Anatoly Lunacharsky as witness

Anatoly Lunacharsky (1875–1933), the first People’s Commissar for Education of the Bolshevik government, played a pivotal role in organising Soviet cultural life in the immediate aftermath of the October Revolution of 1917, serving as both a theorist and a practitioner.

In 1923, Lunacharsky published his book Revolutionary Silhouettes, which became one of the most widely read works in the Soviet Union at the time. [*] The book is primarily a collection of brief portraits of leading figures who came to the fore within the ranks of the Bolshevik Party in 1917. Written in Lunacharsky’s characteristically vivid and skilful style, these biographical sketches portray both the leaders’ roles in the revolution and their personal traits in clear, accessible prose.

The book is structured as a series of chapters, each named after a leading figure. The first two chapters are devoted to the two most influential personalities of the October Revolution, Vladimir Lenin and Lev Trotsky, followed by Grigory Zinoviev, Yakov Sverdlov, Moisei Volodarsky, Moisei Uritsky, and others. Yet Lunacharsky does not confine his work to the Bolsheviks alone; by including figures such as Georgy Plekhanov and Yuly Martov, founders of the early Russian Marxist movement, he seeks to offer a relatively broad panorama of the socialist movement in Russia.

Drawing on the author's memoirs and offering invaluable insights into the leaders of the October Revolution, this book has, regrettably, still not been fully translated into Turkish. Like many works that failed to serve the purposes of Stalinism — which has held the Turkish socialist left in its grip for over a century — Revolutionary Silhouettes was long subject to an unofficial ban and consigned to oblivion. However, a Turkish translation of the second chapter, titled ‘Trotsky’, is available on the website Troçkist.

In Revolutionary Silhouettes, Lunacharsky does not devote a separate chapter to Joseph Stalin, as Stalin’s significance at the time of the revolution and in its immediate aftermath was markedly limited in comparison to the other leaders. His name appears only once in the text, and merely in passing. By contrast, Lenin is mentioned 144 times, Trotsky 107 times, and Zinoviev 55 times – figures that provide concrete and contemporaneous evidence of which Bolshevik Party leaders genuinely held political weight in the years leading up to the revolution and during its early aftermath.

[*] The first edition of the book was printed in Moscow in 1923 by Transpozsektsiya, in an initial run of 10,000 copies. In 1924, it was republished—with identical content apart from minor editorial changes—by the Ukrainian State Publishing House in Kyiv. As the bureaucratic counter-revolution progressed, the book’s content soon became incompatible with the Stalinist official historiography, which was based on lies and gross distortions. The publication of Revolutionary Silhouettes was halted in the Soviet Union, and it was declared a “subversive” work. Yet 41 years later, in 1965, a heavily censored version of the book was once again published in the Soviet Union.