Nestor Makhno

<infobox> <title source="name"/> <image source="image">

</image> <group> <label>Aliases</label> <label>Relatives</label> <label>Affiliation</label> </group> <group> <header>Biographical information</header> <label>Marital status</label> <label>Date of birth</label> <label>Place of birth</label> <label>Date of death</label> <label>Place of death</label> </group> <group> <header>Physical description</header> <label>Species</label> <label>Gender</label> <label>Height</label> <label>Weight</label> <label>Eye color</label> </group> </infobox>Nestor Ivanovich Makhno or Bat'ko (1889 - 1934) was an anarcho-communist revolutionary, commander of the Black Army (and considered a military genius) during the Russian Civil War (which defended the Free Territory of Ukraine) and one of the ideological founders of Platformism.

Born

Childhood

Born to a poor peasant family in Gulyai-Polye to a family of six boys, his father died before he turned a year old. He began working tending cows and sheep for the local peasantry, later working as a farm laborer and in a factory.

Imprisonment

In 1906, a year after the failed Russian Revolution, he joined an anarchist group in Gulyai-Polye at age 17, and was arrested and imprisoned to years later for involvement around the murder of a police officer. He was originally sentenced to death, but was instead changed to life in prison in Butyrki prison in Moscow because of his youth. He hated life in prison and was unable to accept the strict discipline, leading to him frequently being placed in solidarity confinement and tortured. But he shared a prison cell with the older anarchist Peter Arshinov who taught him about Bakunin and Kropotkin. He was released from prison in 1917, as the February Revolution gave amnesty to political prisoners.

Return

He returned to his native village and helped organize a trade union for farm laborers. He was also elected chairman of the local union of carpenters and metalworkers and the Gulyai-Polye Soviet of Workers' and Peasants' Deputies. In August 1917, he recruited several armed peasants and began forcefully expropriating land from the wealthy in the area and redistributing it to the peasantry, making him a hero, compared to Stenka Razin and Yemelyan Pugachev.

The signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (ceding much of Ukraine to the German and Austrian empires) led to him going into hiding as soldiers began to occupy towns, and he escaped to Moscow, arriving in June 1918. He arranged a meeting with Peter Kropotkin and later one at the Kremlin with Vladimir Lenin, where he argued that anarchists were a realistic and effective group, and Lenin helped offer him to return to Ukraine.