A Socialist Revolutionary who defended democratic socialism through exile and testimony
Arriving at his place of exile, Russkoye Ustye, Zenzinov wrote in his diary: 'This is, of course, Russia, but Russia of the 17th, perhaps 16th century.'
Vladimir Zenzinov was a member of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party's Central Committee and a journalist who turned three Siberian exiles into pioneering ethnographic and ornithological study of the Arctic. In 1918 he backed the democratic alternative of the Samara Constituent Assembly committee and the Ufa Directory between Bolshevik power and Kolchak's military rule, before the Omsk coup banished him, and he spent his last decades recording the revolution and civil war in Paris and New York.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1903Joined the Socialist-Revolutionary Party
- 1905–1906Worked on the SR Central Committee; took part in the Moscow uprising
- 1917Member of the Petrograd Soviet executive and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee
- 1917–1918Deputy to the Constituent Assembly; member of its Samara committee
- 1918Member of the Ufa Directory
- 1918–1919Arrested after the Omsk coup and exiled to China
- 1919–1939Worked in émigré socialist journalism in Europe
- 1940–1953Worked as an émigré journalist and memoirist in New York