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New groups emerged and periodicals were set up, the print-runs of papers such as "Nabat" (Alarm Bell) in Kharkov and "Predtecha" (Forerunner) in Zhitomir were in the thousands. Anarchist publications from Russia were also distributed in the Ukraine, the most significant of which being "Obshchina" from Moscow and "Chornoye Znamya" (Black Flag) from Leningrad. The main task facing Ukrainian anarchists in 1989 was that of "rehabilitating" anarchism, in other words of destroying the stereotypes which the Stalinists had created in mass consciousness. The average citizen had grown used to the cinematic image of drunken anarchist bandits and trembled with fear and loathing at the very mention of the words "anarchy" and "anarchists". The sight of an anarchist black flag affected them in the same way as a red cape does a bull, or a mouse a housewife in the old sexist stereotype. In October 1989 the second KAS conference was held in Zaporozhye to mark the centenary of the birth of Nestor Makhno. (For a whole month prior to the congress the local press whipped up hysteria, calling on parents to keep their children indoors because, apparently, the anarchists were coming from every corner of the USSR and had sworn to sacrifice one hundred infants to mark the centenary of their "Batko"*2). On the whole the conference went well, but amidst the euphoria of growth and upswing divisions could be seen which were to mark the boundaries of future splits in the organization. No understanding was possible between the pro-market KAS members in Kharkov and the anarcho-communists in Dnepropetrovsk in particular in terms of anarchist tactics, but also in general due to divergent points of view on the process of capitalization in the USSR, which was then in its initial phase. The disagreement went so far that leading members of the Kharkov organization declared they would disrupt the distribution of the AKRS paper "Chornoye Znamya" in Kharkov, describing its class-struggle approach as "fascism". The aggravation of the contradictions led to a split in KAS at its second congress in March 1990 in Moscow. This was the most representative of all anarchist congresses in the USSR, there being over 200 participants from 26 different cities (almost half of them from the Ukraine). The authoritarian tendencies of the Moscow leaders*3, the refusal of the majority at the congress to depart from a position of so-called market socialism, decision-making on matters of principle by majority vote - thus imposing the will of the majority on a minority - forced many activists to leave the congress, including many veteran Ukrainian anarchists. The minority which left decided to hold a congress of their own, which led to the foundation of a new organization of Soviet anarchists in the autumn of that year - the Association of Anarchist Movements (ADA). Amidst all the verbal abuse and confusion at the congress in Moscow the Ukrainian anarchists held a meeting of their own in the foyer of the conference building and decided to meet in Kharkov on 1 May to re-constitute their own Ukrainian anarchist association - the Confederation of Anarchists in the Ukraine (KAU) "Nabat". The specific socio-political situation in the Ukraine, its increasing withdrawal from the disintegrating USSR and what many activists at the time saw as the necessity of closely cooperating with the Ukrainian national-liberation movement were the primary factors which brought about the formation of a separate organization of Ukrainian anarchists within the anarchist movement of the USSR as a whole. The split in the KAS, the creation of ADA and KAU, and the dissociation of the left wing of the KAS-AKRS led to a significant intermeshing of the anarchist groups in the Ukraine which were already fairly amorphous. A large number of the KAU groups continued to consider themselves part of KAS, others affiliated with ADA (at first only very few), and in the ranks of KAU there were active AKRS members said to have "more than a pinch of Trotskyism". At around this time the Kharkov local group of KAS/KAU had over 100 members, making it the strongest in the Ukraine. The research assistant I. Rassokha played a leading role, as did the students Ye. Solovyov and V. Radchenko and the Afghanistan war veteran V. Fidelman. In early 1990 when there were rumours of an anti-Jewish pogrom being planned Fidelman set up the Militant Anarcho-Revolutionary Union (BARS); veterans of the war in Afghanistan, young workers and students came together to organize resistance. They readied themselves for self-defense and in the most uneasy nights they conducted patrols on the streets - but in the end there was no pogrom. When the immediate danger had passed BARS didn't disband, however, but continued training its members and remained in a state of readiness so it could react if provoked. The Kharkov anarchist paper "Nabat" became quite well known in the independent Ukrainian press and with a print-run of 3,000-5,000 was quite large for an anarchist paper The KAU was founded in Kharkov on 1 May 1990, bringing together anarchists of all tendencies from 20 towns and cities in the Ukraine. At the Mayday demonstration the Kharkov anarchists and KAU congress delegates marched in a 200-strong block of their own with black and red-and-black flags. All in all there were about 500 anarchist activists in the Ukraine, and in the opinion of journalists, "in 1990 the KAU was the largest and most popular of the leftist organizations in the Ukraine" (if we leave out the Soviet Communist Party, which can hardly be considered to be left). But in autumn 1990 the rot set in. The process of formation and growth of new local groups slowed down and then stopped altogether. In the course of just two months a series of scandals shook and destroyed the Kharkov organization of the KAS/KAU. The Kharkovites could also not resist the allure of the national question. "If Kharkov is made a Ukrainian town, we'll make it a new Ulster!" This and similar utterances by the ambitious Kharkov "leaders" served only to speed up the process of disintegration. The publication of "Nabat" was stopped, and by the winter only a shadow was left of the organization's previous strength. BARS found no real practical tasks and dissolved. The leading anarchists of 1989-90 drifted further and further away from