Russian CW with Black Anarchist Ukraine under Makhno

yourworstnightmare

Banned
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Hard, the Anarchist were dependent on Bolshevik support, and the Bolshevik only tolerated them as long as they needed them. To get Makhno and his gang to survive and establish some kind of state in the Ukraine the Boslheviks have to keep needing them until they have established a power basis strong enough to hold on their own.
 
OK, how could Makhno's Anarchist movement have remained in power in the Ukraine after the Whites were defeated by the early 1920s ?

I've thought about this at length before, and I don't think there's any real way they can - at least, not under Makhno.

Makhno's "Free Territory" was a temporary autonomous zone; it could only survive for as long as the two nearest forms of state authority were distracted ... fighting among themselves. Grassroots support for Makhno was born partially from war-weariness on the part of the Ukranian & Crimean peasantry, who took arms to defend their lands from the pillage and looting of various marauding armies.

A slightly weird & tangential way of achieving your stated outcome would be to have Makhno swallow his pride much earlier, adopt a more conciliatory / pragmatic tone with Petrograd, and ally with the Bolsheviks against the Whites, in exchange for some level of regional autonomy - something like Xiaoping's "one country, two systems" idea.

And then, if we can somehow manouvre a faction like Group of Democratic Centralism or a "softer" version of Trotsky's Left Opposition into a stronger position than OTL, slightly earlier than OTL, we might be able to circumvent Stalin, and find ourselves looking at a slightly more pluralist radical revolutionary alt-USSR, with Makhno and his ilk a tolerated (if not key) part of the political equation.
 
One less explored path is more nuanced Western policy toward former Russian Empire. IOTL Entente's policy was more or less black and white: 1st they tried to get rid of Bolsheviks, 2nd, understanding that there's no country-wide non-socialist alternative to Lenin, distantioned themselves (to a degree that a lot of Whites considered their behaviour "betrayal") and let Bolsheviks free reign over the Empire sans Poland, Finland and Baltics. What about French and British keeping Lenin on very tight leash of limited partnership (and partnership and trade was what Russia desperately needed at this point) in exchange for Bolsheviks' guarantees of independence for socialist non-communist statelets? ITTL we can see pink Far Eastern Republic and agrarian Makhnovite Eastern Ukraine surviving in loose federation with the USSR. This is extremely unlikely, but not completely impossible.
 
The Far Eastern Republic didn't exist until 1920, and was set up as a Bolshevik puppet government, so there would be another name for such a state in this scenario. The word you're looking for is Transbaikal (Cisbaikal if the Japanese are the ones doing the partitioning).
 
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