Nestor Ivanovych Makhno (Ukrainian: Не́стор Іва́нович Махно́, pronounced [ˈnɛstor iˈwɑnowɪtʃ mɐxˈnɔ]; Russian: Не́стор Ива́нович Махно́; 7 November 1888 – 25 July 1934), also known as Bat'ko Makhno (Ukrainian: Ба́тько Махно́ [ˈbɑtʲko mɐxˈnɔ], 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. Anarchists have cited him as an inspiration during his life and into today.
Raised by a peasant family and coming of age amid the fervor around the 1905 revolution against the autocratic rule of Russian Emperor Nicholas II, Makhno was a member of the Union of Poor Peasants, a local anarchist group, and spent seven years imprisoned for that. 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 Russian 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' 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 internment 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 later became alienated from the French anarchist movement. His family continued to be persecuted in the decades following his death of tuberculosis at the age of 45.
Nestor Ivanovych Makhno was born on 7 November [O.S. 26 October] 1888 into a poor peasant family in Huliaipole, a town then in the Katerynoslav Governorate of the Russian Empire and now in Ukraine. He was the youngest of five children born to Ivan and Evdokia Mikhnenko, former serfs who had been emancipated in 1861. After Makhno's birth, Ivan went to work as a coachman for a wealthy industrialist when the family's small plot of land could not feed them. He died when Makhno was only ten months old, leaving behind his impoverished family.
Makhno was briefly fostered by a more well-off peasant couple. Unhappy with them, he 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. Makhno 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 him to develop a "sort of rage, resentment, even hatred for the wealthy property-owner". His aversion to the landlords grew, nurtured by Evdokia'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 Bat'ko Ivan, an older stable hand 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 brothers had left home and started their own families. Makhno rapidly moved between jobs, focusing most of his work on Evdokia's land while occasionally returning to employment to help provide for his brothers.
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.
On 26 March 1910, a Katerynoslav district court-martial sentenced Makhno to be hanged. Although he had refused to appeal, Makhno's sentence was commuted to a life sentence of hard labor, due to his young age. While in prison, Makhno contracted a near-fatal bout of typhoid fever but eventually recovered. He was moved several times: to the Luhansk prison, where family briefly visited him, to the Katerynoslav prison, and in August 1911, to Butyrka prison in Moscow, where over 3,000 political prisoners were being held. Through the other prisoners he learned Russian history and political theory, taking a particular interest in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) by the Russian anarchist communist theorist Peter Kropotkin. Makhno's frequent boasting in prison earned him the nickname "Modest". He sometimes even antagonized the guards, which landed him in solitary confinement. Due to prison conditions, Makhno quickly fell sick again and was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He spent many periods in the prison hospital throughout his sentence.
In Butyrka prison, Makhno met the anarchist communist politician Peter Arshinov, who took the young anarchist on as a student. Makhno also became disillusioned with intellectualism during this time after seeing the prejudice with which guards treated prisoners of different social classes. As the years passed, Makhno began to write his own works and to distribute them among his fellow prisoners, starting off with a poem titled "Summons" that called for a libertarian communist revolution. Prison did not break his desire for revolution, as Makhno swore that he would "contribute to the free re-birth of his country". Although exposed to the ideas of Ukrainian nationalism in prison, Makhno nevertheless remained hostile to all forms of nationalism, adopting an internationalist position during World War I and even circulating an anti-war petition around the prison. When political prisoners were released during the February Revolution of 1917, Makhno's shackles were removed for the first time in eight years. He found himself physically off-balance without the chains weighing him down and in need of sunglasses after years in dark prison cells. He remained in Moscow for three weeks, briefly joining an anarchist group in Moscow's Lefortovo District until late March, when his mother and his old anarchist communist comrades convinced him to return to Huliaipole.