No Harmless Power: The Life and Times of the Ukrainian Anarchist Nestor Makhno

by Charlie Allison, N.O. Bonzo (Illustrator), Kevin Matthews (Illustrator)

Lively, incendiary, and inspiring No Harmless Power follows the life of Nestor Makhno, who organized a seven million strong anarchist polity during the Russian civil war, and who developed Platform-anarchism during his exile in Paris as well as advising other anarchists like Durruti on tactics and propaganda. Both timely and timeless, this biography reveals Makhno's rapidly changing world and his place in it. He moved swiftly from peasant youth to prisoner to revolutionary anarchist leader. Narrowly escaping Bolshevik Ukraine for Paris--this book also chronicles the friends and enemies he made along the way including: Lenin, Trotsky, Alexander Berkman, Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, Ida Mett, and others.

No Harmless Power is the first text to fully delve into Makhno's sympathy for the downtrodden, the trap of personal heroism, his improbable victories, unlikely friendships, and his alarming lack of gun-safety in meetings. Makhno and the movement he began are seldom mentioned in most mainstream histories--Western or Russian--mostly on the grounds that acknowledging anarchist polities calls into question the inevitability and desirability of the nation-state and unjust hierarchies.

With illustrations by N.O. Bonzo and Kevin Matthews, this is a fresh, humorous, and necessary look at an under-examined corner of history as well as a deep exploration of the meaning--and value, if any--of heroism as history.

Genres: History, Biography, Russia, Politics

256 pages, Paperback

First published August 10, 2023

Reviews

[Jim Feast]

No Harmless Power by Charlie Allison is both stirring and depressing. It tells the story of Unranian anarchist Nestor Makhno who during the time of the Russian Revolution, generalled a small army, one that expanded and contracted according to the fortunes of war. This force was fighting the white armies of reactionaries who wanted to stop the revolution, working sometimes in alliance with Bolsheviks and later, after the reds had repeatedly betrayed them, battling both reds and whites. Of special significance is that when Makhno’s troops liberated a Ukranian territory, which would be made up largely of farms, they expelled the rich landowners and gave the land to the peasants who often ran their farms cooperatively. It was a short-lived trial of small peasant-control since as soon as the whites, who had superior forces and weaponry – Makhno’s group often had to turn away volunteers as they had no guns to give them – took back the land, they re-enslaved any peasants they didn’t kill for over zealously backing the anarchists.
Like the peasants, Makhno was himself was multiply beset, fending off assassinatiton attempts and betrayals from conservatives, the communists and turncoats within his ranks who disliked his often-highhanded methods. Fighting on all sides from 1917-1921 when the Bolsheviks overran the Ukraine, Makhno fled the country, ending up in Paris to spend the rest of his life isolated and on the verge of destitution.
Where Allison can be praised for giving a well-reseached and sobering account, he can also be complimented for his admirable brashness. Where most academic historians, trained to hide their biases under the mask of objectivity, will refrain from passing explicit judgement on their material, Allison hoists his black flag. With a healthy suspicion of heroes, he depicts Makhno as a man of both flaws and strengths. Moreover, without mincing words, he roundly excoriates the trickery and treachery of the Bolsheviks, who, for example, when Makhno’s men were allied with them, keeping trying to send them to Poland, where they would have little local support. More generally, Allison underscores the corruptiton and venality of the ownership class and frequently takes digs at how the police usually function to harshly put down even the mildest dissent while never noticing the fraud and misconduct of the wealthy.
One can see this as part of a larger effort to make an anarchist understanding more accessible. This involves writing novels, histories, poetry, science books and other works that take up an anarchist world view. This also involves, for example in composing a history, making the chronicles highly readable in the way Allison does in how he puts in jokes, relevant references to the present, colorful anecdotes and well-placed insults of the haves. Peter Werbe’s Summer on Fire, about the 1976 Detroit riot is another good example of this genre. It’s an open secret that most mainstream history is unspeakably dull. The best anarchist history goes in the other direction, being informing, gripping, relevant and, when appropriate, filled with barbed humor.

[Dasha]

Allison has an engaging and snarky way of writing, filled with sarcastic side comments and jokes. This makes the work very accessible. While I am not a huge fan of close readings of someone's life, I did enjoy this book and it's interweaving with the broader history of anarchism and the different forms of anarchism arose.

[Alex]

A very readable, irreverent, humorous biography and history of the circumstances of Makhno's life. The art and illustrations are immaculate. The highlighting of other important contemporaneous anarchists reveals Allison's intent not to glorify the individual, but the anarchist movement as a whole and in particular its vital challenge to any authoritarian system of oppression. And this is why the book, and Makhno's story, resonate so strongly in our world today.

[Dimitrii Ivanov]

Easy to read, with the text enlivened by imagined dialogue and such - natural when the book is based on a YouTube series. Good illustrations, including the cover. But the book is citing only a handful of sources, all in English and a vast majority focusing only on the history of the anarchist or Makhnovist movement, which is to say, often a bit dated from the historiographic point of view. So there are significant factual errors at a rate of roughly one per page. Most importantly, the political situation in Ukraine and Russia is rather frequently misinterpreted, so the context of whom Makhnovists were fighting against or side be side with is at best muddled, at worst very wrong. A lone Richard Pipes book is alas not enough to work through that - and a reference to Volodymyr Ishchenko would not suffice to explain Makhno's place in the historical memory of Ukraine. The last chapter is a tacked-on series of mini-biographies which would have worked better as a separate booklet. They are sort of condensed versions of Nick Heath's biographies (with good portraits) but, like the main text, are riddled with factual errors - e.g. there were no "mysterious circumstances" surrounding Jaroslav Hašek's death, if his health history is taken into account.

[Mlhoganjr]

Nestor Makhno was one of the most colorful characters in the Ukranian anarchist movement to resist Bolshevik domination after the 1917 revolution in Russia. Makhno recruited, led, and fought alongside anarchist guerilla fighters comprising the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine (also known as the Black Army, or just the Makhnovists), taking on both the imperialist White Army and the Red Army during that time. This book traces his life and work from the time of his birth in a Ukranian peasant family to his conversion to anarchism and guerilla warfare against multiple would-be oppressors, and finally his unhappy desperate last days as something like an anarchist elder statesman exiled in Paris. Allison connects various threads represented by other anarchists and political theorists in Russia, Ukraine, and all over the world and how those people supported and worked with Makhno, either on the battlefield or in his later days writing and organizing.

Even if anarchist politics don't interest you in the slightest, this biography is worth reading simply for the arc of his life and outsized impact on the history of Europe, Ukraine, Russia, and people's lives at the time.

[Julian]

(3.5/5)

Super neat book on Makhno! I feel like I learned a lot and seemed like a pretty nuanced/level-headed portrait of a deeply complicated man, even if the book has a pretty obvious personal sympathy (as do I). That said, I feel like the more 'informal' writing style was a little overboard at times, but that's just a personal preference. Would have loved to learn more about what daily life actually looked like in the Makhnovshchina, but then again I suppose that sort of would be another book (although was kind of surprised this one still have pretty little concrete info on this?). Wonderful illustrations to. Definitely a good primer on Makhno though, and of course yet another book in the highly unfortunate but true canon of authoritarian 'left'-ists betraying those who actually live and breathe their ideals and don't want to perpetuate hierarchy for their own personal gain...

[Fiona McLary]

3.75/5

I first heard of Nestor Makhno through the Behind the Bastards podcast when he was the feature of a non-bastard Christmas special, so I was intrigued to pick up a book expanding more on his life and circumstances. I was not disappointed. Charlie Allison takes us through a chronology of Nestor's life with clarity and humor. It's definitely not a perfect book, but it served as a good introduction to aspects of Russian history that I did not know as well as some commentary on tendencies within anarchism that are still relevant 100 years on. Unfortunately this book really needed some copyediting. Along with occasional typos, the comma usage is absolutely diabolical.