In May 1918, together with other opponents of the Soviet regime, Vol′skii made his way to the Volga and became a leading member of the anti-Bolshevik underground, helping to organize the rising against Soviet power in Samara in early June and the establishment of Komuch (subsequently serving as the chair of its presidium). As leader of the PSR delegation to the Ufa State Conference, he advocated making the new all-Russian government answerable to the Constituent Assembly of 1917. On 19 November 1918, following the Omsk coup, Vol′skii (as chairman of the Congress of Members of the Constituent Assembly), together with V. M Chernov, I. N. Rakitnikov, and others, was briefly arrested by officers at Ekaterinburg and would probably have been executed but for the intervention of troops of the Czechoslovak Legion, who released the prisoners. On 2 December 1918, he escaped arrest again at Ufa, when some of the future PSR victims of the Omsk massacre were rounded up by the army. By then, in contravention of the line of the PSR Central Committee, Vol′skii had become an outspoken advocate of alliance with the Bolsheviks to oppose the Whites; consequently, in January 1920 (together with P. D. Klimushkin and N. Sviatitskii), he crossed the front and led what was to become known as the Narod group of the PSR to Moscow, where he offered his support to the Soviet government. For this action he was subsequently expelled from the PSR.
On 25 February 1922, Vol′skii was arrested by the Cheka and convicted (without trial) of leading a counterrevolutionary “White-SR” organization and planning “a rising on an all-Russian scale against Soviet power.” He spent three years in the Pertominsk concentration camp near Arkhangel′sk, then was sentenced to another three-year term of exile in 1925. In February 1937, Vol′skii was again arrested. On 22 September 1937, his name appeared on a list of names, signed personally by J. V. Stalin, of people to be sentenced by the Military Collegium of Supreme Court of the USSR, with the direction that he be assigned to “Category One,” meaning a death sentence. Vol′skii was subsequently found guilty of membership in a mythical “anti-Soviet terrorist organization” and was executed on 4 October 1937. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 18 October 1991.
VOLUNTEER ARMY. This anti-Bolshevik military force was active chiefly in the North Caucasus and in South Russia during the civil wars; following the Moscow Directive of General A. I. Denikin, it played a key role in the summer–autumn offensive of 1919 of the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR). It was initially manned entirely by volunteers—most of them officers (or trainee officers) of the Russian Army, or students—but from late 1918 began to organize mobilizations among local populations in the areas that it controlled. This was probably a necessary, and indeed inevitable, step, given the Reds’ huge advantage over the Whites in manpower and resources, but it did serve to dilute the discipline of the Volunteer Army and to weaken it members’ commitment to the “White idea.” Consequently, the improbable victories that the Volunteers achieved in 1918 could not be repeated in 1919.
In the aftermath of the October Revolution, numerous officers, officer cadets, and other opponents of the Bolsheviks began to gather at Novocherkassk, capital of the Don Cossack Host, in the belief that this would be a good base to begin building an army that would oppose Soviet rule and continue the First World War against the Central Powers. Among the first to arrive were many senior officers of the old army who had been incarcerated at Bykhov following the Kornilov affair, including General L. G. Kornilov and Generals S. L. Markov, A. I. Denikin, and A. S. Lukomskii. Others were members of the anti-Bolshevik Alekseev Organization from Petrograd. Having established his headquarters at 39 Barochnaia Street on 2 November 1917, General M. V. Alekseev, the former chief of staff of the Russian Army, began signing up volunteers (initially for four months’ service) and sent them into action against the Reds at Rostov-on-Don, which was secured by the Volunteers on 2 December 1918, weeks before the formation of the Volunteer Army was formally announced on 27 December 1917. When the army was formed, its overall command was entrusted to Alekseev, who actually concentrated on political and financial affairs; Kornilov was named commander in chief and Lukomskii chief of staff.
In January–February 1918, the force was engaged in battles with Red Guards and other Soviet elements around Taganrog and Rostov-on-Don during the so-called Railway War, but when forces of the Don Cossack Host proved both unwilling and unable to defend their territory from Red invasion, Kornilov decided to withdraw southward. Subsequently, the approximately 4,000 Volunteers (half of them officers, a third of them officer cadets, and the rest mostly students), along with as many civilians, set off on the First Kuban (Ice) March on 9 February 1918. Over the following months, facing continuous battles against Red forces in the North Caucasus, despite many losses (some units suffering 100 percent casualties), the size of the army increased to about 6,000 men (partly due to its union in Kuban with the Cossack partisans of General V. M. Pokrovskii on 26 March 1918). However, the Volunteers failed in their primary objective—to capture Ekaterinodar, capital of the Kuban Cossack Host—despite repeated attacks on the city from 9 to 13 April. The siege was abandoned when General Kornilov was killed, and General Denikin then succeeded him as commander in chief. New recruits nevertheless continued to locate and merge with the Volunteers (notably the 3,000-strong force under Colonel M. G. Drozdovskii, which had traveled 1,000 miles from Jassy, on the Romanian Front, arriving in late May 1918), and by September1918, as it engaged in another (and this time more successful) campaign across the North Caucasus, the Second Kuban March, the force had reached a strength of around 30,000 fighters. Many of the new recruits were Cossacks of the Kuban Host and the Terek Cossack Host, both of which had revolted against Soviet rule. In recognition of this, the army was eventually (albeit temporarily) renamed the Caucasus Volunteer Army (10 January–22 May 1919).
As increasing amounts of Western aid began to arrive, the world war ended, and the Allied intervention developed, Denikin (who succeeded to the supreme command following Alekseev’s death from cancer in September 1918) was able to capture virtually all the North Caucasus by the end of 1918 and to drive the 11th Red Army from the region. At that point, the Volunteers (now 48,000 strong) united with the Don Army, the Crimean–Azov Volunteer Army, and other formations to forge what proved to be a sometimes uneasy alliance between the Cossacks and the Whites in the AFSR (from 8 January 1919). On 22 May 1919, the Volunteers were again separated from the Cossacks to form the Volunteer Army (operating between Kursk and Orel) and the Caucasian Army (operating around Tsaritsyn) within the AFSR. In that formation they participated in the Moscow offensive of the AFSR, capturing numerous towns and cities, including Khar′kov (27 June 1919). When, in 1919–1920, the AFSR was defeated by the Red Army before Moscow and driven back, its forces fled toward the Black Sea, and remnants of the Volunteer Army (about 5,000 men), now redubbed the Independent Volunteer Corps (under General A. P. Kutepov), were evacuated from Novorossiisk to Crimea, where they formed part of the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel.