A short biography of Russian anarchist communist Ivan Yudin
Born in Murom, in Vladimir oblast in Russia, Ivan Yudin became an anarchist communist with the October Revolution of 1917 and joined the anarchist group of Ivanovo- Voznesensk, 158 miles northeast of Moscow. In April 1919 he was in Ukraine and took part in the Makhnovist movement after the Ivanovo-Voznesensk group decided to send a 36-strong delegation there. The following year he founded the anarchist group in Murom, and acted as its secretary. There he was arrested by the Soviet authorities and interned for several months in a work camp, and deprived of the right to work in administrative and cultural organisations.
He moved to Moscow in 1921, where he enrolled in the First State University there. He was one of the founders of the United Anarchist Students there, along with Petr Mikhailov (1) and Mikhail Vorobiev, and acted as its secretary. He was arrested on 18th March 1921, when a meeting of the group’s officers was raided, and imprisoned. He was one of the imprisoned anarchists who took part in a hunger strike at the Taganka prison, which led to an intervention by foreign delegates at the Congress of the Red International of Labour Unions being held in Moscow. Due to their intervention, and after ten days of hunger strike, he was one of ten anarchists sentenced to be expelled from the Soviet Union on September 17th 1921. He then managed, along with Mikhailov, to embark on a Soviet cargo vessel and clandestinely disembark at Hamburg in January 1922.
He moved to Berlin where he was active in the Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad.
At the beginning of 1924 he moved to Paris where he worked as a window cleaner, meanwhile pursuing studies in law at the Sorbonne. He was a member of the The Group of Russian Anarchists of France along with Vorobiev, Nikolai Revsky (aka Bezdomny) and Alexei Kharenko.
Yudin sometimes employed the pseudonym Muromets, after his home town and the epic Slavic hero Ilya Muromets. Yudin briefly visited Barcelona during the Spanish Revolution and Civil War. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad openly supported the CNT leadership in its policies , calling for unity in the fight against fascism, at the same time opposing the desire of the component political parties of the Popular Front to expand their influence. They recognised the presence in the anti-fascist coalition of reactionary forces, including among the Basque and Catalan nationalists, with the Basque nationalists having the backing of elements of the Catholic clergy. The Group justified this by the logic of anti-fascism.
On the outbreak of the Second World War, Yudin was prearing a doctoral thesis on the evolution of trade union law. He was denounced by a White Russian collaborator of the Gestapo and arrested. He was deported at the beginning of August 1944 in one of the last covoys from France to the Buchenwald concentration camp. He was then transferred to the Mittelbau-Dora camp, where he perished.
Nick Heath
(1) Mikhailov was born into a working class family. He studied medicine at the First Moscow State University. Anarchist since 1917, he was a member of the PanRussian Anarchist Federation in 1918.The following year, he was one of the organisers of the student anarchist group of his faculty, which resulted in his arrest by the Moscow Cheka. After a hunger strike he was released. In 1921, as seen above, he was a member of the United Anarchist Students. He took part in the hunger strike at the Taganka prison, along with Yudin and other anarchists. After getting to Germany with Yudin, he subsequently emigrated to the USA. He continued to be active in New York within the Russian anarchist movement in exile, contributing to the paper Amerikanskie Izvestiia (New York, 1920-1924), organ of the the organisation of Russian Workers of the United States and Canada. He subsequently dropped out of all militant activity.
Sources:
https://maitron.fr/spip.php?article155279
https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/sj3wn2
Russian anarchist emigration and Spanish anarchists: towards a history of cooperation during the Spanish civil war (1936-1939):
https://ahl.igh.ru/uploads/article/file/146/%D1%80%D1%83%D0%B1%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%B2.pdf
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