Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Voline returned to Russia in 1917, and after the October Revolution, initially worked with the Soviet government in the People’s Commissariat for Education. However, he opposed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918) and in the summer of 1918 left Petrograd for Ukraine, to help organize resistance to the Austro-German intervention. By the autumn of 1918, he was one of the leaders of the anarchist group Nabat, and in 1919, he became one of the chief political advisors to and ideologues of Nestor Makhno’s Revolutionary-Insurgent Army of Ukraine. He was arrested by the Soviet authorities on 14 January 1920, but was released in October of that year, together with other anarchists (following an agreement between Moscow and Makhno) and returned to Ukraine, only to be rearrested at Khar′kov, on 25 November 1920, and sent back to prison in Moscow. He was then released, following pressure from delegates to the founding congress of Profintern in the summer of 1921, and on 5 January 1922 he was expelled from Soviet Russia.

Voline lived in emigration first in Berlin, where he was an active journalist, translator, and writer in the anarchist press, and subsequently (from 1923) in Paris, where he collaborated with Sébastien Faure on the Encyclopédie Anarchiste and worked as the editor of Makhno’s memoirs. He died of tuberculosis in a Paris hospital shortly after the end of the Second World War, leaving his major work (subsequently much republished and translated) to be issued posthumously, as La Révolution inconnue, 1917–1921 (Paris, 1947). Voline was buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

Volkov, Viacheslav Ivanovich (15 September 1877–10 February 1920). Colonel (1918), major general (19 November 1918). The Cossack officer V. I. Volkov, who probably had more influence than any other individual on the demise of the Democratic Counter-Revolution in Siberia, was born at Ust′-Kamenogorsk, Semipalatinsk oblast′, and was the son of a general in the Siberian Cossack Host. He saw action in the First World War, chiefly on the Caucasus Front, rising to the command of the 7th Siberian Cossack Regiment.

As a convinced opponent of the October Revolution, from early 1918 Volkov was active around Petropavlovsk in “Death for the Motherland,” one of the first underground anti-Bolshevik organizations. Following the overthrow of Soviet power in Siberia, in which he was a leading participant, he became commander of forces in the Petropavlovsk (Akmolinsk) Region and commander of the 1st Siberian Cossack Regiment (from 31 May 1918). On 8 September 1918, he was named head of the Omsk Garrison by the Provisional Siberian Government and subsequently played a leading role in both the Novoselov affair and the Omsk coup of 18 November 1918. Having confessed to his part in the arrest of the members of the Ufa Directory, together with I. N. Krasil′nikov and A. V. Katanaev Volkov was brought before a military court at Omsk on 21 November 1918, charged with “an attack on the supreme state authority,” but the judge, A. F. Matkovskii, found their actions to have been justified. (The new supreme ruler, Admiral A. V. Kolchak, had already promoted Volkov and his codefendants on 19 November.)

Volkov was soon afterward sent east to bring the rebellious Ataman G. M. Semenov to heel, as commander of the Eastern Siberian Independent Army (1 December 1918–24 January 1919) and of the Irkutsk Military District (24 December–17 February 1919), before being dispatched to Vladivostok to organize the raising of Cossack units in the Maritime Province (from 18 March 1919). He subsequently served as a frontline commander of the Urals Army Group (12–27 June 1919) and the Southern Cavalry Group of the Western Army (from 28 June 1919). On 20 November 1919, he was named commander of the Siberian Cossack Group of the 3rd Army, with which he undertook the Great Siberian (Ice) March as White forces in the east disintegrated. Ill with typhus, he found refuge on a train of the Czechoslovak Legion, but was ejected from it near Tel′ma station. Near Irkutsk, on 11 February 1920, his unit was overwhelmed by Red partisans, and Volkov appears to have committed suicide to evade capture. His daughter, Mariia Viacheslavovna Eikhel′berger (1903–1983), became a celebrated émigrée poet.