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