Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky

Lunacharsky's most controversial intellectual adventure was 'God-building' (богостроительство). In the two-volume Religion and Socialism (1908–1911) he argued that Marxism itself harboured a kind of 'religious' sensibility (a sense of cosmic solidarity, a divinization of collective humanity) and that the proletariat should not simply destroy the old God but worship the collective power of humankind itself. This drew inspiration from Max Stirner, Nietzsche, and the empirio-criticism of Richard Avenarius. Lenin fiercely attacked Lunacharsky's position in Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1908) as 'reactionary' and idealist, and this philosophical collision soon became a political rupture. In 1909 Lunacharsky joined Bogdanov and Bazarov in forming the Vpered (Forward) group, which was expelled from the Bolshevik faction; they ran party schools for workers on Capri and in Bologna, pursuing an independent programme of revolutionary cultural education. By the First World War he had gradually retreated from god-building, and after 1917 he publicly repudiated his earlier philosophy. Yet the god-building era's core insight (that revolution is not merely a political and economic transformation but a rebirth of the human spirit, with culture as its medium) left a deep imprint on his cultural policy as Commissar of Enlightenment.

Lunacharsky served as People's Commissar of Enlightenment from 1917 to 1929, laying the foundations of Soviet cultural and educational policy. He oversaw the literacy campaign (Likbez), school reorganization, and the nationalization of museums, theatres and publishing, keeping Soviet cultural policy open between avant-garde experimentation and preservation of inherited culture. Under his principle that 'culture belongs to all working people,' he funded avant-gardists like Malevich and Mayakovsky with state money while refusing to sell a single painting from the Tsarist collections. In party debates he was closer to Bogdanov's Vpered group, yet retained Lenin's trust. He died in 1933 shortly after being appointed ambassador to Spain.

In autumn 1929 Lunacharsky was removed from the post of People's Commissar of Enlightenment (held from October/8 November 1917 to 12 September 1929) and appointed chairman of the Academic Committee under the USSR Central Executive Committee, a demotion from the center of the cultural policy he had built for twelve years. On 1 February 1930 he was elected an Academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and in the early 1930s he directed the Institute of Literature and Language of the Communist Academy and the Institute of Russian Literature (IRLI) of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and served as one of the editors of the Literary Encyclopedia.

His late publications include Vladimir Mayakovsky, Innovator (1931), George Bernard Shaw (1931) and Maxim Gorky (1932); his best-known work was the memoir collection Revolutionary Silhouettes, portraying Lenin, Trotsky and eight other revolutionaries. He wrote dozens of articles on music and literature through 1925–1933, but a sharp worsening of his illness that threatened complete loss of sight occupied much of 1932, when he wrote nothing on music.

He avoided taking sides when the party split after Lenin's death, and almost became embroiled by accident when Revolutionary Silhouettes (1923) included portraits of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Martov but failed to mention Stalin; he also offended Trotsky with a remark at the Bolshoi Theatre. From about 1927 he was losing control over cultural policy to Stalinists such as Leopold Averbakh. In September 1933 he was appointed plenipotentiary (polpred) of the USSR to Spain, a post he could not reach owing to ill health; he was also deputy head of the Soviet delegation to the League of Nations disarmament conference, and in December 1933 died of angina en route to Spain at the French resort of Menton. His body was cremated and the urn placed in the Kremlin Wall; the Russian source dates the Spanish posting 20 August – 26 December 1933.

Sources conflict on the exact date of death. Russian and English sources agree on 26 December 1933, but the Ukrainian Wikipedia infobox prints 26 January 1933 while its own body text says he died in December of that year. The December date has source support; the January date stands as a documented alternative or error.

His posthumous trajectory was uneven. Burial in the Kremlin Wall was a rare honour in the Soviet era. During the Great Purge of 1936–1938, however, his name was erased from the Communist Party's history and his memoirs were banned. A revival came in the late 1950s and 1960s, when memoirs reappeared and many streets and organizations were named in his honour, and the Soviet intelligentsia came to view him as an educated, refined and tolerant Soviet politician.