native village as a man of revolutionary ideas and exceptional leadership skills and was instantly elected to five (!) different posts upon his return, including the Head of Peasants’ Union. Then he became the First Head of the Soviet of Workers and Peasants’ Deputies, and after the Kornilov mutiny was defeated, he was named the Chief Officer of the Committee For Saving the Revolution. In October 1917 Makhno signed the decree of the Soviet on the nationalization of all the land in the region, which was to be redistributed among the peasants.

After the “shameful” (as Makhno called it) Brest Treaty, Ukraine was granted to Germany and Nestor went to Moscow, which he later described as the “capital of revolution on paper.” There he met Vladimir Lenin, Yakov Sverdlovand Feliks Dzerzhinsky. What Makhno saw on his way to Moscow and then back to his native land with a clear order to start a civil war there, made him doubt the October Revolution ideals. He saw the “dictatorship of the proletariat” as an attempt to split the people rather than unite them. “There are no parties… there are only bunches of charlatans who for the sake of personal profit and extreme sensations… destroy the working people,” he later wrote in his diaries.

Makhno was able to travel back to Gulyay Pole under the forged ID of a village school teacher and there he started a partisan war under the black flag of anarchy. Upon his return he learned that the Austrian army had shot one of his brothers,