Vladimir Burtsev - World War I and The Bolsheviks (1914 - 1921)

1921)

At the outset of World War I in 1914 he repatriated, was arrested at the border and again exiled to Siberia. Amnestied in 1915, he returned to Petrograd.

Burtsev strenuously opposed the Bolsheviks. In 1917 he accused Lenin and his comrades of being agents of Germany. In his article Either Us or the Germans and Those with Them (Russian Freedom, July 7, 1917), he listed the major enemies of Russia:

1. Bolsheviks, whose demagoguery puts their own goals above the interests of Russia
2. Reactionary forces
3. German agents and spies. The Bolsheviks are, and always have been, the agents of Wilhelm II.

On the day of the October revolution, he was arrested on orders of Leon Trotsky, which led some historians to count him as the first political prisoner in the USSR.

Despite their political differences and public disputes in the press, Maxim Gorky pleaded for Burtsev's release and in February 1918 he was indeed freed and left Soviet Russia. Burtsev spent the rest of his life as an emigre, first in Finland, then Sweden and later in France. During the Russian Civil War, he supported the White Movement of Admiral Kolchak and General Anton Denikin.

His numerous attempts to bring all anti-Bolshevik forces together under one ideological umbrella did not succeed.