Nestor Makhno

Biography

Nestor Ivanovich Makhno was born on October 27, 1888, in Gulyaipole, a town in Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia region. He was the most remarkable and paradoxical figure of the Russian Civil War: a peasant anarchist who built a military force of 50,000 fighters, controlled a territory the size of France, fought both the Reds and the Whites with equal ferocity, and ended his days as a tubercular émigré in a Paris tenement — but who, at his peak, shaped the entire course of the war in southern Russia. Makhno came from the poorest stratum of Ukrainian peasant society. His father died when he was ten months old; his mother and four brothers scratched out a living from the steppe. As a teenager he was drawn to anarchism through the writings of Mikhail Bakunin and Pyotr Kropotkin and joined an anarchist-communist group that carried out expropriations — armed robberies of landowners and government offices. Arrested in 1908 for an attempted murder charge stemming from these activities, he was sentenced to death; his age (he was nineteen) saved him from the gallows, and the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment with hard labor in the Butyrka Prison in Moscow. In prison he educated himself voraciously and became mentored by the veteran anarchist Pyotr Arshinov. Released by the February Revolution in 1917, he returned to Gulyaipole and began organizing peasants. After the Germans occupied Ukraine under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, he led guerrilla resistance against the occupiers and the Ukrainian nationalist government (the Hetmanate). By 1919 his 'Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine' — the Black Army, named for the anarchist black flag — numbered tens of thousands of peasant fighters who were fanatically loyal to 'Batko' ('Father') Makhno. His territory, the 'Free Territory,' was a genuine attempt to implement anarchist communism: peasants controlled the land, workers ran factories, there were no taxes, no government bureaucracy. Makhno himself was a charismatic if erratic leader who drank heavily, was wounded repeatedly, and led from the front. He twice allied with the Red Army against the Whites — his raids on Denikin's supply lines in autumn 1919 were decisive in the White collapse — and twice was betrayed by the Bolsheviks who attempted to disarm or destroy his forces immediately after the common enemy was defeated. After the final defeat of Wrangel in 1920, the Red Army launched a full offensive against Makhno. Outnumbered and with nowhere to go, he crossed into Romania in August 1921 with a small band of followers. He spent the rest of his life in exile in Paris, working in a foundry and writing his memoirs. He died of tuberculosis on July 25, 1934.

Key Battles