Most sources, for instance Boris Souvarine's Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism (Longmans, Green & Co., first edition 1939, p. 161) claim that Volodarsky was a Menshevik prior to 1917. However, Michael Glenny, the editor of the 1967 translation of Anatoly Lunacharsky's Revolutionary Silhouettes, writes that "he was exiled to Archangel while still a schoolboy for 'political unreliability'. In 1905 he joined the Bund, later the 'Spilka' or Ukrainian S.R. Party. Arrested in 1911, he was again sent to Archangel."
