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NM
Modern Era
Nestor Makhno
1888–1934 · Anarchist communism
Land and liberty, held by the people who worked it.
A Ukrainian peasant who spent nine years in tsarist prison, Makhno came home in 1917 and built a movement of village communes and elected councils behind the lines of the civil war. His insurgent army fought the Whites, the Reds and the nationalists in turn, then was crushed by the Red Army it had helped to win. He spent his exile warning that Lenin's state was a new class with a new whip.
Why it matters for freedom
The Makhnovist communes are the largest working test of stateless organization in the twentieth century.
Who they stood against
the tsar, the White generals, and the Bolsheviks who disbanded the soviets they had promised