Viacheslav Volgin

Early years

Vyacheslav Petrovich Volgin was born in Borshchyovka village, Khomutovsky District, Kursk Governorate, Russia on 14 June 1879. Between 1897 and 1908 he attended Moscow University, where he studied first physics and mathematics, then history and philology. A committed Marxist, he was repeatedly arrested during this period. He published his first scientific paper in 1906, on the German labor movement. In 1908 he wrote a study on A Revolutionary Communist of the 18th Century (Jean Meslier and his Testament). The study was published in 1919. During World War I, Volgin was a contributor to Maxim Gorky's Chronicles. Before the Revolution Volgin was a member of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party since 1901 and became a Menshevik in 1914. He joined the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1920.

Academic contributions

Volgin spent many years researching the history of social thinking in France before the French Revolution, developing an original view of the nature of the ideological struggle during this period. One of the subjects he studied was the teaching of the philosopher Charles Fourier, publishing two articles that analyzed Fourier's views. In 1924 he published a major work Sen-Simon i Sen-Simonizm on Saint-Simon and the resulting Saint-Simonianist movement. He also published in depth biographies of French proto-communist thinkers and activists such as Jean Meslier, Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, Étienne-Gabriel Morelly and François-Nöel Babeuf.

Volgin was the most active of Soviet academics in the study of classic utopias. He published and wrote the prefaces to editions of Tommaso Campanella (1934), Thomas More (1935) and Robert Owen (1950). In his introduction to the 1934 Russian-language version of Campanella's work The City of the Sun, Volgin identified the monastic life as an early form of "communist utopia", emphasizing "the absence of private property, the universal obligation of labor (which is considered a matter of honor), the social organization of production and distribution, and the training through labor of the inhabitants."