The Forgotten Story of the Free Territory
The Capital Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) is the latest in a long history of free territories
When the February 1917 revolution overthrew the Tsar in Russia, political prisoners were freed from the jails in Moscow and looked up to as heroes who had fought the old regime. Later that year, in October, the Bolsheviks led a second revolution and installed the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” In the civil war that followed, one of the prisoners released in February, an anarchist named Nestor Makhno, would take control of eastern Ukraine with an army 100,000 strong and lead the charge for the “third revolution.”
It’s surprising how little is written about Makhno and the Free Territory, considering it was one of the longest and largest historical examples of a stateless society organized under anarchist principles, although the fluid situation which created the dynamic which gave rise to the Free Territory also makes it difficult to fully grasp what was happening.
It is curious to note another facet of the Free Territory almost universally ignored today; it existed in the same exact area where separatists are currently waging war against Ukraine’s government. The Free Territory, at its peak, connected the current de facto rebel capital of Donetsk to the currently…
