants began they were treated well. This paints a stark contrast to Trotsky and the Red Army’s policy of imprisoning and slaughtering not only members of the Black Army but also their families and anyone who was an outspoken Mahknovist.

The article simultaneously criticises what it perceives as Mahknov’s utopianism, by attempting to transition directly to anarcho syndicalism/communalism and what it perceives as his hypocrisy by maintaining a hierachical army to defend the revolution. This criticism of Mahknov’s so called hypocrisy I will dismiss out of hand as it cannot be simultaneously maintained alongside a criticism of utopianism and I have no doubt that if he were to weaken his defence of the revolution by attempting to somehow form an anarchist army this too would have been criticised as utopian idealism. I will note that unlike the Bolsheviks the Black army never engaged in conscription. The criticisism of Mahknovs utopianism I take more seriously, as in the end Mahknovists failed to defend their revolution. But who they failed to defend it from were THE BOLSHEVIKS who the authors article argues were JUSTIFIED IN THEIR ACTIONS as it was less convenient and more risky for them to wage an indiscriminate and bloody war against the Black Army, noncombatant Mahknovists, and their families, a war which almost let White forces retake Moscow, because the Mahknovist peasants might not have given them a good enough deal on grain and might not have maintained or let the bolsheviks maintain, the rail network. We will never know if this was actually the case because the Bolsheviks never seriously tried to negotiate.

Mahknov’s revolution did not neglect the liberation of the working class, it simply did not place the needs and rights of peasants as subservient to those of wage labourers. As the article you quoted admits, the Black Army was often more supportive of workers rights to the ownership of their means of production, self determination in their place of work and ownership of the fruits of their labour than the workers themselves. When they asked him to set up a state and pay them wages he refused and instead suggested they collectively barter with peasants and other workers using the fruits of their labour. Essentially, he was attempting to enact post currency anarcho-communalism/syndicalism without any transitional stages. This was arguably utopian, especially given the Mahknovists failed to defend their revolution from the Bolsheviks, but it was far from reactionary and the indiscriminate violence against them was utterly unjustified.