An active participant in the revolutionary movement in Russia, he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) at the age of twenty in 1914.

In October-December 1915, he was a storekeeper at the Cheremukhino mine in the city of Apeksandrovsk-Grushevsky, Cherkasy District, Don Cossack Host Region.

Bulin and a group of soldiers, without thinking, rushed to the left wing, where the cadets were holed up, and a few minutes later the shots stopped.

The members of the regimental committees arrested after the suppression of the July demonstration, including Bulin, sent a greeting from prison to the 6th Party Congress.

In August through December 1919 he was the military commissar of the 6th rifle division of the Northern Front, during the difficult days of fighting with Nikolai Yudenich's troops and the Finnish interventionists.

Taking 30 communists with him and armed with two light machine guns, Bulin moved at night across the thin ice of the Luga River, attacked the White Guard general's troops from the rear, and cut off the enemy's escape routes.

Bulin served in 1920 and 1921 as military commissar of a number of other rifle divisions, then commandant of the Petrograd fortified region, before being transferred to party work in July 1921.

According to the statement of his wife, Natalia Loginovna Yakovleva-Bulina, sent from the Segezha Corrective Labor Camp (Karelian ASSR) in January 1940 to Voroshilov, "Bulin hated Trotsky with a wild hatred.

In 1927, when Trotsky was expelled from the party, he called Bulin a Stalinist gendarme for dispersing the Trotskyists on 7/11/1927, when they went out into the streets with anti-Stalinist slogans."

Bulin was personally known and highly valued by Joseph Stalin and Kliment Voroshilov, who recommended him at the 17th Party Congress for membership in the Central Committee.

Bulin was a candidate member of the Central Committee elected by the 17th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) from 1934 until 12 October 1937.

On 5 November 1937, he was arrested by the NKVD on an order signed by Mikhail Frinovsky and expelled from the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks).

The statement I submitted to you on 16 November about my participation in a right-wing organization and in a military-fascist conspiracy is false from beginning to end; it was written under the dictation of those conducting the investigation into my case in my ill condition and as a result of beatings and torture; I have never been recruited by anyone into any conspiracy against Soviet power, against the Stalinist leadership of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and I have never been recruited.

The Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) nonetheless included him on the list of prisoners to be executed on 26 July 1938.

He was formally sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR on 28 July 1938 "for participation in a counter-revolutionary Trotskyist organization" under Articles 58-16, 58-8, 58-9 and 58-11 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR.

“The military commissar of the 6th rifle division, comrade Anton Stepanovich Bulin, is awarded the Order of the Red Banner for the following distinctions: during the entire operation from Ligovo to 28 November 1919, Bulin, often being with chains in position, showed rare persistence and energy and with his behavior instilled an offensive spirit in the Red Army soldiers, achieved that in difficult times our units, overcoming fatigue and resistance of the enemy, moved forward ...

In the battle near the village of Vysotskoye during the retreat of the Bashkirs on the night of 1-2 November, comrade Bulin restrained and inspired them; “There was not a single part of the Krasnoselsky district that he had not visited, everywhere demonstrating composure and resourcefulness, often being under rifle, machine gun and artillery fire...” Father - Stepan Zinovievich Bulin (born in 1857).