area controlled by the RIAU also came to be known as "Makhnovia" (; ), a term used primarily in Soviet historiography. This "Makhnovist territory" or "Makhnovist region" was alternatively referred to as a "liberated zone", "liberated region", "liberated area", or "autonomous area". In June 1919, the Bolsheviks began to refer to the Makhnovist territory as the "independent anarchist republic of Huliaipole", in calls for the Makhnovshchina's abolition. According to Bolshevik sources, that month's Planned Fourth Regional Congress intended to assert the region's independence and establish the "Priazov-Donets Republic" or a "libertarian republic of Makhnovia". Later, during their alliance with the Bolsheviks in October 1920, the Makhnovists insisted on terms allowing for the establishment of an "Autonomous Republic of Free Soviets" in the region. History Background What became the territory of the Makhnovshchina was centered in the region of Zaporizhzhia, which had previously been inhabited by Cossacks before its conquest by the Russian Empire. Rechristened as the province of Katerynoslav, land largely came to be used for agriculture, leading to the rise of a landed nobility and a middle-peasant class known as the kulaks, many of whom were Black Sea Germans. The region's poor peasants attempted to resist Pyotr Stolypin's agrarian reforms, which threatened to break up their traditional communes, but by the 20th century the region had been thoroughly integrated into the grain market and came to export nearly half of its wheat each year. As the price of land raised in order to prevent poor peasants from buying it, they became actively hostile to the concentration of land ownership by the pomeshchiks and kulaks. Supported by their local governments, peasants resolved to found their own agricultural cooperatives and began trading their grain in a system of market socialism. This eventually led to the development of an agricultural industry in Katerynoslav, which produced almost a quarter of the Russian Empire's agricultural machinery and developed the region's settlements into small industrial centers. The development of industry brought together the peasantry and proletariat for the first time, with peasants often moving to centers of industry to become wage-earners and then back to their villages during times of industrial crisis. This also caused the region to become quite ethnically diverse, with Ukrainians, Russians, Germans, Jews and Greeks all settled alongside each other. The region's common language soon became Russian and many local Ukrainians eventually became unable to speak the Ukrainian language. Due in