Volin quickly became a leading proponent of anarcho-syndicalism during the
1917 Revolution, calling for
workers' control in his frequent speeches to the workers of Petrograd and as editor of
Golos Truda, which expanded its circulation to 25,000 readers. In the wake of the
October Revolution, he became a vocal critic of the
Bolsheviks, warning of their
authoritarian tendencies and predicting that they would see the power of the
soviets usurped by the
state. He particularly criticised the
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which he considered to be a renouncement of
world revolution by the Bolsheviks. He called for the prosecution of
partisan warfare against the
Central Powers and consequently decided to move to
Ukraine, which had fallen under the occupation of the
German Empire and
Austria-Hungary. After visiting relatives in Voronezh and spending a few months organising educational institutions for the local soviet in
Bobrov, Volin moved to
Kharkiv, where he participated in the establishment of the
Nabat Confederation of Anarchist Organisations. On 18 November 1918, at the organisation's first conference in
Kursk, he drew up a declaration of principles, which was designed to be acceptable to the three major
anarchist schools of thought:
communism,
individualism and
syndicalism. Volin's theory of
anarchist synthesis, which encouraged anarchists of different tendencies to cooperate, was criticised as ineffective by his former anarcho-syndicalist comrades such as
Grigorii Maksimov and
Mark Mratchny. Nevertheless, Volin continued to advocate for his organisational theory through the Nabat, which grew to include autonomous branches throughout Ukraine, as well as a youth section and a publishing house. and the
Makhnovshchina By mid-1919, the organisation had drawn the attention of the Bolsheviks, who closed its meeting places and shut down its newspaper press. In response, Volin moved the Nabat's headquarters to
Huliaipole, where it became a central organisation within the
Makhnovshchina, an anarchist mass movement led by
Nestor Makhno's
Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine. Volin joined the movement's Cultural-Educational Commission, serving as an editor for its publications and organising its
regional congresses, even going on to act as
chairman of the
Military Revolutionary Council (RVS), the movement's executive body. As chair of the RVS, Volin clashed with the Insurgent Army's command over the excessive violence employed by the
Kontrrazvedka. He also edited the movement's
Draft Declaration, which proposed the establishment of
free soviets as the basis for a transition towards a
communist society. (center) and other commanders of the
Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine In December 1919, Volin went to
Kryvyi Rih in order to counter the spread of
Ukrainian nationalism in the region, but he contracted
typhus and was forced to stop for recovery in a peasant village. On 14 January 1920, he was arrested on his sickbed by the
14th Army and given to the
Cheka, who had orders from
Leon Trotsky to execute him. Russian American anarchists such as
Alexander Berkman attempted to appeal his sentence, but this was rejected by
Nikolay Krestinsky, the
general secretary of the Communist Party and a former colleague of Volin. Further appeals by Russian libertarians, including the Bolshevik
Victor Serge, eventually secured his transfer to
Butyrka prison in
Moscow, where his death sentence was commuted. He was finally released in October 1920, as part of the terms of the
Starobilsk agreement between the Bolsheviks and the Makhnovists, and he was even offered the post of
People's Commissar for Education in the
Ukrainian Soviet government, which he rejected. In November, Volin made a quick visit to
Dmitrov, where he paid his respects to a dying
Peter Kropotkin, who by then was pessimistic about the prospects of the revolution. He then returned to Kharkiv, where he began to prepare an All-Russian Congress of Anarchists to be held on 25 December, as well as leading the negotiations with
Christian Rakovsky's government over the controversial fourth political clause of the Starobilsk agreement, which would have provided for the autonomy of the Makhnovshchina. Following the
soviet victory over the
White movement in
Crimea, Volin and other members of the Nabat were arrested and imprisoned again in Moscow. In July 1921, after being visited by
Gaston Leval, a French syndicalist delegate to the
Profintern, Volin and other anarchist political prisoners staged a
hunger strike in order to draw the attention of other visiting trade union delegates. Following protests from the delegates to
Vladimir Lenin, the prisoners were released and subsequently deported from
Soviet Russia in January 1922. ==Exile==