Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution
By Harrison B. Salisbury
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Years later, long after he was dead, “Bukharin's fox” was still racing around the Kremlin, which was empty and desolate by that time, and playing hide and seek in the Tainitsky Garden
It was Bukharin's fox (he was a man inordinately fond of pets—hedgehogs, garter snakes, a crippled hawk and the famous fox) that haunted the Kremlin for years after Nikolai Bukharin was shot in March, 1938, following the greatest of Stalin's purge trials. But it is Bukharin's ghost, the indelible memory of his post‐Marxian philosophy and his remarkable prevision of the Nazi‐Soviet rapprochement and the inevitable deterioration of Stalin's Russia into proto‐Fascism, which remains to haunt the Communist world.
Nikolai Bukharin was Lenin's most brilliant disciple. He was more than that. He was in Lenin's last years almost his foster‐son, both in a personal sense and a political sense. It was of him that Lenin wrote in his famous Last Testament:
“Bukharin is not only the party's most valuable and greatest theoretician but he is also rightfully considered the favorite of the whole party.” Then Lenin added in a clear reflection of some recent disputes with Bukharin; “But his theoretical views can only with very great doubt be regarded as fully Marxist for there is something scholastic in them (he never studied and, I think, never fully understood dialectics).”
If his name has not come down to the present day with anything like the luster and excitement it evoked in the 1920's and 1930's the blame can be placed upon what Trotsky so precisely called “The Stalinist School of Falsification.” Bukharin's name was second only to Trotsky's when Lenin died in January, 1924. Now it glows dimly in the dusty polemics of Marxist splinters and in the occasional paragraph in the turgid prose issuing from the bowels of the MarxEngels‐Lenin Institute in Moscow.
Stephen Cohen's full‐scale study of Bukhaiin is the first major study of this remarkable associate of Lenin. As such it constitutes a milestone in Soviet studies, the by‐product both of increased academic sophistication in the use of Soviet materials and also of the very substantial increase in basic information which has become available in the 20 years since Stalin's death. Like the study of Stalin by Cohen's Princeton colleague, Robert C. Tucker, it is testimony to the maturity and mastery of Ameristudies in the Soviet field.
Cohen's industrious and thoughtful scholarship reveals that Bukharin tells us more about the present‐day Soviet Union than one might imagine. In his almost forgotten works written during and just after World War I (“Imperialism and World Economy,” “The Economics of the Transition Period,” and others) he drew a frightening picture of “militaristic state capitalism” that could serve as a blueprint of the Soviet state as it came to be under Stalin and his successors. Bukharin called it “the present‐day monster, the modem Leviathan,” a draconian proto‐Fascist state run by a dictatorial oligarchy which in Cohen's words, “mercilessly crushes all resistance.”
In this state, Bukharin said, “Centralization becomes the centralization of the barrack; among the elites the vilest militarism Inevitably intensifies as does the brutal regimentation and bloody repression of the proletariat.” Bukharin, as Cohen notes, was speaking of what he perceived as the emergence of “state capitalism” in the capitalist world. What he described fitted two states of the future—Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia.
Bukharin and Stalin clashed on two critical points concerning Germany. First, over Bukharin's opposition, through the Third International Stalin compelled the German Communists to break with the Social Democrats, thus insuring Hitler's rise to power. Then, with Hitler's advent —and this has nowhere been brought out more clearly than by Mr. Cohen —I3ukharin fought to the end against a policy of collaboration or detente with the Nazis, whereas Stalin as early as 1935 and 1936 had begun to lay the ground lines for the notorious Nazi‐Soviet pact.
This is not to suggest—and Mr. Cohen makes this clear—that Bukharin was a spotless hem. He was not. By collaborating wholeheartedly with Stalin until 1928 (despite some twistg and turns), he made possible Stalin's victories over all other rivals and placed himself in a position in which Stalin could cut hap down with comparative ease. Since Bukharin had supported repressive measures against many others, he was on shaky ground in opposing these tactics against himself. Like most of the old Bolsheviks, he helped to dig his own grave.
But unlike some old Bolsheviks, Bukharin perceived the abyss long before he was fi rally shoved into it. He was a brilliant writer and polemicist. For many years he was editor of Pravda and later the editor of Izvestia. It was in those pages that he fought Stalin's policies, first in open argument and ultimately in that cryptic code language the Communists call Aesopian—a kind of dauble‐talk.
Bukharin had no superior at this kind of trick. For example, at a time when Stalin's forced collectivization had spread famine through the countryside, Bukharin wrote: “What do the popes do? Do they not drive the Christiansi impoverished by papal plundering, to starvation —do they not unceasingly fleece their flock and cut into their flesh while shearing them?” The analogy was obvious to the alert Russian reader. (The Russian word for peasant is krestyanin.) Bukharin played this game to the end—to his appearance at the fateful purge trial of February‐March, 1938.
Mr. Cohen demonstrates rather conclusively that Bukharin did not testify as did his prototype, Rubashov, in Arthur Koestler's “Darkness at Noon” as a last service to the party.” His testimony almost certainly was compelled in his effort to save the lives of his young wife and son.
Having decided to testify, Bukharin then sought by means of Aesopian language to turn the trial into an “anti‐trial” in which he would place Stalin under indictment. This maneuver was only partially successful. It was clearly understood in a brilliant analysis written for the State Department at the time by George Kennan. A few of the Western correspondents present suspected what was going on, though the tactic was too subtle for United States Ambassador Joseph Davies and most of the world. They heard Bukharin's plea of guilty but did not penetrate the meaning of his brilliant duel with the prosecutor, Andrei Vishinsky.
On re ‐ reading the stenographic report of the BukharinVishinsky dialogue one can feel the tensions, the nearness to total revelation of the whole macabre Stalinist appamtus. But, of course, that reading is undertaken against a backdrop of more than 30 years' exposure of Stalin's lies, plots and crimes.
Yet there is a grim lesson in Bukharin's words and Bukharin's fate. Years have passed. The Old Bolsheviks are dead. Stalin is dead. Vishinsky is dead. Yagoda, Yezhov and Beria are gone. Even pedantic precise little Judge Ulrich who presided over all the trials and then primly retired to his second‐floor suite at the Metropole has died. But the system is not dead. Brezhnev is not Stalin. Nor is Solzhenitsyn Bukharin. Yet today the same deadly minuet is being played out in post‐Stalin Russia, in that vast and tragic country where, as Bukharin once put it, “Three ethical norms dominate everything: devotion to the ‘nation’ or to the ‘state,’ ‘loyalty to the Leader’ and the spirit.
Stephen F. Cohen has analyzed Bukharin's role witt brilliance and dogged determination. One must read this work to realize the extent to which Bukharin the man has been obliterated by the operation of the Soviet “memory hole” and the extermination of almost all those who knew him. Little remains but the enduring body of Bukharin's works, but these cast a lurid light over the Soviet regime which has emerged since the death of Stalin. ■
A. Kemp-Welch (ed.)
Published: 25 June 1992
Abstract
Nikolai Bukharin was a pioneer and founder member of Soviet Communism. An Old Bolshevik and a close comrade of Lenin, he was shot by Stalin, but eventually reinstated, posthumously, under Gorbachev. This collection of chapters provides is a systematic study of his ideas. The book analyses three major areas of his thought: economics and the peasantry, politics and international relations, and culture and science, and examines his influence both on his contemporaries and on subsequent thinkers. The introduction establishes the context for this discussion, and also provides a historical evaluation of Bukharin's role in relation to the emergence of Stalinism, the phenomenon that finally removed him from the political stage.
Published: 25 June 1992
Abstract
Nikolai Bukharin was a pioneer and founder member of Soviet Communism. An Old Bolshevik and a close comrade of Lenin, he was shot by Stalin, but eventually reinstated, posthumously, under Gorbachev. This collection of chapters provides is a systematic study of his ideas. The book analyses three major areas of his thought: economics and the peasantry, politics and international relations, and culture and science, and examines his influence both on his contemporaries and on subsequent thinkers. The introduction establishes the context for this discussion, and also provides a historical evaluation of Bukharin's role in relation to the emergence of Stalinism, the phenomenon that finally removed him from the political stage.
Contributors include Anna diBiagio, John Biggart, V. P. Danilov, Peter Ferdinand, Neil Harding, A. Kemp-Welch, Robert Lewis, and Alec Nove.
"Unite the Left": Contextualizing Bukharin's ABC of Communism and Berkman's ABC of Anarchism (PDF)
Abstract
In 1919, Nikolai Bukharin, the leading theoretician of the Bolshevik Party, published a
manual entitled The ABC of Communism meant to put the governing ideology of the newly formed Soviet State into eminently readable terms. Alexander Berkman, a Russian Anarchist who strongly supported the October Revolution, became disillusioned with the new regime in 1921 and left the country. He later published his own tract entitled The ABC of Anarchism.
This thesis pits these two theoretical works against each other as historical documents
embodying the nature of leftist polemics that has characterized the movement since the
dissolution of the First International. Both Bukharin’s and Berkman’s books engage in
polemical self-definition by means of defining the other. By emphasizing Bukharin’s contributions to Bolshevism, this paper rescues the nature of the Bolshevik Party as a group of thinkers with wide-ranging beliefs in contrast to the historiographical trends that continue to emphasize Lenin as the only important figure in the party. I translate and analyze under-utilized articles that Bukharin published in New York from 1916-1917, and in Moscow in 1917 before the Revolution. In looking at Berkman’s critiques of Bolshevism in practice, the historiography of the Russian Revolution is enriched with analyses of the Party from the left, where it usually emphasizes criticism from the right. No major historiography exists on Berkman, and thus I typify his thought by reconciling his letters with his published works.
The tension in both Bukharin and Berkman in matching theory and practice is also a major component of this work and has its roots in the original splits of the Russian narodnik movement on the need for a vanguard
"Unite the Left": Contextualizing Bukharin's ABC of Communism and Berkman's ABC of Anarchism (PDF)
David Hayter
Virginia Commonwealth University
THESIS
2021
Abstract
In 1919, Nikolai Bukharin, the leading theoretician of the Bolshevik Party, published a
manual entitled The ABC of Communism meant to put the governing ideology of the newly formed Soviet State into eminently readable terms. Alexander Berkman, a Russian Anarchist who strongly supported the October Revolution, became disillusioned with the new regime in 1921 and left the country. He later published his own tract entitled The ABC of Anarchism.
This thesis pits these two theoretical works against each other as historical documents
embodying the nature of leftist polemics that has characterized the movement since the
dissolution of the First International. Both Bukharin’s and Berkman’s books engage in
polemical self-definition by means of defining the other. By emphasizing Bukharin’s contributions to Bolshevism, this paper rescues the nature of the Bolshevik Party as a group of thinkers with wide-ranging beliefs in contrast to the historiographical trends that continue to emphasize Lenin as the only important figure in the party. I translate and analyze under-utilized articles that Bukharin published in New York from 1916-1917, and in Moscow in 1917 before the Revolution. In looking at Berkman’s critiques of Bolshevism in practice, the historiography of the Russian Revolution is enriched with analyses of the Party from the left, where it usually emphasizes criticism from the right. No major historiography exists on Berkman, and thus I typify his thought by reconciling his letters with his published works.
The tension in both Bukharin and Berkman in matching theory and practice is also a major component of this work and has its roots in the original splits of the Russian narodnik movement on the need for a vanguard
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