Yevgeni Preobrazhensky

Yevgeni Preobrazhensky
Е.A. Преображeнский
Member of the 10th Secretariat
In office 5 April 1920 – 16 March 1921
Personal details
Born	15 February 1886 (Old Style) Bolkhov, Oryol Governorate, Russian Empire
Died	13 February 1937 (age 50) Moscow, Soviet Union
Cause of death	Execution
Political party	Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, Communist Party

Yevgeni Alekseyevich Preobrazhensky (Russian: Евге́ний Алексе́евич Преображе́нский; IPA: [jɪvˈɡʲenʲɪj ɐlʲɪˈksʲejɪvʲɪt͡ɕ prʲɪəbrɐˈʐɛnskʲɪj]; 1886–1937) was a Russian revolutionary and economist. A member of the governing Central Committee of the Bolshevik faction and, its successor, the All-Union Communist Party, Preobrazhensky is remembered as a leading voice for the rapid industrialisation of peasant Russia through a concentration on state-owned heavy industry.

Closely associated with Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition movement of the 1920s, Preobrazhensky fell afoul of the secret police during the decade of the 1930s, suffering expulsion from the Communist Party and internal exile in 1932 and a new arrest ending in execution in 1937 during the Great Purge.

Yevgeni Alekseyevich Preobrazhensky was born in Bolkhov, Oryol Governorate, Russia on 15 February 1886 (Old Style). His father was the son of a Orthodox priest who taught for seven years in a zemstvo school before his ordination in 1883. 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 both a religious and an intellectually oriented upbringing, as well as an early loathing of inequality. He was an early and active reader. After leaving his father's private school, Preobrazhensky spent two years attending the state-operated Bolkhov public school. 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".