Early years Nikolai Vladislavovich Volski was born in
Morshansk, in the
Tambov Governorate of the
Russian Empire, in 1879. His family was of
Lithuanian origin. As a student at the
St. Petersburg Technological Institute, Volski became involved in the revolutionary movement. At first he sympathised with the
Narodniki (populists) and became affiliated with some of the early
Socialist-Revolutionary circles. Later he discovered
Marxism and became involved in the Social-Democratic party. In 1898, Volski was arrested and banished to
Ufa. In 1900, after his release, he moved to
Kiev, where he attended the
Polytechnic and resumed his revolutionary activities. He also met his future wife Valentina there; in her honour he came to use the pseudonym 'Nikolai Valentinov'. During these years, Valentinov-Volski undertook a thorough study of Marxism, reading
Karl Marx' magnum opus Capital and writings by
Georgi Plekhanov and
Vladimir Lenin. He also took an interest in contemporary philosophy of science, especially in the empirio-criticism and empirio-monist theories of
Ernst Mach and
Richard Avenarius.
Bolshevik activist Valentinov played an active part in the student revolutionary movement and was arrested several times. In 1902, he received a serious head wound, which almost killed him, during a demonstration. In 1903, after his release from yet another term of imprisonment, he went into exile to
Switzerland. In
Geneva, he associated with Lenin. Under Lenin's influence, Valentinov joined the
Bolshevik wing of the
Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party (RSDRP) after the party's split at its second congress in 1903. Valentinov later recounted his time with Lenin in his 1953 book entitled
My Encounters with Lenin. Valentinov had been attracted to Lenin because of the latter's pamphlet
What Is To Be Done? (1902), whose vision of a network of working-class activists, skilled at the art of evading police, appealed to the former sympathizer of
Narodnaya Volya. However, Valentinov soon came into conflict with Lenin, particularly with respect to philosophical issues. Valentinov set out to combine Marxism with the
empirio-criticism philosophy of Mach and Avenarius. He was not unique in this; Machism was a popular current in the Russian, German and Austrian socialist movements of the period: The Russian Bolsheviks
Alexander Bogdanov and
Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Socialist-Revolutionaries
Viktor Chernov and
Nikolai Avksentiev and the
Austro-Marxist Friedrich Adler were
Russian machists strongly influenced by empirio-criticism. Valentinov claimed Lenin was not so much an orthodox Marxist as a materialist influenced by
Nikolay Chernyshevsky. This, Valentinov maintained, was behind Lenin's utter rejection empirio-criticism as a form of subjective idealism. For Lenin, the dispute had not merely philosophical but political implications: empirio-criticism was a form of petty bourgeois ideology that not only threatened the philosophical purity of Marxism but would also, in time, reveal its objectively counterrevolutionary political consequences. Valentinov considered Lenin's position dogmatic, unscientific and based on an inadequate understanding of philosophy. Relations soon deteriorated. In 1905, Valentinov returned illegally to Russia and defected to the
Menshevik faction of the RSDRP. Valentinov had laid out his philosophy in the book
Ernst Mach and Marxism (1907). Lenin wrote a long polemic,
Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1908), against what he considered the baleful influence of empirio-criticism on the revolutionary movement. Valentinov, along with Bogdanov and Lunacharski, was one of his targets. Valentinov countered with the book
The Philosophical Conceptions of Marxism (1908). In this work he rejected the charge of idealism and, in his various philosophical writings, went out of his way to criticise former Marxists like
Sergei Bulgakov and
Petr Struve, who had embraced idealist philosophies.
Post-Bolshevik activities During the abortive
Revolution of 1905, Valentinov worked for the Ukrainian Menshevik party in various capacities but played a minor role in the political events of the day. He concentrated primarily on journalism, contributing to such papers as
Russkoe Slovo (
Russian Word) and
Kievskaya Mysl (where
Leon Trotsky was one of his colleagues). Valentinov published his articles under various pseudonyms. He adopted a moderate
Internationalist position during the
First World War. He welcomed the
Revolution of 1917 but gradually grew disillusioned with
Kerenski's provisional government and the Menshevik/SR leaders of the soviets. After the
October Revolution, Valentinov left the Menshevik party. He was appointed as a 'non-party specialist' to the Supreme Economic Council of Soviet Russia (
Vesenkha), and was one of the architects of the
New Economic Policy (NEP) after the
Russian Civil War. He also founded the journal
Torgovo-Promyshlennaya Gazeta (
Commercial-Industrial Gazette). During those years he collaborated closely with
Nikolai Bukharin. After Lenin's death in 1924, Valentinov found his position in Soviet Russia increasingly precarious. He watched the rise of
Joseph Stalin with alarm and firmly opposed moves to abandon the NEP in favour of a programme of rapid industrialisation and collectivisation of agriculture. As one of the most ardent defenders of the NEP, Valentinov felt that his life was in danger when Stalin decided definitively to abandon the NEP. In 1928, he fled from the Soviet Union and settled in Paris. He contributed to various émigré journals, now generally using the pseudonym 'E. Yurevski', and reconnected with the Menshevik exiles. Valentinov survived the
Second World War in Paris. Valentinov was frequently consulted by scholars (e.g.,
Leopold Haimson) on the early history of the Russian revolutionary movement and the Soviet Union. In the 1950s and '60s, Valentinov authored and edited various books on historical, philosophical, literary and economic subjects, including:
My Encounters with Lenin (1953),
Two Years with the Symbolists (1969),
The Early Years of Lenin (1969) and
The New Economic Policy and the Party Crisis after the Death of Lenin (1971). Several of these works appeared posthumously, as Nikolai Valentinov died in Paris on 26 August 1964. ==Footnotes==