Volin

In 1904 he left the university, joined the Socialist-Revolutionary Party and became involved in the revolutionary labor movement. He was engaged in cultural and educational activity among the workers of the city when he met Father Gapon and joined his petition movement; on Bloody Sunday (1905) he was with a group that was turned back by soldiers before it could reach the Winter Palace. During the ensuing strikes he took the lead in creating the first St. Petersburg Soviet in order to coordinate aid and information for the workers; although quiescent much of the year and finally suppressed in December after the Russian Revolution of 1905, the Soviet was revived during the February Revolution of 1917.

He was arrested, imprisoned and deported because of his revolutionary activities after the 1905 Revolution. In 1907 he escaped from prison fled fled to France. He settled in Paris where he completed his studies, came under the influence of Russian anarchists and joined the movement, a small group of Apollon Karelin, in 1911.[1] Volin's views eventually gravitated towards anarcho-syndicalism, and he decided to leave the Socialist-Revolutionary Party in 1913.[1] During the first months of the First World War he participated in the International Commission for the Anti-militarist Section, for which he was detained by the French authorities in 1915. At this point he was married and had four children. He remained in a concentration camp from where he was to be deported, but he escaped with the help of some French comrades and embarked from Bordeaux to the United States.

In America, Volin joined the Union of Russian Workers, which had more than 10,000 members. In the union he was very well received, he was placed in charge of editing its paper, Golos Truda (Voice of the Labor), and he was regularly required to attend conferences throughout North America, since it lacked speakers and propagandists. He was a great orator, as the Russian press had pointed out during the events of 1905. His easy speech, the persuasive tone of his voice, the elegance of his imaginative and colorful language, the vigor and the elevation of his thought, attracted the adherence of the masses, who gathered to listen to him.

But in 1917 he abandoned his work in America to return to Petrograd, in the midst of the Russian Revolution. Back in Russia, he verified the weakness of the anarchist movement, due to the little consideration that anarchists in Russia paid to the organization in North America. He tried to solve the disunity of anarchists living in Russia and anarchists who went into exile in the times of the Tsar, but forming the Petrograd Union of Anarcho-Syndicalist Propaganda. This decided to continue the publication of the Golos Truda, of which Volin continued as editor. After the October revolution, the newspaper was made daily and a Bolshevik-oriented editorial committee was added to it. This committee was not to the liking of Volin, who left the newspaper after the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty.

He left for Bobrov, where he worked in the city Soviet and was reunited with his wife and four children, back from France. He was in charge of popular education, with the task of bringing the population to an understanding of revolutionary events. Shortly thereafter, he joined the organizers of the Kursk Conference, which commissioned him to draft adopted resolutions and prepare a statement that could be accepted by all the trends and nuances of anarchism - allowing everyone to work in a single organization. Thus, Volin formulated his idea of Synthesis anarchism, which included syndicalism, communism and individualism, since he considered these to be the three main aspects of anarchism.

In the autumn of 1918, Volin created, together with other colleagues, the Nabat, an organization that had a great capacity for mobilization due to its high number of affiliates.[1]

In 1919, Volin decided to join the Makhnovist movement, in the culture and education sector, to organize meetings, conferences, talks, popular councils, as well as the publication of flyers and posters. That same year, Volin was elected president of the Insurgent Council, where he worked intensively for six months.[4] His work was interrupted when he fell ill with tuberculosis. Due to his immobility, he was easily arrested on January 14, 1920 and transferred to Moscow at the hands of the Cheka. He was released in October 1920, on the occasion of the alliance signed between the Black Army and the Red Army to fight Pyotr Wrangel's forces.

He moved to Kharkiv, where, with the Nabat Confederation, he prepared an anarchist Congress for December 25. On the eve of the congress, the Bolsheviks arrested Volin and the anarchists in attendance, for their membership in libertarian groups. Volin and the other prisoners were transferred to Moscow.

From then on he was incarcerated in Butyrka prison In prison, everyone knew about the Cheka's brutality, against which they protested with a hunger strike that lasted for ten and a half days, and ended thanks to an unexpected intervention: convinced by Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman and Alexander Shapiro, the European delegates to a Profintern Congress obtained the release of ten prisoners, including Volin, on condition of perpetual banishment under threat of death.[5][6]

Admitted to Germany despite lack of proper documents, he and his family lived in Berlin, where he wrote (in German) an 80-page pamphlet called The Persecution of the Anarchists in Soviet Russia, translated Peter Arshinov's History of the Makhnovist Movement and wrote a long biographical preface for it. Together with Arshinov, he founded a magazine called The Anarchist Herald and along with other Russian exiles, they formed several committees to help theire comrades imprisoned by the Bolshevik regime. After two years, Volin received an invitation from Sébastien Faure to help him prepare the Encyclopédie Anarchiste, so he moved to Paris, where he wrote for the Encyclopédie and other publications.[1]

Volin participated in the publication of Dielo Truda (Causa Obrera), as part of the "Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad". However, following the publication of the controversial Organizational Platform of the Libertarian Communists in 1926, Volin broke with Nestor Makhno and Peter Arshinov. The bitter dispute marked a deep divide within the Russian anarchist movement in exile. In 1927 Volin founded the Association des Fédéralistes Anarchistes, a synthesist organization, and after several rearrangements of the French anarchist organizations, in 1934 he joined the editorial staff of Terre Libre. From there he published criticism of the CNT's collaboration with the Popular Front and participation in the government of the Second Spanish Republic.

The death of his wife affected him severely and the Nazi invasion of France forced him to move from one hiding place to another. He returned to Paris after the war, but developed incurable tuberculosis and died in a hospital in September 1945, leaving his account of his experiences in the revolutions and civil war, La Révolution inconnue (The Unknown Revolution), to be published posthumously.[1][7]

The entry for October 29, 1945, in Victor Serge's Notebooks: 1936-1947 includes both a summary of his life and an appreciation: "He was 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."[8]

• D. Wierzchoś, List Nestora Machny do Ministerstwa Spraw Zagranicznych Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej, Przegląd Wschodni, T. X, Zeszyt 3(39).
• D. Wierzchoś, Nestor Machno i jego kontakty z Polakami i Polską, [w:] Studia z dziejów polskiego anarchizmu, Szczecin 2011.
• M. Przyborowski, D. Wierzchoś, Machno w Polsce, Poznań 2012.