35 Facts About Yevgeni Preobrazhensky

Yevgeni Preobrazhensky's father was the son of an Orthodox priest who taught for seven years in a zemstvo school before his ordination in 1883.

Yevgeni Preobrazhensky 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".

That summer, upon his return to the family home at Bolkhov, Yevgeni 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.

Yevgeni 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.

Yevgeni 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.

Together with two friends, Evgraf Litkens and Ivan Anisimov, Yevgeni Preobrazhensky declared his formal allegiance to the RSDLP late in 1903.

Yevgeni 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.

In October 1905, Yevgeni Preobrazhensky was co-opted onto the Orel party committee.

The 19 year Yevgeni Preobrazhensky was one of only two convinced Bolsheviks on the committee.

In November 1905, Yevgeni Preobrazhensky traveled to Moscow where he was promoted to the position of chief propagandist for the urban Presnensky raion.

Yevgeni Preobrazhensky was arrested for the first time in Perm in March 1906, but released after five months.

Yevgeni Preobrazhensky then moved to the Ural region, which he represented at the 4th RSDLP party conference in Helsingfors in November 1907.

From January 1918, Yevgeni Preobrazhensky was a candidate member of the Ural Provincial Committee of the Bolshevik Party.

Yevgeni Preobrazhensky 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, Yevgeni Preobrazhensky was aware of the decision in advance and discussed the matter with Lenin in Moscow.

In 1918, Yevgeni Preobrazhensky joined the Left Communists faction, which opposed the draconian peace with Germany established by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

Yevgeni Preobrazhensky 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.

Yevgeni 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.

Yevgeni Preobrazhensky was at the same time elected one of three secretaries of the Central Committee, and a member of the Orgburo.

In 1921, Yevgeni 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.

Yevgeni Preobrazhensky was the original leader of the Left Opposition, for a few months before Trotsky openly broke with Stalin after Lenin's death.

Yevgeni Preobrazhensky 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.

Yevgeni Preobrazhensky was 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.

Yevgeni Preobrazhensky published a series of articles on the topic in Vestnik Kommunisticheskoi Akademii in 1924.

Yevgeni Preobrazhensky visited Trotsky when he was in Berlin for medical treatment in 1926, an "interesting" fact that Stalin, noted in a letter to Molotov after it had been reported back to him by the Ogpu.

Yevgeni Preobrazhensky advocated for a rapid pace of industrialization in the context of the Soviet Union's New Economic Policy, arguing that the numerically limited Communist Party faced a grave danger of being swamped by the richest and most powerful individuals in the villages and the mass of peasants who might naturally follow these local leaders.

On 7 November 1927, Yevgeni Preobrazhensky took part in a demonstration to mark the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution but was attacked by a crowd as he tried to address the crowd from a balcony.

In January 1930, Yevgeni Preobrazhensky was restored to membership in the Communist Party and appointed to the Nizhny Novgorod Planning Committee.

Yevgeni Preobrazhensky was sentenced to 3 years of exile and expelled from the party , but was readmitted to the party later in 1933.

In February 1934, Yevgeni Preobrazhensky was one of the leading ex-oppositionists who were allowed to address the 17th Party Congress.

Yevgeni Preobrazhensky was arrested a second time on December 20,1936, but unlike his old comrades, such as Serebryakov, Mrachkovsky, Smirnov and Ter-Vaganyan, he was not a defendant at any of the Moscow Show Trials, though he must have been under the same pressure as they all were to make a false confession.

Yevgeni Preobrazhensky was arrested again on 2 January 1937 On July 13,1937, he was sentenced to death by a secret tribunal and shot the same day.

Yevgeni Preobrazhensky was posthumously rehabilitated by the government of Mikhail Gorbachev on 22 December 1988.

Yevgeni Preobrazhensky argued in The New Economics that the Soviet Union had to undergo "primitive socialist accumulation", a reflection of primitive accumulation of capital that early Capitalism experienced.

Yevgeni Preobrazhensky posited that it was impossible for the small industrial sector of the Soviet Union alone to provide the means of industrialization, and that the USSR would have to extract surplus from the peasantry in order to fund further industrial development.