Background
Vladimir Dmitriyevich Bonch-Bruyevich was born on June 28, 1873, in Moscow City, Russian Federation to a land surveyor family who came from the Mogilev province and belonged to the nobility of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
1918
Vladimir Dmitriyevich Bonch-Bruyevich (fourth from left), Council of People's Commissars
1918
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov and Vladimir Dmitriyevich Bonch-Bruyevich at the Kremlin
Younger Vladimir Dmitriyevich Bonch-Bruyevich
publisher writer memoirist state and public figure
Vladimir Dmitriyevich Bonch-Bruyevich was born on June 28, 1873, in Moscow City, Russian Federation to a land surveyor family who came from the Mogilev province and belonged to the nobility of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
At the age of ten, Vladimir Dmitriyevich was sent to the Moscow Institute of Surveying and graduated from the school of land surveying. In 1889, he was arrested for taking part in a student demonstration, and banished to Kursk.
When the RSDLP split in 1903 between the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, and the Mensheviks, Vladimir Dmitriyevich was among the original Bolsheviks. He helped bring out the RSDLP newspaper Iskra while it was still under Lenin's control and backed Lenin during 1904 when it appeared he might be losing control of the Bolsheviks to conciliators who wanted to heal the split. In Dember 1904, he helped organise Vpered, the first Bolshevik newspaper.
Vladimir Dmitriyevich returned to Russia early in 1905, and for a time worked illegally for the Bolsheviks in St Petersburg, organizing the underground storage of weapons. After the 1905 revolution, he was able to operate legally. In 1906, he organized the Bolsheviks' weekly newspaper Nasha mysl (Our Beliefs), the journal Vestnik zhizni (Herald of Life) and several other publications. From 1907, he headed the Bolshevik publishing house, Zhizn i znanie (Life and Knowledge). From 1912 Vladimir Dmitriyevich was a member of the editorial board of the newspaper Pravda. During this time he was repeatedly arrested but did not serve a long prison sentence.
On the outbreak of the February Revolution, in 1917, Vladimir Dmitriyevich founded the newspaper Izvestya, and used it in April as a vehicle to defend Lenin's decision to return to Russia through Germany, despite the two countries being at war. During June and July 1917, Bolshevik party meetings were held at his dacha, to avoid the attention of the police. During the October Revolution, Vladimir Dmitriyevich was in charge of protecting the Bolshevik party headquarters in the Smolny Institute, in Petrograd.
Vladimir Dmitriyevich was head of administration for the Council of People's Commissars from November 1917 to October 1920. Between December 1917 and March 1918 he was the chairman of the Committee against the pogroms and in February – March 1918 a member of the Committee for the Revolutionary Defense of Petrograd. From 1918 Vladimir Dmitriyevich was Deputy Chairman of the Board of Medical Colleges. In 1919 he was Chairman of the Committee for the construction of sanitary checkpoints at railway stations in Moscow and the Special Committee for Rehabilitation of water supply and sanitation in Moscow. Between 1918–1919 Vladimir Dmitriyevich was the head of the publishing house of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) "Kommunist."
Vladimir Dmitriyevich took an active part in the nationalization of the banks in the preparation of the Soviet government moving to Moscow in March 1918. In 1918 as Managing Director of the Council of the People's Commissars, he endorsed setting in motion the Red Terror.
In 1918 Vladimir Dmitriyevich was elected a member of the Socialist Academy of Social Sciences. After Lenin's death, he did research and authored works on the history of the revolutionary movement in Russia, the history of religion and atheism, sectarianism, ethnography, and literature.
Between 1920 and 1929 Vladimir Dmitriyevich was the organizer and leader of a farm that supplied its products mostly to the leaders of the Communist Party and the government. Beginning in 1933, he was the director of the State Literary Museum in Moscow. Between 1945 and 1955 he was the director of the Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism, Academy of Sciences of the USSR in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg).
Vladimir Dmitriyevich died on 14 July 1955. He was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.
Vladimir Dmitriyevich returned to Moscow in 1892 and entered the Moscow Workers' Union and distributed illegal literature. Since 1895 he was active in the social-democratic circles. In 1896 he emigrated to Switzerland and organized shipments of Russian revolutionary literature and printing equipment and became an active member of Iskra.