Boris Nikolaevich Volkov, 1894 - 1954

B. N. Volkov was born in Ekaterinoslavl' (Siberia) on 30 May 1894 (N.S.). A university student in law, he volunteered for military duty at the front in 1915, serving in Poland and the Caucasus as commander of a medical unit responsible for retrieving wounded soldiers from the front lines. In December 1917, he was involved in an anti-Bolshevik uprising in Irkutsk. During the Russian Civil War, Volkov served as an agent of the Siberian Provisional (later All-Russian) government in Mongolia.

Escaping from Baron R. F. Ungern-Shternberg, who had sentenced him to death, he spent the following few years in China, as a commercial and sales agent for Gilchrist and Co. and the Tientsin Chemical Works Association.

In 1923 Volkov and his wife moved to the United States, where he worked as a longshoreman and construction worker, and at a variety of other jobs. He was also a poet and writer, and though his autobiographical novel, "Conscript to Paradise," was never published, he did see to press a book of verse entitled V pyli chuzhikh dorog (Berlin, 1933). Volkov also wrote for the émigré press, and much of his poetry was published in periodicals. He died in San Francisco on 9 June 1954.

Detailed processing and preservation microfilming for these materials were made possible by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and by matching funds from the Hoover Institution and Museum of Russian Culture. The grant also provides for depositing a microfilm copy in the Hoover Institution Archives. The original materials and copyright to them (with some exceptions) are the property of the Museum of Russian Culture, San Francisco.

Boris Volkov Register