Born of peasant stock in Gwlyog-Polye, Ukraine, Nestor Makhno became an anarchist after the Russian Revolution of 1905. Sentenced to death for armed struggle, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Liberated in 1917, he organized an army of anarchist resistance against both the Bolsheviks and the White counter-revolutionaries. Throughout his period of struggle, he consistently advocated the creation of anarchist communism in the most difficult and impractical of conditions.
Forced to flee by the Bolsheviks, he eventually ended up in exile in Paris. Marginalized and impoverished, in poor health as a result of wounds sustained in fighting against the Whites and the Bolsheviks, and time spent in prisons inside tsarist Russia before the Revolution and in Eastern European prisons en route to exile afterwards, Nestor Makhno wrote occasional essays in self-vindication and in vindication of the peasant insurgent movement that bore his name.
Published primarily for fellow-exiles, these essays ranged from the theoretical and analytical, establishing him plainly as a deliberate as well as a visceral anarchist, to challenges thrown out to his enemiesincluding some Jewish anarchists - to produce proof of the alleged anti-Semitism of his movement in revolutionary Ukraine. He remained politically active, contributing to Delo Truda and other papers, and helped create the Organizational Platform Of The Libertarian Communists. Makhno was determined that the next time anarchism, acting in the light of experiences dearly bought, revamped and more disciplined thanks to its Organizational Platform, might reap the rewards proportionate with the commitment and sacrifice of its activists. Nestor Makhno died from tuberculosis on July 25, 1934, aged 44.
The essays in this volume date from his period in exile.
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