Bubnov, Andrei

(party pseudonyms, Khimik and Iakov; literary pseudonyms, A. Glotov, S. Iaglov, A. B., and others). Born Mar. 23 (Apr. 4), 1883, in Ivanovo-Voznesensk, now Ivanovo; died Jan. 12, 1940. Soviet state and Party figure; historian, publicist. Communist Party member from 1903. Born into the family of a textile factory director.

Bubnov studied at the Moscow Agricultural Institute, from which he was expelled for revolutionary work. In 1905 he was a member of the Ivanovo-Voznesensk committee of the RSDLP, and in 1906 he was a member of the bureau of the Ivanovo-Voznesensk union of the RSDLP. He attended the Fourth Congress (1906) and the Fifth Congress (1907) of the RSDLP. He was a member of the Moscow committee of the RSDLP in 1907 and a member of the RSDLP Oblast Bureau of the Central Industrial Region in 1908. From 1909 until 1917 he conducted party work in Nizhny Novgorod, Sormovo, St. Petersburg, Samara, and other cities. He was repeatedly arrested. In 1910 he was co-opted into the Bolshevik Center in Russia. At the sixth (Prague) all-Russian conference of the RSDLP (1912), he was elected candidate member of the Central Committee of the RSDLP. From 1912 on, he was a Pravda contributor. After the February Revolution of 1917, Bubnov was a member of the Moscow Oblast bureau of the RSDLP (Bolshevik). He was a delegate to the seventh (April) conference of the RSDLP (Bolshevik); at the Sixth Party Congress he was elected to the Central Committee of the RSDLP (Bolshevik) and was the Central Committee representative in the Petrograd committee of the RSDLP (Bolshevik). At the Central Committee session of Oct. 10 (23), 1917, he was elected to the Politburo and at the Central Committee session of Oct. 16 (29), 1917, to the Party revolutionary military center for leading the October armed uprising; he was a member of the Petrograd Revolutionary Military Committee and commissar of all the railroad stations. After the Second Congress of Soviets, he was a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and member of the collegium of the People’s Commissariat of Transportation. In November 1917 he was dispatched south as the republic’s railroad commissar; he participated in the liquidation of the revolt led by Kaledin. In 1918 he joined the Left Communists.

From March 1918, Bubnov was a member of the Soviet Ukrainian government and of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party (UCP [Bolshevik]); from October 1918 he was a member of the Kiev Oblast underground bureau of the UCP (Bolshevik). In 1919 he was chief of the revolutionary committee and then of the executive committee of the soviet in Kiev. He was elected a member of the Politburo of the UCP (Bolshevik) Central Committee; he was a member of the Revolutionary Military Council (RMC) of the Ukrainian Front and of the RMC of the Fourteenth Army. Beginning in late 1919 he worked in Moscow in the Main Administration of Textile Enterprises and was a member of the bureau of the Moscow committee of the RCP (Bolshevik). He participated in the suppression of the Kronstadt uprising of 1921. In 1921-22 he was member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Northern Caucasus Military District. In 1922-23 he was chief of the Agitation and Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the RCP (Bolshevik). In 1920-21 he was a member of the Democratic Centralism Group and in 1923 of the Trotskyite opposition, which he left soon afterward. From the beginning of 1924 to September 1929 he was chief of the Political Administration of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the USSR, and member of the organizational bureau of the Central Committee of the ACP (Bolshevik). In 1925 he was secretary of the Central Committee of the RCP (Bolshevik). From 1929 until 1937 he was people’s commissar of education of the RSFSR. He played a prominent role in the implementation of the law on universal compulsory elementary education and was an advocate of polytechnical education; he devoted much attention to the high ideological level of instruction and fought against distortions in the content and methods of instruction. At the Eighth, Eleventh, and Twelfth congresses of the RCP (Bolshevik) he was elected candidate member of the Central Committee, and at the Thirteenth through Seventeenth congresses he was elected a member of the Party Central Committee. He was a member of the All-Russian and USSR central executive committees. He was awarded the Order of Lenin and the Order of the Red Banner.

Bubnov is the author of several major works on the history of the Communist Party: Major Moments in the Development of the Communist Party in Russia (1921), Basic Questions of the History of the RCP (1924), and the monographic article “The All-Union Communist Party” in the first edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (vol. 11, pp. 8-554; appeared also as a separate publication).