Revolution, Civil War, and the Horseman from the Steppe

The Russian Civil War was one of the great catastrophes of the twentieth century, although it is often overshadowed by the world wars that framed it. Between 1917 and 1922, across the vast territories of the collapsing Russian Empire, perhaps ten million people died from combat, famine, disease, terror, and reprisal. Reds fought Whites, Whites fought Greens, and Greens fought everyone. Autocrats fought anarchists, nationalists fought internationalists, peasants fought cities, and villages fought armies.(The conflict stretched from Poland to Vladivostok, from the Arctic Ocean to the Caucasus, and drew into its vortex Russians, Ukrainians, Jews, Cossacks, Tatars, Armenians, Greeks, Mennonites, Germans, Czechs, Poles, and dozens of other peoples caught between competing visions of the future. and foreign powers inserted themselves into the chaos including Britain, Australia, the United States, and Japan.

As I wrote in an earlier essay on the Revolution and Civil War, this was not one war so much as many wars occurring simultaneously. It was less a civil war than a kind of World War 1.2: a continental struggle in which the old order died, and several incompatible new worlds attempted to be born.

Among the prophets, executioners, ideologues, adventurers, warlords, saints, opportunists and dreamers thrown up by that upheaval, few were more remarkable than Nestor Ivanovych Makhno: charismatic Ukrainian anarchist and Green insurgent, peasant revolutionary, cavalry commander, military opportunist, libertarian idealist, and larger-than-life folk hero.

Unlike so many of his contemporaries, he survived. He escaped the firing squads, the battlefields, the prisons, the epidemics, and the purges. The man who fought Germans, Austro-Hungarians, Ukrainian nationalists, White armies, Red armies and assorted local warlords eventually died not with a rifle in his hand but in a Paris hospital bed, impoverished and tubercular, an exile far from the black-earth steppe that had made him famous.

Or perhaps infamous.

For Makhno belongs to that category of historical characters who stubbornly resist classification. The Whites hated him because he was a revolutionary peasant insurgent. The Bolsheviks hated him because he was a revolutionary peasant insurgent who refused to obey them. Ukrainian nationalists distrusted him because he placed anarchism before nationalism. Landowners feared him. Foreign occupiers hunted him. Even fellow anarchists sometimes regarded him with suspicion. Yet somehow this peasant from Huliaipole (now in the Zaporizhzhia Oblast of Ukraine) acquired an almost mythological stature. A century later, artists still paint him, films are made about him, rock bands commemorate him. political activists still claim him, and historians still argue about him. Wikipedia’s entry about Nestor Makhno, is long, thorough, and extensively detailed, but makes for exciting reading with its comprehensive account of his colourful career during, before and after the civil war, and even beyond the grave.

The two manga-style illustrations that prompted these reflections are themselves evidence of that enduring fascination.

Makhno the Legend

The first thing one notices is that the artists are not attempting strict historical realism. The Makhno of these images is tall, windswept, and handsome, somewhere between a Cossack ataman, a samurai, and a western gunslinger. The black banner streams dramatically behind him. His gaze is fixed on some distant horizon. One expects stirring Russian choral music to surge in the background.

The real Makhno was rather different. Contemporary photographs show a relatively short, compact man, often clean-shaven, intense rather than imposing. His contemporaries remembered not his stature but his energy. He seemed perpetually in motion. Charismatic, restless, impulsive, brave, reckless, idealistic and pragmatic in equal measure. The sort of man who appears during periods of social collapse and seems almost generated by the turbulence itself.

Yet the artists understand something important: historical memory rarely preserves people as they actually were. It preserves them as they are remembered. The artwork therefore depicts not so much the historical Makhno as “Makhno the Legend”- the anarchist rebel rider of the Ukrainian steppe. And legends tell us as much about those who create them as they do about their subjects.

The flag in the first picture identifies his force as the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine. One speech bubble proclaims: “My ne khochemo zavoyovaty vladu — my khochemo zruynuvaty yiyi nazavzhdy!”  – “We do not want to seize power- we want to destroy it forever!” A poster declares: “No to authority! No to the Party! No to the State! Long live the free community!” Another slogan advocates “Free councils of free people.”

One can almost hear every bureaucrat in history grinding their teeth. For Makhno was that rarest of political creatures: an anarchist who genuinely seemed to mean it. Here was one who would have signed to Denearys Targaryen’s vow not to join the wheel but to break it.

A Kaleidoscope of Lost Futures

The popular memory of the Russian Civil War tends to reduce it to a struggle between Reds and Whites. Bolsheviks versus monarchists. Revolution versus reaction. Reality was considerably messier. The conflict resembled a kaleidoscope more than a chessboard.

The collapse of the Romanov Empire unleashed a bewildering array of competing visions. Monarchists wanted restoration. Liberals hoped for constitutional government. Socialist Revolutionaries dreamed of a peasant democracy. Bolsheviks sought proletarian dictatorship. National movements emerged across the empire’s periphery. Foreign powers intervened. Countless local strongmen pursued their own ambitions. Entire regions changed hands repeatedly.

The lands between the Dnieper and the Don were particularly complex. They were never inhabited solely by Russians and Ukrainians in the neat modern national sense. These were borderlands in the deepest historical meaning of the word. Cossacks rode the steppe. Mennonite farmers cultivated colonies founded generations earlier. Jews lived in market towns and cities. Greeks inhabited settlements along the coast. Tatars maintained ancient communities. Armenians traded. Germans farmed. Merchants, smugglers, soldiers, pilgrims, revolutionaries and dreamers moved constantly through the landscape.

Every modern nation prefers neat origin stories. But history seldom cooperates.

Makhno emerged from this world of overlapping identities and competing loyalties. His Free Territory in southeastern Ukraine represented perhaps the most improbable political experiment of the entire Civil War: an attempt to create a libertarian society amidst one of the bloodiest upheavals in modern history.

Whether it could ever have survived is doubtful. The twentieth century belonged to states, bureaucracies, standing armies, intelligence services, and industrial administration. It rewarded those who could organise railways, requisition grain, count factory output and maintain prisons. Anarchism was playing an away game.

Yet for a brief moment Makhno’s movement offered a glimpse of a different possibility. That possibility was ultimately crushed, first by necessity, then by power, and finally by history itself.

The Black Banner and the Long Shadow of Empire

There is another reason, beyond the romance and mythology, why Makhno still matters.

His story emerged from one of the great turning points of modern history: the collapse of empires. The Russian Civil War was not simply a struggle between Reds and Whites. It was also a struggle over what would replace the Romanov Empire. Across the former imperial territories, peoples sought to determine their own futures. Finns, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Ukrainians and many others attempted to carve nation-states from the wreckage of imperial collapse. Some succeeded. Others failed. All became caught up in the wider maelstrom.

The tragedy of the twentieth century is that many of those hard-won freedoms proved fleeting. The new states born from the ruins of the Romanov, Habsburg, Hohenzollern and Ottoman empires found themselves trapped between larger and more powerful forces. First came the Nazi storm. Then came the Soviet one. Much of Central and Eastern Europe spent decades living under one form of domination or another. The promise of national self-determination so evident in the years immediately following the First World War often ended in occupation, dictatorship or subordination.

Yet history did not stop there.

The Soviet Union eventually followed the Romanov Empire into the graveyard of failed political systems. One by one, nations that had disappeared behind the Iron Curtain re-emerged as sovereign states. Flags long hidden returned to public squares. Languages once marginalised regained official status. Historical memories suppressed for decades resurfaced. The old imperial map dissolved once again.

Seen from this perspective, the present war in Ukraine is not simply a dispute over territory. It is part of a much longer historical argument about empire, sovereignty and identity.

A century after Reds, Whites and Greens fought across the same black-earth steppe, war once more rages in the lands where Makhno made his name. Huliaipole itself has found itself close to the front line. Mariupol, Melitopol, Berdyansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson appear both in histories of the Civil War and in contemporary battlefield reports. The same landscape that once carried cavalry columns, tachanki and armoured trains now carries tanks, drones, missile batteries and mechanised brigades.

The present conflict is not a replay of the Russian Civil War. Historical analogies are useful servants but dangerous masters. Yet the recurrence is striking. Once again Ukraine finds itself at the centre of a struggle shaped by the afterlife of empire.

At its heart lies a question that has echoed through East European history for more than a century: who has the right to determine Ukraine’s future?

An increasingly irredentist Russia, drawing heavily upon imperial memory and historical grievance, has launched an assault upon a former imperial possession that insists upon its own sovereignty and right to choose its own path. The arguments are framed in terms of security, history, ethnicity and geopolitics. Beneath them lies a much older issue. The Russian Empire fell. The Soviet Empire followed it. Must Ukraine forever remain part of another state’s historical imagination, or may it exist fully as itself?

One suspects Makhno would have found the question both familiar and irritating.

He was never a nationalist in the conventional sense. Unlike Bandera and later Ukrainian nationalists, Makhno did not fight for a Ukrainian nation-state. He fought for something simultaneously larger and smaller: local autonomy, peasant self-government and anarchist freedom. He distrusted all states, whether Russian, Ukrainian, Bolshevik, White, German or otherwise.

This has made his legacy awkward for modern Ukraine.

States generally prefer heroes who wanted states.

Makhno wanted free councils of free people.

As a consequence, he occupies an unusual place in Ukrainian memory. Unlike Bandera or Shukhevych, he has never become a central pillar of official state mythology. Unlike the controversial legacy of the OUN-UPA or the Waffen-SS Galicia Division, debates surrounding Makhno are not primarily about nationalism. Instead, he exists in several overlapping forms at once: the historical insurgent commander, the libertarian icon celebrated by anarchists across the world, the regional folk hero of southern Ukraine, and increasingly, the son of Ukraine who resisted domination from distant centres of power.

None of these versions fully captures the man.

The historical Makhno remains elusive. His movement opposed antisemitic pogroms more consistently than many contemporary forces and included Jews within its ranks, yet it operated amidst the appalling violence of the Civil War and was never entirely untouched by it. His Free Territory represented one of the most ambitious anarchist experiments in modern history, yet it was also shaped by the brutal necessities of war. Admirers romanticise him. Critics emphasise the contradictions. Both have evidence on their side.

Perhaps that ambiguity explains his enduring fascination.

The artist who gave him the modern Tryzub belt buckle has quietly fused three Makhnos into one figure: the historical insurgent of 1918–21, the anarchist hero of libertarian mythology, and the modern Ukrainian patriot retrospectively enlisted into a national story that he himself might have regarded with considerable scepticism.

The anachronism is historically dubious but symbolically powerful.

History rarely asks permission before appropriating its characters.

And then there is the final act.

Defeated but not destroyed, Makhno escaped the fate that overtook so many of his contemporaries. Unlike John Brown, Custer, Davy Crockett or Ned Kelly, he did not die with his boots on. Unlike countless White and Red commanders, he did not perish on a battlefield or before a firing squad. Miraculously, given the odds against him, he survived.

The horseman of the steppe ended his days in Paris.

One imagines him there during the 1920s and early 1930s, sitting in smoky cafés among White émigrés, ex-Bolsheviks, anarchists, monarchists, refugees and stateless wanderers, all arguing about futures that had already vanished. The thunder of cavalry had faded into memory. The revolutionary epic had dissolved into reminiscence.

When he died in 1934, aged only forty-five, worn down by tuberculosis, old wounds and years of hardship, he was cremated. His ashes were placed not in the Ukrainian black earth but in the columbarium of Père Lachaise Cemetery, niche 6686.

There is something wonderfully ironic about that. The anti-clerical anarchist who spent his life fighting states, hierarchies and institutions now rests among the famous dead of France, surrounded by poets, musicians, revolutionaries and dreamers. History possesses a sense of humour.

I have always loved Père Lachaise. I have wandered its avenues among the celebrated and the forgotten, the visited and the unvisited. It occurs to me that perhaps there is a verse yet to be written about those whose names draw no pilgrims and whose flowers have long since withered. Next time I find myself there, I think I shall seek out niche 6686 and offer a quiet dobryi den to the old anarchist.

For the world has turned another circle since his death.

The Black Army vanished. The Free Territory disappeared. Stalin’s Soviet Union rose and fell. The nations that struggled for freedom amidst the ruins of empire endured decades beneath first Nazi and then Soviet domination before re-emerging as sovereign states. And now, in the lands where Makhno once rode beneath a black banner, another war is being fought over questions of empire, identity, memory and self-determination.

What would Nestor Makhno make of it all?

We cannot know.

But one suspects he would recognise the landscape immediately.

And perhaps that is why he refuses to stay buried.

The ashes remain in Père Lachaise.

The legend still rides the steppe.

Coda.

Trotsky, Makhno, and the Problem of Power

One of the most fascinating aspects of Makhno’s story is his relationship with the Bolsheviks.

Leon Trotsky regarded him as a dangerous adventurer, an undisciplined partisan commander whose independence threatened revolutionary unity.

Makhno regarded Trotsky as a would-be dictator masquerading as a liberator.

Both men were, in their own ways, correct.

Their uneasy alliance against General Wrangel’s White Army in Crimea remains one of those moments when history briefly forces bitter enemies onto the same side before restoring them to mutual hostility. The Makhnovists helped defeat the Whites. Once that task was accomplished, the Bolsheviks turned on their troublesome allies.

The logic was almost inevitable. The Bolsheviks sought power. Makhno sought freedom from power. Those two projects could coexist only temporarily.

My old tutor Tibor Szamuely would undoubtedly have seen the episode as another illustration of what he called the Russian Tradition. Revolutions changed slogans and symbols, but the underlying gravitational pull of centralised authority remained remarkably constant. The old autocracy vanished. New forms emerged. Yet power continued to accumulate at the centre.

The names changed. The structure endured.

The Matryoshka Doll Called Ukraine

One begins with Makhno and eventually finds oneself discussing Ukraine.

That, too, seems inevitable.

Churchill’s famous observation about Russia being “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” is often quoted without its conclusion. He suggested there was a key: Russian national interest.

Yet even that turns out to be another matryoshka doll.

Open “national interest” and inside you find geography. Open geography and inside you find history. Open history and inside you find memory. Open memory and out tumble Kyivan Rus, Mongol invasions, Orthodox Christianity, imperial expansion, Soviet power, nationalist awakenings, famines, wars, myths, and competing historical narratives.

Eventually one arrives at Ukraine. Or perhaps one begins there.

The artist has quietly inserted a modern Tryzub—the Ukrainian trident—onto Makhno’s belt buckle. It is a striking touch and a thoroughly anachronistic one. The symbol derives from the seals of Volodymyr the Great and modern Ukrainian statehood. Makhno himself never wore it.

The artist is making a statement. This is not merely Makhno the anarchist. This is Makhno the Ukrainian hero. The image therefore fuses three different figures into one. There is the historical Makhno of the Civil War. There is the anarchist Makhno of libertarian mythology. And there is the modern Ukrainian Makhno retrospectively recruited into the story of national identity. History rarely asks permission before appropriating its characters.

Makhno himself would probably have been amused – and perhaps mildly irritated. He spent much of his life rejecting national labels in favour of anarchist ones. Yet here he is, another figure enlisted into the ongoing contest over memory.

From Huliaipole to Kherson

And memory, inevitably, brings us to the present.

It is impossible today to read about the Russian Civil War without occasionally experiencing moments of historical déjà vu. The geography is hauntingly familiar. Kharkiv. Kherson. Mariupol. Melitopol. Odesa. Kyiv. A century ago, armies advanced and retreated across these landscapes. Reds, Whites, Greens, nationalists, foreign interventionists and local militias fought for possession of the same territory. Entire populations found themselves trapped between competing visions of political destiny.

The circumstances are very different today and historical analogies always have limits. Yet the persistence of geography is striking. The same rivers flow. The same cities endure. The same questions of identity, sovereignty, memory and belonging continue to reverberate across the region.

The lands between the Dnieper and the Don remain what they have long been: a frontier between competing narratives of the past and competing visions of the future.

History does not repeat itself exactly. But it often revisits old addresses.

Pancho, Lefty, and the Free Territory

At first glance Townes Van Zandt’s Pancho and Lefty would seem to have very little to do with Nestor Makhno.

Then one thinks about it a little longer.

Like Pancho, Makhno became larger than life. Like Pancho, he occupies the uncertain territory between history and folklore. Like Pancho, he remains eternally young in the imagination. The real man ages. The legend never does.

Yet the deeper connection lies elsewhere.

Townes’ great ballad is not really about a bandit. It is about the distance between dreams and reality. Between youthful visions and mature compromises. Between the life we imagined and the life we actually lived. Pancho becomes the dream. Lefty becomes the survivor. The song asks a question that echoes through history: what happens after the revolution ends?

Most stories conclude when the hero rides away. Real life begins afterwards. Makhno’s cavalry charges, victories, defeats and escapes belong to legend. The more intriguing question is what became of the dream once the banners were lowered.

Paris and the Ghosts

The answer, improbably enough, was Paris.

The mighty insurgent commander eventually found himself in the French capital among the strange community of exiles that accumulated there after the Great War and the Revolution. White émigrés dreamed of restoring the Romanovs. Former Bolsheviks denounced the revolution they had once served. Stateless intellectuals, displaced aristocrats, defeated nationalists and failed revolutionaries crowded cafés and boarding houses.

Paris between the wars was a city populated by ghosts.

One imagines Makhno among them, smoking, arguing, reminiscing, coughing.

The tuberculosis worsened.

The years passed.

The Free Territory survived only in memory.

There is a Russian word, toska, which Nabokov famously described as a spiritual anguish without precise object. A longing for something absent. A yearning that cannot quite be named.

One suspects Makhno understood it.

So did Chekhov.

So did many of the exiles who haunted Paris in those years.

For what is exile if not a prolonged conversation with vanished possibilities?

The revolutionary epic dissolved into memoirs, arguments and recollections. The thunder of cavalry became stories told over coffee and cigarettes.

The dream survived.

The dreamers grew old.

The Ashes and the Legend

Nestor Makhno died on 25 July 1934 at the age of forty-five.

He was cremated and his ashes placed in the columbarium of Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Not beneath a black banner.

Not on the Ukrainian steppe.

Not in the town where his rebellion began.

A niche in a Paris cemetery.

There is something almost literary about the image. The horseman of Huliaipole, who once commanded tens of thousands of insurgents and rode across southern Ukraine pursued by enemies on every side, ends his journey in a small compartment among thousands of others.

History has a peculiar sense of humour.

Yet perhaps the final irony belongs to memory itself.

The Black Army vanished. The Free Territory disappeared. The Soviet Union that destroyed Makhno eventually collapsed. The world that produced him passed into history.

Yet Makhno remains.

Not exactly as he was. Not exactly as he would have wished to be remembered. But alive nevertheless in paintings, songs, novels, political arguments, historical debates, and manga-inspired artwork.

The artist who gave him a Tryzub belt buckle and the physique of a cinematic hero understands something essential. Historical memory is not an archive. It is a conversation between past and present. Each generation creates the figures it needs.

And so the anarchist who rejected states has become part of a national story. The peasant insurgent has become a folk hero. The historical man has become a legend.

The ashes rest quietly in Père Lachaise.

The legend still rides the steppe.

And somewhere beyond the horizon, beneath a black banner snapping in the wind, Nestor Makhno continues his endless charge toward a freedom that history never quite allowed him to reach.