He built the Soviet government apparatus and studied the religious dissenters of the empire
On the night of October 1917, after the Smolny session, he put Lenin up in his own apartment. He fastened every chain and lock on the front door, loaded two revolvers, and dozed on the sofa listening for sounds — only to catch Lenin tiptoeing past him to the desk, pretending his host was asleep. By grey morning Lenin pulled from his pocket the handwritten draft of the famous Decree on Land and read it aloud. Bonch-Bruevich greeted the household: 'Congratulations on the first day of the Socialist Revolution.'
As Lenin's de facto personal secretary and first Administrator of Affairs of Sovnarkom (1917–20), he laid the foundations of the Soviet administrative apparatus. An ethnographer of Russian religious sectarianism, he was the driving force behind the 1919 law legalising conscientious objection.
Career Timeline
- 1883–1892Entered Konstantinovsky Survey Institute; expelled for student activism; graduated from Kursk surveying school
- 1895–1903Joined RSDLP; Moscow Workers' Union; emigrated to Switzerland 1896; Iskra collaborator; organised Doukhobor migration to Canada
- 1903–1905Head of RSDLP Central Committee Expedition in Geneva; co-founded the Party Central Archive
- 1905–1912Returned to Russia; edited Novaya Zhizn and Nasha Mysl; ran Zhizn i Znanie publishing from 1908; Pravda editorial board 1912
- 1917.3–10Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee; commandant of Smolny–Tauride district
- 1917–1920Administrator of Affairs of Sovnarkom — built the Soviet administrative apparatus and executed the government's relocation to Moscow
- 1919Led drafting of the decree exempting religious conscientious objectors from military service
- 1920–1929Turned to scholarship and writing; managed the 'Lesnye Polyany' experimental state farm near Moscow
- 1933–1945Founded and directed the State Literary Museum in Moscow
- 1945–1955Director of the Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism, USSR Academy of Sciences, Leningrad
Related historical events
The Doukhobor Migration to Canada and the 'Book of Life'
In the late 1890s, Bonch-Bruevich collaborated with Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Chertkov to organise the emigration of the persecuted pacifist Doukhobor sect to Canada. In 1899 he sailed across the Atlantic with the Doukhobors and, after their arrival, spent about a year living among them in Canada. During that stay, with the help of the immigrants, he undertook the massive task of recording their orally transmitted 'psalms' (hymns). The fruit of this labour appeared in 1909 in St Petersburg as The Doukhobor Book of Life (Животная книга духоборцев), the first written codification of the spiritual heritage of a community that had sustained its faith through oral tradition alone, without a written scripture.
His Doukhobor research launched a lifelong scholarly engagement with Russian religious sectarianism. In 1901 he published a study of the Nazarenes of Hungary and Serbia; in 1904 he issued a Social-Democratic enlightenment journal aimed at sectarians, Rassvet (Рассвет), from Geneva. His expertise on sectarian movements would later provide the substantive foundation for the 4 January 1919 Sovnarkom decree that legalised conscientious objection on religious grounds, a law he was the driving force behind drafting.