Background
Yefim Alekseevich Pridvorov was born on April 13, 1883 in Kirovohrad Oblast, Ukraine.
Saint Petersburg State University
Yefim Alekseevich Pridvorov was born on April 13, 1883 in Kirovohrad Oblast, Ukraine.
When Yefim Alekseevich was 14, his father secured him a paid-for place in a feldsher training college in Kiev. This was followed by four years of military service. In 1904, he entered the philological and historical faculty of Petersburg University (now Saint Petersburg State University).
Yefim Alekseevich was a steadfast supporter of the Bolshevik cause throughout the Russian Revolution and Civil War, writing agitprop from the frontlines. For this, he was decorated with the Order of the Red Banner in 1923, followed by the Order of Lenin in 1933. He was the only writer to be allocated rooms in the Kremlin.
His first political setback came in December 1930, when two of his historical poems were censured by the Central Committee. Yefim Alekseevich wrote a plaintive letter to Stalin asking, and received a long reply accusing him of having insulted the Russian working class. Stalin also disliked a play that Bedny (Yefim Alekseevich) had written in 1932 about the Red Army.
In September 1932, due to a report stating Bedny's debauched life during a CPSU Poliburo meeting, Stalin decided to evict Bedny from his Kremlin apartment. He was relocated to Rozhdestvensky Boulevard, which he called a rat's barn. In November 1936 the Politburo condemned Bedny's opera The Bogatyrs for its "antihistorical and mocking depiction of Old Russia's acceptance of Christianity."
Nonetheless, in 1938 Yefim Alekseevich was stripped of membership in the Communist Party and the Union of Soviet Writers. He died on May 19, 1945.
His university years coincided with the heady times of the 1905 Revolution, and Yefim Alekseevich, like most students, became an ardent supporter of the revolution. From 1911 he began to be published in Communist newspapers, such as Pravda, and in 1912 he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks). Also in 1911, he published the poem "Of Demyan Bedny", which led to him being known by that name and began a private correspondence with Vladimir Lenin which was said to develop into a long-lasting personal friendship.