From the use made of them by the younger Belash, it is plain that there are lots of archival materials available, especially in the Ukraine itself. The State Archives in Kiev appear to be the best equipped, but every town of any significance has its own archival collection as well. We salute the archives in Dniepropetrovsk (formerly Ekaterinoslav) which in 1993 published a pamphlet reproducing a number of documents and drawing up a detailed listing of its holdings on Makhno and the Makhnovist movement. Unfortunately, access is not easily come by for a variety of different reasons, in the immediate term at any rate. Be that as it may, there must be materials there on the basis of which a number of other facets of the Makhnovist movement can be explored further.
As we said before, lots of publications on the subject have seen the light of day. However, it is very hard to get hold of them in current circumstances, for there is no national distribution network either in the Ukraine or in Russia and it requires a good network of connections before one can lay hands on them. For instance, none of the books recently published have been able to cite Belash, due to their having been unable to get hold of a copy of his book.
We salute the 1995 republication of Arshinovs History of the Makhnovist Movementhy Rough Country publications in Zaporozhiye (formerly Alexandrovsk): of several editions of the Memoirs of Makhno, including a 334-page one in Moscow in 1992 from Republic Editions (albeit that much of the 1st volume has been dropped); the 192-page anthology put together by V. F Verstyuk in Kiev in 1991 (even though it offers no details or source for the texts presented): the literaty study, Tatchankas from the South by the journalist V. Golovanov (Moscow 1997), a joint publication by Mars and Rough Country editions containing many irksome and ambiguous personal remarks, citing numerous unpublished testimonies and heavily reliant, indeed, upon our own monograph: in Moscow and Smolensk, Olympus and Rusitch publishers produced Vadim Teylitsyn’s Nestor Makhno (us
Ing the works published previously, albeit without acknowledgment): finally, there is Alexander Shubins 176-page Makhno and the Makhnovist Movement (Moscow 1998, MIG publishers) which represents a political rehabilitation of Makhno and of the call for free soviets. Shubin cites examples to show how self-management operated in the region. He is a historian, a one-time anarcho-syndicalist and leader of the Greens in Moscow. His plentiful references to sources and archives which are not plainly identified and not reprinted as they are in the Belash book (which he ignores) hoist it into the academic register but undermine its interest as a source of documentation. Note the smallness of its print-run: 1,000 copies were printed — indicative of the publishing and distribution problems in Russia today. By comparison our own book— 10,000 copies spread over three editions — is a very respectable effort and speaks well of the French public s interest in the matter. Speaking of which, we salute Hdene Chatelain for her documentary film, Nestor Makhno, Peasant of the Ukraine, broadcast by the Arte television channel on February 26, 1997. Among projects in the making, there is the plan fot a Russian-language edition of the anthology of Nestor Makhnos writings published by us in French in 1984 (and by AK Press in English in 1996 as The Struggle Against the State and Other Essays) to mark the jubilee of Makhnos death. This will prove a real find for Russian and Ukrainian readers, these essays being utterly unknown to them. This present monograph was issued in Russian in Paris in 2000. An important anthology of documents (including a contribution from ourselves) regarding Nestor Makhno and his wife Galina Kuzmenko was issued in 1999 for simultaneous publication in Russian and Ukrainian in Kiev and Gulyai-Polye. Some homecoming that will be for the prodigals to the land of their birth! Which
Is only right as far as a matter of this significance is concerned, because in the 20th century — an age of calamity upon calamity — the Makhnovist experiment and that by the Spanish comrades in 1936—1939 represent the only attempts to install a society wherein human liberation might be something more than mere empty rhetoric.
— A. S. Paris, 2001
World History
