Nestor Makhno

Nestor Ivanovych Makhno, often called Bat'ko Makhno, was a Ukrainian anarchist revolutionary who led the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine during the Ukrainian War of Independence. Between 1918 and 1921, he spearheaded the Makhnovshchina, a widespread peasant movement aimed at building anarchist communism in Ukraine. The movement began in his home province of Katerynoslav and his hometown of Huliaipole, but eventually held strong influence over large parts of southern Ukraine, especially what is now Zaporizhzhia Oblast. Anarchists have drawn inspiration from him both during his lifetime and since.

Early life

Makhno grew up in a poor peasant family. Born on 7 November 1888 in Huliaipole, then part of the Russian Empire, he was the youngest of five children. His parents, Ivan and Evdokia Mikhnenko, had been serfs freed in 1861.

After Makhno’s birth, his father worked as a coachman for a wealthy industrialist because the family’s small plot could not feed them. Ivan died when Makhno was only ten months old, leaving the family destitute. For a short time, Makhno was fostered by a better-off peasant couple, but he was unhappy and returned to his birth family. At age seven, he began tending livestock.

He started attending a local secular school at eight and was initially a good student, but later skipped classes to play games and ice skate. After his first school year, he worked on a local estate in the summer. His brothers also worked as farmhands.

Makhno attended only one more year of school before extreme poverty forced him, at age ten, to work the fields full-time. This experience bred in him a deep resentment toward wealthy landowners, a feeling strengthened by his mother’s stories of serfdom. In 1902, he saw a farm manager and the landlord’s sons beating a young farmhand. An older stable hand named Bat'ko Ivan attacked the assailants and led a spontaneous workers’ revolt.

Afterward, Ivan told Makhno that if a master ever struck him, he should grab the nearest pitchfork and fight back. The next year, Makhno left field work for a job in a foundry. By then, most of his brothers had moved out, and Makhno shifted between jobs, mostly working his mother’s land and occasionally helping his brothers.

Revolutionary activity

When the 1905 revolution erupted, the sixteen-year-old Makhno quickly joined the revolutionary movement. He first distributed propaganda for the Social Democratic Labor Party, then joined the local anarchist communist group in his hometown, the Union of Poor Peasants. Despite increased repression, the group met weekly, and Makhno became devoted to the revolution. Initially, other members distrusted him because he seemed to drink and fight often.

After six months in the Union, he had thoroughly studied libertarian communism and became a formal member. In response to agrarian reforms that weakened traditional peasant communes and created a wealthier landowning class, the Union launched a campaign of “Black Terror” against large landowners and Tsarist police. They carried out expropriations from local businessmen, using the stolen money to print propaganda attacking the reforms. Suspected of involvement in these attacks, Makhno was arrested and spent seven years in prison.

Agrarian activism

Released during the 1917 Revolution, Makhno became a local revolutionary leader in Huliaipole. He oversaw the seizure and redistribution of large estates to peasants. During the Russian Civil War, he initially sided with the Soviet Russian Bolsheviks against Ukrainian nationalists and the White movement, but these alliances proved short-lived.

Integration into the Red Army

He rallied Bolshevik support to lead an insurgency, defeating the Central Powers’ occupation forces at the Battle of Dibrivka and establishing the Makhnovshchina. In 1919, his troops briefly joined the Bolshevik Red Army during the Soviet invasion of Ukraine, but they split over disagreements about the movement’s autonomy. Makhno rebuilt his army from the remnants 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 tried to establish anarchist communism.

In 1920, Makhno’s army fought the Bolshevik re-invasion of Ukraine until a White Army offensive forced a short-lived alliance between the Bolsheviks and Makhnovists. Together, they 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 pushing him westward. In August 1921, he fled to Romanian internment camps, then moved through Poland and Europe before settling in Paris with his wife and daughter.

There, he wrote memoirs and articles for radical newspapers, contributing to the development of platformism. He later became estranged from the French anarchist movement. After his death from tuberculosis at age 45, his family continued to face persecution for decades.