The only woman to graduate from officer training school in Paris, the leading raider in the legendary Nestor Makhno's gang. The enigmatic Marusya Nikiforova…
Maria was born in 1885 to Staff Captain Grigory Nikiforov, a hero of the Russo-Turkish War. At sixteen, she fell head over heels in love with a man whose name history will never know. He turned out to be nothing more than a wily seducer, abandoning the unfortunate schoolgirl penniless in the middle of the Zaporizhzhia steppes. Before her encounter with a gang of anarchists, the eighteen-year-old girl had to work as a smoked meat vendor and a dishwasher.
At just twenty years old, Maria found herself in the dock for dozens of lives lost in terrorist attacks. She wasn't fighting the bourgeoisie, not a class enemy… No, she was fighting the injustice of life, its entire structure, making no allowances for either the lords or the common workers. Only the leniency of the court saved her from the death penalty, which was commuted to twenty years of hard labor. However, after just a year of hard labor, Maria led a rebellion among the convicts and escaped.
Having reached Vladivostok, she secretly boarded a foreign ship and, after visiting Japan and America, managed to reach Paris. There, she became not so much a fiery revolutionary (who uncompromisingly argued with all the prominent political émigrés of the time, including V. I. Lenin) as a talented artist and sculptor. At 27, she began studying at the Rodin School of Art, and everyone predicted a brilliant bohemian future for her… But World War I forced Maria to change her views on the future.
At thirty, having previously completed a military school near Paris and become the only woman to receive an officer's rank there, she was sent to the French front, from where, abandoning all oaths, she made her way to Russia. This new chapter in her life was a series of raids, shootouts, chases, and ambushes. Eyewitnesses described her as “a young woman, draped with weapons, wearing a dashing Kubanka hat, worn askew.” Her fame thundered across the steppes of Ukraine.
It was there, in her homeland, that she became the ataman Marusya, for whom the people stormed city council buildings, aimed armored trains at cities, and for whom the renowned leader of the Ukrainian fronts, Antonov-Ovseenko, and the legendary “Batko” Nestor Makhno, sent telegrams to the Kremlin asking for their release from arrest (though these requests were more like demands). Maria's enemies included both the Whites and the Reds—she relentlessly waged a war of all against all, thinking only of the Motherland.
Having joined Makhno's army with the Black Guard detachments she had organized, she became the ataman's right-hand woman, convincing him not to “play liberal,” as she put it, with Lenin. Unfortunately, when the Makhnovists were outlawed in the summer of 1919, Marusya realized she had been right. Declaring war on the Bolshevik government, she carried out a series of successful terrorist attacks, but a new love became the next turning point in her life.
In 1920, she fled to Sevastopol with the Polish anarchist Witold Brzostek. At that time, eyewitnesses already described her as “a prematurely aged woman with a thin, haggard face, more like a long-suffering college student.” Having devoted her best years to the struggle, Maria decided to start a new life. Marriage to Witold gave her new hope for a bright future, a return to the beautiful Paris she had come to love so much.
But history guards its secrets well: the subsequent fate of the legendary Marusya Nikiforova remains shrouded in mystery. It is said that, soon after divorcing Brzostek, she returned to the Bolsheviks and, in the 1920s, as a Soviet spy, organized the assassination of the Ukrainian nationalist leader Petliura. Others believe that she and her husband were identified and hanged by White Guards as they left Sevastopol.
However, each of us is free to imagine the rest of this amazing story. After all, who knows, perhaps the fierce ataman's wife did find her captivating feminine happiness after all?
