Mikhail Gerasimov (1889–1939) was one of the most widely read working-class poets in early-twentieth-century Russia. He embraced the Bolshevik Revolution as a liberating event and participated in the effort to create a new proletarian culture. As an exiled worker-writer in Paris, he'd been trained by the left Bolshevik Anatolii Lunacharskii, who — with Aleksandr Bogdanov, the science fiction writer and left Bolshevik intellectual — was deeply committed to a reinterpretation of Marxist theory that would give ideology and culture a more creative and central role. In 1917 Gerasimov became a leading Bolshevik organizer in his native Samara, where he took charge of the city Soviet and helped to form the local Red Guard unit. He was one of the first Proletkult leaders elected in 1918. The Proletkult journal in Samara, Glow of the Factories (Zarevo zavodov ), bore the name of one of his poems. Following the New Economic Policy he became disillusioned. He was imprisoned during the Stalin era, and died while in custody.