The Makhnos of memory: Mennonite and Makhnovist narratives of the Russian Civil War, 1917-1921

Abstract

This thesis examines the conflict between the military forces of Nestor Makhno and Mennonite colonists in southern Ukraine during the Russian Civil War (1918-1921) through the historical narratives found in each group’s literature. Employing a methodology derived from deconstructionist approaches to history and James Wertsch’s theory of distributed collective memory, this thesis considers the nature of each group’s historical narratives, their biases, the context of their respective productions and how these same narratives contain intimations of the other side’s perspective.