Born in 1886, Yevgeni Alekseyevich Preobrazhensky was a Russian revolutionary from his teenage years. Like so many of that generation, he was eventually murdered in Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge, after playing a leading role in the debates about how to construct a socialist economic system in the Soviet Union during the 1920s.
Preobrazhensky was the author of numerous works, the best known of which are 1919’s The ABC of Communism, coauthored with another leading Bolshevik, Nikolai Bukharin, and The New Economics from 1926. Preobrazhensky’s writings are now more accessible to an English-speaking audience through the publication of a massive, three-volume edition of his works, The Preobrazhensky Papers, between 2014 and 2023.
The son of a priest, Preobrazhensky belonged to Russia’s underground Social Democratic Party from 1903. One of his first actions was to distribute a statement to his fellow students opposing the Russo-Japanese War of 1904. During the 1905 revolution, his group led a general strike in Oryol educational establishments, and he became a full-time party worker in the Urals.
He was a supporter of the party’s Bolshevik fraction from the early days and prided himself on his contacts with Vladimir Lenin. He was rewarded for his political activities in 1909 with jail and exile to Yekaterinburg. Ordered to escape so as to attend a party congress, he evaded what he described as a “blind drunk” police officer and made his way to Novonikolaevsk. He was rearrested there in 1912, only to be freed after a prosecution blunder.
The son of…
Auteur: Bill Jefferies
