Anatoliy Vasilievich Lunacharsky

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Anatoliy Vasilievich Lunacharsky (Russian:Анатолий Васильевич Луначарский) (November 23 [O.S. November 11] 1875 – December 26, 1933) was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and the first Soviet People's Commissar of Enlightenment responsible for culture and education. He was active as an art critic and journalist throughout his career.

Biography

Lunacharsky became a Marxist at the age of fifteen. He studied at Zurich University for two years without taking a degree. While in Zurich, he met European socialists like Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches and joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.

In 1903 the party split into Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin and Mensheviks led by Julius Martov and Lunacharsky sided with the Bolsheviks. When the Bolsheviks, in turn, split into Lenin's supporters and Alexander Bogdanov's followers in 1908, Lunacharsky supported Bogdanov, his brother-in-law. In 1909, he joined Bogdanov and Maxim Gorky at the latter's villa on the island of Capri, where they started a school for Russian socialist workers. In 1910, Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, Mikhail Pokrovsky and their supporters moved the school to Bologna, where they continued teaching classes through 1911.

In 1913, Lunacharsky moved to Paris, where he started his own "Circle of Proletarian Culture". After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Lunacharsky adopted an internationalist anti-war position, which put him on a converge course with Lenin and Leon Trotsky. In 1915, Lunacharsky and Pavel Lebedev-Poliansky restarted the social democratic newspaper Vpered with an emphasis on "proletarian culture" ^{[#endnote_Paris]}. After the February Revolution of 1917, Lunacharsky returned to Russia and, like other internationalist social democrats returning from abroad, briefly joined the Mezhraiontsy before they merged with the Bolsheviks in July-August 1917.

After the October Revolution of 1917, Lunacharsky was appointed Commissar of Enlightenment (Narkompros) in the first Soviet government and remained in that position until 1929, which put him in charge of education, among other things. He was also in charge of the Societ state's first censorship system. Luncharsky helped his former colleague, Alexander Bogdanov, found a semi-independent proletarian art movement, Proletkult. Lunacharsky oversaw massive improvements in Russia's literacy rate and was regarded as fairly lenient. In particular, he invited Harriet G. Eddy, a California county library organizer for the California State Library, to Moscow in 1927. She returned again in 1930. He saved many historic buildings which the Bolsheviks wanted to destroy by arguing for their architectural importance.

When Joseph Stalin consolidated his power in the late 1920s, Lunacharsky lost all of his important positions in the government. In 1930 he represented the Soviet Union at the League of Nations and in 1933 he was appointed ambassador to Spain. He died in Menton, France, en route to Spain.

Lunacharsky's body was returned to Moscow and buried in the Kremlin wall, a rare privilege during the Soviet era, but during the later years of Stalin's rule Lunacharsky's importance was downplayed. A revival came in the late 1950s and 1960s, with a surge of memoirs about Lunacharsky and many streets and organizations named or renamed in his honor. During that era, Lunacharsky was viewed by the Soviet intelligentsia as a rare example of an educated, refined, and tolerant Soviet politician.

Notes

↑ See Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, New Myth, New World: From Nietzsche to Stalinism, Pennsylvania State University, 2002, p.85 ISBN 0271025336

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