Volin

Template:Short description Template:Good article Template:Use dmy dates Vsevolod Mikhailovich EikhenbaumTemplate:Refn (23 August [O.S. 11 August] 1882Template:Spaced ndash18 September 1945), commonly known by his pseudonym Volin,Template:Refn was a Russian anarchist intellectual. He became involved in revolutionary socialist politics during the 1905 Russian Revolution, for which he was forced into exile, where he gravitated towards anarcho-syndicalism.

He returned to Petrograd following the February Revolution of 1917 and propagandised for anarcho-syndicalism in the Russian capital. In the wake of the October Revolution, which he criticised for bringing the Bolsheviks to power, he left for Ukraine, where he became a leading figure in the Makhnovshchina. During this time, he developed a theory of synthesis anarchism, which advocated for collaboration between anarchists of different tendencies, and spearheaded the intellectual development of Ukrainian anarchism, as leader of the Nabat and chair of the third Military Revolutionary Council during the civil war.

After the suppression of the Russian and Ukrainian anarchist movements by the Bolsheviks, Volin again went into exile. In Paris, he became a leading opponent of platformism, which he criticised as authoritarian, and found work as a prolific writer in multiple different languages. He lived out the last years of his life in poverty, evading persecution by the Nazis and the French State, as he was wanted for his Jewish heritage and his anarchist political convictions. He died of tuberculosis shortly after the liberation of France.

Early life

Volin was born Vsevolod Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum on 23 August [O.S. 11 August] 1882,Template:Sfnm to an educated Russian Jewish family from Voronezh, a city in the Central Black Earth Region of the Russian Empire. His parents, both of whom were doctors,Template:Sfnm employed western tutors for Volin and his brother, Boris, who were educated in the French and German languages, in addition to Russian. After completing his education in Voronezh,Template:Sfn Volin moved to Saint Petersburg, where he studied in the Faculty of Law at Saint Petersburg State University.Template:Sfnm

Political activism

File:Совет рабочих депутатов Петербурга (1905).jpg

Members of the Saint Petersburg Soviet, which Volin helped establish during the 1905 Russian Revolution

By 1901, Volin had become involved in the imperial capital's nascent workers' movement,Template:Sfn and in 1904, he dropped out of university to be a full-time activist for the Socialist Revolutionary Party.Template:Sfnm He mostly worked to educate workers as a tutor, also establishing a library and organising study groups.Template:Sfn As a socialist revolutionary, he was involved in the 1905 Russian Revolution from its inception: witnessing the events of Bloody Sunday;Template:Sfnm participating in the establishment of the Saint Petersburg Soviet;Template:Sfnm before he was arrested for his part in an uprising at Kronstadt,Template:Sfnm for which he was briefly imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress.Template:Sfn Following the suppression of the revolution, in 1907, he was arrested again by the Okhrana and deported to Siberia, but was able to escape into exile in France.Template:Sfnm

After settling in Paris, Volin met a number of anarchists, including the French Sébastien Faure and the Russian Apollon Karelin. By 1911, he had committed himself to anarchism, leaving the Socialist Revolutionary Party and joining Karelin's Brotherhood of Free Communists.Template:Sfn With the outbreak of World War I, Volin immediately joined the anti-war movement, catching the attention of the French authorities.Template:Sfnm He managed to evade capture and fled to the United States in 1915. Upon arriving in New York City, he joined the Union of Russian Workers, a Russian American anarcho-syndicalist organisation. He soon joined the editorial staff of its newspaper, Golos Truda, and in December 1916, he went on a speaking tour of North American cities. In the wake of the February Revolution, Volin returned to Russia.Template:Sfnm In July 1917, he and his colleagues from Golos Truda arrived in Petrograd, where they restarted publication of their newspaper, now propagating anarcho-syndicalism directly to the workers of the Russian capital.Template:Sfnm

Revolutionary activities

Volin quickly became a leading proponent of anarcho-syndicalism during the 1917 Revolution, calling for workers' control in his frequent speeches to the workers of Petrograd and as editor of Golos Truda, which expanded its circulation to 25,000 readers.Template:Sfn In the wake of the October Revolution, he became a vocal critic of the Bolsheviks, warning of their authoritarian tendencies and predicting that they would see the power of the soviets usurped by the state.Template:Sfnm He particularly criticised the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which he considered to be a renouncement of world revolution by the Bolsheviks. He called for the prosecution of partisan warfare against the Central Powers and consequently decided to move to Ukraine, which had fallen under the occupation of the German Empire and Austria-Hungary.Template:Sfn

After visiting relatives in VoronezhTemplate:Sfn and spending a few months organising educational institutions for the local soviet in Bobrov,Template:Sfnm Volin moved to Kharkiv, where he participated in the establishment of the Nabat Confederation of Anarchist Organisations.Template:Sfnm On 18 November 1918, at the organisation's first conference in Kursk, he drew up a declaration of principles,Template:Sfnm which was designed to be acceptable to the three major anarchist schools of thought: communism, individualism and syndicalism.Template:Sfnm Volin's theory of synthesis anarchism, which encouraged anarchists of different tendencies to cooperate,Template:Sfnm was criticised as ineffective by his former anarcho-syndicalist comrades such as Grigorii Maksimov and Mark Mratchny.Template:Sfnm Nevertheless, Volin continued to advocate for his organisational theory through the Nabat, which grew to include autonomous branches throughout Ukraine,Template:Sfnm as well as a youth section and a publishing house.Template:Sfn

File:Voline-1919.jpg

Volin in 1919, during his time with the Nabat and the Makhnovshchina

By mid-1919, the organisation had drawn the attention of the Bolsheviks, who closed its meeting places and shut down its newspaper press.Template:Sfnm In response, Volin moved the Nabat's headquarters to Huliaipole, where it became a central organisation within the Makhnovshchina, an anarchist mass movement led by Nestor Makhno's Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine. Volin joined the movement's Cultural-Educational Commission, serving as an editor for its publications and organising its regional congresses, even going on to act as chairman of the Military Revolutionary Council (RVS), the movement's executive body.Template:Sfnm As chair of the RVS, Volin clashed with the Insurgent Army's command over the excessive violence employed by the Kontrrazvedka.Template:Sfnm He also edited the movement's Draft Declaration, which proposed the establishment of free soviets as the basis for a transition towards a communist society.Template:Sfnm

File:Makhno group.jpg

Nestor Makhno (center) and other commanders of the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine

In December 1919, Volin went to Kryvyi Rih in order to counter the spread of Ukrainian nationalism in the region, but he contracted typhus and was forced to stop for recovery in a peasant village.Template:Sfnm On 14 January 1920, he was arrested on his sickbed by the 14th Army and given to the Cheka,Template:Sfnm who had orders from Leon Trotsky to execute him. Russian American anarchists such as Alexander Berkman attempted to appeal his sentence, but this was rejected by Nikolay Krestinsky, the general secretary of the Communist Party and a former colleague of Volin.Template:Sfn Further appeals by Russian libertarians, including the Bolshevik Victor Serge, eventually secured his transfer to Butyrka prison in Moscow, where his death sentence was commuted.Template:Sfnm He was finally released in October 1920, as part of the terms of the Starobilsk agreement between the Bolsheviks and the Makhnovists,Template:Sfnm and he was even offered the post of People's Commissar for Education in the Ukrainian Soviet government, which he rejected.Template:Sfn

In November, Volin made a quick visit to Dmitrov, where he paid his respects to a dying Peter Kropotkin,Template:Sfn who by then was pessimistic about the prospects of the revolution.Template:Sfn He then returned to Kharkiv, where he began to prepare an All-Russian Congress of Anarchists to be held on 25 December,Template:Sfnm as well as leading the negotiations with Christian Rakovsky's government over the controversial fourth political clause of the Starobilsk agreement, which would have provided for the autonomy of the Makhnovshchina.Template:Sfn

Following the soviet victory over the White movement in Crimea, Volin and other members of the Nabat were arrested and imprisoned again in Moscow.Template:Sfnm In July 1921, after being visited by Gaston Leval, a French syndicalist delegate to the Profintern,Template:Sfn Volin and other anarchist political prisoners staged a hunger strike in order to draw the attention of other visiting trade union delegates.Template:Sfnm Following protests from the delegates to Vladimir Lenin, the prisoners were released and subsequently deported from Soviet Russia in January 1922.Template:Sfnm

Exile

Exiled in Berlin, Volin and his family were supported by German anarchists such as Rudolf Rocker,Template:Sfnm who provided them with a small attic to live in.Template:Sfnm While in the German capital, Volin worked with Alexander Berkman to provide support for anarchist political prisoners and exiles,Template:Sfn including Nestor Makhno himself, who Volin helped escape from Poland to Berlin.Template:Sfnm He also published a weekly newspaper, The Anarchist Herald,Template:Sfnm translated Peter Arshinov's History of the Makhnovist Movement and publicised evidence of political repressions against Russian anarchists.Template:Sfnm

In 1924, his old comrade Sébastien Faure invited him back to ParisTemplate:Sfnm to collaborate on the publication of his Anarchist Encyclopedia.Template:Sfnm Volin became a key contributor to the encyclopedia, as well as a number of anarchist periodicals in various different languages, including the French Le Libertaire, the German Die Internationale, the English Man!, the Russian Delo Truda and the Yiddish Fraye Arbeter Shtime. It was at this time that he also began to compile his history of the Russian Revolution.Template:Sfn

File:Fleshin-Voline-Steimer.jpg

Volin (center) with his friends Senya Fleshin and Mollie Steimer

In 1927, Volin was caught in the debate over the Platform, which had caused a split in the exiled Russian anarchist movement.Template:Sfnm Volin himself was extremely critical of the Platform, which he claimed contradicted the anarchist principle of decentralisation and reflected a desire to create an anarchist political party.Template:Sfnm This split led to a particularly harsh falling-out with Nestor Makhno,Template:Sfnm who resented Volin's intellectualism.Template:Sfnm Despite this, the pair managed to reconcile before Makhno's death in 1934, at the behest of Makhno's wife Halyna Kuzmenko,Template:Sfnm and Volin took up the task of editing and publishing Makhno's memoirs.Template:Sfnm

Along with his criticisms of platformism, Volin also published denunciations of Bolshevism, which he described as "red fascism", comparing the policies of Joseph Stalin to those of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler.Template:Sfnm He criticised the "anarcho-Bolsheviks", who had favoured collaboration with the Bolshevik government, and was openly critical of the "anarcho-Bolshevik" Template:Ill, who he accused of lacking anarchist convictions.Template:Sfn

File:Voline sur lit.jpg

Volin during the last years of his life

He attempted to continue his educational activities by providing free classes about anarchism, but he also needed money to support his family, so he took up a number of jobs in the publishing industry, notably working on a Russian translation of Eugene O'Neill's play Lazarus Laughed.Template:Sfn In the wake of the Spanish Revolution of 1936, he briefly worked on the French language organ of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo,Template:Sfnm but quit after the organisation joined the government of the Popular Front.Template:Sfn Volin lived out the following years in poverty,Template:Sfn until André Prudhommeaux provided him a job on the board of his newspaper Terre Libre, which he contributed to in Nîmes.Template:Sfnm

In 1940, while living in poverty in Marseille, he completed his work on The Unknown Revolution, a history of the Russian Revolution.Template:Sfnm Following the invasion of France by Nazi Germany and the establishment of the collaborationist French State, he was driven into hiding due to his Jewish heritage and his anarchist political beliefs. Although his friends Senya Fleshin and Mollie Steimer attempted to convince him to escape to Mexico with them, he resolved to remain in France, as he believed that there would be a revolution following the end of the war.Template:Sfn

However, by the time the liberation of France allowed him to return to Paris, he had contracted tuberculosis. On 18 September 1945, Volin died in a Parisian hospital.Template:Sfnm His ashes were buried in a niche of the Père Lachaise Cemetery, near the resting place of his comrade Nestor Makhno.Template:Sfn

In his obituary to Volin written the month after his death, Victor Serge described him as "one of the most remarkable figures of Russian anarchism, a man of absolute probity and exceptional rigor of thought. ... One must hope that the future will render justice to this intrepidly idealistic revolutionary who was always, in prison, in the poverty of exile, as on the battlefield and in editorial offices, a man of real moral grandeur."

Works

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See also

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External links

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