Nikolai Bukharin
Encyclopedia
Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin , ( – 15 March 1938) was a Russian Marxist, Bolshevik
revolutionary
, and Soviet
politician. He was a member of the Politburo
(1924–1929) and Central Committee (1917–1937), chairman of the Communist International (Comintern, 1926–1929), and the editor in chief of Pravda
(1918–1929), the journal Bolshevik (1924–1929), Izvestia
(1934–1936), and the Great Soviet Encyclopedia
. He authored Imperialism and World Economy (1918), The ABC of Communism
(1919. co-authored with Yevgeni Preobrazhensky
), and Historical Materialism (1921) among others. Initially a supporter of Joseph Stalin
after Vladimir Lenin
's death, he came to oppose a large number of Stalin's policies and was one of Stalin's most prominent victims during the "Moscow Trials
" and purges of the Old Bolsheviks in the late 1930s.
, the second son of two schoolteachers, Ivan Gavrilovich and Liubov Ivanova Bukharin. His childhood is vividly recounted in his mostly autobiographic novel How It All Began.
Bukharin's political life began at the age of sixteen with his lifelong friend Ilya Ehrenburg
when he participated in student activities at Moscow University related to the Russian Revolution of 1905
. He joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party
in 1906, becoming a member of the Bolshevik
faction. With Grigori Sokolnikov, he convened the 1907 national youth conference in Moscow, which was later considered the founding of the Komsomol
.
By age twenty, he was a member of the Moscow Committee of the party. The committee was heavily infiltrated by the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana. As one of its leaders, Bukharin quickly became a person of interest to them. During this time, he became closely associated with N. Osinskii and Vladimir Smirnov, and also met his future first wife, Nadezhda Mikhailovna Lukina, his cousin and the sister of Nikolai Lukin, who was also a member of the party. They married soon after their exile, in 1911.
In 1911, after a brief imprisonment, Bukharin was exiled to Onega
in Arkhangelsk
, but soon escaped to Hanover
, where he stayed for a year before visiting Cracow in 1912 to meet Vladimir Lenin
for the first time. During the exile, he continued his education and wrote several books that established him as a major Bolshevik theorist in his 20's. His work, Imperialism and World Economy influenced Lenin, who freely borrowed from it in his larger and better known work, Imperialism — The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Nevertheless, he and Lenin often had hot disputes on theoretical issues and Bukharin's closeness with the European Left and his anti-statist tendencies. Bukharin developed an interest in the works of Austrian Marxists and non-Marxist economic theorists, such as Aleksandr Bogdanov, who deviated from Leninist positions. Also while in Vienna in 1913, he helped the Georgia
n Bolshevik Joseph Stalin
write an article Marxism and the National Question at Lenin's request.
In October 1916, while based in New York City
, he edited the newspaper Novy Mir
(New World) with Leon Trotsky
and Alexandra Kollontai
. When Trotsky arrived in New York in January 1917, Bukharin was the first to greet him (as Trotsky's wife recalled, "with a bear hug and immediately began to tell them about a public library which stayed open late at night and which he proposed to show us at once" dragging the tired Trotskys across town "to admire his great discovery").
At the news of Russian Revolution of February 1917
, Bukharin returned to Russia by way of Japan and at once became one of the leading Bolsheviks in Moscow
, being elected to the Central Committee. During the October Revolution
, he drafted, introduced, and defended the revolutionary decrees of the Moscow Soviet, in whose name the insurrection took place. Bukharin then represented the Moscow party in their report to the revolutionary government in Petrograd. After the second 1917 revolution, he became the editor of the party's newspaper, Pravda
.
Bukharin believed passionately in the promise of world revolution
. In the Russian turmoil near the end of World War I
, when a negotiated peace with the Central Powers
was looming, he demanded a continuance of the war, fully expecting to incite all the foreign proletarian classes to arms. Even as he was uncompromising toward Russia's battlefield enemies, he also rejected any fraternization with the capitalist Allied powers
: he reportedly wept when he learned of official negotiations for assistance.
Bukharin emerged as the leader of the Left Communists in bitter opposition to Lenin's decision to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
. In this wartime power struggle, he was urged by some of his more fiery allies to have Lenin arrested. He rejected this idea immediately, but the issue would later become the basis of Stalinist charges against him, culminating in the show trial of 1938.
After the ratification of the treaty, Bukharin resumed his responsibilities within the party. In March 1919, he became a member of the Comintern's executive committee and a candidate member of Politburo
. During the Civil War
period, he published several theoretical economic works, including the popular primer The ABC of Communism
(with Yevgeni Preobrazhensky
, 1919), and the more academic Economics of the Transitional Period (1920) and Historical Materialism (1921).
By 1921, he changed his position and accepted Lenin's emphasis on the survival and strengthening of the Soviet state as the bastion of the future world revolution. He became the foremost supporter of the New Economic Policy
(NEP), to which he was to tie his political fortunes. Considered by the Left Communists as a retreat from socialist policies, NEP reintroduced money, allowed private ownership and capitalistic practices in agriculture, retail trade, and light industry while the state retained the control of heavy industry. While some have criticized Bukharin for this apparent U-turn, his change of emphasis can be partially explained by the necessity for peace and stability following seven years of war in Russia, and the failure of Communist Revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe, which ended the prospect of worldwide revolution.
. In the subsequent power struggle among Leon Trotsky
, Grigory Zinoviev
, Lev Kamenev
, and Stalin, Bukharin allied himself with Stalin, who positioned himself as centrist of the Party and supported NEP against the Left Opposition
, which wanted more rapid industrialization, escalation of class struggle against the kulaks, and agitation for world revolution. It was Bukharin who formulated the thesis of "Socialism in One Country
" put forth by Stalin in 1924, which argued that socialism
(in Marxist theory, the transitional stage from capitalism to communism) could be developed in a single country, even one as underdeveloped as Russia. This new theory stated that revolution need no longer be encouraged in the capitalist countries since Russia could and should achieve socialism alone. The thesis would become a hallmark of Stalinism
.
Trotsky, the prime force behind the Left Opposition, was defeated by a triumvirate formed by Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev, with the support of Bukharin. By 1926, Stalin-Bukharin alliance ousted Zinoviev and Kamenev from the Party leadership, and Bukharin enjoyed the highest degree of power during the 1926-1928 period. He emerged as the leader of the Party's right wing
, which included two other Politburo members Alexei Rykov
, Lenin's successor as Chairman
of the Council of People's Commissars and Mikhail Tomsky
, head of trade unions, and he became chairman of Comintern's executive committee in 1926. However, prompted by grain shortage in 1928, Stalin reversed himself and proposed a program of rapid industrialization and forced collectivization because he believed that the NEP was not working fast enough. Stalin felt that in the new situation the policies of his former foes – Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev - was the right one.
Bukharin was worried by the prospect of Stalin's plan, which he feared would lead to “military-feudal exploitation” of the peasantry. Bukharin did want the Soviet Union to achieve industrialization but he preferred the more moderate approach of offering the peasants the opportunity to become prosperous, which would lead to greater grain production for sale abroad. Bukharin pressed his views throughout 1928 in meetings of the Politburo and at the Party Congress, insisting that enforced grain requisition would be counter-productive, as War Communism had been a decade earlier.
Having helped Stalin achieve unchecked power against the Left Opposition, Bukharin found himself easily outmaneuvered by Stalin. Nevertheless, Stalin's victory would not have been inevitable if Bukharin had been more politically astute. He seems to have enjoyed a majority in the Politburo initially (he said Kalinin and Voroshilov betrayed the Right at the last minute) and unlike the Left Opposition, broad mass support among the peasantry, which made up 80% of the Russian population. Yet Bukharin played to Stalin's strength by maintaining the appearance of unity within the Party leadership. Meanwhile, Stalin used his control of the Party machine to replace Bukharin's supporters in the Rightist power base in Moscow, trade unions, and Comintern.
Bukharin attempted to gain support from earlier foes including Kamenev and Zinoviev who had fallen from power and held mid-level positions within the Communist party. The details of his meeting with Kamenev, to whom he confided that Stalin was “Genghis Khan” who changed policies to get rid of rivals, were leaked by Trotskyist press and subjected him to accusation of factionalism. Eventually, Bukharin lost his position in the Comintern in April 1929 and editorship of Pravda, and he was expelled from the Politburo on 17 November of that year.
Bukharin was forced to renounce his views under pressure. He wrote letters to Stalin pleading for forgiveness and rehabilitation, but through wiretaps of Bukharin's private conversations with Stalin's enemies, Stalin knew Bukharin's repentance was insincere.
International supporters of Bukharin, Jay Lovestone
of the Communist Party USA
among them, were also expelled from the Comintern
. They formed an international alliance to promote their views, calling it the International Communist Opposition, though it became better known as the Right Opposition
, after a term used by the Trotskyist Left Opposition
in the Soviet Union to refer to Bukharin and his supporters there.
Although Bukharin had not challenged Stalin since 1929, his former supporters, including Martemyan Ryutin
, drafted and clandestinely circulated an anti-Stalin platform, which called Stalin the “evil genius of the Russian Revolution”. Stalin wanted to impose the death penalty on those involved, despite Lenin's injunction against bloodletting among Party members, but he was resisted by moderates.
More importantly, Sergey Kirov
, a Leningrad party leader, was emerging as popular leader of the moderates. Although Kirov himself was a staunch Stalin loyalist, he was in favor of a general relaxation and reconciliation toward former oppositionists. In the 1934 Party congress, Kirov was elected to the Central Committee with only three negative votes, the fewest of any candidate, while Stalin received 292 negative votes.
In the brief period of thaw in 1934-1936, Bukharin was politically rehabilitated and was made editor of Izvestia
in 1934. There, he consistently highlighted the dangers of fascist regimes in Europe and the need for "proletarian humanism". He was also the principal framer of the Soviet Constitution of 1936, which promised freedom of speech, the press, assembly, religion, and the privacy of the person, his home, and his correspondence.
However, Kirov was assassinated in Leningrad in December 1934, and his death was used by Stalin as a pretext to launch the Great Purge
, in which about a million people were to perish as Stalin eliminated all past and potential opposition to his authority. Some historians now believe that Kirov's assassination in 1934 was arranged by Stalin himself or at least that there is sufficient evidence to plausibly posit such a conclusion. After Kirov's assassination, the NKVD
charged an ever growing group of former oppositionists with Kirov's murder and other acts of treason, terrorism, sabotage, and espionage.
, which therefore opened the possibility of exile, but he decided against it saying that he could not live outside the Soviet Union.
Bukharin, who had been forced to follow the Party line since 1929, confided to his old friends and former opponents his real view of Stalin and his policy. His conversations with Boris Nicolaevsky
, a Menshevik
leader who held the manuscripts on behalf of SPD, formed the basis of "Letter of an Old Bolshevik", which was very influential in contemporary understanding of the period (especially the Ryutin Affair
and Kirov murder) although there are doubts about its authenticity. According to Nicolaevsky, Bukharin spoke of "the mass annihilation of completely defenseless men, with women and children" under forced collectivization and liquidation of kulaks as a class that dehumanized the Party members with "the profound psychological change in those communists who took part in the campaign. Instead of going mad, they accepted terror as a normal administrative method and regarded obedience to all orders from above as a supreme virtue.... They are no longer human beings. They have truly become the cogs in a terrible machine."
Yet to another Menshevik
leader, Fyodor Dan, he confided that Stalin became "the man to whom the Party granted its confidence" and "is a sort of a symbol of the Party" even though he "is not a man, but a devil." In Dan's account, Bukharin’s acceptance of the Soviet Union’s new direction was thus a result of his utter commitment to Party solidarity.
To André Malraux
, he also confided, "Now he is going to kill me". To his boyhood friend, Ilya Ehrenburg
, he expressed the suspicion that the whole trip was a trap set up by Stalin. Indeed, his contacts with Mensheviks during this trip were to feature prominently in his trial.
Bukharin was tried in the Trial of the Twenty One
on 2–13 March 1938 during the Great Purges, along with ex-premier Alexei Rykov
, Christian Rakovsky
, Nikolai Krestinsky
, Genrikh Yagoda
, and 16 other defendants alleged to belong to the so-called "Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites". Meant to be the culmination of previous show trials
, it was now alleged that Bukharin and others sought to assassinate Lenin and Stalin from 1918, murder Maxim Gorky
by poison, partition the Soviet Union and hand out her territories to Germany, Japan and Great Britain.
Even more than earlier Moscow show trials, Bukharin's trial horrified many previously sympathetic observers as they watched allegations become more absurd than ever and the purge expand to include almost every living Old Bolshevik leader except Stalin. For some prominent communists such as Bertram Wolfe
, Jay Lovestone
, Arthur Koestler
, and Heinrich Brandler
, the Bukharin trial marked their final break with communism and even turned the first three into fervent anti-Communists eventually.
While Anastas Mikoyan
and Vyacheslav Molotov
later claimed that Bukharin was never tortured and his letters from prison do not give the suggestion that he was tortured, it is also known that his interrogators were instructed with the order: "beating permitted". Bukharin held out for three months, but threats to his young wife and infant son, combined with "methods of physical influence" wore him down. But when he read his confession amended and corrected personally by Stalin, he withdrew his whole confession. The examination started all over again, with a double team of interrogators.
Bukharin's confession and his motivation became subject of much debate among Western observers, inspiring Koestler's acclaimed novel Darkness at Noon
and a philosophical essay by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
in Humanism and Terror. His confessions were somewhat different from others in that while he pled guilty to the "sum total of crimes", he denied knowledge when it came to specific crimes. Some astute observers noted that he would allow only what was in the written confession and refuse to go any further.
There are several interpretations of Bukharin's motivations (beside being coerced) in the trial. Koestler and others viewed it as a true believer's last service to the Party (while preserving the little amount of personal honor left) whereas Bukharin biographer Stephen Cohen and Robert Tucker saw traces of Aesopian language
, with which Bukharin sought to turn the table into an anti-trial of Stalinism (while keeping his part of the bargain to save his family). While his letters to Stalin – he wrote 34 very emotional and desperate letters tearfully protesting his innocence and professing his loyalty – suggest a complete capitulation and acceptance of his role in the trial, it contrasts with his actual conduct in the trial.
Bukharin himself speaks of his "peculiar duality of mind" in his last plea, which led to "semi-paralysis of the will" and Hegelian "unhappy consciousness
", which likely stemmed not only from his knowledge of the ruinous reality of Stalinism (although he could not of course say so in the trial) but also of the impending threat of fascism.
The result was a curious mix of fulsome confessions (of being a "degenerate fascist" working for the "restoration of capitalism") and subtle criticisms of the trial. After disproving several charges against him (one observer noted that he "proceeded to demolish or rather showed he could very easily demolish the whole case." ) and saying that "the confession of accused is not essential. The confession of the accused is a medieval principle of jurisprudence" in a trial that was solely based on confessions, he finished his last plea with the words:
While in prison, he wrote at least four book-length manuscripts including a lyrical autobiographical novel, How It All Began, philosophical treatise Philosophical Arabesques, a collection of poems, and Socialism and Its Culture – all of which were found in Stalin's archive and published in the 1990s).
wrote to Stalin seeking clemency, arguing that "an intellect like that of Bukharin is a treasure for his country." He compared Bukharin's situation to that of the great chemist Antoine Lavoisier
who was guillotined during the French Revolution
: "We in France, the most ardent revolutionaries... still profoundly grieve and regret what we did.... I beg you to show clemency." He had earlier written to Stalin in 1937, "For the sake of Gorky I am asking you for mercy, even if he may be guilty of something," to which Stalin noted: "We must not respond." Bukharin was executed on 15 March 1938, but the announcement of his death was overshadowed by the Nazi Anschluss
of Austria.
'Koba, why do you need me to die?' Bukharin wrote in a note to Stalin just before his execution. ("Koba" was Stalin's revolutionary pseudonym
, and Bukharin's use of it was a sign of how close the two had once been. The note was found still in Stalin's desk after his death in 1953.)
Despite the promise to spare his family, Bukharin's wife, Anna Larina
, was sent to a labor camp, but she survived to see her husband officially rehabilitated by the Soviet state under Mikhail Gorbachev
in 1988.
Bukharin was immensely popular within the party throughout the twenties and thirties, even after his fall from power. In his testament, Lenin portrayed him as the "Golden Boy" of the party, writing:
Bukharin made several notable contributions to Marxist-Leninist thought, most notably The Economics of the Transition Period (1920) and his prison writings, Philosophical Arabesques, (which clearly reveal Bukharin had corrected the 'one-sidedness' of his thought), as well as being a founding member of the Soviet Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a keen botanist. His primary contributions to economics were his critique of marginal utility theory, his analysis of imperialism, and his writings on the transition to the communism in Soviet Union.
Voice of the stalking shadow (Pin thodarum nizhalin kural), a Tamil
novel by Jeyamohan
, is based on the life of Nikolai Bukharin.
once told him: “Forget about politics. There is no future in politics for you. Painting is your real calling."
His cartoons are sometimes used to illustrate biographies of Soviet officials. Russian historian Yury Zhukov stated that Nikolai Bukarin's portraits of Joseph Stalin
were the only ones drawn from the original, not from a photograph.
Bolshevik
The Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists , derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903....
revolutionary
Russian Revolution of 1917
The Russian Revolution is the collective term for a series of revolutions in Russia in 1917, which destroyed the Tsarist autocracy and led to the creation of the Soviet Union. The Tsar was deposed and replaced by a provisional government in the first revolution of February 1917...
, and Soviet
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
politician. He was a member of the Politburo
Politburo
Politburo , literally "Political Bureau [of the Central Committee]," is the executive committee for a number of communist political parties.-Marxist-Leninist states:...
(1924–1929) and Central Committee (1917–1937), chairman of the Communist International (Comintern, 1926–1929), and the editor in chief of Pravda
Pravda
Pravda was a leading newspaper of the Soviet Union and an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party between 1912 and 1991....
(1918–1929), the journal Bolshevik (1924–1929), Izvestia
Izvestia
Izvestia is a long-running high-circulation daily newspaper in Russia. The word "izvestiya" in Russian means "delivered messages", derived from the verb izveshchat . In the context of newspapers it is usually translated as "news" or "reports".-Origin:The newspaper began as the News of the...
(1934–1936), and the Great Soviet Encyclopedia
Great Soviet Encyclopedia
The Great Soviet Encyclopedia is one of the largest and most comprehensive encyclopedias in Russian and in the world, issued by the Soviet state from 1926 to 1990, and again since 2002 .-Editions:There were three editions...
. He authored Imperialism and World Economy (1918), The ABC of Communism
The ABC of Communism
The ABC of Communism is a book written by Nikolai Bukharin and Yevgeni Preobrazhensky in 1920 during the Russian Civil War. Originally written to convince the proletariat of Russia to support the Bolsheviks, it became "an elementary textbook of communist knowledge"...
(1919. co-authored with Yevgeni Preobrazhensky
Yevgeni Preobrazhensky
Yevgeni Alekseyevich Preobrazhensky was an Old Bolshevik, an economist and a member of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik faction and, its successor, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.-Life:...
), and Historical Materialism (1921) among others. Initially a supporter of Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
after Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and communist politician who led the October Revolution of 1917. As leader of the Bolsheviks, he headed the Soviet state during its initial years , as it fought to establish control of Russia in the Russian Civil War and worked to create a...
's death, he came to oppose a large number of Stalin's policies and was one of Stalin's most prominent victims during the "Moscow Trials
Moscow Trials
The Moscow Trials were a series of show trials conducted in the Soviet Union and orchestrated by Joseph Stalin during the Great Purge of the 1930s. The victims included most of the surviving Old Bolsheviks, as well as the leadership of the Soviet secret police...
" and purges of the Old Bolsheviks in the late 1930s.
Before the first 1917 revolution
Nikolai Bukharin was born in MoscowMoscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
, the second son of two schoolteachers, Ivan Gavrilovich and Liubov Ivanova Bukharin. His childhood is vividly recounted in his mostly autobiographic novel How It All Began.
Bukharin's political life began at the age of sixteen with his lifelong friend Ilya Ehrenburg
Ilya Ehrenburg
Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg was a Soviet writer, journalist, translator, and cultural figure.Ehrenburg is among the most prolific and notable authors of the Soviet Union; he published around one hundred titles. He became known first and foremost as a novelist and a journalist - in particular, as a...
when he participated in student activities at Moscow University related to the Russian Revolution of 1905
Russian Revolution of 1905
The 1905 Russian Revolution was a wave of mass political and social unrest that spread through vast areas of the Russian Empire. Some of it was directed against the government, while some was undirected. It included worker strikes, peasant unrest, and military mutinies...
. He joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party
Russian Social Democratic Labour Party
The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party , also known as Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party or Russian Social Democratic Party, was a revolutionary socialist Russian political party formed in 1898 in Minsk to unite the various revolutionary organizations into one party...
in 1906, becoming a member of the Bolshevik
Bolshevik
The Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists , derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903....
faction. With Grigori Sokolnikov, he convened the 1907 national youth conference in Moscow, which was later considered the founding of the Komsomol
Komsomol
The Communist Union of Youth , usually known as Komsomol , was the youth division of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The Komsomol in its earliest form was established in urban centers in 1918. During the early years, it was a Russian organization, known as the Russian Communist Union of...
.
By age twenty, he was a member of the Moscow Committee of the party. The committee was heavily infiltrated by the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana. As one of its leaders, Bukharin quickly became a person of interest to them. During this time, he became closely associated with N. Osinskii and Vladimir Smirnov, and also met his future first wife, Nadezhda Mikhailovna Lukina, his cousin and the sister of Nikolai Lukin, who was also a member of the party. They married soon after their exile, in 1911.
In 1911, after a brief imprisonment, Bukharin was exiled to Onega
Onega (town)
-External links:...
in Arkhangelsk
Arkhangelsk Oblast
Arkhangelsk Oblast is a federal subject of Russia . It includes the Arctic archipelagos of Franz Josef Land and Novaya Zemlya, as well as the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea....
, but soon escaped to Hanover
Hanover
Hanover or Hannover, on the river Leine, is the capital of the federal state of Lower Saxony , Germany and was once by personal union the family seat of the Hanoverian Kings of Great Britain, under their title as the dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg...
, where he stayed for a year before visiting Cracow in 1912 to meet Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and communist politician who led the October Revolution of 1917. As leader of the Bolsheviks, he headed the Soviet state during its initial years , as it fought to establish control of Russia in the Russian Civil War and worked to create a...
for the first time. During the exile, he continued his education and wrote several books that established him as a major Bolshevik theorist in his 20's. His work, Imperialism and World Economy influenced Lenin, who freely borrowed from it in his larger and better known work, Imperialism — The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Nevertheless, he and Lenin often had hot disputes on theoretical issues and Bukharin's closeness with the European Left and his anti-statist tendencies. Bukharin developed an interest in the works of Austrian Marxists and non-Marxist economic theorists, such as Aleksandr Bogdanov, who deviated from Leninist positions. Also while in Vienna in 1913, he helped the Georgia
Georgia (country)
Georgia is a sovereign state in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bounded to the west by the Black Sea, to the north by Russia, to the southwest by Turkey, to the south by Armenia, and to the southeast by Azerbaijan. The capital of...
n Bolshevik Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
write an article Marxism and the National Question at Lenin's request.
In October 1916, while based in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, he edited the newspaper Novy Mir
Novy Mir (1916 magazine)
Novy Mir was a magazine published by Russian social democratic émigrés in New York City in 1916–1917 until their return to Russia after the February Revolution of 1917. It was edited by Nikolai Bukharin and Alexandra Kollontai, who were briefly joined by Leon Trotsky when he arrived in New York in...
(New World) with Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....
and Alexandra Kollontai
Alexandra Kollontai
Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai was a Russian Communist revolutionary, first as a member of the Mensheviks, then from 1914 on as a Bolshevik. In 1919 she became the first female government minister in Europe...
. When Trotsky arrived in New York in January 1917, Bukharin was the first to greet him (as Trotsky's wife recalled, "with a bear hug and immediately began to tell them about a public library which stayed open late at night and which he proposed to show us at once" dragging the tired Trotskys across town "to admire his great discovery").
The February 1917 Revolution to 1923
February Revolution
The February Revolution of 1917 was the first of two revolutions in Russia in 1917. Centered around the then capital Petrograd in March . Its immediate result was the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, the end of the Romanov dynasty, and the end of the Russian Empire...
, Bukharin returned to Russia by way of Japan and at once became one of the leading Bolsheviks in Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
, being elected to the Central Committee. During the October Revolution
October Revolution
The October Revolution , also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution , Red October, the October Uprising or the Bolshevik Revolution, was a political revolution and a part of the Russian Revolution of 1917...
, he drafted, introduced, and defended the revolutionary decrees of the Moscow Soviet, in whose name the insurrection took place. Bukharin then represented the Moscow party in their report to the revolutionary government in Petrograd. After the second 1917 revolution, he became the editor of the party's newspaper, Pravda
Pravda
Pravda was a leading newspaper of the Soviet Union and an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party between 1912 and 1991....
.
Bukharin believed passionately in the promise of world revolution
World revolution
World revolution is the Marxist concept of overthrowing capitalism in all countries through the conscious revolutionary action of the organized working class...
. In the Russian turmoil near the end of World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
, when a negotiated peace with the Central Powers
Central Powers
The Central Powers were one of the two warring factions in World War I , composed of the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Bulgaria...
was looming, he demanded a continuance of the war, fully expecting to incite all the foreign proletarian classes to arms. Even as he was uncompromising toward Russia's battlefield enemies, he also rejected any fraternization with the capitalist Allied powers
Allies of World War I
The Entente Powers were the countries at war with the Central Powers during World War I. The members of the Triple Entente were the United Kingdom, France, and the Russian Empire; Italy entered the war on their side in 1915...
: he reportedly wept when he learned of official negotiations for assistance.
Bukharin emerged as the leader of the Left Communists in bitter opposition to Lenin's decision to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was a peace treaty signed on March 3, 1918, mediated by South African Andrik Fuller, at Brest-Litovsk between Russia and the Central Powers, headed by Germany, marking Russia's exit from World War I.While the treaty was practically obsolete before the end of the year,...
. In this wartime power struggle, he was urged by some of his more fiery allies to have Lenin arrested. He rejected this idea immediately, but the issue would later become the basis of Stalinist charges against him, culminating in the show trial of 1938.
After the ratification of the treaty, Bukharin resumed his responsibilities within the party. In March 1919, he became a member of the Comintern's executive committee and a candidate member of Politburo
Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Politburo , known as the Presidium from 1952 to 1966, functioned as the central policymaking and governing body of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.-Duties and responsibilities:The...
. During the Civil War
Russian Civil War
The Russian Civil War was a multi-party war that occurred within the former Russian Empire after the Russian provisional government collapsed to the Soviets, under the domination of the Bolshevik party. Soviet forces first assumed power in Petrograd The Russian Civil War (1917–1923) was a...
period, he published several theoretical economic works, including the popular primer The ABC of Communism
The ABC of Communism
The ABC of Communism is a book written by Nikolai Bukharin and Yevgeni Preobrazhensky in 1920 during the Russian Civil War. Originally written to convince the proletariat of Russia to support the Bolsheviks, it became "an elementary textbook of communist knowledge"...
(with Yevgeni Preobrazhensky
Yevgeni Preobrazhensky
Yevgeni Alekseyevich Preobrazhensky was an Old Bolshevik, an economist and a member of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik faction and, its successor, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.-Life:...
, 1919), and the more academic Economics of the Transitional Period (1920) and Historical Materialism (1921).
By 1921, he changed his position and accepted Lenin's emphasis on the survival and strengthening of the Soviet state as the bastion of the future world revolution. He became the foremost supporter of the New Economic Policy
New Economic Policy
The New Economic Policy was an economic policy proposed by Vladimir Lenin, who called it state capitalism. Allowing some private ventures, the NEP allowed small animal businesses or smoke shops, for instance, to reopen for private profit while the state continued to control banks, foreign trade,...
(NEP), to which he was to tie his political fortunes. Considered by the Left Communists as a retreat from socialist policies, NEP reintroduced money, allowed private ownership and capitalistic practices in agriculture, retail trade, and light industry while the state retained the control of heavy industry. While some have criticized Bukharin for this apparent U-turn, his change of emphasis can be partially explained by the necessity for peace and stability following seven years of war in Russia, and the failure of Communist Revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe, which ended the prospect of worldwide revolution.
Power struggle
After Lenin's death in 1924, Bukharin became a full member of the PolitburoPolitburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Politburo , known as the Presidium from 1952 to 1966, functioned as the central policymaking and governing body of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.-Duties and responsibilities:The...
. In the subsequent power struggle among Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....
, Grigory Zinoviev
Grigory Zinoviev
Grigory Yevseevich Zinoviev , born Ovsei-Gershon Aronovich Radomyslsky Apfelbaum , was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet Communist politician...
, Lev Kamenev
Lev Kamenev
Lev Borisovich Kamenev , born Rozenfeld , was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a prominent Soviet politician. He was briefly head of state of the new republic in 1917, and from 1923-24 the acting Premier in the last year of Lenin's life....
, and Stalin, Bukharin allied himself with Stalin, who positioned himself as centrist of the Party and supported NEP against the Left Opposition
Left Opposition
The Left Opposition was a faction within the Bolshevik Party from 1923 to 1927, headed de facto by Leon Trotsky. The Left Opposition formed as part of the power struggle within the party leadership that began with the Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin's illness and intensified with his death in January...
, which wanted more rapid industrialization, escalation of class struggle against the kulaks, and agitation for world revolution. It was Bukharin who formulated the thesis of "Socialism in One Country
Socialism in One Country
Socialism in One Country was a theory put forth by Joseph Stalin in 1924, elaborated by Nikolai Bukharin in 1925 and finally adopted as state policy by Stalin...
" put forth by Stalin in 1924, which argued that socialism
Socialism
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...
(in Marxist theory, the transitional stage from capitalism to communism) could be developed in a single country, even one as underdeveloped as Russia. This new theory stated that revolution need no longer be encouraged in the capitalist countries since Russia could and should achieve socialism alone. The thesis would become a hallmark of Stalinism
Stalinism
Stalinism refers to the ideology that Joseph Stalin conceived and implemented in the Soviet Union, and is generally considered a branch of Marxist–Leninist ideology but considered by some historians to be a significant deviation from this philosophy...
.
Trotsky, the prime force behind the Left Opposition, was defeated by a triumvirate formed by Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev, with the support of Bukharin. By 1926, Stalin-Bukharin alliance ousted Zinoviev and Kamenev from the Party leadership, and Bukharin enjoyed the highest degree of power during the 1926-1928 period. He emerged as the leader of the Party's right wing
Right Opposition
The Right Opposition was the name given to the tendency made up of Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, Mikhail Tomsky and their supporters within the Soviet Union in the late 1920s...
, which included two other Politburo members Alexei Rykov
Alexei Rykov
Aleksei Ivanovich Rykov was a Russian Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet politician most prominent as Premier of Russia and the Soviet Union from 1924–29 and 1924–30 respectively....
, Lenin's successor as Chairman
Premier of the Soviet Union
The office of Premier of the Soviet Union was synonymous with head of government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics . Twelve individuals have been premier...
of the Council of People's Commissars and Mikhail Tomsky
Mikhail Tomsky
Mikhail Pavlovich Tomsky was a factory worker, trade unionist and Bolshevik leader. He was the Soviet leader of the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions.Tomsky attempted to form a trade union at his factory in St...
, head of trade unions, and he became chairman of Comintern's executive committee in 1926. However, prompted by grain shortage in 1928, Stalin reversed himself and proposed a program of rapid industrialization and forced collectivization because he believed that the NEP was not working fast enough. Stalin felt that in the new situation the policies of his former foes – Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev - was the right one.
Bukharin was worried by the prospect of Stalin's plan, which he feared would lead to “military-feudal exploitation” of the peasantry. Bukharin did want the Soviet Union to achieve industrialization but he preferred the more moderate approach of offering the peasants the opportunity to become prosperous, which would lead to greater grain production for sale abroad. Bukharin pressed his views throughout 1928 in meetings of the Politburo and at the Party Congress, insisting that enforced grain requisition would be counter-productive, as War Communism had been a decade earlier.
Fall from power
Bukharin's support of continuation of NEP was not popular with higher Party cadres, and his slogan to peasants, “Enrich yourselves!” and proposal to achieve socialism “at snail's pace” left him vulnerable to attacks first by Zinoviev and now by Stalin. Stalin attacked Bukharin's views, portraying them as capitalist deviation and declaring that the revolution would be at risk without a strong policy that encouraged rapid industrialization.Having helped Stalin achieve unchecked power against the Left Opposition, Bukharin found himself easily outmaneuvered by Stalin. Nevertheless, Stalin's victory would not have been inevitable if Bukharin had been more politically astute. He seems to have enjoyed a majority in the Politburo initially (he said Kalinin and Voroshilov betrayed the Right at the last minute) and unlike the Left Opposition, broad mass support among the peasantry, which made up 80% of the Russian population. Yet Bukharin played to Stalin's strength by maintaining the appearance of unity within the Party leadership. Meanwhile, Stalin used his control of the Party machine to replace Bukharin's supporters in the Rightist power base in Moscow, trade unions, and Comintern.
Bukharin attempted to gain support from earlier foes including Kamenev and Zinoviev who had fallen from power and held mid-level positions within the Communist party. The details of his meeting with Kamenev, to whom he confided that Stalin was “Genghis Khan” who changed policies to get rid of rivals, were leaked by Trotskyist press and subjected him to accusation of factionalism. Eventually, Bukharin lost his position in the Comintern in April 1929 and editorship of Pravda, and he was expelled from the Politburo on 17 November of that year.
Bukharin was forced to renounce his views under pressure. He wrote letters to Stalin pleading for forgiveness and rehabilitation, but through wiretaps of Bukharin's private conversations with Stalin's enemies, Stalin knew Bukharin's repentance was insincere.
International supporters of Bukharin, Jay Lovestone
Jay Lovestone
Jay Lovestone was at various times a member of the Socialist Party of America, a leader of the Communist Party USA, leader of a small oppositionist party, an anti-Communist and Central Intelligence Agency helper, and foreign policy advisor to the leadership of the AFL-CIO and various unions...
of the Communist Party USA
Communist Party USA
The Communist Party USA is a Marxist political party in the United States, established in 1919. It has a long, complex history that is closely related to the histories of similar communist parties worldwide and the U.S. labor movement....
among them, were also expelled from the Comintern
Comintern
The Communist International, abbreviated as Comintern, also known as the Third International, was an international communist organization initiated in Moscow during March 1919...
. They formed an international alliance to promote their views, calling it the International Communist Opposition, though it became better known as the Right Opposition
Right Opposition
The Right Opposition was the name given to the tendency made up of Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, Mikhail Tomsky and their supporters within the Soviet Union in the late 1920s...
, after a term used by the Trotskyist Left Opposition
Left Opposition
The Left Opposition was a faction within the Bolshevik Party from 1923 to 1927, headed de facto by Leon Trotsky. The Left Opposition formed as part of the power struggle within the party leadership that began with the Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin's illness and intensified with his death in January...
in the Soviet Union to refer to Bukharin and his supporters there.
Great purge
Stalin's collectivization policy proved to be as disastrous as Bukharin predicted, but Stalin had by then achieved unchallenged authority in the party leadership. However, there were signs that moderates among Stalin's supporters sought to end official terror and bring a general change in policy, now that mass collectivization was largely completed and the worst was over.Although Bukharin had not challenged Stalin since 1929, his former supporters, including Martemyan Ryutin
Martemyan Ryutin
Martemyan Nikitich Ryutin was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and a political functionary of the Russian Communist Party. Ryutin is best remembered as the leader of a pro-peasant political faction organized against Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in the early 1930s and as the primary author of a 200...
, drafted and clandestinely circulated an anti-Stalin platform, which called Stalin the “evil genius of the Russian Revolution”. Stalin wanted to impose the death penalty on those involved, despite Lenin's injunction against bloodletting among Party members, but he was resisted by moderates.
More importantly, Sergey Kirov
Sergey Kirov
Sergei Mironovich Kirov , born Sergei Mironovich Kostrikov, was a prominent early Bolshevik leader in the Soviet Union. Kirov rose through the Communist Party ranks to become head of the Party organization in Leningrad...
, a Leningrad party leader, was emerging as popular leader of the moderates. Although Kirov himself was a staunch Stalin loyalist, he was in favor of a general relaxation and reconciliation toward former oppositionists. In the 1934 Party congress, Kirov was elected to the Central Committee with only three negative votes, the fewest of any candidate, while Stalin received 292 negative votes.
In the brief period of thaw in 1934-1936, Bukharin was politically rehabilitated and was made editor of Izvestia
Izvestia
Izvestia is a long-running high-circulation daily newspaper in Russia. The word "izvestiya" in Russian means "delivered messages", derived from the verb izveshchat . In the context of newspapers it is usually translated as "news" or "reports".-Origin:The newspaper began as the News of the...
in 1934. There, he consistently highlighted the dangers of fascist regimes in Europe and the need for "proletarian humanism". He was also the principal framer of the Soviet Constitution of 1936, which promised freedom of speech, the press, assembly, religion, and the privacy of the person, his home, and his correspondence.
However, Kirov was assassinated in Leningrad in December 1934, and his death was used by Stalin as a pretext to launch the Great Purge
Great Purge
The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...
, in which about a million people were to perish as Stalin eliminated all past and potential opposition to his authority. Some historians now believe that Kirov's assassination in 1934 was arranged by Stalin himself or at least that there is sufficient evidence to plausibly posit such a conclusion. After Kirov's assassination, the NKVD
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....
charged an ever growing group of former oppositionists with Kirov's murder and other acts of treason, terrorism, sabotage, and espionage.
Tightening noose
In February 1936, shortly before the purge started in earnest, Bukharin was sent to Paris by Stalin to negotiate the purchase of Marx and Engels archives, held by the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) before its dissolution by Hitler. He was joined by his young wife Anna LarinaAnna Larina
Anna Larina was the wife of the Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin, and spent many years trying to rehabilitate her husband after he was executed in 1938. She was the author of a memoir entitled This I Cannot Forget....
, which therefore opened the possibility of exile, but he decided against it saying that he could not live outside the Soviet Union.
Bukharin, who had been forced to follow the Party line since 1929, confided to his old friends and former opponents his real view of Stalin and his policy. His conversations with Boris Nicolaevsky
Boris Nicolaevsky
Boris Ivanovich Nicolaevsky was a revolutionary Russian Marxist activist, archivist, and historian. Nicolaevsky is best remembered as one of the leading Menshevik public intellectuals of the 20th Century.-Early years:...
, a Menshevik
Menshevik
The Mensheviks were a faction of the Russian revolutionary movement that emerged in 1904 after a dispute between Vladimir Lenin and Julius Martov, both members of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. The dispute originated at the Second Congress of that party, ostensibly over minor issues...
leader who held the manuscripts on behalf of SPD, formed the basis of "Letter of an Old Bolshevik", which was very influential in contemporary understanding of the period (especially the Ryutin Affair
Ryutin Affair
The Ryutin Affair was one of the last attempts to oppose the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin within the Soviet Communist Party.Martemyan Ryutin was an Old Bolshevik and a secretary of the Moscow City Communist Party Committee in the 1920s...
and Kirov murder) although there are doubts about its authenticity. According to Nicolaevsky, Bukharin spoke of "the mass annihilation of completely defenseless men, with women and children" under forced collectivization and liquidation of kulaks as a class that dehumanized the Party members with "the profound psychological change in those communists who took part in the campaign. Instead of going mad, they accepted terror as a normal administrative method and regarded obedience to all orders from above as a supreme virtue.... They are no longer human beings. They have truly become the cogs in a terrible machine."
Yet to another Menshevik
Menshevik
The Mensheviks were a faction of the Russian revolutionary movement that emerged in 1904 after a dispute between Vladimir Lenin and Julius Martov, both members of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. The dispute originated at the Second Congress of that party, ostensibly over minor issues...
leader, Fyodor Dan, he confided that Stalin became "the man to whom the Party granted its confidence" and "is a sort of a symbol of the Party" even though he "is not a man, but a devil." In Dan's account, Bukharin’s acceptance of the Soviet Union’s new direction was thus a result of his utter commitment to Party solidarity.
To André Malraux
André Malraux
André Malraux DSO was a French adventurer, award-winning author, and statesman. Having traveled extensively in Indochina and China, Malraux was noted especially for his novel entitled La Condition Humaine , which won the Prix Goncourt...
, he also confided, "Now he is going to kill me". To his boyhood friend, Ilya Ehrenburg
Ilya Ehrenburg
Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg was a Soviet writer, journalist, translator, and cultural figure.Ehrenburg is among the most prolific and notable authors of the Soviet Union; he published around one hundred titles. He became known first and foremost as a novelist and a journalist - in particular, as a...
, he expressed the suspicion that the whole trip was a trap set up by Stalin. Indeed, his contacts with Mensheviks during this trip were to feature prominently in his trial.
The trial
Following the trial and execution of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and other leftist Old Bolsheviks in 1936, Bukharin and Rykov were arrested on 27 February 1937 following a plenum of the Central Committee and were charged with conspiring to overthrow the Soviet state.Bukharin was tried in the Trial of the Twenty One
Trial of the Twenty One
The Trial of the Twenty-One was the last of the Moscow Trials, show trials of prominent Bolsheviks, including the Old Bolsheviks. The Trial of the Twenty-One took place in Moscow in March 1938, towards the end of Stalin's Great Purge.-The Trial:...
on 2–13 March 1938 during the Great Purges, along with ex-premier Alexei Rykov
Alexei Rykov
Aleksei Ivanovich Rykov was a Russian Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet politician most prominent as Premier of Russia and the Soviet Union from 1924–29 and 1924–30 respectively....
, Christian Rakovsky
Christian Rakovsky
Christian Rakovsky was a Bulgarian socialist revolutionary, a Bolshevik politician and Soviet diplomat; he was also noted as a journalist, physician, and essayist...
, Nikolai Krestinsky
Nikolai Krestinsky
Nikolay Nikolayevich Krestinsky was a Russian Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet politician.-Origins:Krestinsky was born in the town of Mogilev, in what is now Mahilyow Voblast of Belarus. According to Russian archivist A. B. Roginsky, Krestinsky was of ethnic Russian origin...
, Genrikh Yagoda
Genrikh Yagoda
Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda , born Enokh Gershevich Ieguda , was a Soviet state security official who served as director of the NKVD, the Soviet Union's Stalin-era security and intelligence agency, from 1934 to 1936...
, and 16 other defendants alleged to belong to the so-called "Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites". Meant to be the culmination of previous show trials
Moscow Trials
The Moscow Trials were a series of show trials conducted in the Soviet Union and orchestrated by Joseph Stalin during the Great Purge of the 1930s. The victims included most of the surviving Old Bolsheviks, as well as the leadership of the Soviet secret police...
, it was now alleged that Bukharin and others sought to assassinate Lenin and Stalin from 1918, murder Maxim Gorky
Maxim Gorky
Alexei Maximovich Peshkov , primarily known as Maxim Gorky , was a Russian and Soviet author, a founder of the Socialist Realism literary method and a political activist.-Early years:...
by poison, partition the Soviet Union and hand out her territories to Germany, Japan and Great Britain.
Even more than earlier Moscow show trials, Bukharin's trial horrified many previously sympathetic observers as they watched allegations become more absurd than ever and the purge expand to include almost every living Old Bolshevik leader except Stalin. For some prominent communists such as Bertram Wolfe
Bertram Wolfe
Bertram David "Bert" Wolfe was an American scholar and former communist best known for biographical studies of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, and Diego Rivera.-Early life:...
, Jay Lovestone
Jay Lovestone
Jay Lovestone was at various times a member of the Socialist Party of America, a leader of the Communist Party USA, leader of a small oppositionist party, an anti-Communist and Central Intelligence Agency helper, and foreign policy advisor to the leadership of the AFL-CIO and various unions...
, Arthur Koestler
Arthur Koestler
Arthur Koestler CBE was a Hungarian author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest and, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria...
, and Heinrich Brandler
Heinrich Brandler
Heinrich Brandler was a German communist trade unionist, politician, revolutionary activist, and writer. Brandler is best remember as the head of the Communist Party of Germany during the party's ill-fated "March Action" of 1921 and aborted uprising of 1923, for which he was held responsible by...
, the Bukharin trial marked their final break with communism and even turned the first three into fervent anti-Communists eventually.
While Anastas Mikoyan
Anastas Mikoyan
Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan was an Armenian Old Bolshevik and Soviet statesman during the rules of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, and Leonid Brezhnev....
and Vyacheslav Molotov
Vyacheslav Molotov
Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov was a Soviet politician and diplomat, an Old Bolshevik and a leading figure in the Soviet government from the 1920s, when he rose to power as a protégé of Joseph Stalin, to 1957, when he was dismissed from the Presidium of the Central Committee by Nikita Khrushchev...
later claimed that Bukharin was never tortured and his letters from prison do not give the suggestion that he was tortured, it is also known that his interrogators were instructed with the order: "beating permitted". Bukharin held out for three months, but threats to his young wife and infant son, combined with "methods of physical influence" wore him down. But when he read his confession amended and corrected personally by Stalin, he withdrew his whole confession. The examination started all over again, with a double team of interrogators.
Bukharin's confession and his motivation became subject of much debate among Western observers, inspiring Koestler's acclaimed novel Darkness at Noon
Darkness at Noon
Darkness at Noon is a novel by the Hungarian-born British novelist Arthur Koestler, first published in 1940...
and a philosophical essay by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Karl Marx, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in addition to being closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir...
in Humanism and Terror. His confessions were somewhat different from others in that while he pled guilty to the "sum total of crimes", he denied knowledge when it came to specific crimes. Some astute observers noted that he would allow only what was in the written confession and refuse to go any further.
There are several interpretations of Bukharin's motivations (beside being coerced) in the trial. Koestler and others viewed it as a true believer's last service to the Party (while preserving the little amount of personal honor left) whereas Bukharin biographer Stephen Cohen and Robert Tucker saw traces of Aesopian language
Aesopian language
Aesopian Language is communications that convey an innocent meaning to outsiders but hold a concealed meaning to informed members of a conspiracy or underground movement. For instance, Person X is known for exposing secrets in an organization, so the organization leaders announce, "any members who...
, with which Bukharin sought to turn the table into an anti-trial of Stalinism (while keeping his part of the bargain to save his family). While his letters to Stalin – he wrote 34 very emotional and desperate letters tearfully protesting his innocence and professing his loyalty – suggest a complete capitulation and acceptance of his role in the trial, it contrasts with his actual conduct in the trial.
Bukharin himself speaks of his "peculiar duality of mind" in his last plea, which led to "semi-paralysis of the will" and Hegelian "unhappy consciousness
Unhappy consciousness
For Hegel the unhappy consciousness is associated with a stage in the history of the development of the freedom of self-consciousness....
", which likely stemmed not only from his knowledge of the ruinous reality of Stalinism (although he could not of course say so in the trial) but also of the impending threat of fascism.
The result was a curious mix of fulsome confessions (of being a "degenerate fascist" working for the "restoration of capitalism") and subtle criticisms of the trial. After disproving several charges against him (one observer noted that he "proceeded to demolish or rather showed he could very easily demolish the whole case." ) and saying that "the confession of accused is not essential. The confession of the accused is a medieval principle of jurisprudence" in a trial that was solely based on confessions, he finished his last plea with the words:
"the monstrousness of my crime is immeasurable especially in the new stage of struggle of the U.S.S.R. May this trial be the last severe lesson, and may the great might of the U.S.S.R become clear to all."
While in prison, he wrote at least four book-length manuscripts including a lyrical autobiographical novel, How It All Began, philosophical treatise Philosophical Arabesques, a collection of poems, and Socialism and Its Culture – all of which were found in Stalin's archive and published in the 1990s).
Execution
Among other intercessors, the French author and Nobel laureate Romain RollandRomain Rolland
Romain Rolland was a French dramatist, novelist, essayist, art historian and mystic who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915.-Biography:...
wrote to Stalin seeking clemency, arguing that "an intellect like that of Bukharin is a treasure for his country." He compared Bukharin's situation to that of the great chemist Antoine Lavoisier
Antoine Lavoisier
Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier , the "father of modern chemistry", was a French nobleman prominent in the histories of chemistry and biology...
who was guillotined during the French Revolution
French Revolution
The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...
: "We in France, the most ardent revolutionaries... still profoundly grieve and regret what we did.... I beg you to show clemency." He had earlier written to Stalin in 1937, "For the sake of Gorky I am asking you for mercy, even if he may be guilty of something," to which Stalin noted: "We must not respond." Bukharin was executed on 15 March 1938, but the announcement of his death was overshadowed by the Nazi Anschluss
Anschluss
The Anschluss , also known as the ', was the occupation and annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany in 1938....
of Austria.
'Koba, why do you need me to die?' Bukharin wrote in a note to Stalin just before his execution. ("Koba" was Stalin's revolutionary pseudonym
Pseudonym
A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...
, and Bukharin's use of it was a sign of how close the two had once been. The note was found still in Stalin's desk after his death in 1953.)
Despite the promise to spare his family, Bukharin's wife, Anna Larina
Anna Larina
Anna Larina was the wife of the Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin, and spent many years trying to rehabilitate her husband after he was executed in 1938. She was the author of a memoir entitled This I Cannot Forget....
, was sent to a labor camp, but she survived to see her husband officially rehabilitated by the Soviet state under Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is a former Soviet statesman, having served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991, and as the last head of state of the USSR, having served from 1988 until its dissolution in 1991...
in 1988.
Political stature and achievements
Speaking of the young C.C. members, I wish to say a few words about Bukharin and Pyatakov. They are, in my opinion, the most outstanding figures (among the youngest ones), and the following must be borne in mind about them: Bukharin is not only a most valuable and major theorist of the Party; he is also rightly considered the favourite of the whole Party, but his theoretical views can be classified as fully Marxist only with great reserve, for there is something scholastic about him (he has never made a study of the dialectics, and, I think, never fully understood it)... Both of these remarks, of course, are made only for the present, on the assumption that both these outstanding and devoted Party workers fail to find an occasion to enhance their knowledge and amend their one-sidedness.
Bukharin made several notable contributions to Marxist-Leninist thought, most notably The Economics of the Transition Period (1920) and his prison writings, Philosophical Arabesques, (which clearly reveal Bukharin had corrected the 'one-sidedness' of his thought), as well as being a founding member of the Soviet Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a keen botanist. His primary contributions to economics were his critique of marginal utility theory, his analysis of imperialism, and his writings on the transition to the communism in Soviet Union.
Voice of the stalking shadow (Pin thodarum nizhalin kural), a Tamil
Tamil language
Tamil is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by Tamil people of the Indian subcontinent. It has official status in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and in the Indian union territory of Pondicherry. Tamil is also an official language of Sri Lanka and Singapore...
novel by Jeyamohan
Jeyamohan
B. Jeyamohan or Jayamohan is a noted Tamil and Malayalam writer and literary critic from Nagercoil in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu....
, is based on the life of Nikolai Bukharin.
Cartoonist
Nikolai Bukharin was a gifted cartoonist who left many cartoons on contemporary Soviet politicians. The renowned artist Konstantin YuonKonstantin Yuon
Konstantin Fyodorovich Yuon or Juon was a noted Russian painter and theatre designer associated with the Mir Iskusstva. Later, he co-founded the Union of Russian Artists and the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia.-Biography:...
once told him: “Forget about politics. There is no future in politics for you. Painting is your real calling."
His cartoons are sometimes used to illustrate biographies of Soviet officials. Russian historian Yury Zhukov stated that Nikolai Bukarin's portraits of Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
were the only ones drawn from the original, not from a photograph.
See also
- Communist Party of the Soviet UnionCommunist Party of the Soviet UnionThe Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the only legal, ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world...
- Marxian economicsMarxian economicsMarxian economics refers to economic theories on the functioning of capitalism based on the works of Karl Marx. Adherents of Marxian economics, particularly in academia, distinguish it from Marxism as a political ideology and sociological theory, arguing that Marx's approach to understanding the...
- Historical materialismHistorical materialismHistorical materialism is a methodological approach to the study of society, economics, and history, first articulated by Karl Marx as "the materialist conception of history". Historical materialism looks for the causes of developments and changes in human society in the means by which humans...
External links
- Nikolai Bukharin archive at marxists.org
- The evil that Stalin did, George WaldenGeorge WaldenGeorge Gordon Harvey Walden is a British journalist and a former Conservative Party Member of Parliament who served as the Minister for Higher Education from 1985-87....
on Bukharin's death-cell letter to Stalin - How it all began, Bukharin's last letter to his wife
- A Bolshevik Love Story, Mises Institute