NIKOLAI BUKHARIN: ALTERNATIVE OR INTERREGNUM?
Anthony Stephen Novosel, Ph.D.
University of Pittsburgh, 2005
This dissertation examines the claims that Nikolai Bukharin was an inconsistent Marxist
theoretician, at times “un-Marxist” in his thinking who radically altered his political philosophy
to justify his support for such different policies as War Communism and the New Economic
Policy. It also investigates the validity of the accepted wisdom that Bukharin represented a
“liberal” alternative to Stalin and Stalinism within Bolshevism and that, by 1925, he had moved
to the Right of the Party.
This study begins by examining the conflicting visions of the state and the evolutionary
and revolutionary strains within Marxism. It then studies the works of those Marxist thinkers, of
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whose work on the state, revolution and the
transition to socialism significantly influenced Bukharin’s work. Finally, it subjects Bukharin’s
major theoretical works on imperialism, revolution and the role of the state in the transition to
socialism, between 1915-1925, to an in-depth analysis to determine the validity of the claims
made about Bukharin and his works.
While one can still argue that Bukharin may have acted differently from Stalin once in
power, this dissertation demonstrates that Bukharin was consistent in his theoretical work on the
revolution and the transition to socialism. This study also conclusively demonstrates that 
Bukharin was located within the heart of both Marxism and Bolshevism and did not move to the
Right during the NEP. It clearly shows that Bukharin’s support for War Communism and the
NEP flowed directly from his original synthesis of the revolutionary and evolutionary strains
within Marxism, and the need for a powerful, proletarian state, “The Dictatorship of the
Proletariat,” that would manage the socialization of antagonistic petit-bourgeois elements into
socialism, build socialism economically, and do whatever was necessary to protect the
Revolution from its internal and external enemies. Thus, in reality, Bukharin, the “liberal
alternative,” provided the philosophical foundation and justification for the use of unlimited state
power, which in the hands of Stalin led to the “Revolution from Above” and from this
perspective one can locate Bukharin as the philosophical interregnum between Lenin and Stalin. 

The Captain Goes Down With The Ship:

Why Nikolai Bukharin Committed Political Suicide by Defending
 the New Economic Policy (NEP)
Brenden Woldman