These days all you hear about political leanings is, for the most part, “conservative,” “progressive,” and the occasional “liberal.” A hundred years ago we weren’t so lexically starved. Take Vsevolod Mikhailovich Eikenbaum, for example. He was born August 23, 1882, and is usually known by his pen name, Volin. He wasn’t just a “conservative” or a “progressive;” he was a revolutionary socialist who gravitated toward anarcho-sydicalism!
Volin was born in Voronizh, in southwestern Russia, which at the time was the Russian Empire. Both of his parents were doctors, and hired private tutors for Volin and his brothers. Somewhat unusually for that time and place, they learned French and German as well as Russian. After that Volin moved to Saint Petersburg to study law.
It was probably at the university that Volin got interested in politics. In 1904, when he was 22, he dropped out of law school to become a full-time activist in the Socialist Revolutionary Party. At the time, there was an incredible amount of political turmoil in Russia; the Czar was still in charge, but there were workers’ movements and uprisings all over the place. Volin was involved in the 1905 Russian Revolution and helped establish the Saint Petersburg Soviet. A “soviet,” by the way, is just a council; it doesn’t imply any particular ideology. Anyway, if you remember your Russian history, the 1905 revolution didn’t establish a new nation or anything — in fact, it was “the first Russian revolution,” and was largely beaten back. Volin was arrested, along with many of his fellow activists, and deported to Siberia. He managed to escape, though, and went to Paris.
It was an era of political upheaval throughout Europe, and Paris exposed Volin to more factions and ideologies. He became an anarchist. When the Great War started he got involved in an anti-war movement, and was chased out of France by the authorities. He fled to New York, where he joined a Russian American anarcho-syndicalist organization and became a writer for their newspaper. He even went on a speaking tour of US cities. Anarcho-syndicalism, by the way, is a worker-centric school of thought that suggests that workers should “syndicate together” (sort of) and be in control of the economy, but should avoid hierarchy as much as possible because ethically it’s impossible to justify. They also regard “work for wages” as functionally equivalent to slavery. I suspect there were very many very long meetings where these issues were discussed at great length…but I digress.
Volin returned to Russia after the 1917 Revolution, and re-established the anarcho-syndicalist newspaper in Petrograd. He was a vocal critic of the Bolsheviks because they tended toward authoritarianism, and after a year or so threw up his hands in frustration and moved to Ukraine. Anarchism, at the time, was a major international movement, but confusing, because there were three separate anarchist schools of thought: communism, individualism, and syndicalism (see how interesting politics used to be?) and Volin came up with his theory of “synthesis anarchism,” which tied everything together.
This could go on for quite a while, so I’ll cut to the chase, where “the chase” is Volin being chased out of Russia again, this time to Berlin. He supported himself by writing and translating, and was active in politics, criticizing everyone from Stalin to Hitler — by the 1920s he was back in Paris, where he stayed (in hiding) even after the Nazis invaded. Some friends tried to get him to escape to Mexico, but he declined because he thought there would be a French revolution after the war ended. Unfortunately his life in hiding affected his health, and he died of tuberculosis in 1945.
This probably seemed complicated, but it skips an incredible amount of detail — the political world of a century ago was hugely complicated and hard to follow. Volin was right in the middle of a lot of it, and you can get the inside story in his book The Unknown Revolution, published postumously and translated into English in the 1950s.
