Nikolay Ivanovich Bukharin

Russian Communist Party leader (1924-1928)

• Born: October 9, 1888
• Birthplace: Moscow, Russia
• Died: March 15, 1938
• Place of death: Moscow, Soviet Union (now in Russia)

Bukharin was a leader of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the foremost theoretician of the Soviet Communist Party during its early formative years. In 1924, after the death of the party’s founder, Vladimir Ilich Lenin, Bukharin became his heir and successor until he was forced from power by Joseph Stalin in 1928.

Early Life

Nikolay Ivanovich Bukharin (NEE-koh-li i-VAHN-ohv-yihch bew-KAHR-yeen) was a precocious child who could read and write by age four. He was educated at home by his parents, who were both schoolteachers. He early developed a lifelong interest in art, nature study, and science and read widely in the Russian and European classics of literature. Later he attended a public gymnasium (secondary school), where he became acquainted with Marxist ideas, which were spreading through Russia as a form of revolutionary protest against the tyrannical conditions of the czarist regime.

When revolution broke out in 1905-1907, Bukharin led workers’ strikes and organized student demonstrations, and in 1906, he joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party led by Vladimir Ilich Lenin. In 1907, he entered the University of Moscow to study economics, and he continued his illegal party activities, for which he was arrested in 1910 and exiled to the north of Russia as punishment. He soon escaped abroad, where he remained for the next decade, working with radical socialist organizations in Europe and the United States. In New York, he met another future leader of the party, Leon Trotsky, edited a socialist Russian-language newspaper, and helped to found a revolutionary Marxist organization that later became the American Communist Party.

When the czarist government of Nicholas II was deposed by revolution in March, 1917, Bukharin returned to Russia and joined Lenin’s followers in planning the overturn of the Provisional Government that had succeeded the monarchy. When the Bolsheviks struck for power in November, 1917, Bukharin led the struggle to win Moscow for the party. Though still in his twenties, he was entrusted by Lenin with many important party and government posts, and he was elected to leading positions in various political, economic, scientific, and cultural organizations seeking to create a new Marxian-socialist order in Russia.

In 1919, Bukharin helped to organize the Third (Communist) International, which united all communist parties in the world for the purpose of carrying out international proletarian revolution, and he later became its chair. He also edited the influential newspaper Pravda, which was the ideological arm of the Russian Communist Party.

Life’s Work

Although Bukharin attained some of the highest positions in the Russian and international communist hierarchy of his day, his most important and enduring impact on the early history of Soviet communism stemmed not from the manipulation of the instruments and symbols of power but from the force and influence of his thought. A dedicated and learned Marxist, Bukharin believed that the struggle for worldwide revolution and communism had to be waged not only on the barricades but also in the minds of men, and it was to this effort that he devoted his main energies. Accordingly, he set for himself the formidable task of providing the international and Russian communist movements with a comprehensive theoretical rationale by reformulating the classical nineteenth century Marxian doctrines to accommodate developments in the world since the deaths of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Bukharin was well prepared for this effort, for he was extremely intelligent, familiar with foreign languages, well read in the classical and current literature of the West, and adept at writing and public speaking. He was also very prolific, and his written works and public speeches would, if collected in one place, fill many large volumes. These qualities led Lenin to characterize Bukharin as the “most valuable and biggest theoretician” of the Soviet Communist Party and its personal “favorite” and darling, testifying to Bukharin’s ideological influence and great popularity, particularly among the young people of Russia. Bukharin’s many theoretical works helped to shape the official doctrine of the Soviet and international communist movements. By 1925, Bukharin had written several important works, including Mirovoe khoziaistvo i imperializm (1918; Imperialism and World Economy , 1929) and K teorii imperialisticheskogo gosudarstva (1925; the theory of the imperialist state), which were two pioneering studies of how world capitalism was expected to bring on inevitable proletarian revolution leading to ultimate world communism. He had also written, with Evgeny Preobrazhnesky, Azbuka kommunizma (1921; The ABC of Communism , 1921), which was a widely circulated popular explanation of the theory and practice of Bolshevism that was translated into twenty foreign languages.

As a result of his high positions, prolific pen, and wide influence, Bukharin became the most prominent leader of the Russian Communist Party after Lenin’s death early in 1924 and was generally viewed within the Soviet Union and abroad as Lenin’s legitimate heir and successor, though the struggle for succession was not immediately resolved. By virtue of his authority as the foremost figure in the Soviet Union, Bukharin was able to persuade the party to follow a gradualist, humane policy of building socialism and eventually communism in Russia and to defeat the opposition of Trotsky and his followers, who advocated forceful, coercive measures against the workers and peasants to speed up the process of revolutionary transformation. Bukharin, in alliance with Joseph Stalin, led the ideological struggle against Trotsky and had Trotsky purged from the party and exiled from Russia in the late 1920’s.

By defeating Trotsky, however, Bukharin left himself exposed, and in 1928 Stalin turned against him. Differences between the two men concerning party policies and practices reached a crisis, and in a series of moves in 1928-1929, Stalin had Bukharin removed from power because Stalin controlled the membership and apparatus of the party. Having earlier helped to remove others from competing positions in the leadership, and having failed to build a political base himself, Bukharin was easily defeated and pushed into the shadows while Stalin launched his Five-Year Plans of rapid industrialization and enforced agricultural collectivization at great costs in human life and suffering. Bukharin waged a rear-guard struggle in the party against Stalin’s brutal policies, but, in 1936, Stalin launched the infamous purge trials intended to rid himself of his rivals. Two years later, Bukharin was accused of treason and placed on public trial. Though he was innocent, he confessed to the charges to spare his wife and son, who were promised safety if Bukharin would plead guilty. On March 14, he was declared guilty, and the following day he was executed. After his death, Stalin ordered the history of the party to be rewritten to eliminate any traces of the achievements of Bukharin and hundreds of other victims of Stalin’s terror, who became “unpersons” in the official annals of Soviet communism.

Significance

For more than thirty years following his demise, Bukharin’s name and accomplishments were obscured and repressed in the communist world, and his important contributions to the early history of the Bolshevik movement were arrogated by Stalin as his. Only since the advent of glasnost and perestroika in the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev has the historic record of Soviet communism been rectified and the record of Bukharin’s life and career cleared of the Stalinist distortions. In 1988, Bukharin was posthumously exonerated of the charges of treason and restored to honor in the annals of the party, and his writings were again circulated in the Soviet Union.

Many of Bukharin’s prescriptions for developing socialism gradually by means of a mixed collectivist and private system of enterprises acquired new relevance when Gorbachev came to power in 1985 and initiated his radical reforms of the highly centralized command economy inherited from the Stalinist and Brezhnev eras. There has also been renewed interest in Bukharin’s philosophical and theoretical ideas, which mark him as one of the most original thinkers of the twentieth century and one of the most important and influential disciples of Marx and Engels.

Bibliography

Cohen, Stephen F. Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973. A masterful study of Bukharin’s life and thought viewed against the background of Soviet and international events of his day, on which he exercised a major influence.

Heitman, Sidney. Nikolai I. Bukharin: A Bibliography. Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1969. A comprehensive guide to Bukharin’s numerous written works and speeches, published in twenty languages throughout the world. It also includes notations and the locations of each item in major Western libraries.

Hostettler, John. Law and Terror in Stalin’s Russia. Chichester, England: Barry Rose, 2003. This overview of Russia in the time of Stalin includes the chapter “The Trial of Bukharin.”

Katkov, George. The Trial of Bukharin. Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.: Stein & Day, 1969. This book is an account of Bukharin’s life and career leading up to his infamous treason trial in 1938. It reveals, among other things, the inner workings of the Stalinist regime by focusing on the power struggles in the Soviet Communist Party culminating in the purges of the 1930’s.

Medvedev, Roy A. Nikolai Bukharin: The Last Years. Translated by A. D. P. Briggs. New York: W. W. Norton, 1980. This account deals with the hitherto little-known last decade of Bukharin’s life and thought, when he was relegated by Stalin to obscurity and disgrace in the Soviet Communist Party. It is written by a leading Soviet dissident historian, who had access to documents and witnesses unavailable to Western writers.

Nicolaevsky, Boris I. Power and the Soviet Elite. Edited by Janet D. Zagoria. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1965. A collection of essays by an émigré Russian scholar who knew Lenin, Bukharin, Stalin, and other Soviet leaders personally. One of its main thrusts is to show that the policies advocated by Bukharin in the 1920’s were those Lenin would have followed, had he lived past 1924, contrary to the claims of Stalin.

“Nikolai Bukharin and the New Economic Policy.” Independent Review 2, no. 1 (Summer, 1997): 79. Examines the Soviet’s plan for a “new economics,” which was espoused by Bukharin in the 1920’s.

Tarbuck, Kenneth J. Bukharin’s Theory of Equilibrium: A Defense of “Historical Materialism.” London: Pluto Press, 1989. This study by a British Marxist examines Bukharin’s interpretation of classical Marxian philosophy and refutes the claim that Bukharin held unorthodox or incorrect views, as claimed by Stalin and some noncommunist writers. The book is one example of the renaissance of interest in Bukharin’s life and thought since his rehabilitation in the annals of history.