My history of Makhno isn't too hot but I'll bump with an opinion because I want to see the good answers -- he was the kind of person that would name his newly formed anarchist territory after himself. I personally think this is something of a red flag.
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2021
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I personally think this is something of a red flag.
Surely there must exist a more appropriate idiom to use here.
Exactly what I came here to say, even (or especially?) as someone who leans toward the stateless end of communism.
Thank you for the bump, and for your input :) I appreciate it. I browse this site a lot more than I participate in it and I love being able to have some people to interact with that aren’t the fucking chuds I deal with on a day-to-day basis.
I feel neutral about it, he was just another faction in the Russian civil war, he used a ton of the same methods as the Red army did, he ultimately lost. That's about it.
Some people are extremely opinionated about him and claim he would have/already did create an Anarchist paradise of freedom, I dont think he would have been able to act much differently than the USSR ultimately did if he wanted to succeed.
Ignore the inflammatory title, this is a well citied critique, more of the myths around Makhno than the man himself. https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/nestor-makhno-the-failure-of-anarchism/
I also don't know much about the whole Ukraine Free Territory thing despite being curious. Most of the popular stuff on the issue reads like hagiography and dunks people go for in ml vs anarchist slap fights don't seem to land, so I assume Makhno was pretty good.
so one of the problems is a lack of primary sources. we have Makhno's words himself, and we have what the newly founded Soviet Union who crushed them said. there is not any primary source that anybody is going to call 'unbiased' and so, you can find things which portray Makhno as a bandit piece of shit who actually wanted to kill all the jews in Ukraine, and you can find things about being a staunch defender of the liberty of the peasants of Ukraine.
I'll play my cards and say that I am a Marxist Leninist, and so quite obviously a fan of the Soviet Union in this era. I do think that in the long term the soviet union was far more stable than a roving peasant army which failed to build many institutions in a time of crisis, but it's no secret that Trotsky got a lot of people killed unnecessarily for quite flimsy reasons where negotiations could very much have far lessened the bloodshed if not avoided it outright.
history is not an outright 'these are the good guys who did nothing wrong, and these are the bad guys who were 100% evil'
Thank you for the response!
it's a difficult topic to talk about because, as I said, a total lack of solid sources. everything is heavily biased to one side or the other. and, not to sound like a centrist, but sometimes truly the history is somewhere in the middle. many of those under Makhno really did see themselves as the true embodiment of peasant liberty, as did Trotsky at the head of the Red Army. I do not think Mahkno was a 'bad' person, I think he truly saw himself as a revolutionary, I do not think he was equipped to carry out that revolution. I think it is always a tragedy when leftists turn on one another in sectarian violence, especially in such a revolutionary moment when every person matters so much more to defend that revolution. to me, the answer of what was best, to leave them alone or to some how gain control of Ukraine? has to be that the Ukrainian anarchists never would have held off counter revolution or foreign intervention like the Red Army had to time and time again.