Yevgeni Alekseyevich Preobrazhensky (; 1886–1937) was a Russian revolutionary, Soviet economist and sociologist. 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 Stalin. He recanted Trotskyism in 1929, but eventually joined a secret alliance with Trotsky in 1932. He was arrested in 1933 and shot in 1937 during the Great Purge.
Early years
Yevgeni Alekseyevich Preobrazhensky was born in Bolkhov, Oryol Governorate, Russia Empire on 15 February 1886 (Old Style). His father was the son of an 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 being a very religious child and intellectually precocious child, who learnt 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. 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".
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 at first hand. 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. 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. That summer, upon his return to the family home at Bolkhov, Preobrazhensky closely reviewed this and other illegal material and determined to himself become actively involved in the revolutionary movement seeking the overthrow of the Tsarist regime in Russia.
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. 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, with a view to establishing 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 himself 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.