MAKHNO, NESTOR IVANOVICH

(1889–1934), leader of an insurgent peasant army in the civil war and hero of the libertarian Left.

Born in Ukraine of peasant stock in Hulyai-Pole, Yekaterinoslav guberniya, Nestor Makhno (né Mikhnenko) became an anarchist during the 1905 Revolution. Makhno's father had died when he was an infant, so he worked as a shepherd from the age of seven and as a metalworker in his teens, attending school only briefly. In 1910, following his arrest two years earlier for killing a police officer, Makhno was condemned to death, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment because of his youth. Freed in 1917 from a Moscow prison, where he had befriended the anarchist Peter Arshinov, Makhno returned to Hulyai-Pole to chair its soviet and organize revolutionary communes. In 1918, he established a peasant army in southeastern Ukraine and during the Civil War proved himself to be a brilliant and innovative (if unorthodox) commander. Makhno's forces battled the Central Powers, Ukrainian nationalists, the Whites, and the Reds (although he also periodically collaborated with the latter). Makhno's Revolutionary Insurgent Army played a decisive role in defeating the Whites in South Russia in 1919 and 1920, utilizing techniques of partisan and guerilla warfare to dramatic effect. The Makhnovists also oversaw an enduringly influential anarchist revolution (the Makhnovshchina ) in southern Ukraine, summoning non-party congresses of workers and peasants and exhorting them to organize and govern themselves. In 1920, having refused to integrate his forces with the Red Army and hostile to Bolshevik authoritarianism, Makhno became an outlaw on Soviet territory. In August 1921, Red forces pursued him into Romania. After suffering imprisonment there and in Poland and Danzig, Makhno settled in Paris in 1924. In 1926, he helped create Arshinov's Organizational Platform of Libertarian Communists, but broke with his former mentor when Arshinov came to terms with Moscow. Thereafter, Makhno devoted himself to writing. In 1934, in poverty and isolation, he died of the tuberculosis he had originally contracted in tsarist prisons, but his name and achievements are revered by anarchists the world over. He is buried in Père La Chaise Cemetery, Paris.

See also: anarchism; civil war of 1917–1922

bibliography

Arshinov, Peter. (1974). History of the Makhnovist Movement. Detroit: Black & Red.

Jonathan D. Smele