A Socialist Revolutionary who defended democratic socialism through exile and testimony
Vladimir Zenzinov was a Socialist-Revolutionary leader, journalist, and ethnographer of the Arctic regions of Siberia. Repeated arrests and exiles from the 1905 Revolution through 1917 led him to publish pioneering ethnographic and ornithological studies of the far north. In 1918 he joined the Samara Constituent Assembly committee and the Ufa Directory, defending a democratic alternative between Bolshevik power and Kolchak's military rule before Cossacks arrested him during the Omsk coup on 18 November. He later worked in émigré socialist journalism in Paris and New York, recording the revolutionary and civil-war experience.
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