”The anarchists are not promising anything to anyone. The anarchists only want people to be conscious of their own situation and seize freedom for themselves”
-Maria Nikiforova

(1885-1919) Maria Nikiforova was born in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine in 1885 to a poor family. As an intersex child she spent much of her childhood forced to live as a boy, under a boys name. As a teenager she began presenting more androgynously and ran away from home. She found herself living in squatted tenements in the slums of Zaporizhzhia, and working in the city’s distilleries and bottle factories. It was here she became radicalized and got involved with local anarchists, carrying out militant actions and expropriations against the rich. After one particularly daring action, she found herself sentenced to a life of hard labor in Siberia. With nothing to lose, she and other prisoners staged a mass insurrection, during which she was able to escape to Japan. While there, she stayed with Japanese anarchists and appealed to anarchist comrades in China for help to get to the United States. Lui Shifu and others managed to secure her safe passage to California where she hitchhiked to Chicago to stay with the community of Russian anarchist refugees living there.

By her 20s, she changed her name to Maria and began living more publicly as a woman. Seeking to return to Europe, she moved to Paris where she continued to organize with local anarchists. After a period there she spent some time in Spain and Portugal, assisting with various propaganda by the deed actions for two years. Wounded in a bank robbery in Barcelona, Nikiforova soon returned to Paris for medical treatment. She would spend the next few years there, studying, working, and networking with other anarchists around the world. At the onset of World War I, the anarchist movement found itself divided between those who opposed the war, and those who, under the guidance of Peter Kropotkin, supported the Allies against the Germans. She soon found herself enlisted and fighting in World War 1 for the Allies.

When revolution broke out in Russia and Ukraine in early 1917, she promptly abandoned her military post to return home and fight for anarchist revolution. There she began arming workers and advocating for anarchism. She became an early influence on the Kronstadt mutineers, and delivered fiery speeches across Russia and Ukraine in support of anarchism. She organized a large detachment of anarchists, workers, and peasants which robbed from the rich, the police, and the government and redistributed their belongings among the poor and working class. In time, she became an associate of fellow anarchist Nestor Makhno who was leading similar efforts and they began organizing together. Her detachment became the foundation for what developed into the anarchist Black Guards. The Provisional Government of Zaporizhzhia arrested her for her actions, but the local workers were deeply loyal to her and considered her one of their own. They kidnapped the head of the soviet at gunpoint, marched him to the prison and threatened to kill him if she wasn’t released. Their strategy succeeded and she was soon released.

She would go on to fight alongside Makhno and other anarchists against the General Council of Ukraine and its forces. After their victory there, she gave heartfelt speeches and won the sympathies of many workers and cossacks. She was nominated as deputy commander of the Black Guards in Zaporizhzhia, and after Makhno withdrew, she became the commander. Her detachment of The Black Guards became known as Free Combat Druzhina. Shunning uniforms, making decisions collectively, raiding prisons to free prisoners, and armoring a train they used to terrorize the rich and the those sympathetic to the Central Council of Ukraine, they proved to be quite the unconventional military detachment.

After some initial advances, The Central Council of Ukraine would ally with the Central powers and the added reinforcements of the German and Austrian army would prove to be too much for the Black Guards as well as Red Army. After the initial defeat in Ukraine, the Soviets no longer viewed the anarchists as necessary allies, and she would live in conflict with them for the rest of her life, being arrested multiple times by the Cheka and put on trial, narrowly escaping each time. In 1919, she was finally caught by the Whites and executed alongside her lover Withold Brzotek.

“One more pillar of anarchism has been broken, one more idol of blackness has crashed down from its pedestal… . Legends formed around this ‘tsaritsa of anarchism’. Several times she was wounded, several times her head was cut off but, like the legendary Hydra, she always grew a new one. She survived and turned up again, ready to spill more blood…”
-Aleksandrovsk newspaper

Further Reading:
–Atamansha: The Story of Maria Nikiforova, the Anarchist Joan of Arc by Malcolm Archibald
–The Immediate Revolution: An Anarchist’s Epic through Ukraine by Mila Cotlenko
–Maria Nikiforova by JP Press