[3] As a socialist revolutionary, he was involved in the 1905 Russian Revolution from its inception: witnessing the events of Bloody Sunday;[1] participating in the establishment of the Saint Petersburg Soviet;[4] before he was arrested for his part in an uprising at Kronstadt,[2] for which he was briefly imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress.

[14] On 18 November 1918, at the organisation's first conference in Kursk, he drew up a declaration of principles,[15] which was designed to be acceptable to the three major anarchist schools of thought: communism, individualism and syndicalism.

[21] 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.

[24] 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.

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.

[28] He was finally released in October 1920, as part of the terms of the Starobilsk agreement between the Bolsheviks and the Makhnovists,[29] and he was even offered the post of People's Commissar for Education in the Ukrainian Soviet government, which he rejected.

[31] He then returned to Kharkiv, where he began to prepare an All-Russian Congress of Anarchists to be held on 25 December,[32] 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.

[44] Volin became a key contributor to the encyclopedia, as well as a number of anarchist periodicals in various different languages, including the French Le Libertaire, the German Die Internationale, the English Man!, the Russian Delo Truda and the Yiddish Fraye Arbeter Shtime.

[51] Along with his criticisms of platformism, Volin also published denunciations of Bolshevism, which he described as "red fascism", comparing the policies of Joseph Stalin to those of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler.

[53] He attempted to continue his educational activities by providing free classes about anarchism, but he also needed money to support his family, so he took up a number of jobs in the publishing industry, notably working on a Russian translation of Eugene O'Neill's play Lazarus Laughed.

[54] In the wake of the Spanish Revolution of 1936, he briefly worked on the French language organ of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo,[55] but quit after the organisation joined the government of the Popular Front.

Although his friends Senya Fleshin and Mollie Steimer attempted to convince him to escape to Mexico with them, he resolved to remain in France, as he believed that there would be a revolution following the end of the war.

[57] In his obituary to Volin written the month after his death, Victor Serge described him as "one of the most remarkable figures of Russian anarchism, a man of absolute probity and exceptional rigor of thought. ...

One must hope that the future will render justice to this intrepidly idealistic revolutionary who was always, in prison, in the poverty of exile, as on the battlefield and in editorial offices, a man of real moral grandeur.