Nestor Makhno was a Ukrainian anarchist who commanded the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine during the Ukrainian War of Independence. Born to a peasant family in 1888, he was jailed for seven years for his membership of an anarchist group after the 1905 revolution. After the 1917 revolution he seized large estates and redistributed them to peasants in his home region around Huliaipole. His movement, the Makhnovshchina, aimed to build anarchist communism across southern Ukraine between 1918 and 1921. At different points his forces fought the Central Powers, the White Army, the Ukrainian nationalists and the Bolsheviks, and at times they even allied with the Bolsheviks against the Whites. The Bolsheviks eventually turned on him, and in 1921 he fled west to Romania and later settled in Paris, where he wrote memoirs. He died of tuberculosis in 1934 at 45.

Hampi is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Karnataka, India, with more than 1,600 surviving remains spread over 4,100 hectares. It was the capital of the Vijayanagara Empire from 1336 to 1565. Travellers from Persia and Portugal described it as a prosperous, wealthy and grand city with temples, markets and farms along the Tungabhadra River. By 1500 it was estimated to be the world's second-largest city after Beijing, and probably India's richest at the time. In 1565 a coalition of Muslim sultanates defeated the Vijayanagara Empire, its capital was conquered and destroyed, and the city was left in ruins. Hampi remains a religious centre, with the active Virupaksha Temple at its heart.