Elena Nestorovna Mikhnenko (Russian: Елена Несторовна Михненко;[a] 1922–1993) was the daughter of the Ukrainian anarchist revolutionaries Nestor Makhno and Halyna Kuzmenko.

Elena Mikhnenko's parents, Nestor Makhno[b] and Halyna Kuzmenko, were leading figures in the Makhnovist movement, which attempted to establish anarchist communism in southern Ukraine.

[6] They met at the height of the Ukrainian War of Independence,[7] in which the Makhnovists were defeated by the Bolsheviks, forcing Makhno and Kuzmenko to flee into exile.

[12] In July 1924, they moved to the Free City of Danzig,[13] where the whole family was arrested on charges of Makhno's alleged persecution of German Mennonites in Ukraine.

Halyna was quickly released and fled to Paris with Elena,[14] while Makhno himself escaped from prison and made his way to France through Germany.

[2] Following the Nazi invasion of France, she was conscripted into forced labour and transferred to Berlin,[14] where she worked as a drafter for Siemens and as a German-French translator.

[29] Although also found to be uninformed about her father's past activities in Ukraine,[30] Elena was sentenced to five years for "anti-Soviet agitation"[31] and subsequently exiled to Jambyl, in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic.

[34] At this time, Soviet journalists from Moscow and Leningrad started arriving in Kazakhstan, specifically looking for an interview with Elena Mikhnenko, which she usually refused.

She declared that she felt she had no homeland, neither in France nor the Soviet Union, but nevertheless asked Semanov to send her some French newspapers, which she was unable to get in Kazakhstan.

[34] Semanov also interviewed her mother, who according to Vladimir Litvinov had attempted to avoid "complicating the lives of herself and her daughter with stories that denied the official historiography.