Peter Arshinov

Peter Andreyevich Arshinov (Russian: Пётр Андре́евич Арши́нов; 1887 – c. 1940) was a Russian anarchist revolutionary and intellectual who chronicled the history of the Makhnovshchina. Joining the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party during the 1905 Revolution, the following year he became active within the Ukrainian anarchist movement, taking part in attacks on Tsarist officials. He was arrested for this and imprisoned in Butyrka prison, where he met Nestor Makhno. Following the 1917 Revolution, he was released and returned to Ukraine to join Makhno's partisan movement. Arshinov became a leading intellectual figure within the Makhnovist movement, serving as editor of its main newspaper, and chronicling the movement's development as its official historian. When the movement was suppressed by the Soviet government, he went into exile, where he participated in the publication of the Organisational Platform and the debates surrounding it. By the 1930s, he had moved back towards communism and returned to the Soviet Union, where he disappeared during the Great Purge. He is generally presumed to have been executed.