Ivan Alekseyevich Yudin

After lengthy efforts to untangle the fate of Comrade Yudin, one of the ten anarchists deported by the Bolsheviks at the end of 1921 after a hunger strike in Taganka Prison,[1] we have received melancholy news from Paris that Yudin was captured by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz, where he likely died. Another comrade deported by the Bolsheviks, Mikhail P. Vorobyev, survived and is living in Paris.

At the time of his arrest in 1921, Yudin was a student at the First Moscow University. He had joined the anarchist movement at the beginning of the October Revolution. He became a member of the Ivanovo-Voznesensk group, and was part of the delegation from this group that went to Ukraine in 1921 to work in the Nabat organization.[2]

In 1920 he returned to his home town, the city of Murom, Vladimirskaya province, where he organized a group and was its secretary. Because of his anarchist activity in this city, he was assigned to a labour battalion and deprived of the right to work in the administrative and cultural-educational organs of the Soviet government.

In 1921 he enrolled in Moscow University and was active in the “United Anarchist Student Society of the City of Moscow.” He was arrested on March 18, 1921, at a regular meeting of the secretariat of United Student Society. Yudin was incarcerated in Taganka Prison, took part in the hunger strike, and was deported to Berlin, where he belonged to the Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad. In 1925 he arrived in Paris, where he attended the Sorbonne. During the Spanish Civil War, he was briefly in Barcelona.[3]

G. M.[Grigori Maksimov]

Notes

1, After ten days nine were deported: A. Feldman, G. Gorelik, G. Maksimov, M. Mratchny, A. Shapiro, V. Volin, M. Vorobyev, E. Yarchuk, I. Yudin. See A Grand Cause : The Hunger Strike and the Deportation of Anarchists From Soviet Russia by Maksimov

2, The delegation from Ivanovo-Vosnesensk, 36 anarchists, joined the Makhnovists, not Nabat, in April, 1919.[MA]

3, In the movement, Yudin was often known by the nickname “Muromets,” after his home town. It was under this name that he had a letter published in “Delo Truda” in 1937 (about Spain). For more  information about Yudin’s activities in connection with the Spanish Civil War see D. I. Rublev, “Russkiye anarkhisty v Ispanskoy grazhdanskoy voyne (1936-1939 gg.).” [Russian anarchists in the Spanish civil war (1936-1939)], in Grazhdanskaya voyna v Ispanii: Izvestnoye i neizvestnoye [The Civil war in Spain: Known and unknown], ed. A. YU. Fyodorov and YU. V. Fetisov, (Moscow, 2018), pp. 201-229.[MA]

According to Dictionnaire des militants anarchistes, There’s a 1969 Letter from Vorobyev with more information http://militants-anarchistes.info/spip.php?article2758

Translation (and assistance with notes) Malcolm Archibald

From: Delo Trouda-Probouzhdenie No. 16 (January, 1946), p. 19. Translated by: Malcolm Archibald.