>As to Makhno, I will confess to knowing nothing about him. I asked a
>Ukrainian co-worker in her early 30s and she said she remembers being taught
>in high school that he was some vicious killer, but that in post-USSR
>Ukraine he has become somewhat popular.
There is a lot about Makhno online in fact (your summary above it pretty funny but perhaps what it might be expected would be taught in schools of that period). In fact Makhno led a substantial anarchist army that liberated the eastern part of the Ukraine from the Austro-Hungarians in 1918 and later from Denkin and Wrangel. For most of that time he was in alliance with the Red Army and in fact for part of 1919 his forces were part of the Red Army but the alliance was betrayed three times by the Bolsheviks who eventually suceeded in destroying the movement. He fled into exile and died in Paris of TB (and probably alcoholism) in 1927.
As well as his contribution to anarchism (he was one of the authors of the 'Organisational Platform of the Libertarian Communists') he's also of historical interest as one of the first victims of the 'Stalinist school of falsification' except in his case it was Trotsky rather then Stalin using the method in 1919/20 by attempting to link his former military ally with the whites (rather the fascists).
Anyway lots for info at http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Embassy/8559/makhno.htm
On Russia anarchism to day there is quite a lot of material at http://struggle.ws/eastern.html which also covers other parts of Eastern Europe.
And one last one, did you know there was an IWW colony in the Kuzbass from 1922 - 26? http://struggle.ws/russia/kuzbass_colony.html
(see someone else was following it)
Andrew
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International anarchism
Issues-> http://struggle.ws Me -> http://struggle.ws/andrew.html