ABSTRACT
As a theorist, Nestor Makhno is best known for his work on workers’ and peasants’ cooperatives. In the cooperative villages he established after the 1917 Revolution, some villagers were employed in agricultural work and others formed combat groups to defend the villages. Imperialism, one of the most important and innovative concepts in Lenin’s writings, is a means of furthering capitalist ends given the limitations on capital accumulation within a national economy. Nestor Makhno’s left critique of the Russian Revolution provides an interesting framework with which to view Eastern European states’ relationship to Russia in historical perspective. Makhno was nonetheless optimistic that: Ukrainian life is filled with all sorts of possibilities, especially the potential for a mass revolutionary movement. Makhno’s theories suggest a different conceptualization of the USSR and of contemporary Russia as seen from the post-Soviet states, one that acted less like an instantiation of Marxist communist ideals and instead an Imperial state colonizing its neighboring states.
