https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/nestor-makhno-the-failure-of-anarchism/#_edn23

Anarchists such as Van der Walt and Schmidt and Alexander Skirda make great play of the supposed success of Makhno’s agricultural collectives in comparison to the failure of Bolshevik collectivisation. The reality is that only tiny numbers were involved in the Makhnovist collectives – a number of whom were already ideologically committed anarchists. The mass of the peasantry held fast to their private plots.²³ Even the anarchist historian Volin, who was a political advisor to Makhno, states that there were no more than a few hundred families involved in the Makhnovist communes.²⁴ Makhno in his memoirs admits that “the mass of people did not go over” to the free communal order;²⁵ while even the strongly pro-Makhno anarchist Alexander Skirda acknowledges: “The idyllic dream of ‘cooperative enterprise’ was to dissolve in discord and bitterness, or even in ‘dismal despair,’ with commune workers quitting one after another.”²⁶

On the one hand the anarchist supporters of Makhno excuse the failure of the Makhnovist communes on the difficult material circumstances. Yet on the other hand anarchists such as Van der Walt and Schmidt and the Anarchist FAQ are highly critical of the Bolsheviks’ argument that the harsh material reality in Russia – the mass poverty, the devastation caused by the Civil War and imperialist invasions, the collapse of industrial production and so on – made it impossible for the revolution to immediately establish a totally free and equal society.