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Makhno and memory

Anarchist and mennonite narratives of Ukraine's civil war (1917-1921)
Patterson, Sean
University of Manitoba Press, 200 blz., paperback, 2021, ISBN 9780887558382
Nestor Makhno has been called a revolutionary anarchist, a peasant rebel, the Ukrainian Robin Hood, a mass-murderer, a pogromist, and a devil. These epithets had their origins in the Russian Civil War (1917–21), where the military forces of the peasant-anarchist Nestor Makhno and Mennonite colonists in southern Ukraine came into conflict. In autumn 1919, Makhnovist troops and local peasant sympathizers murdered more than 800 Mennonites in a series of large-scale massacres.

The history of that conflict has been fraught with folklore, ideological battles and radically divergent cultural memories, in which fact and fiction often seamlessly blend, conjuring a multitude of Makhnos, each one shouting its message over the other.

Drawing on theories of collective memory and narrative analysis, Makhno and Memory brings a vast array of Makhnovist and Mennonite sources into dialogue, including memoirs, histories, diaries, newspapers, and archival material. A diversity of perspectives are brought into relief through the personal reminiscences of Makhno and his anarchist sympathizers alongside Mennonite pacifists and advocates for armed self-defense.

Through a meticulous analysis of the Makhnovist-Mennonite conflict and a micro-study of the Eichenfeld massacre of November 1919, Sean Patterson attempts to make sense of the competing cultural memories and presents new ways of thinking about Makhno and his movement. Makhno and Memory offers a convincing reframing of the Mennonite-Makhno relationship that will force a scholarly reassessment of this period.

“In this immaculately researched book, Sean Patterson has forged a new way of thinking about the anarchist Nestor Makhno and the Mennonites in the Ukraine just after the Russian revolution. Faith and class collide in this telling. There is no ideology here, only a desire to make sense of how history is shaped, and who gets to tell the story, and how vengeance and justice become two sides of the same coin.”

– David Bergen, author of Stranger and The Time in Between

Sean Patterson is a PhD student in history at the University of Alberta. He graduated from the University of Manitoba and University of Winnipeg’s joint masters program, where he was awarded the W.L. Morton Gold Medal for outstanding research. Patterson’s current research, which is being funded by a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship, explores historical memory in Ukraine’s Zaporizhia region across the twentieth century.
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€ 43,50
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