Title:
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The Makhnovshchina, 1917-1921 : ideology, nationalism and peasant insurgency in early twentieth century Ukraine
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The peasant partisan movement led by the Russified anarchist
Nestor Makhno in left-bank Ukraine from 1917 to 1921 has been
claimed by libertarians as a rare example of anarchism in
practice. But peasant discontent in Ukraine, an area of developing
capitalist agriculture, was neither ideologically monolithic
nor monocausai. It was differentiated both by class and
region, and while the Makhnovshchina, strongest in the provinces
of Ekaterinoslav, Kherson and the Tauride, certainly included
anarchists, it is unclear whether the ideology of the leaders was
widely shared by the rank and file. Indeed, an analysis of the
class composition of the movement is difficult empirically and
theoretically.
Ukrainian nationalists have also claimed Makhno as one of their
own. But while the partisans twice allied themselves with the Red
Army I they never moved beyond occasional tactical truces with the
various separatist Ukrainian groups which were then active. The
relatively high level of class consciousness of the leadership
may have been the decisive factor here.
Internal development; within the Makhnovshchina also present
theoretical difficulties for the libertarian viewpoint. Makhno's
highly authoritarian style was, his supporters have argued,
justified in a military leader faced with the confused circumstances
of the Russian civil War. But after the Makhnovists were
expelled from Russia in 1921, the debate over leadership led to
a split between anarchist fundamentalists and supporters of an
"organisational platform." This apparently obscure controversy
among exiled Russians and Ukrainians has had repercussions in
West 'European anarchism down to the present, and was particularly
important in the French student movement of 1968
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