Petrograd's press commissar whose assassination helped trigger the Red Terror
“Comrades, do you think I am looking at my watch? No — I am looking at the clock of humanity, the clock of the world revolution.”
Petrograd's Commissar for Press and Propaganda and a magnetic crowd orator who built the Bolshevik censorship apparatus and founded Krasnaya Gazeta. Shot dead by an SR militant on 20 June 1918, his assassination, alongside Uritsky's murder and the attempt on Lenin, became the spark for the full-scale Red Terror.
Career Timeline
- 1905Joins the Bund at 14; expelled from gymnasium for unreliability
- 1908–11Social Democratic agitator in Volhynia and Podolia
- 1911–13Exiled to Pinega; freed under 1913 Romanov amnesty
- 1913–17US emigration: Philadelphia garment worker; co-publishes Novy Mir
- 1917.5Returns to Russia, joins the Mezhraiontsy
- 1917.6–8Joins Bolsheviks via Mezhraiontsy; chief agitator; VI Congress delegate
- 1917.9–10Petrograd Soviet Presidium; October rising
- 1917.11–1918.6VTsIK Presidium; Commissar for Press/Propaganda; founds Krasnaya Gazeta
Related historical events
- 1905–1907The Revolution of 1905joined Bund
- 1917.10–1918.01The October RevolutionChief agitator, Petrograd Soviet Presidium memberAs a member of the Petrograd Soviet and VTsIK presidiums he took part in the insurrection; afterwards, as Commissar for Press, Propaganda and Agitation, he directed press censorship and founded Krasnaya Gazeta.
- 1918–1922The Civil War and Foreign InterventionA spark of the Red TerrorPetrograd’s commissar for the press, whose 1918 assassination helped ignite the Red Terror.
Press Censorship and the May 1918 Trial
Appointed Commissar for Press, Propaganda, and Agitation in Petrograd in November 1917, Volodarsky immediately set about constructing the Bolshevik censorship apparatus. He systematically shut down opposition newspapers and, as press commissar for the Union of Communes of the Northern Region in 1918, controlled the city's entire press landscape. In May 1918, Volodarsky served as chief prosecutor in a widely publicized trial against several non-Bolshevik evening newspapers, accusing them of hostile agitation against Soviet power. The trial marked a decisive escalation: censorship intensified sharply afterwards, and the independent press in Petrograd was effectively extinguished.
His ruthlessness as censor was acknowledged even by sympathetic contemporaries. Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Commissar of Enlightenment, wrote that Volodarsky 'was ruthless. He was imbued not only with the full menace of the October Revolution, but with a foretaste of the outbursts of Red terror which were to come after his death. There is no sense in concealing the fact that Volodarsky was a terrorist.' Lunacharsky noted that Volodarsky was 'profoundly convinced that if we were to falter in lashing out at the hydra of counter-revolution it would devour not only us but along with us the hopes that October had raised all over the world.'
Yet he did not align with every Bolshevik position. Shortly before the October insurrection he sided with Zinoviev and Kamenev in opposing the armed rising. He also opposed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty but remained publicly silent to preserve party discipline. His severity as censor was a product of conviction, and he is remembered as the figure who laid the cornerstone of the Bolshevik press monopoly.