Boris Mikhailovich Volin

(pseudonym of B. M. Fradkin). Born June 1 (13), 1886, in Glubokoe, in present-day Vitebsk Oblast; died Feb. 15, 1957, in Moscow. Soviet state and Party figure; publicist. Member of the Communist Party from 1904. Born into the family of a minor functionary.

Volin graduated from a city school in Ekaterinoslav in 1901. In 1905 he was a member of the Ekaterinoslav committee of the RSDLP; in 1906 and 1907 he did Party work in Briansk and in the Urals and was the editor of the under-ground Bolshevik newspaper Ufimskii rabochii. He was repeatedly arrested. Volin emigrated to France in 1911, returned to Russia in 1913, and graduated from the law department of Moscow University in 1917. That same year he became a member of the Moscow committee of the RSDLP (Bolshevik). For a time during the October Armed Uprising in Moscow he was chairman of the Zamoskvorech’e Revolutionary Military Committee. In 1918 he was an editor of Pravda. During 1918-21, Volin chaired province executive committees in Orel, Kostroma, and Kharkov, and he was secretary of the Briansk Province committee of the RCP (Bolshevik) and deputy people’s commissar of internal affairs of the Ukrainian SSR.

He worked on newspapers in Rostov-on-Don and in Moscow. In 1925 and 1926 he was assistant editor of the newspaper Izvestiia of the Central Executive Committee. Volin was chief of the press department of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs during 1927-29. During 1931-35 he was a member of the collegium of the People’s Commissariat for Education, director of the Chief Administration for Literature and Publishing (Glavlit), director of the literature institute of the Institute of the Red Professoriat, and editor of the magazine Bor’ba klassov (1931-36). In 1935 he was chief of the school department of the Central Committee of the ACP (Bolshevik). He was a delegate to the Eighth, Ninth, and Sixteenth Party Congresses. Volin was first deputy people’s commissar of education of the RSFSR during 1936-38 and editor of Istorietteskii zhurnal during 1936-45. In 1945 he became a scientific staff member of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute of the Central Committee of the ACP (Bolshevik). He became a professor in 1939. Volin was the author of works on Party history and on general political questions. He was awarded three orders and medals.