From the first days of the Russian Revolution, he played a leading role in the country's syndicalist movement – editing the newspaper Golos Truda and organising the formation of factory committees.

[2] By June 1917, he had been elected to the city's central council of factory committees and became one of its most active members, as part of a rising tide of anarcho-syndicalism in the Russian capital.

[4] In the articles he penned for the paper, Maksimov spoke in favour of the factory committees as a model for workers' control, while he criticised mainstream Russian trade unions, which he considered to be a relic of capitalism.

[8] Maksimov rebuffed the claims of David Riazanov, who favoured the trade unions, dismissing him as a "white-handed intellectual who had never worked, never sweated, never felt life.

[10] In Golos Truda, Maksimov denounced the centralisation of industry by the Bolshevik party and declared that Russian anarchists should oppose the Soviets, as they were by this time under the control of the state.

[19] During the subsequent period, Maksimov attempted to organise food workers into underground factory committees, which he hoped would form the nucleus of a nationwide General Confederation of Labor.

In March 1920, Maksimov spoke at the Second All-Russian Congress of Food-Industry Workers, which adopted his resolution that denounced the Bolshevik's "dictatorship over the proletariat" and called for the establishment of free soviets.

[23] In order to draw the attention of visiting European syndicalists, who had arrived in Moscow for the first congress of the Profintern, Maksimov and his fellow anarchist inmates in Taganka prison staged a hunger strike.

[30] After a brief stay in Paris, in 1925, he moved to the Chicago, where he hung wallpaper and edited Golos Truzhenika, the Russian language organ of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).