Nestor Ivanovych Makhno (Ukrainian: Нестор Івaнович Махно, pronounced [ˈnɛstor iˈʋɑnowɪt͡ʃ mɐxˈnɔ]; 7 November 1888 – 25 July 1934), also known as Batko Makhno (батько Махно, lit. 'Father Makhno'), was a Ukrainian anarchist revolutionary and the commander of the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine during the Ukrainian War of Independence. He established the Makhnovshchina (loosely translated as "Makhno movement"), a mass movement by the Ukrainian peasantry to establish anarchist communism in the country between 1918 and 1921. Initially centered around Makhno's home province of Katerynoslav and hometown of Huliaipole, it came to exert a strong influence over large areas of southern Ukraine, specifically in what is now the Zaporizhzhia Oblast of Ukraine.
Raised by a peasant family and coming of age amid the fervor around the 1905 Revolution, Makhno participated in a local anarchist group and spent seven years imprisoned for his involvement. With his release during the 1917 Revolution, Makhno became a local revolutionary leader in his hometown and oversaw the expropriation and redistribution of large estates to the peasantry. In the Ukrainian Civil War, Makhno sided with the Soviet Russian Bolsheviks against the Ukrainian nationalists and White movement, but his alliances with the Bolsheviks did not last. He rallied Bolshevik support to lead an insurgency, defeating the Central Powers's occupation forces at the Battle of Dibrivka and establishing the Makhnovshchina. Makhno's troops briefly integrated with the Bolshevik Red Army in the 1919 Soviet invasion of Ukraine, but split over differences on the movement's autonomy. Makhno rebuilt his army from the remains of Nykyfor Hryhoriv's forces in western Ukraine, routed the White Army at the Battle of Perehonivka, and captured most of southern and eastern Ukraine, where they again attempted to establish anarchist communism.
Makhno's army fought the Bolshevik re-invasion of Ukraine in 1920 until a White Army offensive forced a short-lived Bolshevik–Makhnovist alliance that drove the Whites out of Crimea and ended the Southern Front of the Russian Civil War. The Bolsheviks immediately turned on Makhno, wounding him and driving him westward in August 1921 to Romanian concentration camps, Poland, and Europe, before he settled in Paris with his wife and daughter. Makhno wrote memoirs and articles for radical newspapers, playing a role in the development of platformism. He became alienated from the French anarchist movement after disputes over synthesis anarchism and personal allegations of antisemitism. His family continued to be persecuted in the decades following his death of tuberculosis at the age of 45. Anarchist groups continue to draw on his name for inspiration.
Early life[]
Nestor Makhno was born on 7 November [O.S. 26 October] 1888, into a poor peasant family in Huliaipole, a town in the Katerynoslav Governorate of the Russian Empire (now Zaporizhzhia Oblast, Ukraine). He was the youngest of five children born to Ivan and Evdokia Mikhnenko, former serfs who had been emancipated in 1861. After Nestor's birth, his father went to work as a coachman for a wealthy industralist when the Makhnos' small plot of land could not feed the family. His father died when Nestor was only ten months old, leaving behind his impoverished family.
Makhno was briefly fostered by a more well-off peasant couple, but he was unhappy with them and returned to his family of birth. At only seven years old, he was put to work tending livestock. Makhno started to attend a local secular school when he turned eight years old. He was a good student at first but grew to skip school to play games and ice skate. He worked at a local estate in the summer after his first school year. His brothers also worked as farmhands to support the family.
Makhno attended one more year of school before his family's extreme poverty forced the ten-year-old to work the fields full-time, which led Makhno to develop a "sort of rage, resentment, even hatred for the wealthy property-owner". His aversion to the landlords grew, nurtured by his mother's stories of her time in serfdom. In 1902, he observed a farm manager and the landlord's sons physically beating a young farmhand. He quickly alerted an older stable hand Bat'ko Ivan, who attacked the assailants and led a spontaneous workers' revolt against the landlord. After the affair was settled, Ivan left Makhno with words that would inspire a rebellious spirit within him: "if one of your masters should ever strike you, pick up the first pitchfork you lay hands on and let him have it..." The following year, Makhno quit working in the fields and found a job in a foundry. By this time, most of his older brothers had left home and started their own families. Makhno rapidly moved between jobs, focusing most of his work on his mother's land, while occasionally returning to employment to help provide for his brothers.
Revolutionary activity[]
When the 1905 revolution broke out, the sixteen-year-old Makhno quickly joined the revolutionary movement. He distributed propaganda for the Social Democratic Labor Party before affiliating with his home town's local anarchist communist group, the Union of Poor Peasants. Despite increased political repression against revolutionaries, the Union continued to meet weekly and inspired Makhno to devote himself to the revolution. Makhno was initially distrusted by other members of the group due to his apparent penchant for drinking and getting into fights. After six months in the Union of Poor Peasants, Makhno had thoroughly educated himself on the principles of libertarian communism and became a formal member.
A series of agrarian reforms disempowered the traditional peasant communes by creating a wealthier land-owning class and growing private estates. In response, the Union of Poor Peasants initiated a campaign of "Black Terror" against the large landowners and the local Tsarist police. The group carried out a series of expropriations against local businessmen, using the money they stole to print propaganda that attacked the recent reforms. Suspected of being involved in these attacks, with Nazarii Zuichenko naming him as a participant in an attack on a post office cart, Makhno was arrested in September 1907 but was eventually released without charges due to a lack of evidence. As the rest of the group's members had been declared outlaws by the Tsarist authorities, Makhno founded another anarchist study group in a neighboring village, where two dozen members gathered on a weekly basis to discuss anarchist theory. But after the assassination of a police informant by the Union of Poor Peasants, the police launched a crackdown against the group and arrested many of its members, including Makhno in August 1909.