Andrei Bubnov | |
|---|---|
Андрей Бубнов | |
.jpg) | |
| People's Commissar for Education | |
| In office 12 September 1929 – 26 October 1937 | |
| Premier | Alexei Rykov Vyacheslav Molotov |
| Preceded by | Anatoly Lunacharsky |
| Succeeded by | Pyotr Tyurkin [ru] |
| Head of thePolitical Directorate of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army | |
| In office 17 January 1924 – 1 October 1929 | |
| President | Mikhail Frunze Kliment Voroshilov |
| Preceded by | Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko |
| Succeeded by | Yan Gamarnik |
| Head ofMilitary-Revolutionary Committee of theUkrainian Soviet Socialist Republic | |
| In office 12 July – 18 September 1918 | |
| Preceded by | Volodymyr Zatonsky |
| Succeeded by | Fyodor Sergeyev |
| Member of the6thPolitburo | |
| In office 10 October – 29 November 1917 | |
| Full member of the13thSecretariat | |
| In office 30 April – 31 December 1925 | |
| Candidate member of the14th,15thSecretariat | |
| In office 1 January 1926 – 13 July 1930 | |
| Full member of the13th,14th,15th,16thOrgburo | |
| In office 2 June 1924 – 10 February 1934 | |
| Personal details | |
| Born | (1883-04-03)April 3, 1883 Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Russia |
| Died | 1 August 1938(1938-08-01) (aged 55) Kommunarka, Moscow Oblast, Soviet Union |
| Political party | RSDLP (Bolsheviks)(1903–1918) Russian Communist Party (1918–1937) |
| Alma mater | Moscow Agricultural Institute |
| Occupation | revolutionary, politician, Communist ideologist |
Andrei Sergeyevich Bubnov (Russian:Андрей Сергеевич Бубнов; 3 April [O.S. 22 March] 1883 – 1 August 1938)[1][n 1] was a RussianBolshevik revolutionary leader,Soviet politician and military leader, member of theLeft Opposition, and an important Bolshevik figure in Ukraine.
Bubnov was born in Ivanovo-Voznesensk in Vladimir Governorate (nowIvanovo,Ivanovo Oblast, Russia)[3] into a localRussian merchant's family.[4][5] He studied at theMoscow Agricultural Institute, where he was involved in revolutionary circles beginning in 1900. He failed to graduate from the institute. In 1903, he joined theBolshevik wing of theRussian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP).[3] In summer 1905, he joined the regional party committee of Ivanono-Voznesensk, and was their delegate to the4th (1906) and5th (1907) Party Conferences in Stockholm and London. Between 1907 and 1908, he was a member of the RSDLP's Moscow committee, and of the Bolshevik committee for theCentral Industrial Region.[6] He was arrested in 1908.[3] In his autobiography, he stated that he was arrested 13 times during his revolutionary career, and spent four years imprisoned for his political activities.[3]
On his release from prison in 1909 Bubnov was made an agent of theCentral Committee in Moscow. He was arrested again in 1910, and interned in a fortress.[6] After his release in 1911, he was sent to organize workers inNizhny Novgorod. From there, he was one of the organisers of thePrague Conference of January 1912, the first that excluded all RSDLP members who were not Bolsheviks. He was under arrest at the time of the conference, but in his absence was elected a candidate member of the first all-BolshevikCentral Committee. Afterwards he was sent to St Petersburg to assist in the launch ofPravda, and to work with the Bolshevik faction in theFourth Duma. Arrested yet again, he was deported toKharkov.
On the outbreak of theFirst World War Bubnov became involved in theanti-war movement inKharkiv, whence he had been deported after being expelled from St Petersburg. Arrested in August 1914, he was deported toPoltava. He moved toSamara, where he was arrested in October 1916, and exiled to Siberia in February 1917, but while he was in transit, he heard news of theFebruary Revolution, and made his way back to Moscow.
In Moscow, Bubnov was elected to theMoscow Soviet and, at the 6th Party Conference in July 1917, he was elected to the Bolshevik central committee, which would later become theCentral Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In August, he moved toPetrograd, where he was a central figure during theOctober Revolution. On 23 October, two weeks before the revolution, the Central Committee appointed a seven-man political council consisting ofLenin,Zinoviev,Kamenev,Trotsky,Stalin,Sokolnikov and Bubnov. This is sometimes regarded as the firstPolitburo,[7] but Trotsky's recollection was that this group was "completely impractical", since Lenin and Zinoviev were in hiding, and Zinoviev and Kamenev opposed the planned revolution, and "never once assembled."[8] Bubnov's real importance was as a member of theMilitary Revolutionary Committee. "It was this body rather than the party 'politburo' which made the military preparations for the revolution."[9] Together, they directed the inner-workings of would become known as theOctober Revolution. His role was to supervise the seizure of the postal and telegraph systems. After the successful execution of theOctober Revolution, he was appointed Commissar for Railways, before being sent toRostov-on-Don to organise resistance to the newly formedWhite Army ofGeneral Kaledin.[3]
Bubnov clashed with Lenin for the first time when he opposed the decision to sign theTreaty of Brest-Litovsk that ended the war with Germany. For the next four years, Bubnov was prominent in the left wing opposition to Lenin. He was dropped from the Central Committee in March 1918, but reinstated as a candidate member a year later.[10] In February 1918, he joined theLeft Communists, and moved to Ukraine, to organise partisan detachments in the 'neutral zone' east of the German front line.[3] He andGeorgy Pyatakov, who led the left in the Ukrainian party, argued that Ukraine was not a signatory to the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, and that they were therefore entitled to organise partisan war against the Germans.[11]
In October 1918, Bubnov moved toKyiv, which was ruled byHetman Skoropadskiy, with German backing, and later by the Ukrainian nationalistSymon Petliura. Bubnov acted as the chairman of the clandestine Kyiv soviet, retaining that position after the Red Army had taken Kyiv.[3] During theRussian Civil War, he was a political commissar with theRed Army, fighting on theUkrainian Front. During the Ninth Party Congress in Moscow, in March 1920, he accused the central party leadership of wrecking the party organisation in Ukraine by removing oppositionists, and threatening the stability of the Ukraine government by alienating peasant farmers.[12] He was again removed from the Central Committee and, soon afterwards, he was recalled to Moscow to take charge of the textile industry. At the next party congress, in March 1921, he acted as a spokesman for the "Democratic Centralists", who demanded less centralised control of the communist party, but on hearing of the outbreak of theKronstadt rebellion, rushed north to take part in suppressing, for which he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner.[3]
In 1921–22, Bubnov was posted in theNorth Caucasus. In 1922, he was appointed head of theAgitprop department of the Central Committee,[6] which meant he was working alongside Stalin, the new General Secretary.
Bubnov's last act as an oppositionist was to sign theDeclaration of 46 in October 1923, which was a call for greater party democracy. The Declaration was organised and penned by future members of theLeft Opposition, who supported Trotsky in the power struggle that followed Lenin's death. In January 1924, while Lenin was incapacitated by a stroke, the head of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army's Political Directorate,Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, an ardent Trotsky supporter, was sacked. Bubnov was appointed in his place, despite his past as a left oppositionist. From then on, he was a reliable supporter of Stalin. In May 1924, he was restored to full membership of the Central Committee, which he retained until his arrest. In April–December 1925, he was the Secretary of the Central Committee, and after that in January 1926–June 1930, he was a candidate member of the Secretariat of the Central Committee. In 1924–29, he was a member of theOrgburo.[4]
Early in 1926, Bubnov was appointed head of a Soviet delegation to China, to investigate what seemed to be a breakdown in relations with the Chinese military authorities. He travelled under the name Ivanovsky, taking extraordinary precautions to hide his identity.[13] Following theCanton Coup on 20 March 1926, he worked out an agreement with the new Nationalist leaderChiang Kai-shek. He then worked withGrigori Voitinsky andFedor Raskolnikov on the "Preliminary Theses on the Situation in China", which was presented to theECCI in November and December of that year.[2]
In 1929, he replacedLunacharsky asPeople's Commissar for Education, staying in this role till his arrest in October 1937. AsCommissar for Education, he ended the period of progressive, experimental educational practices and switched the emphasis to training in practical industrial skills. It was in this capacity that he attended the First All-Russian Museum Congress held in Moscow in December 1930.[14]
In October 1937, during theGreat Purge, Bubnov arrived at the Kremlin for a meeting of the Central Committee, but was barred by the guards from entering. Frightened, he went back to the Commissariat for Education, and heard on the radio that evening that he had been removed from his post of People's Commissar.[15] He was arrested by theNKVD a few days later, on 17 October 1937.[4] He was then still a member of the Central Committee, which convened on 4 December, and received a message from Stalin saying that Bubnov had confessed to being 'an enemy of the people' and a German spy.[16] He was expelled from the Party Central Committee.
Though the charges were false, Bubnov did confess quite quickly and probably under torture. In fact, he became so co-operative that the NKVD put him in the same cell asPavel Postyshev, who was refusing to incriminate himself, in the hope that Bubnov would help break his resolve.[17] On 26 July, Bubnov's name was included in a death list of 138 individuals submitted to Stalin, who ordered them all to be shot. After a 20-minute trial on 1 August 1938, he was sentenced to death, and shot the same day.[17][4][1]
Themodus operandi of theSoviet regime was often to keep secret the fate of particular purged persons: whether they were sent tointernal exile to a labor camp, sent to a psychiatric hospital (in which the regime disguised confinement and drugging as compassionate "health care"), or executed. This policy encouraged their families and the general public to believe that they were probably still alive in a camp or hospital somewhere.
Bubnov was posthumouslyrehabilitated in March 1956 during thede-Stalinization of theKhrushchev thaw.[2] The Soviet government did not make public the lists of the purged persons who had already long been executed. Thus, their relatives were often still searching for them in various psychiatric hospitals in the 1970s, as was the case with Bubnov.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location (link){{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| People | |
| Other | |
