Peter Arshinov

<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>Peter Andreyevich Arshinov was an anarcho-communist revolutionary and historian.

Life

Early Life

Peter was born in the village of Andreivka to a family of workers in 1887. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1904. In 1905 he was a fitter in a railway workshop in the town of Kizilarbat, in Turkestan near the Iranian border. He edited the Bolsheviks' newspaper aimed at railway workers, and fled to Ekaterinoslav the town to avoid police attention. It was there he became an anarchist. He started to work in a shovel factory.

He began organising armed attacks on the representatives of the local authorities and the police. He joined an anarchist attack on the town's police headquarters and shot and killed Vasilenko (who had tipped off police about workers' involvement in the 1905 revolution), the owner of a local railway company, in front of a large crowd of workers.

Arrest

He was arrested for the murder in 1907, and condemned to be executed by hanging, but escaped during a religious celebration. He took refuge in France for two years and returned to Russia in 1909 and was arrested for distributing anarchist propaganda, but escaped from prison again. He robbed several wine depots and post offices, before being arrested in Austria in 1910. He was extradited to Russia and sentenced to 20 years in Butyrki prison, where he met Nestor Makhno, teaching him about Bakunin and Kropotkin.

Freedom

During the February Revolution, they were both released and Peter started the Federation of Anarchist Groups of Moscow, and was secretary of the union for propaganda of Moscow, organising two newspapers and paritcipating in the conference of anarchists in Moscow. He later left for the Free Territory of Ukraine to produce newspapers (notably editing Nabat's newspaper) and organising assemblies. Upon the fall of the Free Territory, he fled to Berlin, Germany and lived in Paris and Chicago, continuing to edit newspapers and playing a role in developing Platformism. He began to openly denounce anarchism to secure a passage into the USSR, leading to all of his old friends harshly ending their friendships. Once living in the USSR, he organized an underground anarchist movement (leading some to believe his denouncing of anarchism to be faked to gain the trust of the USSR) and was executed in 1938.

Works

• 1921: History of the Makhnovist Movement
• 1927: The Two Octobers