Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky (Russian: Анато́лий Васи́льевич Лунача́рский, born Anatoly Aleksandrovich Antonov; 23 November [O.S. 11 November] 1875 – 26 December 1933) was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and the first Soviet People's Commissar (minister) of Education, as well as an active playwright, critic, essayist, and journalist throughout his career.
Lunacharsky was born on 23 or 24 November 1875 in Poltava, in the Russian Empire (now in Ukraine), as the illegitimate child of state councillor Alexander Antonov and Alexandra Lunacharskaya, née Rostovtseva. His mother was then married to statesman Vasily Lunacharsky, a nobleman of Polish origin, whence Anatoly's surname and patronym. She later divorced Vasily Lunacharsky and married Antonov, but Anatoly kept his former name.
In 1890, at the age of 15, Lunacharsky became a Marxist. From 1894, he studied at the University of Zurich under Richard Avenarius for two years without taking a degree. In Zürich he met European socialists, including Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches, and joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He also lived for a time in France.
In 1899, Lunacharsky returned to Russia, where he and Maria Ulyanova (Vladimir Lenin's sister) revived the Moscow Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), until they were betrayed by an informant and arrested. He was allowed to settle in Kiev, but was arrested again after resuming his political activities, and after ten months in prison he was sent to Kaluga, where he joined a Marxist circle that included Alexander Bogdanov and Vladimir Bazarov.
In February 1902, he was exiled to Kushinov village in Vologda, where he again shared his exile with Bogdanov, whose sister he married, and with the Legal Marxist Nikolai Berdyaev and the Socialist Revolutionary terrorist Boris Savinkov among others. After the first issue of Lenin's newspaper Iskra had reached Vologda, Bogdanov and Lunacharsky organised a Marxist circle that distributed illegal literature, while he also legally wrote theatre criticism for a local liberal newspaper. In March 1903, the governor of Vologda ordered Lunacharsky to be transferred further north, to Totma, where they were the only political exiles.
In 1903, the RSDLP split between the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, and the Mensheviks. Lunacharsky, who by now had ended his period in exile and was back in Kiev, originally believed that the split was unnecessary and joined the 'conciliators', who hoped to bring the two sides together, but he was converted to Bolshevism by Bogdanov. In 1904, he moved to Geneva and became one of Lenin's most active collaborators and an editor of the first exclusively Bolshevik newspaper, Vpered. According to Nadezhda Krupskaya:
Lunacharsky turned out to be a brilliant orator and did a great deal to assist in strengthening the Bolshevik positions. From then on Lenin became on very good terms with Lunacharsky, became jolly in his presence, and was rather partial towards him even at the time of the difference with the Vpered-ites. And Anatoly Vasilyevich was always particularly keen and witty in Lenin's presence.
Lunacharsky returned to Russia after the outbreak of the 1905 Revolution. In Moscow he co-edited the journal Novaya zhizn and other Bolshevik publications, which could be published legally, and gave lectures on art and literature. Arrested during a workers' meeting, he spent a month in Kresty Prison.
Soon after his release, he faced "extremely serious" charges, and fled abroad, via Finland, in March 1906. In 1907, he attended the International Socialist Congress held in Stuttgart.
In 1908, when the Bolsheviks split between Lenin's supporters and Alexander Bogdanov's followers, Lunacharsky supported his brother-in-law Bogdanov in setting up a new Vpered. During this period, he wrote a two-volume work on the relationship between Marxism and religion, Religion and Socialism (1908, 1911), declaring that god should be interpreted as "humanity in the future". This earned him the description "god builder".
Like many contemporary socialists (including Bogdanov), Lunacharsky was influenced by the empirio-criticism philosophy of Ernst Mach and Avenarius. Lenin opposed Machism as a form of subjective idealism and strongly criticised its proponents in his book Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1908).
In 1909, Lunacharsky 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 1911, 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 antiwar position, which put him on a course of convergence with Lenin and Leon Trotsky. In 1915, Lunacharsky and Pavel Lebedev-Poliansky restarted the social democratic newspaper Vpered with an emphasis on proletarian culture. From 1915, he also worked for the daily newspaper Nashe Slovo, sometimes acting as peacemaker between the two editors, Trotsky and the Menshevik internationalist Julius Martov.
After the February Revolution of 1917, Lunacharsky left his family in Switzerland and returned to Russia on a sealed train - though not the same train that Lenin had used earlier. Like other internationalist social democrats returning from abroad, he briefly joined the Mezhraiontsy before they merged with the Bolsheviks in July–August 1917. He was also the cultural editor of Novaya Zhizn, until forced against his will to sever this connection, because the paper took an anti-Bolshevik line.
Even before he formally joined the Bolsheviks, he proved to be one of their most popular and effective orators, often sharing a platform with Trotsky. He was arrested with Trotsky on 22 July 1917, on a charge of inciting the "July Days" riots, and was held in Kresty prison until September.
People's Commissariat for Education (Narkompros)
After the October Revolution of 1917, Lunacharsky was appointed head of the People's Commissariat for Education (Narkompros) in the first Soviet government. On 15 November, after eight days in this post, he resigned in protest over a rumour that the Bolsheviks had bombarded St Basil's Cathedral on Red Square while they were storming the Kremlin, but after two days he withdrew his resignation. After the creation of the Soviet Union, he was People's Commissar for Enlightenment, which was a function devolved to the union republics, for the Russian Federation only.
Lunacharsky opposed the decision in 1918 to transfer Russia's capital to Moscow and stayed for a year in Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg) and left the running of his commissariat to his deputy, Mikhail Pokrovsky.