The Makhno Myth
Anarchists in the Russian Revolution
Yanowitz, Jason
http://www.isreview.org/issues/53/makhno.shtml
Date Written: 2007-05-01
Publisher: International Socialist Review (ISR)
Year Published: 2007
Resource Type: Article
Cx Number: CX19892
Starting in the 1970s, a new consensus emerged among serious scholars of the Russian Revolution. Instead of seeing the rise of Stalinism as the predetermined outcome of Leninism or workers' power, "revisionist" historians looked instead to the devastating effects of civil war and international isolation. They discovered that the early years of the workers' state were far more complicated and rich than the standard right-wing inevitable-march-to-totalitarianism version. In its broad outlines, their work confirmed that material conditions, rather than Bolshevik original sin, transformed a mass, popular revolution into its opposite, Stalinism.
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