Пётр Андреевич Аршинов (Russian anarchist revolutionary) Add a review

Peter Andreyevich Arshinov (Russian: Пётр Андре́евич Арши́нов; 1887–c.1937), was a Russian anarchist revolutionary and intellectual who chronicled the history of the Makhnovshchina.

Initially a Bolshevik, during the 1905 Revolution, he became active within the Ukrainian anarchist movement, taking part in a number of terrorist attacks against Tsarist officials. He was arrested for his activities and imprisoned in Butyrka prison, where he met Nestor Makhno.

Following the 1917 Revolution, he was released from prison and returned to Ukraine to join Makhno's partisan movement. Arshinov became a leading intellectual figure within the Makhnovist movement, as editor of its main newspaper, and chronicled the development of events as the movement's official historian.

When the movement was suppressed by the Bolsheviks, 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 Bolshevism and decided to return to the Soviet Union, where he was executed during the Great Purge.