Bukharin – A Bonhomie Bolshevik

By Dr. Myron Kuropas

If ever there was an affable Bolshevik, it was Nikolai Bukharin, once described as “favourite of the party” by Vladimir Lenin.

Bukharin had a multi-faceted career.  Born in 1887, he attended Moscow University, became a Bolshevik in 1906, and was arrested by the Czarist police.  Freed, he moved to Vienna and wrote polemical articles.  He reportedly assisted Stalin in the writing of “Marxism and the National Question”, a treatise establishing Bolshevik policy regarding national autonomy.  He also wrote poetry.

During World War I, Bukharin was arrested as a “Russian spy” and expelled to Switzerland.  Later he moved to Sweden, and then to Norway.  He eventually ended up in New York City where he became editor of Noviy Mir (New World), a Russian language newspaper.  Following the February Revolution [of 1917], he returned to Russia via Japan, rejoining his Bolshevik comrades in Moscow.  He became editor of Pravda in 1917, co-wrote The ABC of Communism in 1920, followed by The Theory of Historical Materialism in 1921.  He became a favourite of Lenin and, for a time, of Stalin, who called him “Bukhashka”.

Following Lenin’s stroke, two leading Jewish Bolsheviks, Grigory Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev, joined forces with Stalin to ease Leon Trotsky out of the Communist Party and, eventually out the country.  With Trotsky stymied, Stalin turned on his two erstwhile allies, and, with the help of Bukharin, began to undermine them.  After a 1935 promise by Stalin that they would not be shot if they confessed, Zinoviev and Kamenev admitted to monstrous crimes against the State.  In 1936, both were tried publicly and executed. Trotsky was exiled and later murdered while living in Mexico. 

By 1938, Bukharin himself was accused of being a “Trotskyite”.  Tried during a show trial, he was executed within days.  The New York Times declared that Soviet trial was fair. Asked on one occasion how he could so callously treat his former comrades, Stalin replied, “loyalty is a malady that affects dogs.” 

In a recently published book by Paul R. Gregory titled Politics, Murder and Love in Stalin’s Kremlin: The Story of NIkolai Bukharin and Anna Larina, we learn more about Lenin’s golden boy.  Nikolai, it turns out was one of the few Bolsheviks who protested Stalin’s forced collectivization in Ukraine which led to the Holodomor and the death of some 7 million men, women and children.

Bukharin’s falling out with Stalin began in the late 1920s when he questioned Stalin’s “extraordinary measures” in the Ukrainian countryside. Mindful of the danger of angering the Soviet dictator, Bukharin was still popular enough in 1929 to marshal some support from members of the Soviet Politburo.  At what turned out to be the last free-wheeling plenum of the Central Committee on April 16-23, Bukharin accused Stalin of demanding a “tribute” from the peasants in order to build Soviet industrial might.  The following exchange took place:

Bukharin:  Why does Stalin insist on tribute - a clear mistake?

Stalin: And if Lenin used that expression?

Bukharin: There is nothing resembling Stalin’s tribute in Lenin.

Stalin: That is not so.

Bukharin; No, it is so.  The proletariat is not an exploiter of peasants and cannot be.  To play with such terms is illiterate and harmful.

Stalin denied Bukharin’s charge that “tribute” was a form of “exploitation”.  “I am speaking about a kind of tax, a redistribution of resources from agriculture to industrialization,” he declared.  “To accept Bukharin’s arguments, Stalin insisted, “the State would have to keep raising prices until the peasants were satisfied and the exploitive power of the kulaks would increase.” 

Bukharin had crossed his Rubicon.  He had openly disagreed with Stalin.  At age forty-one, Bukharin’s career was at an end.

Stalin went ahead with forced collectivization and left Bukharin to ponder his fate.  Demoted to a minor industrial post, Bukharin travelled through Ukraine “where”, writes Paul Gregory, “he saw children begging at train stations and famine everywhere.  When he returned to Moscow, he collapsed, sobbing on the couch...” Bukharin had been to the Holodomor.  Nevertheless, he still wanted a role in Communist Party affairs and continued to curry favour with Stalin. 

Diagnosed with a serious lung disease, Bukharin was eventually ordered to the Crimea by his doctor.  It was there that he began to woo the lovely Anna Larina, the sixteen-year old step-daughter of a minor Bolshevik official recovering his health at the same sanatorium.  Four years later, Anna and Nikolai were married.  They had a son, Iurij.

Bukharin’s efforts to kiss and make-up with Stalin, meanwhile, failed.  Arrested, he confessed and then recanted. During his show trial, he mocked the proceedings.  Convicted of espionage, he was executed in March 1938.  Saved from death by Beria, Larina was sent to the Gulag, her son to an orphanage.  Mother and son were reunited in 1956.  Bukharin was rehabilitated in 1988.