Yevgeni Alekseyevich Preobrazhensky (; – 13 February 1937) was a Russian revolutionary, Soviet politician, and Marxist economist. His main contribution to Marxist theory is the concept of "primitive socialist accumulation", which holds that industrialization in an underdeveloped and agrarian economy such as Russia's in 1917 must rely on the squeezing of agriculture, for example by the socialist state buying agricultural goods at low prices and selling back industrial goods at high prices.
Preobrazhensky joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1903, and after the establishment of Soviet Russia became a party secretary and member of the Central Committee in 1920. During the 1920s, he opposed Joseph Stalin's bureaucratization and centralization of the party and advocacy of "socialism in one country", becoming linked to Leon Trotsky and a leader of the Left Opposition movement. In 1927, he was removed from the party on Stalin's orders, but was re-admitted in 1930 after Stalin had moved towards his favored policies. During Stalin's Great Purge, Preobrazhensky was arrested in 1935 and shot in 1937.
Early years Yevgeni Alekseyevich Preobrazhensky was born in Bolkhov, Oryol Governorate, Russian Empire on . His father was the son of an Orthodox priest who taught for seven years in a zemstvo school before his ordination in 1883.Mikhail M. Gorinov, "Foreword," in Richard B. Day and Mikhail M. Gorinov (eds.), The Preobrazhensky Papers: Archival Documents and Materials: Volume I, 1886–1920. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2015; pg. xxi. Following his appointment as a parish priest in Bolkhov in the summer of 1883, the elder Preobrazhensky opened an elementary school for the parish at his own expense. It was in that school that Yevgeni was first educated.
In an autobiography written for the Great Russian Encyclopedia, he recalled being a very religious child and intellectually precocious child, who learned to read at the age of four. After leaving his father's private school, Preobrazhensky spent two years attending the state-operated Bolkhov public school.Gorinov, "Foreword," pg. xxvi. He subsequently left the town to attend the classically oriented gymnasium in the provincial capital of Oryol, where Preobrazhensky remembered himself as the "second-best student in the class".Quoted in Gorinov, "Foreword," pp. xxvi–xxvii.
It was during his years at the Orël gymnasium that Preobrazhensky first became interested in politics, turning from the subjects taught in the classical gymnasium to reading newspapers, intellectual journals, history textbooks, and socially oriented novels. At the age of 14, he decided that he was an atheist, and rejected "the religious quackery" that he witnessed firsthand. This brought him into conflict with his priestly father, who in 1902 was appointed dean of the network of church-run schools in Bolkhov parish.Gorinov, "Foreword," pg. xxix. The estrangement between father and son would last for decades.
During his fifth of eight years at the gymnasium, Preobrazhensky began to accumulate illegal radical literature, including a proclamation by revolutionary students of the Ekaterinoslav Mining Institute, an account of a beating of protesting students at the hands of Cossacks, and hectographed editions of radical poetry and song lyrics.Gorinov, "Foreword," pg. xxxii. That summer, upon his return to the family home at Bolkhov, Preobrazhensky closely reviewed this and other illegal material and determined to become actively involved in the revolutionary movement seeking the overthrow of the Tsarist regime in Russia.Gorinov, "Foreword," pp. xxxii–xxxiii.
Underground revolutionary
Preobrazhensky decided to henceforth "devote a minimum of time to the gymnasium's subjects", merely enough to attain passing marks, to dedicate the bulk of his hours to the study of history and economics.Gorinov, "Foreword," pg. xxxiv. Among the budding revolutionaries who were his friends was one Alexander Aleksin, the son of a local printer, whom Preobrazhensky persuaded to steal lead type from his father's printing works, to establish an illegal print shop of his own that could produce better results than a hectograph could provide.
Preobrazhensky attempted to set type for a pamphlet reproducing revolutionary song lyrics and a declaration "We Renounce the Old World," but his inferior printing equipment fell apart before he could master the process, and the type was eventually returned to Aleksin's printworks, without any printed publications being produced.
During his seventh year at the gymnasium, Preobrazhensky felt compelled to choose which revolutionary organisation to support, being torn between the competing strategies of the peasant-oriented Socialist-Revolutionary Party (PSR) and the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). Influenced by the Communist Manifesto and The Development of Scientific Socialism work by Frederick Engels, Preobrazhensky cast his lot with the latter, believing its approach to be scientifically based. Together with two friends, Evgraf Litkens and Ivan Anisimov (who later joined the Mensheviks), Preobrazhensky declared his formal allegiance to the RSDLP late in 1903.
After the start of the Russo-Japanese War, the Orël committee of the RSDLP issued an anti-war proclamation, which the three students were ordered to distribute. They did this by sneaking into the changing room and stuffing over 150 copies into the coat pockets of older students. The police investigated, but could not identify the culprits, and all three were accepted as members of the RSDLP.
During the summer before his eighth and final year at the Orël gymnasium, Preobrazhensky worked as a RSDLP propagandist to the workers of the Dyatkovo factory in Bryansky raion. Preobrazhensky was able to recruit the son of the Bryansky police to the RSDLP and successfully managed to conceal his small rotary mimeograph machine from searching authorities in a locked drawer of the inspector's own desk. Periodic meetings were held in the neighboring forest. In October 1905, Preobrazhensky was co-opted onto the Orël party committee. The RSDLP had by then split between the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, and Mensheviks. The 19 year Preobrazhensky was one of only two convinced Bolsheviks on the committee.
In November 1905, Preobrazhensky traveled to Moscow where he was promoted to the position of chief propagandist for the urban Presnensky raion., and for the next 12 years, he was an itinerant professional revolutionary. He was arrested for the first time in Perm in March 1906, but released after five months. He then moved to the Ural region, which he represented at the 4th RSDLP party conference in Helsingfors (Helsinki) in November 1907. From autumn 1909, he was a member of the Bolshevik Party bureau in Irkutsk. He was arrested several times. On trial with other Bolsheviks in Yekaterinburg, he was defended by Alexander Kerensky, who in 1917 was head of the Provisional Government, until it was overthrown by the Bolsheviks.
After the February Revolution, in 1917, Preobrazhensky returned to the Urals, where he was elected to the regional party committee, which he represented at the 6th Congress of the Bolshevik Party, beginning near the end of July 1917, where he was elected as a candidate member (alternate) to the party's governing Central Committee.Donald A. Filtzer, "Introduction," to E.A. Preobrazhensky, The Crisis of Soviet Industrialization. London: Macmillan, 1980; pg. xiii.
Years in authority
From January 1918, Preobrazhensky was a candidate member of the Ural Provincial Committee of the Bolshevik Party. He was President of the Presidium of the Ural Regional Committee of the Communist Party from May 1918 and was in that post when Nicholas II and his family were killed in the city of Yekaterinburg, though it was the Ural Regional Soviet under Alexander Beloborodov, Boris Didkovsky and Filipp Goloshchyokin who directly ordered the execution of the Imperial Family. Nonetheless, Preobrazhensky was aware of the decision in advance and discussed the matter with Lenin in Moscow.
In 1918, Preobrazhensky joined the Left Communists faction, which opposed the draconian peace with Germany established by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. It was at this time that Preobrazhensky became closely affiliated with Nikolai Bukharin, himself a popular Left Communist leader and member of the party Central Committee.
In 1919, he co-wrote the book The ABC of Communism with Nikolai Bukharin, who would strongly disagree with him on the industrialization issue. He also wrote The New Economics, a polemical essay on the dynamics of an economy in transition to socialism, Anarchism and Communism and The Decline of Capitalism.
Preobrazhensky was elected a full member of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party at its 9th Congress, which opened at the end of March 1920. He was at the same time elected one of three secretaries of the Central Committee, and a member of the Orgburo. The other two party secretaries, Nikolay Krestinsky and Leonid Serebryakov were both ill during 1920–21, which meant that Preobrazhensky carried most of the work and was, in effect, the 'real master' of the party apparatus.
This was the most powerful post Preobrazhensky ever held. During 1920–21, the staff employed by the secretariat expanded to over 600, including a new section tasked with building up a card index that graded party members according to whether they were 'active and reliable', 'promising', or 'rank and file'. This system was later used by Joseph Stalin, who took over the secretariat two years later, to crush dissent within the party, which Preobrazhensky refused to do. Writing in Pravda on 22 January 1921, he declared that "This possibility of greater freedom of criticism represents one of the conquests of the revolution."
The Tenth Party Congress, in March 1921, was riven by a dispute over the role of the trade unions, in which Lenin and Leon Trotsky were on opposite sides, with Preobrazhensky and the other secretaries backing Trotsky. The party was also shaken by the Kronstadt rebellion, in the light of which Lenin resolved to ban organised factions within the party. All three party secretaries were sacked and lost their membership of the Central Committee.
In 1921, Preobrazhensky was appointed President of the party's Financial Committee and Chief of the Directorate for Professional Training in the People's Commissariat of Education. Through the 1920s, he was a leading Soviet Economist, developing the plan for industrialisation of the country and an opponent of the New Economic Policy. From 1924, he was one of the editors of Pravda, and a member of the Board of People's Commissariat of Finance.
Left Opposition
Preobrazhensky was the original leader of the Left Opposition, for a few months before Trotsky openly broke with Stalin after Lenin's death. He was the main author and leader signatory of The Declaration of 46, which called for greater freedom of dissent within the communist party, and attacked the leadership for having no strategy to deal with the current economic crisis. He was also the author of the theory of Primitive socialist accumulation, which argued that the state would have to lower the price of agricultural and increase the price of consumer goods, to extract the capital needed to expand soviet industry from the peasants, who made up 80 per cent of the population. He published a series of articles on the topic in Vestnik Kommunisticheskoi Akademii (Bulletin of the Communist Academy) in 1924.Alec Nove, "Introduction" to The New Economics. London: Oxford University Press, 1965; pg. xi. These ideas were later expanded at book length in a 1926 volume, The New Economics. and were the basic economic tenets of the Left, or Trotskyist opposition, which brought Trotsky and Preobrazhensky together.