Maria Nikiforova

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Maria Nikiforova : biography

1885 – September 1919

There is little explanation for the neglect on the part of anarchist historians. While several biographies of Nestor Makhno have been published, there is little mention of Nikiforova. This is despite their close collaboration, and her greater contemporary prominence, according to biographer Malcolm Archibald: "…in 1918 Nikiforova was already famous as an anarchist atamansha (military female leader) throughout Ukraine, while Makhno was still a rather obscure figure operating in a provincial backwater." Of several anarchist historians who have published histories regarding Makhno, only Alexandre Skirda’s work, Nestor Makhno: Anarchy’s Cossack, mentions hera single paragraph, out of over 400 pages, is devoted to her.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, historians have attempted to reintroduce individuals expunged from history, such as Nikiforova, Makhno, and other anarchists. Several essays on Nikiforova have been published, and the Nikiforova biography, Atamansha, published in 2007, was based on such sources in Russia and the Ukraine.

Nikiforova appears in the French novel "Clarisse", by Cecil Saint-Laurent. She keep Clarisse prisoner in her armored train in Ukraine, and the two women become lovers, Clarisse being deflowered by Nikiforova.

Biography

Early life and exile

Born in Alexandrovsk (now Zaporizhia), Ukraine, in 1885, Maria’s father was an officer and hero of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878. At the age of 16, she left home and became a babysitter, sales clerk, and ultimately a factory worker, with a position of bottle washer in a vodka distillery. She joined a local group of anarcho-communists. She adopted a strategy of motiveless terrorism (bezmotivny terror), staging a number of bombings and expropriation missions, including bank robberies. Captured, her involvement in these activities led to a death sentence, later commuted to life imprisonment. She served part of her sentence in the Petropavlovsk prison in St. Petersburg, before being exiled to Siberia in 1910. From there she escaped to Japan. She went from there to the United States, then Spain, and finally arrived in Paris. By 1913 she had become well known by a nickname, Marusya, a Slavic diminutive form of "Maria", though when or how she acquired the name is not known.. She was very familiar with it, using it as a signature and was addressed by strangers with it. In Paris, she married Witold Bzhostek, a Polish anarchist and friend, as a matter of convenience. With the outbreak of World War I, she sided with Peter Kropotkin’s anti-German position, in favor of the Allied powers. She applied and graduated from a French officer college, serving in the Macedonian front.

Return to Alexandrovsk

With the outbreak of the Russian revolution, she abandoned the French and returned to Petrograd. In the city, she organized and spoke at pro-anarchist rallies in Kronstadt. In the summer of 1917, with anti-anarchist activity within the Russian Provisional Government on the rise, Maria escaped back to her home town in Alexandrovsk, Ukraine. Once there, she organized a fighting force of anarchist Black Guards under her command to terrorize the city’s authorities, in particular army officers and landlords who refused to cooperate with peasant efforts to redistribute wealth. Alexandrovsk’s nationalist government struggled to maintain order under the subversive actions of leftists in general, and anarchists in particular, who exercised political control and popular support to exclude the influence of the Central Rada and redistribute private property.

Enter Nestor Makhno

When the October Revolution took place in Russian Empire, leftist dominated cities such as Huliaipole were already teetering on open civil war. There, anarchists gained strength by appealing to peasant enthusiasm for revolution. Upon the invasion of Ukraine by the Red Army, the soviet of the small city issued a decree calling for fighters to join the invasion to overthrow the Ukrainian nationalists. Hundreds of men, mostly anarchists, formed a Black Guard under Nestor Makhno and his brother Sava, and marched on Alexandrovsk. Under siege by advancing Red Army forces to the north, Makhno’s anarchists to the east, and subversion by Nikiforova’s Black Guards from within, the nationalist army retreated from the city on January 15, 1918. The city shortly came under Bolshevik control. Makhno’s forces arrived within days, altering the balance of power in the anarchist’s favor.