Russian Revolutionary, Editor, Critic. As founding editor and theorist of the magazine "Red Virgin Soil", he was one of the most influential figures of Soviet Literature in the 1920s. Alexander Konstantinovich Voronsky was born in Khoroshavka, Tambov, the son of an Orthodox priest. He attended the Tambov Seminary but was expelled for maintaining an illegal library for his fellow students. In 1904 he joined the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), and became a trusted aide to Lenin in St. Petersburg. After four years of exile for his political activities (1906 to 1910) he grew more militant, organizing Bolshevik cells and bloody labor strikes from Moscow to Saratov. As a delegate to the 1912 Prague Party Conference, Voronsky supported Lenin's decision to break from the RSDLP and urged the founding of a national daily newspaper for workers, which would eventually emerge as "Pravda". The Revolution of October 1917 found him on the Odessa Executive Committee, through which he helped hand the city over to the Bolsheviks. He then turned his attentions to writing and gained his first practical experience as editor of the Moscow region newspaper "Worker's Land" (1918 to 1920). His work drew much favorable comment from Leon Trotsky and others in the Politburo. In February 1921, Voronsky met with Lenin and Maxim Gorky to propose reviving the concept of a "thick journal", a big monthly literary magazine that had been a mainstay of Russian intellectual life under the Czars. Lenin agreed, and the first issue of "Red Virgin Soil" appeared in June. It offered not only new fiction but poetry and essays on all the arts, and attracted most of the era's finest authors. Babel, Bagritsky, Fedin, Ivanov, Leonov, Pilnyak, Platonov, Prishvin, and Yesenin were among those who first published major works in "Red Virgin Soil". Editor-in-Chief Voronosky's own critiques revealed his great love of literature and his abilities as a writer. He advocated a liberal approach to censorship and tried, brilliantly though not always successfully, to reconcile creative individualism with Marxist doctrine. A fine literary group, "The Pass", was formed around his profoundly humanist principles. This made him a much admired figure in his country's cultural scene but also drew fire from the extremist Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), which demanded "military communism in the arts" and grew more powerful as the decade progressed. Even more dangerous was his role in the Soviet political machine. One of the so-called "old Bolsheviks", Voronsky was inextricably linked with the power struggles in the Kremlin following Lenin's death in 1924. He voiced his support for the Trotsky faction, which left him a marked man even before Josef Stalin attained dictatorship in December 1927. That year Stalin had him removed from the board of "Red Virgin Soil". He was expelled from the Party a few months later and in 1929 was arrested and banished to Lipetsk. Voronsky subsequently recanted his previous political allegiances and was given an anonymous editing job at a state publishing house; he was no longer allowed to write criticism. But his marginal status did not save him from the purges of the late 1930s, when Stalin eliminated all the surviving lieutenants of Lenin and Trotsky. On February 1, 1937, Voronsky was arrested by the secret police and never heard from again. At the time of his "posthumous rehabilitation" in 1955, the authorities claimed he had died in a labor camp in 1943 and this is still quoted in some available sources. Later it was revealed he had been condemned and shot at Moscow's Butyrka Prison in August 1937. Voronsky's downfall symbolized the end of the "Golden Age" of Soviet Literature. "Red Virgin Soil" became a lifeless mouthpiece of the Soviet Writers Union and faded away, and the USSR would not have a literary editor of comparable stature until Alexander Tvardovsky ("Novy Mir") in the 1950s. Voronsky's books include two volumes of "Literary Portraits" (1925, 1929) dealing with Soviet and international writers, and "In Search of Living and Dead Water" (1927), the first installment of a planned autobiographical trilogy. (The manuscripts of the sequels were allegedly destroyed by the secret police at the time of his arrest). A collection of his essays, "Art as the Cognition of Life", was translated into English in 1998.