in the world. I dimly remember my early childhood, deprived of the usual child’s games and fun, marred by the horrible need and poverty our family had to endure, until the boys grew up enough to earn their living,” Makhno later wrote in his memoirs.

At the age of eight the boy entered a parochial school where he spent four years. One year he fell in love with skating – so much so that he took his books in the morning but never made it to school, spending all day at the skating rink. For weeks he didn’t show up for classes. Once in early spring while skating he broke through the thin ice and almost drowned. His mother was furious when she learned about his “studies” and beatthe boy with a knotted piece of string so hard he could not sit for several days; as a result, he became a very diligent student. In the winter Nestor went to school, in the summer he found a job with local landowners herding sheep and cattle. After parochial school he became an apprentice to a carpenter.

Image from www.nestormakhno.info

At the age of 16 Nestor joined a local amateur drama and theater studio, which served as a cover for a revolutionary organization called “The Union of Poor Bread Growers.” To “ensure social justice” this group of young people robbed – they said “expropriated” – local rich men and distributed the loot among the local poor in the best Robin Hood tradition. In 1906 the group of young anarchists was