Vsevolod Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum (Russian:
Все́волод Миха́йлович
Эйхенба́ум, French: Vsevolod Mikhaïlovitch
Eichenbaum; 11 August 1882 – 18 September
1945), known in later life as Volin or (the
spelling he used himself) Voline (Во́лин),
was a leading Russian anarchist who participated
in the Russian and Ukrainian Revolutions before
being forced into exile by the Bolshevik Party
government.
He was a main proponent of the anarchist organizational
form known as synthesis anarchism.
== Biography ==
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, he joined the Taganka
Prison hunger strike.
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 Peter 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 Sébastien 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.
== Synthesis anarchism ==
Volin was a prolific writer and anarchist
intellectual who played an important part
in the organization and leadership of Nabat.
The Nabat Confederation of Anarchist Organizations,
better known simply as Nabat (Набат),
was an anarchist organization that came to
prominence in Ukraine during the years 1918
to 1920.
The area where it held the most influence
is sometimes referred to as the Free Territory,
though Nabat had branches in all of the major
cities in southern Ukraine.Volin was charged
with writing a platform for Nabat that could
be agreeable to all the major branches of
anarchism, most importantly anarcho-syndicalism,
anarcho-collectivism/communism and anarcho-individualism.
The uniform platform for Nabat was never truly
decided upon, but Volin used what he had written
and the inspiration from Nabat to create his
Anarchist Synthesis.
The proposed platform for Nabat included the
following sentence which anticipated synthesis
anarchism: "These three elements (syndicalism,
communism and individualism) are three aspects
of a single process, the building, of the
organization of the working class (syndicalism),
of the anarcho-communist society which is
nothing more than the material base necessary
for the complete fullness of the free individual."Two
texts made as responses to the Platform, each
proposing a different organizational model,
became the basis for what is known as the
organisation of synthesis, or simply "synthesism".
Volin published in 1924 a paper calling for
"the anarchist synthesis" and was also the
author of the article in Sébastien Faure's
Encyclopedie Anarchiste on the same topic.
The main purpose behind the synthesis was
that the anarchist movement in most countries
was divided into three main tendencies: communist
anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, and individualist
anarchism and so such an organization could
contain anarchists of these 3 tendencies very
well
