Nestor Makhno Ran an Anarchist Republic From Here

Huliaipole sits on the open Zaporizhzhia steppe, a market town of forty thousand before the wars, walkable end to end in half an hour. In the autumn of 1918 its most famous son came home. Nestor Makhno was thirty, five foot three, a former farmhand and blacksmith's apprentice who had spent nine years in a tsarist prison for a bomb thrown at a police official. He had read Kropotkin in the cell. He came back to Huliaipole with a plan to prove that a rural society could run itself without landlords, tsars, hetmans, or commissars. Makhno had already been the local anarchist organizer during the 1917 revolution. Austro-Hungarian troops backing the Skoropadsky government had driven him out in April 1918 and hanged his brother. He returned in September, reassembled a partisan band on horseback and in tachanka carts, and by November his insurgents had retaken the town. Over the next two and a half years the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine, the Black Army, would grow to more than fifty thousand riders and infantry at its peak, and the surrounding region became the Free Territory: about seven million people, on and off, living under a patchwork of village councils and regional congresses that abolished private ownership of land, cancelled debts, and refused conscription into any state. Huliaipole was the capital. Congresses of peasants, workers, and insurgents met in the town's schools and workshops. The Bolsheviks called the place 'Makhnograd' and treated it as a rival center. Makhno's forces fought the Austrians, the Hetmanate, the Directory, Denikin's Whites, the Bolsheviks, and briefly allied with the Red Army twice, each alliance ending in betrayal. In October 1919 his cavalry broke Denikin's rear at the Battle of Peregonovka, buying Moscow the breathing room to hold the south. The experiment ended in August 1921. Trotsky's forces cornered what was left of the Black Army; Makhno, wounded and typhoid-stricken, escaped to Romania and eventually to Paris, where he died in 1934 poor and largely forgotten. Soviet history erased Huliaipole's role for seventy years. The town today keeps a modest Makhno museum in a restored merchant's house, a monument on the central square, and the collective memory of the one time a corner of the Ukrainian steppe tried to govern itself with no state at all.