Southern Front of the Russian Civil War
The Southern Front was a military theatre of the Russian Civil War.
The ethnic-Romanian Revolutionary Battalion in Odessa, 1918
Nestor Ivanovych Makhno, also known as Batko Makhno, was a Ukrainian anarchist revolutionary and the commander of the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine during the Ukrainian War of Independence. He established the Makhnovshchina, a mass movement by the Ukrainian peasantry to establish anarchist communism in the country between 1918 and 1921. Initially centered around Makhno's home province of Katerynoslav and hometown of Huliaipole, it came to exert a strong influence over large areas of southern Ukraine, specifically in what is now the Zaporizhzhia Oblast of Ukraine.
Makhno in 1921
Butyrka prison, in Moscow, where Makhno was imprisoned from 1911 to 1917 (photograph taken by Stanislav Kozlovskiy in 2010)
Makhno (centre) and Fedir Shchus (right), together with other Insurgent command staff in Huliaipole (1919)
Makhno wearing his Red Army uniform (1919)