Makhno: Philippe Thirault (Writer), Roberto Zaghi (Art), Nanette McGuiness (Translation)
This graphic novel was a hard read for me, as I did not know anything about the history of Ukraine, but wanted to understand part of what is going on right now in the world. My great-grandfather came from Podolski, was Jewish, and escaped armed conflict there 100 years ago. Makhno was about his age, but their lives could not be more different.
(For Jewish history and pogroms you can check here.)
The following information was extracted from the epilogue written by the author, Philippe Thirault.
Nestor Ivanovych Miknienko was born in 1888 to a peasant family in the Ukrainian town of Huliaipole.
His was a harsh life, and his family starved. He became an anarchist during the 1905 revolution. At the age of 20, he participated in a failed assassination attempt and was sentenced to death, which was commuted to a life of forced labor due to his youth. He remained incarcerated until the second revolution in 1917.
The graphic novel will follow the main parts of his life, in a struggle that defined politics to this day (anarchists were feared and hated by all parties, conservatives and communists alike—they fought against the idea of property and wanted to establish free communes).
The man was intense, violent, and had a penchant for murder. The graphic novel is filled with blood from one part to the other, because the birth of nations that were more democratic—and did not depend on servants to toil the land—came at a heavily bloody cost. It left me the impression that long struggles rage on under the surface of new-century democratic antics, and that all of it is extremely fragile.
Makhno led the fight against the Soviets in the Huliaipole region, organized communes, expropriated exploiters, put land in the hands of poor peasants, placed businesses under self-management, and imposed Francisco Ferrer′s libertarian and avant-garde educational methods in the countryside. He founded labor and agricultural unions and then, in January 1918, he launched an army, the Makhnovshchina, with former railroad worker Viktor Belash at its head.
The army was very weird, still relied heavily on cavalry (even when using artillery, hence the contraption at the cover, called a tachanka), and was completely crushed by the Soviet Union, who first attempted to make a pact with Makhno only to betray him later on.
The war was hideous. Makhno first fought the Whites (the army of the far-right grand bourgeois tsarists), led by the Ataman Petlyura, an anti-Semite whose pogroms the Bolsheviks later attributed to Makhno.
I wonder at that, whether he had anything to do with the persecution. My great-grandfather could have told my grandmother, but war refugees spoke very little Spanish and did not want to remember. Latin America has many Syrian, Palestinian, Kurdish, Turkish, and Jewish migrants for this very reason.
Lenin then signed the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty which, among other things, delivered Ukraine to Austria-Hungary. Petlyura took advantage of Makhno′s trip to Moscow to have his brother killed and his home burnt down.
Successive White officers joined forces against Makhno and were considered freedom fighters (i.e., anti-communists) in Western Europe, while slanderous Communist propaganda slammed Makhno as a bandit.
Nestor Makhno died of tuberculosis at the Tenon Hospital in 1934 at the age of 45. His battle was a bitter one; he fought for his people and was forever entrapped between two mighty forces, Western Europe and the new Soviet Union.
Ukraine still is trapped between both worlds, and conflicts and refugees rage on.
I hope you can think about them and join some of the organizations that offer shelter to people engulfed by war. If Bolivia hadn′t been open to save the Jews during the World Wars, I wouldn′t be here. All of us could become refugees/migrants one day.
Makhno: Ukrainian Freedom Fighter is available since March 2022.
Page Count: 120 pages
Format: Softcover Trade – Color
ISBN: 9781643379692
Featured image by Roberto Zaghi, all images belong to Humanoids
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