Volin | |
|---|---|
Волин | |
 Portrait photograph of Volin | |
| Chairman of theMilitary Revolutionary Council of theMakhnovshchina | |
| In office 1 September 1919 – 31 January 1920 | |
| Preceded by | Nestor Makhno |
| Succeeded by | Dmitry Popov |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Vsevolod Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum 23 August [O.S. 11 August] 1882 |
| Died | 18 September 1945(1945-09-18) (aged 63) Paris,French Republic |
| Resting place | Père Lachaise Cemetery |
| Political party | Socialist Revolutionary(1904–1911) |
| Other political affiliations |
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| Relatives |
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| Education | Saint Petersburg State University |
| Occupation |
|
Vsevolod Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum[a] (23 August [O.S. 11 August] 1882 – 18 September 1945), commonly known by his pseudonymVolin,[b] was aRussian anarchist intellectual. He became involved inrevolutionary socialist politics during the1905 Russian Revolution, for which he was forced into exile, where he gravitated towardsanarcho-syndicalism.
He returned toPetrograd following theFebruary Revolution of 1917 and propagandised for anarcho-syndicalism in the Russian capital. In the wake of theOctober Revolution, which he criticised for bringing theBolsheviks to power, he left for Ukraine, where he became a leading figure in theMakhnovshchina. During this time, he developed a theory ofsynthesis anarchism, which advocated for collaboration between anarchists of different tendencies, and spearheaded the intellectual development of Ukrainian anarchism, as leader of theNabat and chair of the thirdMilitary 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 ofplatformism, 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 theNazis and theFrench State, as he was wanted for hisJewish heritage and his anarchist political convictions. He died of tuberculosis shortly after theliberation of France.
Volin was born Vsevolod Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum on 23 August [O.S. 11 August] 1882,[1] to an educatedRussian Jewish family fromVoronezh, a city in theCentral Black Earth Region of theRussian Empire. His parents, both of whom were doctors,[2] employed western tutors for Volin and his brother,Boris, who were educated in theFrench andGerman languages, in addition toRussian. After completing his education in Voronezh,[3] Volin moved toSaint Petersburg, where he studied in theFaculty of Law atSaint Petersburg State University.[4]
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By 1901, Volin had become involved in the imperial capital's nascentworkers' movement,[3] and in 1904, he dropped out of university to be a full-time activist for theSocialist Revolutionary Party.[5] He mostly worked to educate workers as a tutor, also establishing a library and organising study groups.[3] As a socialist revolutionary, he was involved in the1905 Russian Revolution from its inception: witnessing the events ofBloody Sunday;[1] participating in the establishment of theSaint Petersburg Soviet;[4] before he was arrested for his part in an uprising atKronstadt,[2] for which he was briefly imprisoned in thePeter and Paul Fortress.[3] Following the suppression of the revolution, in 1907, he was arrested again by theOkhrana and deported toSiberia, but was able to escape into exile inFrance.[4]
After settling inParis, Volin met a number of anarchists, including the FrenchSébastien Faure and the RussianApollon Karelin. By 1911, he had committed himself toanarchism, leaving the Socialist Revolutionary Party and joining Karelin's Brotherhood of Free Communists.[6] With the outbreak ofWorld War I, Volin immediately joined theanti-war movement, catching the attention of the French authorities.[7] He managed to evade capture and fled to the United States in 1915. Upon arriving inNew York City, he joined theUnion of Russian Workers, aRussian Americananarcho-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 theFebruary Revolution, Volin returned toRussia.[8] In July 1917, he and his colleagues fromGolos Truda arrived in Petrograd, where they restarted publication of their newspaper, now propagating anarcho-syndicalism directly to the workers of the Russian capital.[9]
Volin quickly became a leading proponent of anarcho-syndicalism during the1917 Revolution, calling forworkers' control in his frequent speeches to the workers of Petrograd and as editor ofGolos Truda, which expanded its circulation to 25,000 readers.[10] In the wake of theOctober Revolution, he became a vocal critic of theBolsheviks, warning of theirauthoritarian tendencies and predicting that they would see the power of thesoviets usurped by thestate.[11] He particularly criticised theTreaty of Brest-Litovsk, which he considered to be a renouncement ofworld revolution by the Bolsheviks. He called for the prosecution ofpartisan warfare against theCentral Powers and consequently decided to move toUkraine, which had fallen under the occupation of theGerman Empire andAustria-Hungary.[12]
After visiting relatives in Voronezh[12] and spending a few months organising educational institutions for the local soviet inBobrov,[13] Volin moved toKharkiv, where he participated in the establishment of theNabat Confederation of Anarchist Organisations.[14] On 18 November 1918, at the organisation's first conference inKursk, he drew up a declaration of principles,[15] which was designed to be acceptable to the three majoranarchist schools of thought:communism,individualism andsyndicalism.[16] Volin's theory ofsynthesis anarchism, which encouraged anarchists of different tendencies to cooperate,[17] was criticised as ineffective by his former anarcho-syndicalist comrades such asGrigorii Maksimov andMark Mratchny.[18] Nevertheless, Volin continued to advocate for his organisational theory through the Nabat, which grew to include autonomous branches throughout Ukraine,[19] as well as a youth section and a publishing house.[20]
By mid-1919, the organisation had drawn the attention of the Bolsheviks, who closed its meeting places and shut down its newspaper press.[21] In response, Volin moved the Nabat's headquarters toHuliaipole, where it became a central organisation within theMakhnovshchina, an anarchist mass movement led byNestor Makhno'sRevolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine. Volin joined the movement's Cultural-Educational Commission, serving as an editor for its publications and organising itsregional congresses, even going on to act aschairman of theMilitary Revolutionary Council (RVS), the movement's executive body.[22] As chair of the RVS, Volin clashed with the Insurgent Army's command over the excessive violence employed by theKontrrazvedka.[23] He also edited the movement'sDraft Declaration, which proposed the establishment offree soviets as the basis for a transition towards acommunist society.[24]
In December 1919, Volin went toKryvyi Rih in order to counter the spread ofUkrainian nationalism in the region, but he contractedtyphus and was forced to stop for recovery in a peasant village.[25] On 14 January 1920, he was arrested on his sickbed by the14th Army and given to theCheka,[26] who had orders fromLeon Trotsky to execute him. Russian American anarchists such asAlexander Berkman attempted to appeal his sentence, but this was rejected byNikolay Krestinsky, thegeneral secretary of the Communist Party and a former colleague of Volin.[27] Further appeals by Russian libertarians, including the BolshevikVictor Serge, eventually secured his transfer toButyrka prison inMoscow, where his death sentence was commuted.[28] He was finally released in October 1920, as part of the terms of theStarobilsk agreement between the Bolsheviks and the Makhnovists,[29] and he was even offered the post ofPeople's Commissar for Education in theUkrainian Soviet government, which he rejected.[20]
In November, Volin made a quick visit toDmitrov, where he paid his respects to a dyingPeter Kropotkin,[30] who by then was pessimistic about the prospects of the revolution.[31] He then returned to Kharkiv, where he began to prepare an All-Russian Congress of Anarchists to be held on 25 December,[32] as well as leading the negotiations withChristian Rakovsky's government over the controversial fourth political clause of the Starobilsk agreement, which would have provided for the autonomy of the Makhnovshchina.[33]
Following thesoviet victory over theWhite movement inCrimea, Volin and other members of the Nabat were arrested and imprisoned again in Moscow.[34] In July 1921, after being visited byGaston Leval, a French syndicalist delegate to theProfintern,[30] Volin and other anarchist political prisoners staged ahunger strike in order to draw the attention of other visiting trade union delegates.[35] Following protests from the delegates toVladimir Lenin, the prisoners were released and subsequently deported fromSoviet Russia in January 1922.[36]
Exiled inBerlin, Volin and his family were supported byGerman anarchists such asRudolf Rocker,[37] who provided them with a small attic to live in.[38] While in the German capital, Volin worked with Alexander Berkman to provide support for anarchist political prisoners and exiles,[39] including Nestor Makhno himself, who Volin helped escape from Poland to Berlin.[40] He also published a weekly newspaper,The Anarchist Herald,[41] translatedPeter Arshinov'sHistory of the Makhnovist Movement and publicised evidence ofpolitical repressions against Russian anarchists.[42]
In 1924, his old comrade Sébastien Faure invited him back to Paris[43] to collaborate on the publication of hisAnarchist Encyclopedia.[44] Volin became a key contributor to the encyclopedia, as well as a number of anarchist periodicals in various different languages, including the FrenchLe Libertaire, the GermanDie Internationale, the EnglishMan!, the RussianDelo Truda and the YiddishFraye Arbeter Shtime. It was at this time that he also began to compile his history of the Russian Revolution.[45]
In 1927, Volin was caught in the debate over thePlatform, which had caused a split in the exiled Russian anarchist movement.[46] Volin himself was extremely critical of thePlatform, which he claimed contradicted the anarchist principle ofdecentralisation and reflected a desire to create an anarchistpolitical party.[47] This split led to a particularly harsh falling-out with Nestor Makhno,[48] who resented Volin'sintellectualism.[49] Despite this, the pair managed to reconcile before Makhno's death in 1934, at the behest of Makhno's wifeHalyna Kuzmenko,[50] and Volin took up the task of editing and publishing Makhno's memoirs.[51]
Along with his criticisms of platformism, Volin also published denunciations ofBolshevism, which he described as "red fascism", comparing the policies ofJoseph Stalin to those ofBenito Mussolini andAdolf Hitler.[52] He criticised the "anarcho-Bolsheviks", who had favoured collaboration with the Bolshevik government, and was openly critical of the "anarcho-Bolshevik"German Sandomirskii [ru], who he accused of lacking anarchist convictions.[53]
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 ofEugene O'Neill's playLazarus Laughed.[54] In the wake of theSpanish Revolution of 1936, he briefly worked on the French language organ of theConfederación Nacional del Trabajo,[55] but quit after the organisation joined thegovernment of thePopular Front.[54] Volin lived out the following years in poverty,[54] untilAndré Prudhommeaux provided him a job on the board of his newspaperTerre Libre, which he contributed to inNîmes.[55]
In 1940, while living in poverty inMarseille, he completed his work onThe Unknown Revolution, a history of the Russian Revolution.[56] Following theinvasion of France byNazi Germany and the establishment of the collaborationistFrench State, he was driven into hiding due to his Jewish heritage and his anarchist political beliefs. Although his friendsSenya Fleshin andMollie 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 thewar.[57]
However, by the time theliberation of France allowed him to return to Paris, he had contracted tuberculosis. On 18 September 1945, Volin died in a Parisian hospital.[56] His ashes were buried in a niche of thePère Lachaise Cemetery, near the resting place of his comrade Nestor Makhno.[57]
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."[58]
Media related toVolin at Wikimedia Commons
