Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich

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Vladimir Dmitrievich Bonch-Bruevich (Russian: Владимир Дмитриевич Бонч-Бруевич), (1873-1955) was a Soviet politician, historian and writer, Old Bolshevik (since 1895). He was a brother of Mikhail Dmitrievich Bonch-Bruevich.

One of Bonch-Bruevich's research interests were Russia's dissenting religious minorities (Russian: секты, 'sects'), which were usually persecuted to various extent by both the established Orthodox Church and the Czarist government. In the late 1890s, he collaborated with Vladimir Chertkov and Leo Tolstoy, ^[1] in particular in the arrangement of the Doukhobors' emigration to Canada in 1899. Bonch-Bruevich 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).^[2][3][4]

In the Soviet period, Bonch-Bruevich'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 (1945-55).

In the Soviet Union, Bonch-Bruevich was best known as the author of a canonical Soviet books about Vladimir Lenin.

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