Mark Mratchny
Mark Mratchny was a Belarusian Jewish writer, anarcho-syndicalist and a member of the Makhnovist movement.
Biography
Mark Mratchny was born into a Belarusian Jewish family in 1892 in the city of Grodno. He studied at the cheder, and graduated in 1911 from the Russian gymnasium. He continued his education in Leipzig, Paris, and later in New York.Following the outbreak of the 1917 Revolution, Mratchny settled in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, where he joined the anarchist movement. Not long after its founding in November 1918, Mratchny joined the Nabat Confederation of Anarchist Organizations and helped it to establish an illegal printing press in Siberia. He quickly came to clash with Volin, the Nabat's leading ideologue, over his formulation of synthesis anarchism, which Mratchny found to be "vague and ineffectual." As a member of the Nabat, he became an employee of the Cultural-Educational Department of the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine and a distributor of the Makhnovist newspapers "Free Rebel" and "Path to Freedom".
In November 1920, Mratchny and other leading members of the Nabat were arrested by the Cheka in Kharkiv and transferred to prison in Moscow. When the first congress of the Profintern was held in July 1921, the imprisoned Nabat members staged a hunger strike in order to attract the attention of visiting syndicalist delegates, who protested their treatment to Felix Dzerzhinsky and Vladimir Lenin. By September 1921, the Bolshevik government relented and released the anarchist political prisoners, on condition that they leave the country. In January 1922, Mratchny, along with Volin, Grigorii Maksimov and Efim Yarchuk, left for Berlin. There he participated in the establishment of a committee for prisoner support, which sent relief packages and letters to anarchist political prisoners in the Soviet Union.
Following the publication of Peter Arshinov's History of the Makhnovist movement, Mratchny was among the first to lay out an anarchist critique of the Makhnovshchina. In the July 1923 issue of the Russian anarcho-syndicalist journal The Workers' Way, which carries out research on the Yiddish language, literature and folklore.