The Soviet system used psychiatry as a weapon by diagnosing political opponents as mentally ill in order to confine them as patients instead of trying them in court. Anyone who challenged the state such as dissidents, writers, would-be emigrants, religious believers, or human rights activists could be branded with fabricated disorders like sluggish schizophrenia. This turned normal political disagreement into supposed medical pathology and allowed the state to present dissent as insanity.
Once labeled in this way, people were placed in psychiatric hospitals where they could be held for long periods without legal protections. Harsh treatments were often used to break their resolve. The collaboration between state security organs and compliant psychiatrists created a system where political imprisonment was disguised as medical care, letting the Soviet regime suppress opposition while pretending it was addressing illness rather than silencing critics.
The irony of the Makhnovist Movement is that it succeeded because of the Bolshevik Revolt in St. Petersburg and the subsequent splitting of Russian forces into the Red and White Armies.
But because Ukrainian agricultural production was so critical to the survival of pre-industrial Russia, the Reds weren’t inclined to let Ukraine exist independently any more than the Whites were.
Makhnovshchina gets to be a purist movement because it dies in infancy. Compare Ukraine to Yugoslavia, a country that embraced many of the same socialist tenants but managed to persist as an independent entity for half a century rather than half a decade, and suddenly they’re Evil Freedom-Hating Baby-Killing Communists again.
You’re never going to find half as many Tito-lovers on Lemmy as Nestor Makhno-lovers, because Tito died in his 80s while leading his country and Nestor died at 45 - alienated even from other anarchists - of tuberculosis as a penniless exile in France.
Meanwhile, the workers in all these countries vanish from view. No armchair Lemmy anarchist seems to care how Soviet-Era Ukraine prospered. Or how the Soviet collapse in 1991 brought in the corporate vultures to pick all these countries clean. We’re always and forever living in 1917, convinced a short-lived militia movement was the Secret Sauce to Real Working Anarcho-Communism, despite all historical evidence to the contrary.
Oh yeah man, the 1930s brought some real prosperity. But I’ve already gathered that you believe Soviet Union to be a tragically lost utopia, so you needn’t bother make up another wall of text in response.
It was bad that the Nazis invaded Ukraine, I agree. Postwar, they saw more economic growth in a decade than they’d experienced in the prior century.
Every industrial era country gets it’s golden age. The question is whether you’re allowed to enter the industrial era or you’re trapped in subsistence for the benefit of your neighbors.
Soviet governments prioritized industrialization, which is what made them rapidly improve in the postwar era.
That upsets a lot of anarchist diehards, because they are convinced the mean old Leninists simply cheated them out of an equivalent heyday
You seem to make the mistake of subsuming the whole of anarchist Ukraine under Makhno. While he was vital for the civil war, he hardly was the architect of what happend in Ukraine.
The factory councils sure didn’t rely on him leading all of a sudden.
I don’t think that’s a mistake I made, because it was wrapped up long before I was born. But the Anarcho-Communists of the Ukraine failed to reconcile with their neighbors in Russia, despite having a host of overlapping priorities. There were clearly more Red Guards than Makhnovists. And so they lost to a numbers game long before a shot was fired.
Didn’t they? We saw what happened to organically constituted Workers Soviets without an armed defense in Shanghai and Paris. Makhno was pivotal in defeating the Whites when they came knocking. So his army was definitely instrumental to the movement lasting as long as it did. And there was even a generous overlap between membership of the Bolsheviks and Makhnovists, given how easily guys like Peter Arshinov changed sides.
How many Ukrainian factory councils slide effortlessly into USSR colors when Lenin came knocking?