Alexandre Skirda

Alexandre Skirda (6 March 1942, Houdan – 23 December 2020, Paris) was a French historian and a translator, specializing in the Russian anarchist revolutionary movement. His mother was Ukrainian and his father was Russian. Knowing both languages, he grew up in France and wrote his work in French.

Biography Skirda became an anarchist as a teenager, through the influence of his friend , the publisher of the periodical and distributor of texts published by . Through Louvet, Skirda was exposed to Bakunin, Kropotkin, Reclus and other classical anarchists.

He founded the (Anarchist Studies and Action Group) with anarchist historian when they were both 19. He was active in demonstrating against France's war in Algeria.

From 1961, he studied at the Sorbonne, being taught History by the Stalinist , philosophy by Jean-Francois Lyotard (then a member of the libertarian communist Socialisme ou Barbarie group with Cornelius Castoriadis), industrial society by Raymond Aron and sociology by Georges Gurvitch (in particular, he was personally close to Lyotard and inspired by Gurvitch.)

He joined the Union of Anarcho-Communist Groups (UGAC) and helped found the Libertarian Communist Movement (MCL). He left the MCL to join the Revolutionary Anarchist Organization (ORA), in which he used the pseudonym Brevan.

Skirda followed the platformist tendency in anarchism, which posits the need for strong organisation.

From the 1970s, he became increasingly involved in collecting and writing the history of anarchism, and from the 1980s he was a second-hand book dealer. Skirda's work focused on the role of Russian and Ukrainian anarchists in the period of the 1917 Russian Revolution and its aftermath, and in particular on the Makhnovtchina (the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine) and Krondstadt.

French historian called him a "weekend historian", saying that "Over the years [Skirda] made regular additions to his output, reprinted by one of his most loyal publishers, Éditions de Paris-Max Chaleil. In the 1970s, Soviet archives were accessible only to a handful of figures vetted by the Soviet party-state. Skirda was persona non grata in such circles. And so it was from Paris that he painstakingly assembled documentation from exiled activists and translated available materials from the Russian." His Kronstadt 1921: Free Soviets Against Party Dictatorship told the story of the repression of the Kronstadt uprising by the Bolsheviks, including Leon Trotsky. He translated the previously unpublished Kronstadt in the Russian Revolution by Efim Yarchuk, one of the main organisers of the Kronstadt anarchists.

He recorded many oral histories of French activists and exiled Russian activists, co-authoring many movement memoirs, often working with . Publications from this work included texts with , Swiss activist André Bösiger, and Makhnov associate .

Translations in English Nestor Makhno (edition by Alexandre Skirda and translation by Paul Sharkey), The Struggle Against The State And Other Essays, AK Press, 1 January 1996, 114 p. Alexandre Skirda (translation by Paul Sharkey), Facing the enemy: a history of anarchist organization from Proudhon to May 1968, AK Press, 1 January 2002, 292 p. Alexandre Skirda (translation by Paul Sharkey), Nestor Makhno: Anarchy's Cossack: The Struggle for Free Soviets in the Ukraine, AK Press, 2004, 415 p.