Mark Mratchny

Mark Mratchny was born into a 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.

In the years of the Ukrainian Revolution, he was an employee of the Cultural and Education Department of the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine (RIAU) and a distributor of the Makhnovist newspapers "Free Rebel" and "Path to Freedom" in 1919-1921.[2] He also became a member of the Nabat Confederation of Anarchist Organizations, which supplied the main intellectual personnel of the Free Territory.

On the night of November 25-26, 1920, Mark was arrested by the Cheka in Kharkov.[3]

In 1922, he left Ukraine, moving to the US in 1928, where he worked as a teacher in Yiddish-teaching schools of the Arbeter Ring system in Los Angeles and Detroit. In 1934 he became a Doctor of Medicine and a psychiatrist. He was author of numerous articles on the theory of anarchism in the Yiddish American press, including work as the editor of the New York newspaper Fraye Arbeter Shtime (FAS). He resigned as editor soon after the defeat of the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. Until his death he was the author of political columns in FAS.

After his death, some of the materials from the personal archive of Mark Mratchny were transferred to the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO), which carries out research on the Yiddish language, literature and folklore.

• Makhno, Nestor (2006). V. Danilov and T. Shanin (ed.). Крестьянское движение на Украине. 1918—1921 (in Russian). Moscow: ROSSPEN. p. 1000.
• Belash, A.V.; Belash, V.F. (1993). Дороги Нестора Махно (in Russian). Kiev: RVC "Proza".