THE MAKHNO MOVEMENT IN UKRAINIAN ETHNIC HISTORY

Abstract

In the proposed article, the author puts forward a hypothesis about the emer gence of a new sub-ethnic community on the territory of Sousern Ukraine during the late 18th and early 20th centuries. The emergence of a new sub-ethnic group in the Ukrainian ethnic system has become a positive fac tor, because sub-ethnic groups, through non-antagonistic rivalry, make the internal structure of the ethnic group more flexible, while not violating its unity. Local factors also actively influenced the formation of the mentality of the emigrants descendants: traditions of the Zaporizhzhya and Azov Cossacks, oridginal landscapes, climate and extraordinary ethnic diversity of the region, which encouraged intensive cultural exchange. The South Ukrainian sub-eth nic group entered the historical arena both as ethnographic group and as a so cial strata (Zaporizhia-Tavrian peasantry) living in a certain territory. For both the first and the second, a weak state consciousness, but a high national and, especially, social consciousness, became an equally characteristic feature.
The main manifestation of the newly born southern ukrainian sub-ethnicity in the political sphere was the existence of the Makhno movement of 1917-1923 and its support of the Makhnov political project of an anarcho-nationalist direction. With the beginning of the XX century in the consciousness of the southern Ukrainian peasantry, its own program of revolutionary transforma tions crystallized quite quickly. In 1919 – 1920, it came to the point of creat ing their own proto-state formations on the basis of the southern Ukrainian sub-ethnicity, when the Gulyaipil, Chigyrin, Kholodnoyar, Zubkiv, Bashtan and Vysun republics emerged. Thus, the Makhno insurgent became an important factor in the nation-building process by following a different path to their social liberation – a pro-anarchist one