Context: After briefly cooperating to defeat the White armies, the Red Army under Leon Trotsky’s direction betrayed the Makhnovists Black Army once they were no longer militarily useful.
Despite formal agreements guaranteeing autonomy and safe passage, Trotsky ordered the Red Army to disarm the Makhnovists, arrest their delegates, and launch surprise attacks against them in late 1920. Makhnovist commanders were ambushed or executed, their political structures outlawed, and their former allies rebranded as “bandits”.
This deliberate reversal, carried out immediately after the Whites’ defeat, demonstrated the Bolshevik leadership’s refusal to tolerate independent revolutionary forces and led to the destruction of the Makhnovist movement by 1921.