Volin
Vsevolod Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum (
August 11,
1882 -
September 18,
1945), known in later life as
Volin ('олин), was a leading Russian
anarchist.
He was born in the
Voronezh district of
Central Russia, where both his parents were doctors, and after finishing college there he went to
Saint Petersburg to study jurisprudence. 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.
After his escape from arrest in
1907 he fled to
France, where he came under the influence of Russian
anarchists and joined that movement, a small group of
Apollon Karelin, in 1911.
He took part in the
Russian Civil War, at first in the Ukrainian anarchist organization
Nabat, then (from August
1919) in the army of
Nestor Makhno. Arrested by the Bolsheviks in January
1920, he was released from prison along with other anarchists in October because of a treaty between the
Soviet Union and Makhno's army, rearrested a month later, and thanks to the intervention of the
Red Trade Union International, during its Congress Съезд Красного Профинтерна) held in Moscow in the summer of
1921, he was finally expelled from the country.
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 P. Arshinov's История махновского движения (
History of the Makhnovist Movement) and wrote a long biographical preface for it, and edited a Russian anarchist magazine. After two years he received an invitation from
Sebastian Faure to help him prepare the
Encyclopédie Anarchiste, so he moved to
Paris, where he wrote for the
Encyclopédie and other publications.
The death of his wife affected him severely, and
World War II 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.
In English
*
Rudolf Rocker's introduction to Voline's The Unknown Revolution*
Voline archiveIn Russian
*
'олин 'севолод Михайлович*
П. П. Аршинов "История махновского движения" (with preface by Voline)In French
*
Voline, La Révolution inconnue
