Today in Labor History August 28, 1921: The Soviet Red Army dissolved the stateless Anarchist Free Territory, after driving the Black Army out of Ukraine. The anarchist rebel leader, Nester Makhno, barely escaped, and with serious injuries.
The Free Territory within Ukraine, also known as Makhnovia (after Nestor Makhno), lasted from 1918 to 1921. It was a stateless, anarchist society that was defended by Makhno’s Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army (AKA the Black Army). Roughly 7 million people lived in the area. The peasants who lived there refused to pay rent to the landowners and seized the estates and livestock of the church, state and private landowners, setting up local committees to manage them and share them among the various villages and communes of the Free State.
Michael Moorcock’s “A Nomad of the Time Streams” is a steampunk/alternative history novel where Makhno survives into the 1940s.