“ Batrak, a student of Moscow University, a former member of Komsomol, badly treated in Turukansk – he was almost dead before the GPU agreed to transfer him to the south, to Tashkent…” Ante Ciliga, 1936 in the paper Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik.

Konstantin Batrak was born on the Bezboroshnya farm, near Potokskaya village in the Kremenchug district of Poltava province, in Ukraine, on March 11, 1905. He was born into a peasant family. As a young man, he witnessed the Makhnovist raids and encountered Nestor Makhno.

In the first half of the 1920s he joined the Communist youth organisation, the Komsomol. In 1924 he was ordered by the Poltava province Communist Party to study in Moscow. There he completed four courses in the education faculty of Moscow State University. At the same time, he worked in an orphanage He was in Moscow during the party discussions with the Trotsky faction and then the New Opposition of Zinoviev and Kamenev. In later interrogation by the Chekists he opined that neither group satisfied him. He was described by co-workers as a "a very developed guy, energetic, good organiser.“

Whilst studying agriculture and philosophy and keeping track of discussions inside the Communist Party, he became interested in anarchism. He studied Kropotkin, and then Stirner, Proudhon and Bakunin. He visited the Kropotkin Museum , and then read books in its library, and texts by contemporary anarchists like Borovoi, Andreev, Karelin, and Kharkhardin, though again he felt that they did not satisfy him. He stayed in the Komsomol until 1927.

Towards the end of 1928, he joined the Bibliographic Circle, a legal anarchist body at the Kropotkin Museum library. He took part in their meetings, some held in his apartment and gave reports on the peasant question, and other topics. "I spoke about the fact that agriculture in the USSR is at a dead end and that the peasant issue is actually a problem." He put together a text, Property in the Conditions of State Capitalism", in which he tried to "give a scientific solution to the question of property in a communist society".

In April 1929, he was in a sanatorium in the Moscow area, probably for the treatment of tuberculosis. After this he worked in a Soviet Pioneer camp. Soviet Pioneer summer camps were organised for children by the Young Pioneer organisation, a Soviet equivalent of the Scouts There he told children and camp staff about the Makhnovist movement.

In August of the same year, he returned to Moscow and once again took part in Bibliographic Circle activities.

He was arrested on November 5that his apartment, along with Tatiana Lanshina and Yakov Schreiber, while putting together the leaflet, Comrade Workers!. This accused the Communist Party of destroying the anarchist movement and other left revolutionary currents, thus endangering the conquests of the revolution. Anarchist literature was found during the search of his apartment.

He was accused of belonging to an underground anarchist organisation, and of counter-revolutionary activities. He denied these charges, stating that the Bibliographic Circle was a legal body. He was sentenced by an OGPU court on December 23rd to three years in a political prison. He was already suffering badly from tuberculosis of the lungs from before his arrest.

Upon completing his sentence, on November 5th, 1932 he was exiled to East Siberia for three years. He lived first in Turukansk and then in Irkutsk.

The anarchist Irina Ilovskaya was sentenced to exile in Tashkent in 1933. There she was part of a group of anarchist exiles. She learnt that Batrak was in the last stages of TB in Irkutsk. She remembered him from chance meetings at the Kropotkin Museum. Wanting to save Konstantin from inevitable death in the harsh conditions of East Siberia, she sought to gain his transfer to Tashkent by claiming that she was his common-law wife. She threatened to go on hunger strike unless this happened.

The trick worked, and by decree of a special meeting of the OGPU, Batrak was transferred in early October 1933. However, he died of TB on December 10th of that year.

Nick Heath

Sources:
https://akrateia.info/dolgozhiteli-anarkhizma-irina-ilovaiskaia-i-iulian-karpik/
https://ru.openlist.wiki/Батрак_Константин_Кириллович_(1905)
https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/12jn8t
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2990629131201367/posts/3902776889986582/