arrested, but since no proof was found, young Nestor was let go. The following year people were killed during an attack, some of them deliberately. Nestor Makhno, presumably, did not kill anyone, but as a part of the gang he was convicted to death by hanging, and only his forged papers stating that he was underage made the court commute the sentence to ten years in prison.

Makhno spent six years in Butyrskaya prison in Moscow, most of the time cuffed for bad behavior. He used the time for self-education, reading many books, both Russian classics and contemporary authors. He also started writing poems. In prison he met the mastermind of the Russian anarchist movement of the time – Pert Arshinov (Marin), and received a totally different type ofeducation – an ideological one. During his imprisonment Makhno spent many days in a damp cell that caused the onset of tuberculosis. His lungs were so bad that one of them was amputated by a jail doctor. On 2 March 1917 both Makhno and Arshinov were freed by the February Revolution.

Nestor returned home and married a peasant girl, Nastya Vasetskaya, whom he had corresponded with while in jail. They had a son who died in infancy, which ruined the marriage and they separated. Later he married again, and had a daughter – the women survived Nestor and both were sent to a concentration camp in Nazi Germany during World War II, then to a Soviet labor camp, and only freed after Stalin’s death.

Makhno was well remembered in his