Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich

Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich

Vladimir Dmitriyevich Bonch-Bruyevich (Russian: Влади́мир Дми́триевич Бонч-Бруе́вич; sometimes spelled Bonch-Bruevich; 28 June [O.S. 16 June] 1873 – 14 July 1955) was a Soviet politician, historian and writer, Old Bolshevik (since 1895). He was a brother of Mikhail Dmitriyevich Bonch-Bruyevich.

One of Bonch-Bruyevich's research interests were Russia's dissenting religious minorities ("sects"), which were usually persecuted to various extent by both the established Orthodox Church and the Tsarist government. In the late 1890s, he collaborated with Vladimir Chertkov and Leo Tolstoy, in particular in the arrangement of the Doukhobors' emigration to Canada in 1899. Bonch-Bruyevich sailed with the Doukhobors, and spent a year with them in Canada. During that time, he was able to record much of their orally transmitted tradition, in particular the Doukhobor "psalms" (hymns). He published them later (1909) as "The Doukhobor Book of Life" (Russian: «Животная книга духоборцев», Zhivotnaya Kniga Dukhobortsev).

In the Soviet period, Bonch-Bruyevich's interest in religion earned him the position of the Director of the Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in Leningrad (1945-1955).

In the Soviet Union, Bonch-Bruyevich was best known as the author of a canonical Soviet book about Vladimir Lenin, whom Bonch-Bruyevich served as secretary in the years immediately following the Bolshevik revolution in 1917.