Soviet cosmonaut, participant in the Soyuz 7 and 11 missions of 1969 and 1971, the second of which resulted in the death of three cosmonauts.

Son of an aviation design engineer, Volkov was educated at the Moscow Aviation Institute. On the Soyuz 7 mission, Volkov, acting as flight engineer, was accompanied by Anatoly V. Filipchenko; the two tested welding techniques in space and multiple launching. Volkov was again flight engineer on the Soyuz 11 mission commanded by Georgy T. Dobrovolsky and accompanied by Viktor I. Patsayev.

The three cosmonauts remained in space a record 24 days and created the first manned orbital scientific station by docking their Soyuz 11 spacecraft with the unmanned Salyut 1 station launched two months earlier. The three were found dead in their space capsule after it made a perfect landing in Kazakhstan; decompression, resulting from a leak in their capsule when a hatch was improperly closed, was given as the cause of death. While in the space station, the cosmonauts had performed meteorological and plant-growing experiments.