Andrei Sergeyevich Bubnov

From February 1924 to October 1929 Bubnov headed the Political Directorate of the Red Army (PURKKA) and the political administration of the USSR Revolutionary Military Council, concurrently serving as responsible editor of Krasnaya Zvezda. Russian Wikipedia gives the tenure as 17 January 1924 to 1 October 1929 and notes that he was appointed in place of Antonov-Ovseenko, a Trotsky supporter.

He was an active reformer of the Red Army who organized political education in the army and created Red Army military-cultural centres for soldiers' leisure. In the 1920s this military-political and organizational experience was also used in the foreign-policy arena. Early in 1926 he headed a Soviet delegation to China travelling under the name 'Ivanovsky' to investigate an apparent breakdown in relations with the Chinese military authorities; following the Canton coup of 20 March 1926 he worked out an agreement with the new Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, and in November-December 1926 joined Voitinsky and Raskolnikov in drafting the 'Preliminary Theses on the Situation in China' presented to the ECCI. The University of the Toilers of China (UTK) was also created in Moscow under his direction to train Chinese civilian and military specialists.

In 1928 he led the struggle against the 'Tolmachevtsy'. The 1928 inner-army opposition comprised communists of the N. G. Tolmachev Military-Political Academy and part of the higher political staff of the Belorussian Military District; in 1938 it was renamed the 'anti-party army Belorussian-Tolmachev grouping'. The Central Committee's 1929 label 'inner-army opposition of 1928' was issued on the prompting of the Revolutionary Military Council leadership (Voroshilov) and the Political Directorate of the Red Army (Bubnov), who saw the dissidents as a source of erosion of one-man command and personal authority.

Bubnov's own role was direct. On 21 April 1928 he delivered a report at the general party meeting of the Tolmachev Military-Political Academy expressing his sharply negative attitude to the 'Tolmachevtsy' position; when on 7 June 1928 the Special Department reported the Belorussian resolution to Voroshilov, Bubnov's indecisiveness in acting was sharply criticized. The 30 October 1928 Politburo resolution 'On the Political-Moral State of the Red Army' was drafted by a commission including Kaganovich, Ordzhonikidze and Bubnov; by year's end 73 people were held to account (one expelled from the party, 6 severe reprimands, 32 reprimands, 9 discharged from the army).

In this period Bubnov broke with Trotsky and became a zealous adherent of Stalin, who after Trotsky's defeat appointed him in early 1924 to this key post. As PUR head he directed a large-scale purge of the army that removed many commissars who had previously aligned with Trotsky, and from April to December 1925 he served concurrently as Secretary of the Central Committee. Alongside this, the critical Russian assessment of his political course is recorded: a man who had himself passed through left communism in 1918, the Democratic Centralists in 1921-22 and adherence to Trotsky in 1923 enforced against others the very line from which he had broken.

Andrei Bubnov was appointed People's Commissar for Education of the RSFSR in 1929, succeeding Anatoly Lunacharsky, and over eight years directed the most sweeping institutional reforms in Soviet educational history. His central achievement was the realization of universal compulsory primary education. Following the August 1930 joint decree of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars 'On Universal Compulsory Primary Education,' schooling became mandatory for children aged 8–10, and by 1934 primary education was effectively universal across the Soviet Union. By 1937 compulsory seven-year schooling was introduced in urban areas.

Bubnov organized the literacy campaign (likbez) like a military operation. In 1929–1931, through the 'culture campaign' (kultpokhod) movement, he mobilized some three million 'culture soldiers' (kultarmeytsy), workers, collective farmers, engineers, teachers, and university students, to teach illiterate adults. They formed study circles, raised aid funds, and encouraged school-age children to enroll.

He also pursued curricular unification, establishing standardized syllabi and textbooks nationwide to create the Soviet Union's first unified educational space. Under the polytechnic principle, he sought to combine general schooling with productive labor. Although labor training was scaled back after the mid-1930s, the universal education system he built became the institutional backbone of Soviet schooling thereafter.

Bubnov worked to raise the status of teachers, introducing uniform pay scales, honorary pedagogical titles, and relief from excessive civic burdens. In 1933 he founded Detgiz, the world's largest specialized children's publishing house, which issued 168 titles totaling 7.74 million copies in its first year alone. He also oversaw construction of the new Lenin Library building in Moscow, opened a Soviet painting gallery in the Tretyakov Gallery, and personally directed the creation of the State Literary Museum. Nadezhda Krupskaya wrote of his appointment: 'The Party has placed at the post of People's Commissar for Education a man whose entire previous work and experience of struggle guaranteed breadth of Party perspective, the habit of approaching a matter not formally but by penetrating to its essence, the ability to persistently pursue a goal, to go into every detail, and to verify execution.'