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Feliks Volkhovskii (1846-1914) was a significant figure in the Russian revolutionary movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He lived through pivotal changes ranging from the rise of ‘nihilism’ in the 1860s and the growth of populism in the 1870s, through to the creation of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in the early 1900s. Imprisoned three times before he turned thirty, he spent ten years in Siberian exile before fleeing abroad to join the fight against tsarist autocracy from western Europe. Following Volkhovskii’s arrival in Britain in 1890, he played a central role in the campaign to win sympathy for the Russian revolutionary movement, editing newspapers and journals including Free Russia. He also helped to smuggle propaganda into Russia as well as becoming one of the most prominent figures in the émigré leadership of the Socialist Revolutionaries. Throughout his life, Volkhovskii was also a prolific writer of poetry and short stories, and was on good terms with many leading literary figures of the time including Ford Maddox Ford and Edward and Constance Garnett. Michael Hughes’s groundbreaking new biography provides a vivid history of this notable but hitherto neglected figure of both the political and literary worlds. Based on ten years of research in archives across the world and drawing on sources in multiple languages, this masterful biography explores how Volkhovskii’s life illuminates broader intellectual and historical questions about the Russian revolutionary movement. It is essential reading for anyone interested in late Imperial Russia and the Russian revolution.
Feliks Volkhovskii (1846-1914) was a significant figure in the Russian revolutionary movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He lived through pivotal changes ranging from the rise of ‘nihilism’ in the 1860s and the growth of populism in the 1870s, through to the creation of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in the early 1900s. Imprisoned three times before he turned thirty, he spent ten years in Siberian exile before fleeing abroad to join the fight against tsarist autocracy from western Europe. Following Volkhovskii’s arrival in Britain in 1890, he played a central role in the campaign to win sympathy for the Russian revolutionary movement, editing newspapers and journals including Free Russia. He also helped to smuggle propaganda into Russia as well as becoming one of the most prominent figures in the émigré leadership of the Socialist Revolutionaries. Throughout his life, Volkhovskii was also a prolific writer of poetry and short stories, and was on good terms with many leading literary figures of the time including Ford Maddox Ford and Edward and Constance Garnett. Michael Hughes’s groundbreaking new biography provides a vivid history of this notable but hitherto neglected figure of both the political and literary worlds. Based on ten years of research in archives across the world and drawing on sources in multiple languages, this masterful biography explores how Volkhovskii’s life illuminates broader intellectual and historical questions about the Russian revolutionary movement. It is essential reading for anyone interested in late Imperial Russia and the Russian revolution.
This chapter introduces the reader to Feliks Volkhovskii, providing a brief overview of his life, and setting it within the broader development of the Russian revolutionary movement from the 1860s down to the First World War. While Volkhovskii is best-known for his role in mobilising support from western sympathisers against the tsarist government, editing publications like Free Russia, he was also a significant figure within the Russian revolutionary movement. As a young man, while still in Russia, he was a key figure in the development of Russian revolutionary populism (narodnichestvo). In later life he played an important role within the Socialist Revolutionary Party, editing several of its publications, including some that sought to foment unrest among soldiers and sailors. The chapter suggests that Volkhovskii’s commitment to the revolutionary movement was driven above all by his loathing of the tsarist regime, as well as the injustices faced by many of its people, rather than by a coherent ideology.
This chapter examines Volkhovskii’s early life from his birth in 1846 down to his third arrest in 1874. Volkhovskii was born into a comparatively impoverished noble family in modern-day Ukraine. He was at a young age scarred by seeing the harsh treatment of the serfs on his grandfather’s estate, which prompted his sympathy for the plight of the Russian people, and he was while still a teenager already well-versed in the ideas expressed in radical literature (both legal and illegal). He initially came under police supervision in 1866, in part because of his role in running a student organisation suspected of fostering Ukrainian national sentiment, before being arrested two years later for his part in setting up the Ruble Society that sought to build closer links between the intelligentsia and the peasantry. Volkhovskii was eventually released without charge, but within a few months he was arrested again, in part because he was suspected of having ties to Sergei Nechaev, the enfant terrible of the mid-nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary movement, whose sadism and penchant for melodramatic pronouncements alienated many of his fellow revolutionaries. Volkhovskii was again acquitted, after two years in prison, subsequently moving south to Odessa where he established one of the most active groups that made up the Chaikovskii movement. Volkhovskii’s group was extremely well-organised, insisting on the complete commitment of its members, and directed much of its attention to agitation among urban workers rather than the peasantry. Volkhovskii believed for a short time in the late 1860s that a successful revolution could be brought about by a small group committed to seizing power to bring about social and economic revolution. He was, though, for the most part convinced that real change would only come about through a programme of agitation designed to foment a radical outlook among the Russian narod.
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