Anatoly Lunacharsky

Anatoly Lunacharsky (Poltava, 1875 – Menton, 1933) was a Soviet communist politician, playwright and literary critic. He was the first Soviet People's Commissar for Education and a central figure in cultural and educational policy after the 1917 revolution. He is also remembered for his attempt to reconcile Marxism with culture and religion, within the tradition of early twentieth-century Russian Marxism.

He became a Marxist at fifteen. He studied at the University of Zurich, where he met Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches, and joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. After the party split in 1903 he initially sided with the Bolsheviks, but his disagreements with Lenin after the 1905 revolution kept him at a distance for a time. He spent long periods in Capri and Bologna with Alexander Bogdanov and Maxim Gorky, working on the education of workers. In Paris he founded a circle for proletarian literature. He opposed the world war from an internationalist position and returned to Russia in 1917, rejoining the Bolsheviks.

After the October Revolution he became People's Commissar for Education, a post he held until 1929. Together with Bogdanov he helped launch the Proletkult arts movement, backed polytechnic schooling, and supported directors such as Meyerhold and Stanislavski, while also protecting historic buildings that some wanted to demolish. Yet his strengths were intellectual rather than administrative, and his plans for school reform largely failed. He resigned in 1929 and was replaced by a supporter of Stalin.

In his book Religion and Socialism he proposed understanding God as humanity in the future, an idea that earned him the nickname god builder and drew criticism from Lenin. He wrote historical plays such as Campanella and Oliver Cromwell, as well as essays on literary theory from a Marxist viewpoint. In 1933 Stalin appointed him ambassador to Spain, but he died in Menton before taking up the post. His influence is most visible in the cultural policy of Soviet Russia's early years and in debates about art's role in revolution.