Bolshevik revolutionary and Communist Party and Soviet government official who became a prominent education official.

Expelled in his youth from the Moscow Agricultural Institute for revolutionary activities, Bubnov joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903. He carried out various organizational and other party assignments from 1905 to 1917 and was repeatedly arrested and imprisoned by the tsarist regime. A longtime supporter of V.I. Lenin's faction within the party, Bubnov was raised to full membership in the Bolshevik Central Committee after the February Revolution of 1917.

Bubnov was responsible for securing control of the railroad stations in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) during the October Revolution. After the Bolsheviks' seizure of power, he continued to hold high party and also high government posts despite briefly participating in the Left Communist (1918) and Democratic Centralist (early 1920s) oppositions to Bolshevik rule. After 1924, however, Bubnov became a staunch supporter of Joseph Stalin. As people's commissar of education (1929–37), Bubnov ended the period of progressive, experimental educational practices in the Soviet Union. He struggled to institute universal compulsory education and reorganized the educational system to emphasize training in practical industrial skills. He was arrested during the purges of the late 1930s and executed, but he was posthumously rehabilitated.