Abstract

From the mid-1920s onward, A.V. Lunacharsky — who had married the young actress N.A. Rosenel, fond of a refined lifestyle — increasingly petitioned the highest party leadership for a range of nomenklatura privileges. He insisted that a service automobile be permanently assigned to him (a vehicle often used by his wife, at times provoking scandalous incidents), and he demanded free and comfortable rail travel for himself and his spouse on the railways of the USSR. In letters marked "secret", Lunacharsky asked the secretary of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, A.S. Enukidze, and other addressees to grant him and his second family vacations at Soviet resorts, as well as a state-owned dacha for the summer season in one of the former noble estates outside Moscow. At the same time, despite his communist convictions, Lunacharsky refused to rest at the "large workers' resorts", where, in his words, "bickering, complaints, and all manner of disorder" prevailed. Considerable correspondence also concerned foreign official travel, on which Lunacharsky was accompanied by his young wife — justified either by her serious illness and need for treatment, or by physicians' advice that he not travel alone. For trips to Western Europe, the People's Commissar of Education requested travel allowances that enabled his family to live generously in capitalist countries. Lunacharsky's persistent appeals for material assistance and for the extension of various benefits to himself, his wife, and her relatives — appeals not always granted — point to his comparatively modest standing within the Soviet political elite in the second half of the 1920s and the early 1930s. These requests, and the time-consuming correspondence they generated, further undermined the authority of the head of Soviet education in the eyes of I.V. Stalin and his circle, and may have contributed to Lunacharsky's removal from the post of People's Commissar of Education in 1929.