Nadezhda Krupskaya - Political Career

Political Career

Krupskaya's political life was active: she was a functionary of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party from 1903. She became secretary of the Central Committee in 1905; she returned to Russia the same year, but left again after the failed revolution of 1905 and worked as a teacher in France a couple of years.

After the October Revolution in 1917, she was appointed deputy to Anatoliy Lunacharskiy, the People's Commissar for Education, where she took charge of Vneshkol'nyi Otdel the Adult Education Division; she became chairman of the education committee in 1920 and was deputy commissar (government minister) from 1929 to 1939. She was instrumental in the foundation of Komsomol and the Pioneer movement as well as the Soviet educational system, including the censorship and political indoctrination within it. She was also fundamental in the development of Soviet librarianship.

Krupskaya became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1924, a member of its control commission in 1927, a member of the Supreme Soviet in 1931 and an honorary citizen in 1931. She apparently favored Stalin in the great debates between the Left Opposition and the CPSU majority of the 1920s. In 1925, she attacked Lev Trotsky in a polemic that was in response to Trotsky's tract The Lessons of October. In it, she stated that "Marxist analysis was never Comrade Trotsky’s strong point." In relation to the debate around Socialism in one country versus Permanent Revolution, she asserted that Trotsky "under-estimates the role played by the peasantry." Furthermore, she held that Trotsky had misinterpreted the revolutionary situation in post-WWI Germany. During the congress of 1925, she initially supported Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, but eventually voted for the process against Nikolai Bukharin and the exclusion of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev from the party.

In 1936 she defended restrictions on abortion passed by the Soviet government in that year, arguing that they were part of a consistent policy pursued since 1920 to do away with the reasons to have an abortion.

Krupskaya is the author of the biography Reminiscences of Lenin, which chronicles the life of her husband. Her biography is the most detailed account of Lenin’s life before coming to power. It ends in 1919, shortly after the Bolsheviks took power.