The summer of 1918 had scattered Ukraine's anarchists. After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk opened the door to occupation by the Central Powers, they retreated into Russia, regrouped at Taganrog, and slipped back home to find the countryside seething against the German-backed Ukrainian State. Makhno returned in secret to his hometown of Huliaipole, gathering fighters in quiet meetings. In late September his group ambushed an Austrian detachment there, seized weapons and horses, and pushed north. At Dibrivka his men fell back into the woods and joined a second small band led by Fedir Shchus, who had been sheltering under the trees since a defeat in July. The two commanders were still debating the advance of Anton Denikin's Volunteer Army to the south when the Austrians quietly ringed the village and closed the roads. The insurgents were surrounded, outnumbered, and out of easy options.

Makhno's plan turned surprise into a weapon. He and Shchus picked thirty men and timed the assault for the middle of the day, when the occupying soldiers had stood down to rest. Shchus swung his smaller party around to flank from the far side of the village, setting up a Maxim gun for enfilading fire. Makhno's larger group crept toward the square with a Lewis gun, unseen until it was too late. When the two positions opened up, most of the Austrian detachment was caught in the crossfire; the survivors broke and ran. As they retreated toward Pokrovske, the fleeing soldiers ran straight into the local peasants, who chased and captured them armed with little more than pitchforks. When the crowd's fury threatened to turn to lynching, Makhno himself stepped in to stop it.

The haul was substantial: four machine guns, two truckloads of ammunition, and eighty prisoners. The fates of the captured diverged sharply. Members of the Ukrainian State Guard and collaborationist landowners were shot; the Austrian conscripts, by contrast, were fed and released once they surrendered their arms, sent off bareheaded after their kepis were taken. For engineering the victory, the insurgents gave Makhno a title he would carry for the rest of the war, spoken with the affection of men for a leader they trusted: Batko, Father. It was a peasant's honorific, not a general's rank, and it fit the movement he led.

Victory came at a price paid by Dibrivka itself. The German command ordered the insurgents liquidated, and Austrian troops with allied Haydamaks returned to shell the village and set it alight, burning more than six hundred houses to the ground and driving the fighters out. Yet the revolt only widened. Through the autumn of 1918 the insurrection spread across southern and eastern Ukraine, sustained by disaffection in the occupying ranks and the collapse of the Central Powers. By late November the anarchists had reoccupied Huliaipole and stood up a general staff for what became the Revolutionary Insurgent Army. In January 1919, the rebuilt village even hosted the first regional congress of peasants, workers, and insurgents, an assembly born of the fight that had begun with thirty men walking into a square.