to cooperate, was criticised as ineffective by his former anarcho-syndicalist comrades such as Grigorii Maksimov and Mark Mratchny. Nevertheless, Volin continued to advocate for his organisational theory through the Nabat, which grew to include autonomous branches throughout Ukraine, as well as a youth section and a publishing house. By mid-1919, the organisation had drawn the attention of the Bolsheviks, who closed its meeting places and shut down its newspaper press. In response, Volin moved the Nabat's headquarters to Huliaipole, where it became a central organisation within the Makhnovshchina, an anarchist mass movement led by Nestor Makhno's Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine. Volin joined the movement's Cultural-Educational Commission, serving as an editor for its publications and organising its regional congresses, even going on to act as chairman of the Military Revolutionary Council (RVS), the movement's executive body. As chair of the RVS, Volin clashed with the Insurgent Army's command over the excessive violence employed by the Kontrrazvedka. He also edited the movement's Draft Declaration, which proposed the establishment of free soviets as the basis for a transition towards a communist society. In December 1919, Volin went to Kryvyi Rih in order to counter the spread of Ukrainian nationalism in the region, but he contracted typhus and was forced to stop for recovery in a peasant village. On 14 January 1920, he was arrested on his sickbed by the 14th Army and given to the Cheka, who had orders from Leon Trotsky to execute him. Russian American anarchists such as Alexander Berkman attempted to appeal his sentence, but this was rejected by Nikolay Krestinsky, the general secretary of the Communist Party and a former colleague of Volin. Further appeals by Russian libertarians, including the Bolshevik Victor Serge, eventually secured his transfer to Butyrka prison in Moscow, where his death sentence was commuted. He was finally released in October 1920, as part of the terms of the Starobilsk agreement between the Bolsheviks and the Makhnovists, and he was even offered the post of People's Commissar for Education in the Ukrainian Soviet government, which he rejected. In November, he made a quick visit to Dmitrov, where he paid his respects to a dying Peter Kropotkin, who by then was pessimistic about the prospects of the revolution. Volin then returned to Kharkiv, where he began to prepare an All-Russian Congress of Anarchists to be held on 25 December, and led the negotiations with Christian Rakovsky's