Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich

Vladimir Dmitriyevich Bonch-Bruyevich (; sometimes spelled Bonch-Bruevich; in Polish Boncz-Brujewicz;  – 14 July 1955) was a Soviet politician, revolutionary, historian, writer and Old Bolshevik. He was Vladimir Lenin's personal secretary. Early life Vladimir Dmitriyevich Bonch-Bruyevich, born in Moscow into the family of a land surveyor who came from the Mogilev province, belonged to the nobility of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania. He was a younger brother of the future Soviet military commander Mikhail Dmitriyevich Bonch-Bruyevich. At the age of ten, he was sent to the in Moscow; where he studied in the school of land surveying. In 1889, he was arrested for taking part in a student demonstration, expelled from the Institute and banished to Kursk. He returned to Moscow in 1892, entered the and distributed illegal literature. From 1895 he was active in social-democratic circles. In 1896 he emigrated to Switzerland and organized shipments of Russian revolutionary literature and printing equipment. He became an active member of the staff of Iskra. Researching dissenters and supporting Doukhobors 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. He believed that Baptists and Flagellants were "transmission points" for revolutionary propaganda. During the 1917 revolutions, he is reputed to have played a crucial in neutralising the Cossack garrison in the capital, Petrograd, through his contacts in the New Israel and Old Israel sects. He also met Grigori Rasputin, but judged that he was an Orthodox Christian, not sectarian. In the late 1890s, he collaborated with Vladimir Chertkov and Leo Tolstoy, in particular in 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" (, Zhivotnaya Kniga Dukhobortsev).