After the October Revolution, Dobrovolsky left the army and settled in St. Petersburg, from where he fled to Terijoki in Finland in December 1918.

[2][3] During the Russian Civil War, from May 1919 to the spring of 1920, he served on the White side as a military prosecutor in Arkhangelsk, the capital of the Northern Oblast, ruled by General Yevgeny Miller.

He received the rank of Major General in Miller's army in January 1920, but soon afterwards the Whites were defeated, and he fled to Finland again and settled in Vyborg.

[5] In the 1920s and 1930s, Dobrovolsky was a key figure in Russian emigrant organizations operating in Finland and in anti-Bolshevik activism.

He also acted as a correspondent for three foreign far-right Russian-language newspapers and toured among the Russian community in Finland on topics related to politics and culture.

Doborovolski organized the secret reconnaissance line of the ROVS to the Soviet Union through Finland in 1933–1937, which served as the intelligence unit of the Finnish General Staff.

The Commission ordered Yrjö Leino, a communist serving his fourth day as Minister of the Interior, to arrange for their arrest and extradition to the Soviet Union.

[11][12] Dobrovolsky was the oldest of the extradited and most notable, and was generally considered the leader of anti-Bolshevik Russian immigrants in Finland.