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International Communist Party, often known pejoratively as the Stern Gang, was a left communist paramilitary militant organization founded by Avraham ("Yair") Stern in Mandatory Palestine. Its avowed aim was to evict the British authorities from Palestine by use of violence, allowing unrestricted immigration of Jews and the formation of a Jewish state. It was initially called the National Military Organization in Israel, upon being founded in August 1940, but was renamed Lehi one month later. The group referred to its members as terrorists and admitted to having carried out acts of terrorism.

Lehi split from the Irgun militant group in 1940 in order to continue fighting the British during World War II. It initially sought an alliance with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Believing that Nazi Germany was a lesser enemy of the Jews than Britain, Lehi twice attempted to form an alliance with the Nazis, proposing a Jewish state based on "nationalist and totalitarian principles, and linked to the German Reich by an alliance". After Stern's death in 1942, the new leadership of Lehi began to move towards support for Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union and the ideology of National Bolshevism, which was considered an amalgam of both right and left. Regarding themselves as "revolutionary Socialists", the new Lehi developed a highly original ideology combining an "almost mystical" belief in Greater Israel with support for the Arab liberation struggle. This sophisticated ideology failed to gain public support and Lehi fared poorly in the first Israeli elections.

In April of 1948, Lehi and the Irgun were jointly responsible for the massacre in Deir Yassin of at least 107 Palestinian Arab villagers, including women and children. Lehi assassinated Lord Moyne, British Minister Resident in the Middle East, and made many other attacks on the British in Palestine. On 29 May 1948, the government of Israel, having inducted its activist members into the Israel Defense Forces, formally disbanded Lehi, though some of its members carried out one more terrorist act, the assassination of Folke Bernadotte some months later, an act condemned by Bernadotte's replacement as mediator, Ralph Bunche. After the assassination, the new Israeli government declared Lehi a terrorist organization, arresting some 200 members and convicting some of the leaders. Just before the first Israeli elections in January 1949, a general amnesty to Lehi members was granted by the government. In 1980, Israel instituted a military decoration, an "award for activity in the struggle for the establishment of Israel", the Lehi ribbon. Former Lehi leader Yitzhak Shamir became Prime Minister of Israel in 1983.

"Bukharin" redirects here. For the Russian anarchist, see Mikhail Bakunin. For the Jewish ethnic group, see Bukharan Jews.

In this name that follows Eastern Slavic naming customs, the patronymic is Ivanovich and the family name is Bukharin.

Nikolai Bukharin
Николай Бухарин
Bukharin in the 1920s
General Secretary of the Executive Committee of the Communist International
In office November 1926 – April 1929
Preceded by	Grigori Zinoviev
Succeeded by	Vyacheslav Molotov
Editor-in-chief of Pravda
In office November 1918 – April 1929
Preceded by	Joseph Stalin
Succeeded by	Mikhail Olminsky
Full member of the 13th, 14th, 15th Politburo
In office 2 June 1924 – 17 November 1929
Candidate member of the 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th Politburo
In office 8 March 1919 – 2 June 1924
Personal details
Born	Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (1888-10-09)9 October 1888 Moscow, Russian Empire
Died	15 March 1938(1938-03-15) (aged 49) Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Cause of death	Execution by firing squad
Resting place	Kommunarka shooting ground
Political party	RSDLP (Bolsheviks) (1906–1918) CPSU (1918–1937)
Spouses	Nadezhda Lukin Esfir' Gurvich Anna Larina
Children	2
Alma mater	Imperial Moscow University (1911)

Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (Russian: Николай Иванович Бухарин, IPA: [nʲɪkɐˈlaj ɪˈvanəvʲɪt͡ɕ bʊˈxarʲɪn]; 9 October [O.S. 27 September] 1888 – 15 March 1938) was a Russian revolutionary, Soviet politician, and Marxist theorist. A prominent Bolshevik described by Vladimir Lenin as a "most valuable and major theorist" of the Communist Party, Bukharin was active in the Soviet leadership from 1917 to his purge in the 1930s.

Bukharin joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1906, and studied economics at Moscow Imperial University. In 1910, he was arrested and internally exiled to Onega, but the following year escaped abroad, where he met Lenin and Leon Trotsky and built his reputation with works such as Imperialism and World Economy (1915). After the February Revolution of 1917, Bukharin returned to Moscow and became a leading figure in the party, and after the October Revolution became editor of its newspaper, Pravda. He led the Left Communist faction in 1918, and during the civil war wrote The ABC of Communism (1920; with Yevgeni Preobrazhensky) and Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology (1921), among other works.

Bukharin was initially a proponent of war communism, but in 1921 supported the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) and became its chief theorist and advocate, supporting the party leadership against Trotsky and the Left Opposition. By late 1924, this stance had positioned Bukharin favourably as Joseph Stalin's chief ally, with Bukharin soon elaborating Stalin's theory of "socialism in one country". From 1926 to 1929, Bukharin served as General Secretary of the Comintern's executive committee. Following Stalin's decision to proceed with agricultural collectivisation in the Great Break, Bukharin was labelled as the leader of the Right Opposition and was removed from Pravda, the Comintern, and the party leadership in 1929.

After a period in lower positions, in 1934 Bukharin was reelected to the Central Committee and became editor of the newspaper Izvestia. He was a principal architect of the 1936 Soviet Constitution. During the Great Purge, Bukharin was accused of treason in February 1937 and executed after a show trial in 1938.

Before 1917

Nikolai Bukharin was born on 27 September (9 October, new style), 1888, in Moscow. He was the second son of two schoolteachers, Ivan Gavrilovich Bukharin and Liubov Ivanovna Bukharina. According to Nikolai his father did not believe in God and often asked him to recite poetry for family friends as young as four years old. 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 they participated in student activities at Moscow University related to the Russian Revolution of 1905. His political life began at high school, but not right away (he was only thirteen years old!). He first experienced three years of academic success. But the political atmosphere is changing in Russia and it is also changing in high school. Students have school magazine projects that are censored; discussion circles are formed; Pissarev's ideas, the populism of the revolutionary socialists and the Marxism of the social democrats are discussed there. Nikolai participated in this political life from the age of sixteen (in 1904) with an impressive number of young people who would be found throughout the history of the revolution (among them: Sokolnikov and Ehrenburg).

In his brief autobiography from 1925, Bukharin recalls this encounter with “illegal” literature and how he first adhered intellectually to Marxism: “At first, reading economic theory left a painful impression on me. After the beautiful and the magnificent, “it was merchandise-value-commodity” [dubious translation, the German translation gives: money –– merchandise –– money!]. But penetrating in medias res into Marxist theory, I felt its unusual logical harmony. I must say that it is undoubtedly this trait which influenced me more than anything. The theories of the “socialist-revolutionaries” seemed to me to be pure mush. The liberals I knew inspired me to violently protest against liberalism”. He joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1906, and became a member of its Bolshevik faction. With Grigori Sokolnikov, Bukharin convened the 1907 national youth conference in Moscow, which was later considered the founding of Komsomol.

By age twenty, he was a member of the Moscow Committee of the party. The committee was widely 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 Valerian Obolensky and Vladimir Smirnov. He 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 in 1911, soon after returning from internal exile. Bukharin chose in 1907 to study economics at the law faculty of Moscow University. He himself says that these studies served as a cover for his clandestine political work. But, according to his university record, for the 9 exams he took between May 1908 (history of philosophy) and September 1910 (probability theory) he obtained five “very good” and four “good” grades  . Bukharin had not lost his capacity for academic success.

His activity and political responsibilities are growing. Thus, with Grigori Sokolnikov, he organized a congress of social democratic youth and students in 1907. In his twentieth year, in 1908, he was co-opted as a member of the Moscow Party Committee (he was confirmed a year later)  . In this difficult period of ebb after the great movements of 1905, there are many debates between tendencies and within each tendency among the social democrats. Bukharin, for his part, says that he remained constantly an “orthodox” Bolshevik, that is to say, neither an “otzovist” (partisan of recalling deputies), nor a “conciliator” or “liquidator”  . He therefore does not approve of the political choices of Alexander Bogdanov who is in favor of boycotting the Duma, but he is passionate about his philosophical, sociological and literary works which Plekhanov and Lenin reject. Finally, he will be one of the first activists who will suspect Roman Malinovsky (the leader of the Bolshevik deputies in the Duma) of being an agent of the Okhrana.

In fact, he was quickly tracked by the political police and their informers. His position quickly became untenable, leaving him with only the choice between exile far from Russia or prison. His first arrest took place on May 23 (June 5), 1909, during a meeting of ten members of the Party Committee in an apartment. He was imprisoned in overcrowded cells, but was released on July 10 (23). The Okhrana wants to follow him and find other activists... Nikolai Ivanovich takes advantage of his freedom to take an exam in the history of Roman law on August 28 (September 10). He was arrested again on November 12 (25) and spent three months in cells at the Arbat police station. The Moscow Okhrana is investigating the workers' club of which he is an organizer and which will be closed in June 1910. He takes advantage of a new moment of freedom to take two exams (international law and history of economic facts) on April 26 and 28 (9 and 11 May) 1910. He also participated in the organization of a student demonstration (3000 people) and in the writing of 3 or 4 issues of a trade unionist newspaper. It was at this time that he met (three times) Duma deputy Roman Malinovsky. He takes two more exams in statistics and probability theory on September 15 and 28 (September 28 and October 11).

On December 19, 1910 (January 1, 1911) Bukharin was arrested for the third time. The Okhrana wants to prevent a demonstration planned for January 9 (22). This time, he was expelled from the University and remained in prison for a long time (nearly six months). By bribing the guards at the police station where he was locked up for three months, he was able to receive visitors and read books. He taunts the guards by drawing and redrawing portraits of Marx on the cell walls. It is there that he is informed of the suspicions of four fellow prisoners about Malinovsky's betrayal. After a transfer to Butyrka prison, he initially hoped that he would be relegated to the Arkhangelsk region and made plans to settle there with his cousin and party comrade, Nadezhda Mikhailovna Lukina. He married her in 1911, on a date unknown to his biographers, probably without ceremony, perhaps at the time when, after paying a deposit, he managed to organize his own trip to Onega, near Arkhangelsk. Understanding that Tsarist justice was going to condemn him to prison, he changed his plans: he left for internal exile, taking advantage of semi-freedom (June 21) to escape as soon as possible (he disappeared from Onega August 30).

In 1911, after a brief imprisonment, Bukharin was exiled to Onega in Arkhangelsk, but he soon escaped to Hanover. He stayed in Germany for a year before visiting Kraków (Poland) in 1912 to meet Vladimir Lenin for the first time. During the exile, he continued his education and wrote several books that established him in his 20s as a major Bolshevik theorist. From 1912 to 1914, Bukharin wanted to develop a "systematic critique of the theoretical economics of the newest bourgeoisie" in Vienna. To do this, he studied the literature of the theorists of the Austrian School of Economics, especially Eugen Böhm von Bawerk , who was teaching in Vienna at the time. He attended several lectures on the topic of marginal utility theory . The result of this systematic critique - the manuscripts for his book The Political Economy of the Pensioner - were confiscated by the Austrian police at the outbreak of the First World War. Bukharin was forced to flee.

He continued his work in Lausanne and finally published his book. The political economy of pensioners was considered a handbook of the market mechanism. His concern: the systematic criticism of the marginal utility theory . In it he also describes and criticizes the "socially superfluous" way of life of the "pensioner bourgeoisie".

In 1913, he met Joseph Stalin in Vienna , whom he helped as an interpreter. Soon after the outbreak of the First World War , he published a Russian newspaper called Zvezda (Star) together with Nikolai Krylenko and Elena Rosmirovich. 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. The theorists of the Second International, such as Rudolf Hilferding and Karl Kautsky , argued that the outbreak of World War was merely a deviation from the normal development of capitalism. Socialism could only be achieved in peaceful times, and until then the workers had to step up to protect their own fatherland. For them, imperialism was not an economic phase, but a short phase of capitalist policy that ran counter to the economic trend. However, due to the normal and peaceful development of capitalism, this policy would soon be replaced by the capitalist development towards "ultra-imperialism", in which major wars between nation states would be a thing of the past due to internationalization.

Kautsky argued:

“ There is no economic necessity for the continuation of the arms race after the World War, not even from the standpoint of the capitalist class itself, with the exception of certain arms interests. On the contrary, the capitalist economy is seriously threatened by precisely these conflicts. Every far-sighted capitalist must call out to his comrades today: Capitalists of all countries, unite! ”

Bukharin countered this argument and claimed that

that imperialism is a continuation of capitalist competition on a world scale, inherent in the nature of capitalism. According to Bukharin, the world economy can be defined "as a system of production relations and corresponding exchange relations on an international scale. "

Bukharin identified two processes in this: the internationalization and the nationalization of capital:

A world market with world prices, with world supply and world demand has emerged. The social division of labor is no longer taking place only within a nation state, but more and more on an international level. In the future, a difference will increasingly emerge between advanced industrial states and backward agrarian states. The capitalist contradictions that exist within nation states will not simply disappear, they will be reproduced on a larger, international level. This means that capitalist crises will now arise on a global level.

But at the same time as internationalization, another process of nationalization is taking place. The tendency towards concentration and centralization of capital and the organization of capital through the fusion of industrial capital and banking capital into finance capital " create an extraordinarily strong tendency towards the transformation of the entire national economy into a huge combined enterprise under the direction of the financial magnates and the capitalist state ."

For Bukharin, the national economic units now took the form of " state capitalist trusts ," thereby anticipating the theory of state monopoly capitalism formulated by Lenin in 1916. The goals of the capitalist economy and the capitalist state were no longer just connected with each other, as in the past, they were actually intertwined organizationally. This intertwining now included a new method of conflict in competitive struggle - the armed struggle between nation states, the imperialist war. The capitalist competition between the individual capital units ensured that the possibility of peaceful capitalist development postulated by Kautsky no longer existed.

Bukharin emphasized the contrast between advanced industrial states (state capitalist trusts) and underdeveloped agrarian states:

“ The difference between ‘town’ and ‘country’ and the ‘movement of this opposition’, which previously took place within the borders of a country, is now reproduced on a vastly expanded scale. From this point of view, entire countries – namely the industrial countries – already appear as ‘towns’, while the agrarian areas represent the ‘countryside’. ”

This theory anticipated later theories of the emergence of a Third World , but neglected the inequalities within individual countries. Furthermore, Bukharin believed that the state capitalist trusts could only be disrupted from outside.

There are no longer any contradictory developments within it: “ The process of organization gradually eliminates the anarchy between the individual components of the national economic mechanisms. ” Capitalism was no longer understood as a contradictory system of social relations, but as a system of organization.

He thought of the final stage of capitalism and portrayed it as a uniform structure:

“ A system of collective capitalism is created… The independent capitalist state disappears: it becomes an association capitalist, a member of an organization: it no longer has to compete, but cooperate with its compatriots; … intra-state competition dies out. ”

This thesis ran counter to the views of the "Second International" around Kautsky. According to Bukharin, the state could not simply be taken over because it was inextricably intertwined with the economy; it had to be destroyed.

His theory was intended to provide a new view of the possible forms that capitalism could take. Capitalism was not only determined by private property, it was possible for capitalism to take such state capitalist forms without losing its exploitative nature. Ironically, he also provided an analysis of the economic conditions in Stalin's Russia that corresponded more closely to reality than his analysis of the "socialist" Stalinist USSR. Bukharin was thus a pioneer of a theory of state capitalism .

He and Lenin also often had hot disputes on theoretical issues, as well as Bukharin's closeness with the European Left and his anti-statist tendencies. Bukharin developed an interest in the works of Austrian Marxists and heterodox Marxist economic theorists, such as Aleksandr Bogdanov, who deviated from Leninist positions. Also, while in Vienna in 1913, he helped the Georgian Bolshevik Joseph Stalin write an article, "Marxism and the National Question", at Lenin's request.

In Baugy, Bukharin joined Nikolai Krylenko, Alexandr Trojanovski and Elena Rozmirovitch. In the fall of 1914, Baugy's group planned to publish a new magazine in Zurich, Zvezda (The Star). Lenin and Zinoviev are opposed to this: a second newspaper, in addition to the Sotsial-Demokrat which they control, means a second line in the party. The Baugy group, which Georgi Piatakov and Evgenia Bosch joined, thus began a period of difficult relations with the external leadership of the RSDLP(b).

The idea of ​​a new review was temporarily postponed, but a new incident occurred at the conference of foreign sections of the RSDLP(b) meeting in Bern (February 27 - March 4, 1915).

The exiled Bolsheviks who had to find refuge in Switzerland or in still neutral countries, such as Scandinavia or the United States, agreed with Lenin in launching a call to transform the imperialist war into a civil war. Bukharin and his friends, however, want to make their voices heard. They propose “theses” where they defend the combination of the slogan of the civil war with those of peace and the United States of Europe . On the other hand, they reject the slogan of the defeat of Russia , even presenting it as “a lesser evil”. Finally, they want an agreement with the most internationalist social democrats like Trotsky. Furthermore, Bukharin argues that "the center of gravity of the proletariat's struggle must shift from the sphere of struggles for general democratic demands to the sphere of the socialist demands of the proletariat." However, he sets Russia apart: democratic slogans are still at the “center of gravity” there, except the right of nations to self-determination which becomes utopian within the limits of capitalism  . Baugy's group remained isolated during the Conference and Bukharin only obtained participation in the synthesis commission which would take up Lenin's theses, ultimately voted on unanimously.

Despite these disagreements, Baugy's group's relations with Lenin improved because, for a few months, they worked together to launch a new magazine called Kommunist . In fact, Lenin and Zinoviev no longer have any money while Trojanovsky has some. Bukharin participates in the enterprise by proposing a “sketch” of his new research project: The world economy and imperialism . The article will appear in September 1915, in ^{issues no.} 1-2  of Kommunist (the only one published), with a new version of the “theses” written with Piatakov and Bosch on the slogan of the right of nations to self-determination.

But on this date, Bukharin had already left Switzerland to go to Sweden. He is making this trip to accompany his wife, Nadezhda Mikhailovna, who has decided to return to Russia to treat her diabetes. Bukharin's biographers do not say when Nadezhda Mikhailovna arrived in Switzerland, but letters from Bukharin cited by Hedeler tell us that to pay for the care required by his wife's illness Nikolai Ivanovich had to give mathematics lessons and that, when her condition deteriorates and she decides to return to Russia, he asks all his friends and acquaintances to find 100 (Swiss) francs. Bukharin stayed three months in Oslo and his biographers complained of having little information: the police had not compiled a file on him... He was expelled with Piatakov and Bosch and it was with them that he rented a attic. He met the Norwegian social democrat Hansen  and wrote articles for the local press ( Klassekampen and Politiken ).

The essential fact is that during the first months of 1916 relations with Lenin and Zinoviev took an increasingly polemical turn. The preparation of a ^No. 3  of the Kommunist was unsuccessful. Lenin reacted very strongly against the ideas of Piatakov and his friends on the national question and against the initiatives of the "Japanese" (this is a name he gave to the Baugy group) which he considered contrary to the discipline of left. He no longer wants to have anything to do with “Kievsky” (Pyatakov).

Bukharin's case is a little different. The fragments of correspondence that have been preserved show a desire for reciprocal cooperation. In relation to the Bolshevik program, Bukharin wanted, for example, to "open a discussion" on the respective roles during the future revolution of a socialist revolutionary government and a democratically elected Assembly, but he agreed with the objective of a direct takeover of power by the socialists. On the question of imperialism convergence was claimed: Bukharin had entrusted the complete manuscript of The World Economy and Imperialism to Lenin so that he could write a preface (which he did in January 1916, welcoming the "scientific value" of this work, and he took the opportunity to devote four of the seven paragraphs of this preface to a critique of Kautsky's superimperialism).

Lenin had decided to publish a Collection of the Social Democrat in place of the Kommunist and Bukharin was to provide an article on imperialism. It is this article which will crystallize the conflict. In July 1916, when Lenin received the text of Towards a Theory of the Imperialist State  , he immediately refused it. He sees this as confirmation of a serious disagreement on the question of the State. As he suspected, Bukharin is a semi-anarchist who wants to destroy the State too quickly during the revolution itself. Bukharin, in fact, not only describes the development of the state apparatus of state capitalism, he says that the revolution must break it before rebuilding the state of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin, more intransigent than Zinoviev at that moment, refused to “open a discussion” and took it upon himself to write a letter of refusal. Bukharin will receive her in Copenhagen.

Lenin's brief letter written in August  is very unclear. She stacks up the reasons for refusal. Materially, there is no more room in the number; part of the text is too superficial; another is publishable in a legal journal; finally come reproaches: the quotes from Engels are cut, Lenin asks what is the meaning of four expressions (they visibly contain words borrowed from Bogdanov like "sociology", "organization" and "general") and the distinction between Marxists and anarchists on the problem of the State is “absolutely inaccurate”. Final advice: rework and publish the “legal” part, “  let the rest mature”.

Bukharin reacted very strongly to this letter and to a letter from Zinoviev in which his “semi-anarchism” was discussed. His letter has disappeared, but Lenin echoes him in a longer and “gentler” letter of October 14, 1916  . Bukharin is indignant because his correspondents take him for an adversary of any minimum program, criticize his semi-anarchism as if he ignored the necessity of the State of the dictatorship of the proletariat and accuse him of cutting his quotes without him say where and what… Lenin wants to smooth things over and keep good relations with Bukharin who is about to leave for the USA. He is counting on him to strengthen his contacts with the exiles in America. He tells him how much he appreciates him (at his "fair value"), and that he would be "happy if the controversy continued only with Kievsky", but, even in a "gentle" letter, he cannot refrain from reprimanding him in a fatherly and masterful tone: “You are no longer reasoning… You are seething… You are missing the target…”. He denies having spoken of heresy or semi-anarchism  and he affirms that he indicated “very precisely” the errors that he noted (he gave a simple list). But for the quotes, he still doesn't say where the "cuts" are! Finally, noting that Bukharin maintains that the quoted sentences are not “susceptible to any other interpretation” than his own, Lenin writes: “We insist precisely on the ‘interpretation’”. It is obvious that, for him, it is indeed their interpretation that the disputed quotations are allegedly “cut”… The following year Lenin wrote The State and the Revolution and changed his interpretation.

Bukharin, on board the ship which took him to America, on October 21, 1916, also wrote a conciliatory letter: he regretted that their differences of opinion had not been resolved, he loved him as his master and hoped that he there would be no break between them. But he had no intention of giving up publishing his ideas about the imperialist state and the need to break it through revolution.

One aspect of Bukharin's stay in Denmark remains obscure: According to Hedeler, Nadezhda Mikhailovna came to Copenhagen during the summer of 1916, but he does not say when she left, nor where... What seems certain is that she was not with her husband when he had to return to Kristiania-Oslo to take his boat and cross the Atlantic.

In October 1916, while based in New York City, Bukharin 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 of the émigrés to greet him. (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"). Bukharin's first article in the newspaper Novyj mir appeared immediately after his landing, on November 7, 1916. Novyj mir is the daily newspaper of the Russian-speaking section of the Socialist Party of America , it is directed by Dr. Ingerman, a Menshevik, and its editor in chief is Novomirski, who comes from anarcho-syndicalism. Bukharin comes to strengthen the group of Bolshevik editors. The newspaper was open to various currents of socialism and this Bolshevik newcomer was immediately integrated, as was Trotsky (then an internationalist Menshevik) when he arrived in January 1917. On November 11, NI published its second article, A New Slavery , where he takes up his ideas on the need to break the imperialist state during the revolution. Novomirsky reacted against this idea and, for a month, Bukharin and his editor-in-chief exchanged their arguments on this subject.

Based on the information given by Hedeler, one can attempt to present the debate: The editor-in-chief of the newspaper argues that socialists must use the modern state and therefore retain it to govern an economically underdeveloped Russia. Bukharin first responds by refusing discussion: he rejects all of Novomirsky's arguments and accuses him of conceiving the socialist state as a classless state. However, a proletarian class state can only establish the Dictatorship of the Proletariat by breaking the organization of the bourgeoisie (CQFD). Novomirski relaunches the debate by observing that the young Bolshevik editor does not only intend to “break the State”, he also wants to “hand over the assets of the trusts to the people”: what will we do in concrete terms with a “broken” State? Bukharin responds and, ultimately, sets out his way of thinking more clearly. What is decisive is the world revolutionary situation. In the current phase of the history of capitalism, the imperialist state has merged with big capital into a unified organization that could hardly be improved and which war has militarized and made even more oppressive. The conflict between the “state capitalist trusts” has escalated to world war and can only be resolved in a world socialist revolution. Hedeler notes that, in the articles in Novyj mir , Bukharin "always starts from the idea of ​​a maximum exacerbation and sudden resolution of contradictions in a tumultuous, erratic, catastrophic and conflicting era." In this world there is no balance and revolution will not restore it anytime soon.

Subject to direct access to the texts, we can conclude from the information given by Hedeler that Novomirsky seems to understand two things: Bukharin thinks, 1° that state capitalism has socialized the production and distribution of wealth in a way " which can hardly be improved” (by the socialists) and, 2° that the socialists must take power (to end the war). In other words: 1° it “absolutizes and makes autonomous the highest state of development of a society” and, 2° it “coagulates a historical process at a point: the moment of revolutionary overthrow”. Bukharin had found a competent opponent capable of detecting in him the traits of a "revolutionary metaphysician... who did not understand the historical method."

Lenin, who was informed of what was happening in New York by A. Kollontai, made a comment in a letter dated December 18, 1916 to I. Armand: “We have received yet another issue of Novyj mir from New York. There is a criticism there – alas, alas, fair! – the misfortune is that a Menshevik is right against Bukharin!! »

In fact, between November and December 1916, Bukharin led a real campaign for his ideas, those that Lenin, in August, had recommended to him to “let mature”. Under the signature of Nota Bene , he published in Zurich in No. ⁶  of The Youth International (December 1, 1916, pp. 7-9) an abridged German version of his article on the theory of the imperialist state. The same text, a little more cut, is reproduced, under his signature, in the Bremen newspaper Arbeiterpolitik , December 9, 1916, pp. 193-195.

Lenin immediately wrote a note on the Youth International for the December Social Democratic Digest. An “organ of youth”, that “stands for itself” has “yet neither clarity nor theoretical firmness”, but we must criticize “in all camaraderie” its errors and in particular those of NB... The first “inaccuracy » concerns the difference between socialists and anarchists. Lenin took advantage of a cut made by the German edition in Bukharin's Russian text (which he knew) and he reproached him for having "forgotten the essential": "the socialists want to use the modern State" and the dictatorship of the proletariat is “also a state”. In the original article, Bukharin said this too! Lenin denies that the socialists want, like the anarchists, to “abolish” the State, to “blow it up”: according to him, they only envisage a gradual “withering away”, “after the expropriation of the bourgeoisie”. Second reproach: NB wrote “The current war has shown how deep roots the idea of ​​the State has grown in the minds of the workers.” This is a “completely confusing” phrase to express how “opportunist politics” collided with “revolutionary social democratic politics.” Here again, it is exactly this opposition between the two workers' policies towards the State that Bukharin had developed in the Russian text and summarized with an ironically "idealist" formula in the German summary... Lenin ends by announcing "an article special” on this “extremely important” issue  . The preparatory “  Blue Notebook  ” for this unfinished article will be used in the writing of The State and the Revolution , during the summer of 1917.

Bukharin, in less than six months, published 35 articles in Novyj mir (he sent one more from Moscow in August 1917). He defends the Bolshevik point of view (in his own version, as we have seen). He would like to organize a conference of socialist organizations and groups in America to bring out the internationalists from the Socialist Party of America and he intervenes in the debates of this party which, for the moment, is his since it is that of his readers. On January 10, 1917, for example, he attacked the right-wing leadership of the SPA which forgot that the real internationalists were in the Zimmerwald group  . His plans will come to an end for two reasons. On January 13, 1917, with his family, Trotsky arrived in New York and he would immediately have an influence unfavorable to that of Bukharin on the New York internationalist milieu. Less than two months later, it was the start of the Russian Revolution and the signal for the return of the exiles.

Bukharin warmly welcomes Trotsky  and immediately wants to show him one of the wonders of the megalopolis: a large library open until late in the evening (where Trotsky will go to obtain information to give the 35 conferences that a friend has scheduled for him...). On January 14, Trotsky took part in a meeting of around twenty left-wing socialists, including Bukharin, to discuss an “action program”. Bukharin expected the acceleration of a split among the Zimmerwald internationalists, but Trotsky had other ideas: there was still a working base to conquer in the SPA and a weekly publication should be launched. Trotsky is the most convincing.

A month later, on February 17, at an “international conference of socialist organizations and groups” – the one that Bukharin wanted to bring together – it was again Trotsky who was the most influential and if the conference decided to formally join Zimmerwald's left, she does not commit to conquering the editorial office of Novyj mir, as Bukharin seems to have had the project  . On March 4, as the USA entered the war, Trotsky and Louis Fraina supported a resolution of active resistance to mobilization which was not adopted by the Manhattan section of the SPA . Bukharin was in Chicago that day.

Indeed, at the end of February, Bukharin set out, on behalf of the editorial staff of Novyj mir , on a tour of public meetings in Chicago and Detroit. The first takes place on March 4, the last is scheduled for March 24. The series will be interrupted by news from Russia. On March 16, the last meetings were canceled and Bukharin returned to New York to prepare for his return to Russia.

Wladislaw Hedeler (like Pierre Broué, Trotsky's biographer) wonders about the relationship between Trotsky and Bukharin during these few weeks. Are they really opposed? Are they liked and have they become friends? The question has been studied too little to conclude, but we must be wary of late statements on this point.

He is an unprincipled intriguer, who subordinates everything to the preservation of his own power. He changes his theory according to whom he needs to get rid of.

Bukharin on Stalin's theoretical position, 1928.

From 1917 to 1923

At the news of the Russian Revolution of February 1917, exiled revolutionaries from around the world began to flock back to the homeland. Trotsky left New York on 27 March 1917, sailing for St. Petersburg. Bukharin left New York in early April and returned to Russia by way of Japan (where he was temporarily detained by local police), arriving in Moscow in early May 1917. Politically, the Bolsheviks in Moscow were a minority in relation to the Mensheviks and Social Democrats. As more people began to be attracted to Lenin's promise to bring peace by withdrawing from the Great War, membership in the Bolshevik faction began to increase dramatically – from 24,000 members in February 1917 to 200,000 members in October 1917. Upon his return to Moscow, Bukharin resumed his seat on the Moscow City Committee and also became a member of the Moscow Regional Bureau of the party. When Bukharin heard this fantastic news, he immediately returned to Russia. After his arrival in April, he - now known for his theoretical writings - was immediately elected to the local Moscow leadership of the Bolsheviks. Unlike other leading members of the Bolsheviks , such as Stalin or Kamenev, Bukharin supported Lenin's April Theses , which called for "All power to the Soviets". Bukharin chose to take the western route. With a few companions, including Volodarski, he completed his world tour of exile in 45 days of an eventful journey. Having left at the end of March or the beginning of April, he will arrive in Moscow around May 15 [May 2 in the Julian calendar]. He briefly spent time in prison in Japan and in Chelyabinsk, the “gate to Siberia,” where Mensheviks arrested him for “agitating soldiers.” He was released at the request of the Petrograd Soviet, and the militia officers put him on the train with a 1st class ticket to Moscow...

As soon as he returned to Russian soil, he contacted Lenin by telegram: he regretted not having been able to participate in the April party conference, but he read the texts of the “theses” and he wrote: “It seems to me that you no longer have to criticize me. With the exception of the national question.” A traveling companion, named Lisovski, took charge of bringing to Lenin letters and documents that Bukharin had taken for him.

In a few days, he found his place in all the leading bodies of the Bolshevik party for the city and the region. He was also admitted to the office of the Moscow Soviet and the local party newspaper, Sotzial demokrat , no ^.  46, on May 3 (Julien), i.e. May 16 (Grégorian), published his first two articles on “The Great Democracy” American prints , and The Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies of Petrograd and the Army .

Delegates of the 2nd World Congress of the Comintern in 1920

The Bolsheviks themselves were divided into a right wing and a left wing. The right-wing of the Bolsheviks, including Aleksei Rykov and Viktor Nogin, controlled the Moscow Committee, while the younger left-wing Bolsheviks, including Vladimir Smirnov, Valerian Osinsky, Georgii Lomov, Nikolay Yakovlev, Ivan Kizelshtein and Ivan Stukov, were members of the Moscow Regional Bureau. Bukharin's main activity until November-December 1917 was his work as an editor in the Moscow Bolshevik press. He wrote 70 articles in the daily Sotzial democrat and 11 articles in the magazine Spartak  . At the beginning, his publications were at the rate of one article every two days.

In both newspapers, he defends a clearly “left” policy. In Moscow, the “old” leaders (Rikov and Nogin) did not follow Lenin and his “April theses” where he affirmed that it was necessary to move towards a proletarian revolution. The “young people”, that is to say Bukharin and his friends from the days of high school and university, who rely more on the regional office in Moscow, seem to be already “more left” than Lenin and look forward with confidence to the world socialist revolution.

Bukharin is convinced that events so far have justified the Bolsheviks' policies: the war led, as expected, to a first revolution. It will now expand and deepen because the fraternization of soldiers on the front “will light the flame of revolution throughout Europe”  .

As early as June, in issue ^no  . 2 of Spartak , he took up one of his conclusions from The World Economy and Imperialism   : State capitalism makes the worker “a serf in a state factory” and Class antagonism directly pits the worker against the State. But state capitalism is also “the greatest possible preparation for the transition to a socialist economy”. The revolution is thus advancing “on two sides”, at least in Western Europe. In Russia, if the war acted as a gigantic crisis which could have been "braked by a state capitalist organization of the economy", the Russian bourgeoisie "fears the transfer of the entire state machine between the hands of the working class and the poorest strata of the peasants and, consequently, it no longer acts as an organizing force, but as a disorganizing and anarchic force

If the Russian bourgeoisie does not do enough state capitalism, the proletarian revolutionary power will be able to “state” the monopoly industries and regulate production and distribution by relying on a whole “complicated” apparatus of central and intermediate organizations ( banks, already created industry or supply committees, zemstvo which organize the local economy, etc.)  . Bukharin envisions a clear program for the proletariat: to do what state capitalism could have done, but with a radically different class spirit. The regulation ( Kontrol ) of the economy can have a similar form, and opposite class contents. This way of seeing which will characterize Bukharin's thought throughout his political life is therefore present from the start.

Of particular interest is a 48-page pamphlet, written and published in July. The Class Struggle and the Russian Revolution is an essay depicting the classes of Russian society from 1905 to February-March 1917, then, in three stages, until July 1917. Surprisingly, the dominant classes there are embodied by their most active political representatives, while the “proletariat” seems to have a party (the Bolsheviks) whose leaders are never named… It is the “only historical writing of its career”, remarks Stephen F . Cohen and after the October victory, as we will see, Bukharin will write the rest, until the appearance of Lenin as head of the Council of People's Commissars, on November 7,  .

Where are Bukharin's relations with Lenin? Since the telegram he sent in May, upon his arrival in Russia, Bukharin does not appear to have had direct contact with Lenin. This is what we must conclude from the information given in 1925 by Bukharin himself: when he went to Petrograd, in July 1917, to participate in the VI ^Congress of the Bolshevik Party, he could not meet Lenin who had to hide after the failure of the July insurrection days, but he saw Lenin's wife, N. Krupskaia, and his first words were the following: "VI asked me to tell you that there is no had no more disagreement with you on the question of the State. The two men would therefore have had no opportunity to discuss this issue, even in writing, for three months. As Lenin remained underground until the insurrection, they only saw each other again when Bukharin came to Petrograd to report to the Council of People's Commissars about the revolutionary struggles in Moscow during the week of November 8 to 15.

Threatened with being dispersed by the police of the provisional government, the Congress changes meeting place and proceeds to the election of the new Central Committee - of which Bukharin is a member - before debating Stalin's report. The most hotly debated question is what to do with the slogan “All power to the Soviets!” » when the leaders of the Soviets “point the artillery against the working class”  . Stalin proposes abandoning the slogan. As Smilga, who supports Stalin, says, the provisional government must be overthrown and the party must be able to seize an opportunity, if it presents itself, to take the lead in the movement without going through the soviets. Others, for example Volodarsky, fear that the party of the proletariat will isolate itself from the (poor) peasantry and the revolutionary democratic forces present in the soviets. Bukharin, according to Rabinowitch, is the only one to “adopt an intermediate position.” Eventually a commission rewrote the resolution and replaced it with “All power to the Soviets!” » with “Complete liquidation of the dictatorship of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie!” ". The subject of this debate will disappear in a few weeks, time for the Bolsheviks to dominate the main soviets and the congress of soviets….

Bukharin, according to his bibliography, spoke six times during the eight days that the Congress lasted. He presents a report and a resolution on “the current situation and the war”. He supports a left-wing Zimmerwaldian idea once taken up by Lenin   : once revolutionary power is installed, it will not renounce its “internationalist duty” and will know how to defend itself by waging a “revolutionary war” (a “holy war”) which “will light the fire of world revolution”  . It also presents the result of the commission responsible for drafting a Manifesto of RSDLP(b)  and finally, it sets aside, for a future Congress, proposals for the Party Program , in particular the replacement of the general description of capitalism written by Plekhanov in 1903 with an analysis of financial capital and imperialism (this debate, initially planned, was postponed due to circumstances)  .

The Central Committee of the party, at this moment in the history of the Bolsheviks, is the sole organ of the Leadership. It is he who will make the decisions leading to the October Revolution. Member of the CC and various institutions in Moscow (Regional Office, Soviet, Municipal Duma, etc.), Bukharin will now often take the train between Petrograd and his hometown.

He was in Moscow when Kerensky convened a State Conference there (from August 13 [26] to 15 [28]). He was responsible for organizing a general strike, particularly in hotels and restaurants, to disrupt the Conference which the Bolsheviks were boycotting.

He was in Petrograd on September 15 [28], when, 15 days after the failure of Kornilov's counter-revolutionary action, the Central Committee discussed a letter from Lenin which called for immediate insurrection. “Stunned” by this injunction, like the entire CC, he participated in the decision to burn the letter  .

He was still in Petrograd on September 21 [October 4] where, on behalf of the Moscow Soviet, he prepared and presented with Trotsky a Petrograd Soviet resolution urgently demanding a Congress of  . Like the majority of Bolshevik leaders, he ended up joining the insurrection scheduled for October 25 [November 7]. He soon leaves again to participate in the preparation of the Moscow insurrection, decided to reinforce that of Petrograd.

On 10 October 1917, Bukharin was elected to the Central Committee, along with two other Moscow Bolsheviks: Andrei Bubnov and Grigori Sokolnikov. This strong representation on the Central Committee was a direct recognition of the Moscow Bureau's increased importance. Whereas the Bolsheviks had previously been a minority in Moscow behind the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries, by September 1917 the Bolsheviks were in the majority in Moscow. Furthermore, the Moscow Regional Bureau was formally responsible for the party organizations in each of the thirteen central provinces around Moscow – which accounted for 37% of the whole population of Russia and 20% of the Bolshevik membership.

While no one dominated revolutionary politics in Moscow during the October Revolution as Trotsky did in St. Petersburg, Bukharin certainly was the most prominent leader in Moscow. During the October Revolution, Bukharin drafted, introduced, and defended the revolutionary decrees of the Moscow Soviet. Bukharin then represented the Moscow Soviet in their report to the revolutionary government in Petrograd. Following the October Revolution, Bukharin became the editor of the party's newspaper, Pravda. In Moscow, the fights which followed those in Petrograd were much harder and much longer. The Bolsheviks, although very actively supported by the left-wing Revolutionary Socialists, lost five hundred men alone (in Petrograd, there were only six dead). The fighting, which began on October 26 [November 8], did not end until November 2 [15].

Bukharin was the politician who wrote the proclamations of the Soviet and the Moscow Military Revolutionary Committee. It is he and his comrade Stukov who are designated to report to the new revolutionary government. Stukov testifies: “When I came to the number of victims, my throat tightened and I had to stop. I saw Nikolai Ivanovich rush into the arms of a fellow worker and burst into tears. People started to cry”  cry

It was when he returned to Moscow, on November 17 [30], that John Reed saw him and described him briefly.

Bukharin first appears on the train which drags between Petrograd and Moscow, he is “a short little man with a red beard and the eyes of a fanatic, “more to the left than Lenin”, they said of him”. The next day, Reed saw him again at the meeting where Nogin, who had just resigned from his post as People's Commissar, tried to explain himself to the Moscow Soviet. Nogin (with Kamenev and a few other commissioners) had wanted to respond favorably to a request from the railway union: the new government could not belong to a single party, it had to be extended to all socialists opposed to the war. He is disapproved and heckled by the Soviet workers who refuse to listen to him. Reed recounts: “Bukharin stood up, fierce and spoke with his imperturbable logic, delivering blow for blow... They listened to him, their eyes shining  . » After the October Revolution, Bukharin was elected to the Constituent Assembly. His speech at this assembly in 1918 shows how enthusiastic he was:

" Comrades, we must now remember our responsibility. We must not forget that the current history of humanity is at a moment of breakthrough that has never happened before - not in the time of the Thirty Years' War, not in the days of the great French Revolution, not in any of the bourgeois wars of liberation was such a great step forward made as today. Comrades, we are now creating the basis of human life for a millennium. "

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. Bukharin developed the theory that small states would be swallowed up by large state units. Therefore, the fight against the oppression of nations could only take place in a fight against imperialism . A deviation such as the fight for national liberation was pointless for Bukharin. It distracted the working class from the real fight against imperialism and therefore should not be supported, but should actually be prevented. Stalin used this theory as a justification for tying the Russian republics to Russia.

Lenin – in contrast to Bukharin – saw in the individual national liberation movements an opportunity for the working class to become active itself and not to be satisfied with what had been achieved even after national liberation and to continue to fight.

While Lenin and Trotsky at this time understood and sought the influences on and solutions to the Russian revolution inside and outside Russia, for Bukharin the (only) main task of the Bolsheviks was to spread the revolution to the whole world. His economic treatise on imperialism helped him in this . In 1918, in his theses of the Petersburg Committee of the CPSU (B), he declared that Europe must become the arena of international class struggles. This is where the struggle for revolution between the world proletariat and the world bourgeoisie should take place. The major fact which emerges from the above was seen and underlined by Stephen F. Cohen half a century ago: in 1917 Bukharin, at the head of the Muscovite “young” group, was a rising star in the Bolshevik party, present on all terrains except the conduct of military operations.

Stephen F. Cohen thought that one of the main weaknesses of the Bolsheviks in 1917 was their "inability to develop an economic program before taking power"  , but the one of whom he is the first biographer was perhaps the least incapable of accomplish this task.

We have seen that Bukharin thinks that by relying on the economic organization put in place by war state capitalism, the proletarian state can ensure effective “  kontrol  ” (regulation) of the economy. This idea will be the basis of his reflection, but, as shown by the articles he writes during and just after the revolutionary days of October-November, his speech also expresses a strong concern in the face of future difficulties. We should not count on a return to peace and balance in Russia (and in the world). We will first have to defend the revolution against the “incredible exasperation” of its internal enemies. It will be necessary to “break this resistance at whatever cost ”   . The civil war in Russia and the world war will continue and the economic situation in Russia will become more and more difficult.

In two articles published on the first day of the fighting in Moscow  Bukharin foresees a proletarian economic program to be implemented after the collapse of the bourgeois state. A new apparatus of worker and peasant power will begin to establish a "non-capitalist" or "semi-socialist" order and this will be an "extremely painful and trying process" because "the war has drained and exhausted the economy of the country, disrupted its transport and finances, and led to an economic collapse of unprecedented proportions. »

Against those who have doubts, Bukharin reiterates that a monopolistic industry already exists in Russia, even if it is masked by an immense peasant economy and that he is counting on the organizational capacity of proletarian power to set up a “  kontrol  ” formally similar to what state capitalism does, but with another class content.

He then proposes a "general outline of the economic development which will reveal itself, step by step, during the Russian revolution": the question comes down to the organization of city-country relations, and the economic regulation by a State of workers ( urban) means the elimination of the anarchic market for agricultural products. “This radically changes the entire direction of development. Under these conditions, a growing and organized link between town and countryside is inevitable, that is to say, the attachment of even small peasant enterprises to the sphere of the general organization of production. Bukharin therefore seems to imagine a change (“step by step”, therefore rather gradual ) integrating small (peasant) businesses into the large proletarian and urban organization of production and consumption…

The article To Socialism! of November 9 ends with a declaration of confidence in the revolution, both global and permanent: the international revolution and the end of the war will strengthen the backward Russian economy by reintegrating it into a socialist Europe where the revolution will have been stimulated by “The complete and decisive victory of the Russian workers, soldiers and peasants” over their imperialists…

Lenin immediately saw Bukharin as a future leader of economic issues. In November [early December], he charged him, with Ossinsky and Shliapnikov, with drafting decrees on nationalizations and the organization of the management of economic life in the country (this will be the Supreme Economic Council, of which Bukharin will be one of the members). first members). On November 27 [December 10] Lenin suggested that he and Piatakov form a small commission responsible for fundamental questions of the government's economic policy. But the Central Committee refused Lenin's suggestion because there was another urgency: finding someone responsible for Pravda . Sverdlov and Stassova propose the name of Bukharin  .

He led Pravda for almost twelve years, with only four months of interruption between March and June 1918, when he led the opposition to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk by “left communists”.

A few days after taking office, in the editorial of New Year's Day 1918, Bukharin's Pravda rejoiced at no longer seeing in the streets rich barins in fur coats who had fled "to the Ukraine or the Kuban." where they must “be content with a third-class ration”  .

Another sign of Bukharin's growing weight in the politics of the revolutionaries: he was responsible for speaking on behalf of the Bolshevik Party in the only debate of the Constituent Assembly, meeting on the night of January 5 to 6 [18 to 19], 1918 and dissolved immediately.

Bukharin was not radically hostile to the Constituent Assembly. On November 29 [December 12], he only proposed to prevent the "kadets" from sitting and to bring together a "Convention" which would be dominated by the Bolsheviks and the left SRs, but, under the leadership of Lenin, he was decided that the Constituent Assembly should adopt a Declaration of the Rights of the Working People vesting power in the soviets and secede, or it would be  .

The task assigned to Bukharin on January 5 [18] is to respond to the speech of the President elected by the Assembly, SR Chernov. He condemns the Constituent Assembly as a stillborn institution because it could only be the ground for compromises between classes – in the name of the nation – and therefore for the restoration of the bourgeois dictatorship. This reasoning applies to all the questions addressed in the speech: the social content of the arming of militias, peace, the organization of work, nationalized banks, the sharing of land and the regulation of industry is determined by the class in power and only the soviets can constitute an exclusive power of the workers and peasants  .

The Assembly having not adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Working People , the Bolshevik deputies left; a little later the left-wing SR deputies followed them; the Red Guards put an end to the debates and the Constituent Assembly on January 6 [19] at 4:40 a.m.

He considered the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk negotiated between the "first workers' state" in Russia and capitalist Germany to be a betrayal of the world revolution. The majority of Bolsheviks did not share this opinion. After the peace treaty was signed in February 1918, Bukharin, three other members of the Central Committee (CC) of the party and three CC candidates resigned on the grounds that the decision to sign it had been made " under the pressure of petty-bourgeois elements and their concerns " and that it would be the " ruin of the proletariat, from demoralization to suicide ".

This one-sided internationalism made them forget the problems within Russia, such as the social deprivation or the emerging civil war; their answer was the “immediate introduction” of socialist production. In this wartime power struggle, Lenin's arrest had been seriously discussed by them and Left Socialist Revolutionaries in 1918. Bukharin revealed this in a Pravda article in 1924 and stated that it had been "a period when the party stood a hair from a split, and the whole country a hair from ruin". Since the Peace Decree of October 26 [November 8], Lenin's government has sought to obtain an armistice – as long as possible – and has initiated negotiations in Brest-Litovsk with the Empires of Germany and Austria.

On December 2 [15] a month of armistice was decided. The Bolsheviks, led by Trotsky, sought to use the negotiations for their revolutionary propaganda. The Empires want to reduce their military effort in the East, but demand to control and occupy more and more territories (Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, etc.).

On January 8 [21], the leaders of the Bolshevik party (meeting in an enlarged Central Committee) divided into three groups: Lenin, with 15 votes, opted for a separate peace as quickly as possible; Trotsky gathered 16 votes for “neither war, nor peace”; Bukharin has the majority (32 votes out of 63) to respond to the Empires with revolutionary war. This will be the only success of the opponents of the treaty.

On January 11 [24], Lenin regained the majority in the CC by supporting Trotsky's position.

After almost three weeks, on January 27 [February 9], the Germans lost patience and presented their demands as an ultimatum.

Trotsky, on January 28 [February 10], responded to this ultimatum that revolutionary Russia “leave the war,” but refused to sign the German peace treaty.

On February 16,  , Germany announced that it would resume hostilities on February 18.

On February 17, the CC preferred to wait rather than sign immediately. Then, on February 18, when the German advance began, Lenin obtained after dramatic debates the support of Trotsky to accept German conditions. But the Germans do not respond and continue to advance. In 5 days, from February 18 to 22, the German army moved 240 km to the East (as much as in three years of war) and threatened Petrograd.

On February 22, the CC decided to accept (possible) military aid from the Allies, Bukharin and the supporters of the revolutionary war voted against (“We are turning the party into a pile of dung!”, said Bukharin, addressing Trotsky ).

On February 23, the Germans set their final conditions: they demanded to occupy all the territories they had seized to date. Lenin obtains the acceptance of the CC (Trotsky abstains) and the Executive of the Soviets.

The treaty was signed in Brest-Litovsk on March 3, by Tchitcherin, who replaced Trotsky. Soviet Russia, according to Orlando Figes, lost a third of its surface area and its population, and also more than half of its industrial establishments and nine-tenths of its coal resources...Bukharin's economism guided him to this policy. The "iron logic" of the theory of imperialism dictated what was to be done, regardless of what was possible at the time. Bukharin and the members of the CC who followed him until the vote on February 23 resigned from the positions they held to campaign against the ratification of the treaty. They launched a new newspaper, Kommunist , the first issue of which appeared in Petrograd on March 4. A congress of the Bolshevik Party is convened for March 6, 7 and 8. This extraordinary and improvised congress brought together representatives of less than half of the party's members. Lenin secured a majority in favor of ratifying the treaty (36 for, 11 against and 4 abstentions), but he did not seek to sideline the “left communists”. Bukharin and his supporters are re-elected to the Central Committee. The resignation they immediately presented was refused in the name of party unity. Bukharin, however, will not appear at any CC meetings or in Pravda for several weeks.

These congressional votes put an end to the first phase of the opposition of the “left communists”. From January 21 to March 8 (6 or 7 weeks), they refused the peace treaty. This fight is over. A new phase began where, five months after the seizure of power, some of the Bolshevik leaders publicly questioned revolutionary economic policy. It is a residual debate which will end quickly (less than three months for Bukharin). Its main object revolves around a concept: state capitalism.

The word was put back at the center of the debate when Lenin, the day after the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, opened an economic project on the organization of production, starting with the “census and control” by the people . After the nationalizations of the first months, we must bring production out of its paralysis and find an agreement with the “capitalist” executives who are capable of organizing production. He also emphasizes discipline in work and productivity. If the model of German state capitalism could be replicated, he said, Russia would be "three-quarters socialist  "

Let us see the traces of the debate found in the left communist newspaper, Kommunist  , and in Lenin's speeches in 1918.

Bukharin published six articles in the first three issues of Kommunist . He is the one who gives the most titles to the newspaper (the other contributors do not exceed five titles), but his absence in the last issue, in June, is already a sign of his withdrawal.

In No.  1, there are three titles: a short, very laudatory bibliographical note on Lenin's State and Revolution , another bibliographical note where he praises an SR (Troutovsky) who wrote on The transition period ^and a “political magazine” dedicated to the heroes of social betrayal , Mensheviks or revolutionary Socialists. In No.  2, he resumes his comparison between Anarchism and scientific communism , a subject on which Lenin had criticized him in 1916. In ^{No. 3} ,  we find an article on Certain essential notions of modern economics where he seeks to demonstrate that state capitalism cannot be confused with control over production by a socialist state. The socialist state-commune “  socializes  ” production, it does not “  nationalize  ” it. State capitalism without capitalism is nonsense. Finally, he devotes three pages of ^No. 3  to a “very interesting and original theoretician”, AA Bogdanov, who published Questions of Socialism in 1917 . For Bukharin, it is a question of distinguishing himself from an author whom he admires but who subordinates the emergence of socialism to that of a new cultural universe of the working class  .

Three articles attack political rivals of the Bolsheviks. The other three articles take stock of the agreements and disagreements with Lenin. Bukharin thinks that there remains only one disagreement, that on state capitalism, and it concerns the use of one word (capitalism) for another (socialism) since the proletarian class is in power. This is a very moderate opposition to the direction that Lenin gave to the party. Bukharin is no longer the leader of the left communists (Ossinsky is a more radical opponent).

Bukharin, however, remains the opponent most targeted by Lenin's anti-criticism arrows. Lenin knows that Bukharin thinks that proletarian power can do everything that state capitalism does with another class content. It is for his intention that he reaffirms that “state capitalism” is a model to be assimilated because it has “something in common” with socialism (to identify and control)  . He only wants to see the limits of Bukharin's bibliographical note devoted to the State and the revolution  : he says nothing there about the tasks of the proletarian State after the revolution, whereas Lenin, in this pamphlet, had already said that the control of the socialist state would also be “organized over those workers who are deeply corrupted by capitalism”  . He rejects criticism from left communists, like Ossinsky, who fear that specialists from the capitalist class will reduce the class initiative of workers and who have no useful practical ideas for restoring the running of trains. Lenin, however, accommodates his criticisms with some compliments to the "Marxists" who are always the left communists, in particular Bukharin who is "of excellent culture"  and "two heads above the left revolutionary socialists and the anarchists"  .

It is not a theoretical discussion nor a political compromise that will lead Bukharin to leave the opposition, but the fight against the Council of People's Commissars initiated by his former allies, the left SRs, who are still resolute adversaries. of the peace treaty. The left SR leaders first formed the plan to arrest Lenin in order to be able to declare war on Germany and Bukharin immediately opposed this project  . The left SR then changed targets: on July 6 they prepared and carried out an attack against the German ambassador, Count von Mirbach, they mounted insurrectional actions and assassinated some Bolsheviks, finally they attempted to kill Lenin on August 30. . The Bolsheviks reacted by closing ranks, removing all other socialist groups from the soviets and setting up the Cheka which engaged in an assumed “red terror”.

After the ratification of the treaty, Bukharin resumed his responsibilities within the party. Bukharin's bibliography indicates a complete absence of publication in June 1918. In fact, this was the time when he left for Berlin with a delegation responsible for economic negotiation  . A month later, on July 7, the day after von Mirbach's assassination, he returned and wrote his first article in Pravda since February. He will write 72 until the end of the year, despite a few weeks of a new stay in Germany in October-November (from where he gives articles to the Scandinavian press...). He publicly admitted having made a mistake in refusing the peace treaty, but only on October 8, in a speech to the Moscow Soviet published by Pravda on October 11.

He therefore resumed his main activity in the party press and the other tasks entrusted to him are “international”. It is not clear what his second mission to Berlin was, except that he saw Liebknecht there and the German government expelled him along with the Soviet diplomats before the armistice that suspended the war on November 11.

Bukharin was also a propagandist, author of libels and pamphlets, and in 1918 he published two of them. The first little book is the continuation of his account of the revolution of 1917. After The Class Struggle and the Russian Revolution , which ended in July, he continues until October with From the Dictatorship of Imperialism to Dictatorship of the proletariat , Both parts are translated into German and printed in Zurich with a new title: From the fall of tsarism to the fall of the bourgeoisie . The second brochure is The Program of the Communists (Bolsheviks) which he wrote personally and published under his sole name in several languages, from May 1918 (date indicated at the end of the conclusion)  .

The writing and publication of these works spans the period of opposition to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and “left communism”. However, there is no trace of this major conflict. On the contrary, these texts, and particularly the story of the revolution, clearly express the ways of seeing and thinking of the Bolsheviks as a whole at this moment in their history.

When Bukharin takes up his pen to recount the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks. He does not think of making a historical testimony: he writes a leaflet to advance "the permanent revolution" which, starting from Russia, "is transformed into a European revolution of the proletariat, armed by this same imperialist state on whose head it raises already the gleaming knife of the guillotine”  .

To summarize the "tract", it suffices to say that it tells how, during the summer of 1917, the two candidates for the role of "Bonaparte of the Russian Revolution", Kerensky and Kornilov, neutralized each other, so that the Bolsheviks , weakened for a moment, were able to resurface and take power in the fall. This story which features social classes or “masses” and their incarnations in political characters is surprisingly unbalanced. Kerensky is named 75 times, Kornilov 56 times and dozens of Cadets, Mensheviks and SRs are also mentioned; on the other hand, the proletariat is embodied in a “Party of the proletariat”, never otherwise designated, of which only two leaders are named: Trotsky, 3 times, and Lenin, 2 times on the same page, when, on October 25 [November 7] , “the new revolution freed him from the mystery with which he had had to surround himself”  .

The word "mystery" also applies to everything relating to the activity of the Bolshevik revolutionaries during the period preceding their coming to power. Bukharin presents things as if the “Party of the Proletariat” had always known what to do without having to discuss it. Total silence on the preparation and organization of a decided and successful insurrection by the Bolshevik Party in an account of the period when the party did nothing else implies the desire to keep a secret. No doubt it is a question of the party's "know-how", of the "revolutionary professionalism" acquired underground. Bolshevism sees itself as the successful union of Marxist science with strategic science, the art of war. Hiding some of your abilities or weaknesses can be a strategic advantage.

Bukharin, by recounting the revolution as if the party was still a single bloc, masks both its enlargement and its splits. Trotsky and other forces from the Mensheviks or the SRs joined the Bolsheviks (which authorizes Bukharin to speak, like Trotsky, of permanent revolution  ). Kamenev, in April, October and November, Zinoviev, in October, and still others (Stalin, Rykov, etc.) sometimes refused to follow Lenin. Readers of the brochure will know nothing about it.

The unity of thought and action of the Bolshevik Party is a myth both before 1917 and during the revolutionary period and in the first years of the Soviet regime. But at the end of the civil war, in 1921, the “fractions” will be banned and the myth will become a destructive constraint: All those who are eliminated in the struggle for power in the party will be for “fractionalism” and their differences will always be inscribed in a series of “mistakes” dating back to the origins of the revolution…

The content of the Program of Communists (Bolsheviks) written by Bukharin confirms that, except on the question of the peace treaty, he does not see himself as an opponent, even if he develops some personal ideas.

The debate on the Program began at the April 1917 RSDLP(b) conference. The majority of the program commission, against Lenin's advice, wanted to recast the entire general part of the founding program of 1903 by basing it on a description of imperialism. Lenin, for his part, wants to keep Plekhanov's summary of capitalism by supplementing it with a paragraph on the last stage of capitalism, imperialism. As in previous debates between exiles, two other questions divided the Bolsheviks: the right to self-determination of nations and the content of the "minimum" program when the proletarian revolution was on the agenda.

The drafting of a program text is planned and postponed four times in a row: 1. The April Conference plans to take a decision at the following Congress. 2. The VIth ^Congress in July being semi-clandestine, the debate is postponed to an extraordinary Congress convened for October 30. 3. The extraordinary Congress having been canceled due to insurrection on October 25, the program file is put on hold for the next Congress. 4. The VIIth ^Congress of March 4-6, 1918 being entirely devoted to the ratification of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, a new postponement resolution was adopted. This time Lenin proposed that a special commission draft the text and publish it quickly on behalf of the party, even if it may contain "many errors"  . The special commission, according to a note from Yaroslavsky included in the 1933 edition of the protocol of the VIIIth ^Congress , did not leave any archives, but it was it which, a year later, disseminated a draft which serves as the basis for the Program finally adopted at the VIIIth ^Congress on March 20, 1919.

The program of Bukharin's communists (Bolsheviks) was completed approximately two months after the 7th ^Congress . The text divided into 19 chapters and a conclusion is a challenge launched to the commission (of which Bukharin is a member). Lenin hoped for a rapid publication of a text respecting his indications and he is one of the three "minorities" of the commission who propose a sort of developed commentary on a program still unwritten...

On the most controversial point, the recasting of the general part on capitalism, Bukharin has a solution. He does not need to complete the economic picture of competitive capitalism (according to Plekhanov) with an economic definition of imperialism (according to Lenin). Capitalism is a social structure based on the private appropriation of the means of production, it opposes “two camps: Those who work a lot and who eat little and poorly, and those who work little or not at all, but who only eat more and better.” How has private ownership of the means of production been maintained until now? Because the capitalists have formed “organizations”. The most important and general is the bourgeois state which has developed into “an enormous federation of capitalists”. These are these “statist associations” of the different bourgeoisies which “are currently fighting among themselves as the separate capitalists fought among themselves.” Only the working class can “  stifle the war and break the yoke of capitalism  ,” as it has begun to do in Russia.

Bukharin relies on his theory of the imperialist state developed in 1916 and on what he retains from Bogdanov's ideas. Chapter III on the objective of “cooperative communist production” confirms this: Lenin had contested the proposal made by Bukharin to introduce a definition of developed communism. “These are things that we do not know”, he said, “the bricks which will be used to build socialism are not yet made”  . Bukharin has a solution: he evokes a future communist society where the “central statistical office” will play an essential role in planning. This representation, common in pre-war social democracy, seems borrowed from The Red Star , Bogdanov's 1908 science fiction novel, or from Bebel's Woman and Socialism .

Lenin in his resolution on the modification of the Program recommended better defining “the State of a new type, the Republic of Soviets and the dictatorship of the proletariat”. Bukharin does this in four chapters where he criticizes bourgeois parliamentarism which excludes the people from power. For the "political part", he only departs from Lenin's demands on one point: he does not consider the hypothesis of a "retreat" during the struggle towards the "outdated" stage of bourgeois parliamentarism. that the party, in this case, would not give up “using”.

“We will have to review in the same spirit the economic parts, including the agrarian part, and also the educational and other parts of our program” said Lenin. Bukharin writes nine chapters on the nationalization of banks, large industry and land, on the administration of industry, the obligation of work and the control of trade. He joined Lenin on the themes of discipline at work and anticipated what he would say in 1919 on the end of the power of money  . He completes Lenin's list by very firmly justifying the “nationalization of foreign trade”.

Finally, he explains the “other parts” of the program by dealing with the place of the church and the school in the Republic of Soviets, the army and “the liberation of peoples”. It is only on the last point that he openly contests a majority position in the party and in the Commission. The right to “self-determination”, he specifies, cannot concern “  nations (of workers and bourgeois together)”. It is a right of the working classes  : “workers of one nationality living in Russia can form a separate Republic of Soviets…we will not detain you for a moment by violence.”

Bukharin, with this Program which is both personal and consistent with the majority choices (he only shows that he deviates from it once) inaugurates his series of contributions to the drafting of international communist “programs”. It will last 10 years, until 1928…

The major flaw of this Program is that it anticipates the difficulties to come little or poorly. It is yet another presentation of the ideas conceived before the revolutionary moment: state monopoly capitalism has already implemented the means of “  kontrol  ” of the production and distribution of the wealth produced; the proletarian state can use them, including to control the countless small businesses which must remain outside nationalization... In fact, nationalizations have been more extended towards small production and have not been able to seize large-scale part of large industry in a dislocated territory occupied by foreign troops... Seizing the banks and merging them gives hope for the achievement of "social accounting of socialist cooperative production", but in the meantime we must adapt inflation… The civil war will prolong the three years of international war. The author of the Program knows this, but very little anticipates the disorganizations still to come. Finally, this program of the Bolshevik communists is imagined as being equally that of the Republic of Soviets and of the Russian working class leading the mass of poor peasants. Without saying it, the “without indulgence” struggle against the bourgeoisie has already established a single-party regime.In March 1919, he became a member of the Comintern's executive committee and a candidate member of the Politburo. During the Civil War period, he published several theoretical economic works. Bukharin, like most Bolsheviks at the time, was convinced that the revolution in Russia could only be successful if it spread worldwide. In The ABC of Communism , which he wrote together with Yevgeny Preobrazhensky in 1920, he said:

" The communist revolution can only triumph as a world revolution. If, for example, the working class in one country seized power, but in other countries the proletariat remained devoted to capital, not out of fear but out of conviction, the great predatory states would eventually strangle this country. "

Some historians of communism think that these texts written at the time of war communism necessarily reflect the illusions of this period (illusion of a direct transition to socialism since the State, for the needs of war, tends to organize production and distribution; the illusion of the implementation of planning by the State making exchange and currency useless to the point of the illusion of the beginning of the decline of the State, when it only exists; deeply disorganized). But Bukharin's reflection on the "transition" only develops the idea that the revolutionary crisis is, economically, the "disintegration" of the structures and organization of state capitalism and that the proletarian revolution has the task of reconstructing and recombine all these elements under the leadership of a socialist state. Bukharin's own illusion, at this moment of extremely violent civil war, is that he imagines that the State of the "  dictatorship of the proletariat  " can quickly organize the entire economy approximately as was done in Germany during the war, under the direction of the army.

But the revolution in other countries, such as Germany and Austria-Hungary, was crushed, and Russia remained isolated. Socialism, as the next step after capitalism, requires global cooperation and a global division of labor. Instead, the Russian working class was only a tiny part of the global proletariat in what was still an agrarian-industrial country.

In such a situation, tactical decisions had to be made that moved in the tension between two poles: on the one hand, what was necessary at the moment, and on the other hand, what was possible at the moment. One way of acting in this field was to elevate the necessary to a principle and ignore the possible. Lenin described such a policy as left-wing radical.

This policy had a particular impact on the peace negotiations between Germany and Russia and later on war communism: According to Lenin  Bukharin was not only the “darling of the whole party”, but also an “extremely valuable and significant theoretician”. He owed this reputation primarily to his works on economics before the October Revolution of 1917: The Political Economy of the Pensioner: The Value and Profit Theory of the Austrian School (1913/14) and Imperialism and World Economy (1914/15).

During this period he published his most important works, which bear witness to his political shift from the extreme voluntarist , radical left wing to the extreme anti-voluntarist, right wing of the party. The current political situation in Russia during the civil war, but above all Bukharin's method of mechanistic Marxism , served as the pivotal point for his transformation.

Even after the Russian Revolution and the bureaucratization of the party, Bukharin remained an important theoretician, now in the service of Stalin. In his study "Economy of the Transformation Period" in 1920, Bukharin recommended "non-economic coercive measures" such as shooting "as a method of creating communist humanity from the human material of the capitalist era." Here, he again challenged, above all, the Second International, which believed that the transition to socialism was a painless, gentle and gradual path through parliament.

He argued that revolutions were an unavoidable necessity, since processes towards a higher mode of life and production were regularly interrupted by capitalist crises. In the long term, progress could only triumph if capitalism was destroyed.

However, according to Bukharin, the destruction of capitalism would entail great (economic) costs. He explained hopefully that the capitalist categories, such as market, price and commodity, would disappear in communism and the following phases of revolution would occur:

1. The ideological revolution

   Economic conditions destroy the ideology of civil peace. The working class becomes aware of itself as a class and strives for power.

2. The political revolution

   The ideological revolution turns into action, into "civil war" and the struggle for political power. The political apparatus of the bourgeoisie is destroyed. It is replaced by a new system, the dictatorship of the proletariat.

3. The economic revolution

   The dictatorship of the proletariat, which represents the concentrated power of the working class, acts as a great lever for economic progress. The capitalist mode of production is destroyed, a new model of production relations is created. The basis for the socialist society is laid.

4. The technological revolution

   The growth of the productive forces occurs.

The book is still seen by some today as a triumph of revolutionary thought. One of the book's weaknesses, however, was its description of the current situation in Russia. Although the Russian Workers' Party had taken power, it was unable to build a socialist economy due to the poverty of the agrarian country, international isolation, civil war, and a lack of economic and technical leadership.

Important writings from this period are:

• On the New Economic Policy : The Economics of the Transformation Period (1920) and The Present Period and the Basis of Our Policies (1925), in which he prepared the possibility of socialism in one country as a theory for Stalin .
• The series of articles Down with factionalism (1924, 1925), in which he supported the destruction of democracy and the bureaucratization of the party.
• Theory of historical materialism as a generally understandable textbook of Marxist sociology (1922).

Bukharin's first reaction to the NEP in 1921 was still that of a war communist. At first he thought that the NEP was necessary in order to make concessions to the starving peasants, but 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, the NEP reintroduced money and allowed private ownership and capitalistic practices in agriculture, retail trade, and light industry while the state retained control of heavy industry. At the beginning of 1921, when the civil war ended with the clear victory of the Bolsheviks, the political and social crisis experienced by Soviet Russia and the PC(b)R called everything into question. Bukharin, who went through this crisis dissatisfying everyone because he sought to play the role of "buffer" between Lenin and Trotsky on the "union question", very quickly became one of the most convinced supporters of the "  new economic policy ".  » (the NEP) launched by Lenin. While many former “left communists” and “old Bolsheviks” no longer recognized the socialism they had imagined, Bukharin, as early as 1921, gave his explanation of what happened: the socialist state did not was unable to maintain a rational non-market organization of the economy incorporating the elements given by state capitalism. The Russian socialist state is still incapable of fully organizing the entire economy.

But it remains true that the transition passes through “socialist forms which are in a certain sense the extension, in a different form, of the capitalist forms which preceded it”  . To move towards socialism, Soviet power must start from a level of organization lower than that already reached by state capitalism. The capitalist forms which are the subject of “destruction-reconstruction” are those of small commodity production (in agriculture) and monopolistic competition (in large industry and finance). By a ruse of which history has the secret we will go to socialism through the market, because the large economic units, over which the socialist State has control, are more rational and more efficient, they will therefore end up absorbing the small urban market units and rural.

The NEP is certainly opposed to "war communism" and the "madnesses" (word of Lenin and Bukharin) which may have been committed in this heroic era, but it does not contradict Bukharin's theoretical reasoning. Bukharin's move from the "left" to the "right" of the party means above all that he becomes aware of the consequences of the real level of development of the Soviet economy. In a context of failure of the international expansion of the revolution, he noted, with Lenin and Trotsky, that the Soviet state was, for an indefinite period, the only bastion conquered by the “world revolution”. To strengthen it and move as far as possible to the “constructive phase” of the revolution, we must be very realistic and rely only on the limited means available. Lenin, in this period of the NEP, until the stroke which rendered him mute inMarch 1923, openly carries a “reformist” and “gradualist” discourse (in the context of a state held exclusively by the party of the proletariat) which will serve as a model for Bukharin throughout the rest of his career.

He also directed the International Lenin School at this time . As the civil war continued, Bukharin declared at the Third Comintern Congress in 1921:

" When the dictatorship of the proletariat is achieved - and if the party is really a communist one, that is, expresses the interests of the working class, then the dictatorship of the party is equal to the dictatorship of the class itself, even if the party itself is declassed and the dictatorial Communist Party continues to hold power. " (Quoted from The Tragedy of Bukharin.)

Power struggle

At the 11th Party Congress of the CPSU in 1922, Bukharin stated that " we are building our own state socialist production ." Here he denied his internationalism for the first time and concluded that the construction of socialism in one country is possible. He added in The Road to Socialism :

" The more we expand ourselves...the greater the proletarian division [of labor ] becomes, and if we continue to grow, at the end of the day we shall swallow up capitalist production. That day will mark the final victory of communism. "

After Lenin's withdrawal from politics, Bukharin initially formed a bloc with Stalin against the "left" Trotskyists in 1923. He supported the New Economic Policy and was strictly against Trotsky. Bukharin believed that the NEP would increase the strength for a socialist economy and the development of industry. After Lenin's death in 1924, Bukharin became a full member of the Politburo. 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 the NEP against the Left Opposition, which wanted more rapid industrialization, escalation of class struggle against the kulaks (wealthier peasants), 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 period of transition to communism) could be developed in a single country, even one as underdeveloped as Russia. This new theory stated that socialist gains could be consolidated in a single country, without that country relying on simultaneous successful revolutions across the world. The thesis would become a hallmark of Stalinism. Stalin had developed the theory of socialism in one country in his text On the Questions of Leninism . Bukharin provided a template for Stalin's theory with his commitment to the New Economic Policy and his works The Economics of the Transfer Period and The Road to Socialism . Stalin himself did not give a reason why the construction of socialism was possible. Bukharin also took on the intellectual defense of this theory, trying to explain it as follows:

“ We will not perish because of the class differences within our country, because of our technical backwardness, … we can build socialism even on this miserable technical basis, … this growth of socialism will perhaps be much slower, … we may only advance at a snail’s pace in its construction, but we will complete it. ”

In his book The Road to Socialism (1925) he described the NEP as a departure from the direct path to communism. However, a detour via such an unorthodox policy had to be made, as he also expressed at the 16th Congress of the CPSU :

“ I repeat, I insist, the necessity of war policy inevitably led to the fall of production in the economic sphere, but now that the political goal has been achieved, that our power has been consolidated and the dictatorship of the proletariat has been established – the hegemony of the proletariat is a certain fact, and now there is only the need to advance productivity in order to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. ”

In fact Bukharin only says that the transition process can continue in the absence of a revolution in European countries more developed than the USSR (on condition of maintaining the course of the NEP and preserving the alliance with the peasantry ), but the opposition remembers that the Bolsheviks always said that the revolution would only succeed if it became global and it thinks that this new theory amounts to saying that the revolution no longer needs to be encouraged in capitalist countries since Russia can and will achieve socialism with its own strength. Completely impervious to these criticisms, Stalin will boast to the end of his "theory" of "socialism in a single country", but, after the turn of collectivization, he will give it a content completely opposed to Bukharin's ideas.

The isolation of the Russian Revolution led to the development of strong opposition within the party to the political course, especially from the Trotskyists . Stalin and Bukharin's response was the first purge of the party in 1926. Trotsky, the prime force behind the Left Opposition, was defeated by a triumvirate formed by Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, with the support of Bukharin. At the Fourteenth Party Congress in December 1925, Stalin openly attacked Kamenev and Zinoviev, revealing that they had asked for his aid in expelling Trotsky from the Party. By 1926, the Stalin-Bukharin alliance ousted Zinoviev and Kamenev from the Party leadership, and Bukharin enjoyed the highest degree of power during the 1926–1928 period. Bukharin justified his position:

"But is there actually a real danger of a petty-bourgeois transformation of our party? Yes, there is. Why does it exist? Because the proletariat itself is fragmenting and becoming ‘petty-bourgeois’. In order to liquidate this process, we must simultaneously purge our party. ”

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 General Secretary of the Comintern's executive committee in 1926. The Central Committee decided in 1927 to abolish the NEP and in 1928 the collectivization of agriculture began. Bukharin saw this as a departure from the construction of socialism in the USSR. Prompted by a grain shortage, 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—were the right ones. After that, Stalin rejected the increasing private capitalist tendencies of the NEP.

Nikolai Bukharin at the Congress of educators in 1925

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 Communist Party Congress, insisting that enforced grain requisition would be counterproductive, as War Communism had been a decade earlier, and opposed Stalin.

Fall from power

Bukharin's support for the continuation of the 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 later by Stalin. Stalin attacked Bukharin's views, portraying them as capitalist deviations 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. 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 the Comintern. Even when he was editor of Pravda on the side of the leadership, Bukharin described the typical functioning of the party as completely undemocratic:

" ...the secretaries of the local organizations are usually appointed by the district committees; it must be noted that the district committees do not even ask for the approval of the local organizations for the candidates, but are content to appoint this or that comrade. The safest method of voting is usually used. The assembly is asked 'Who is against?' and depending on whether someone is more or less afraid to speak against, the candidate appointed by the district committee is then elected... "

But this inner-party dictatorship, which Trotsky strongly criticized, was necessary for Bukharin in the fight against the inner-party factions. Bukharin wrote a series of articles on this in Pravda called Down with Factionalism . At first Bukharin supported Stalin in this course, but later, when he turned against Stalin's collectivization , he no longer dared to openly oppose it - he knew how the purge was carried out.

Nikolai Bukharin at the meeting of the workers and peasants news reporters in Moscow, June 1926

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" and changed policies to get rid of rivals, were leaked by the Trotskyist press and subjected him to accusations of factionalism. Bukharin is still reluctant to make the discord public and he gives Kamenev the impression of being "a man who knows he is doomed." Bukharin does not gain any advantage from these steps prohibited by party discipline. The Trotskyists exiled in Siberia do not plan to join Stalin's camp, but they categorically exclude joining Bukharin. Jules Humbert-Droz, a former ally and friend of Bukharin, wrote that in spring 1929, Bukharin told him that he had formed an alliance with Zinoviev and Kamenev, and that they were planning to use individual terror (assassination) to get rid of Stalin. Eventually, Bukharin lost his position in the Comintern and the editorship of Pravda in April 1929, and he was expelled from the Politburo on 17 November of that year.

The final, very lively debate was resolved in April by a Plenum of the Central Committee, but in complete secrecy. The texts of the defeated will not be published. The decisions taken were even hidden at the XVI Party Conference, meeting at the end of April ^. Stalin will first launch his “theoretical brigades” in a virulent campaign against the “right deviation” to gradually announce his exclusion from the unions, the International, the press, etc. THENovember 17, 1929, Bukharin is finally officially dismissed from the Political Bureau.

Bukharin, who cannot say anything publicly to defend himself, is forced to sign with Rykov and Tomsky a declaration of submission datedNovember 25, 1929. A year later, he signed a new personal declaration  . The “right” is thus eliminated, both in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and in the International. Bukharin's supporters (the American Lovestone, the Germans Brandler and Thalheimer, etc.) were excluded or left the Comintern. They attempted for a moment to form an international alliance, an International Communist Opposition (the Trotskyists of the Left Opposition will always refer to it as the Right Opposition).

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.

Even after his fall, Bukharin still did some important work for the Party. For example, he helped write the 1936 Soviet constitution. Bukharin believed the constitution would guarantee real democratization. There is some evidence that Bukharin was thinking of evolution toward some kind of two-party or at least two-slate elections. Boris Nikolaevsky reported that Bukharin said: "A second party is necessary. If there is only one electoral list, without opposition, that's equivalent to Nazism." Grigory Tokaev, a Soviet defector and admirer of Bukharin, reported that: "Stalin aimed at one party dictatorship and complete centralisation. Bukharin envisaged several parties and even nationalist parties, and stood for the maximum of decentralisation."

Friendship with Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak

Under pressure from Stalin's power, he renounced his previous ideology in 1934. 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". One of his first decisions as editor was to invite Boris Pasternak to contribute to the newspaper and sit in on editorial meetings. Pasternak described Bukharin as "a wonderful, historically extraordinary man, but fate has not been kind to him." They first met during the lying-in-state of the Soviet police chief, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky in May 1934, when Pasternak was seeking help for his fellow poet, Osip Mandelstam, who had been arrested – though at that time neither Pasternak nor Bukharin knew why.

Old Bolsheviks: Nikolai Bukharin, the editor of Pravda and Projector. Ivan Skvortsov-Stepanov, the First People's Commissar (Minister) for Finance. Lev Karakhan, Deputy People's Commissar (Deputy Minister) for Foreign Affairs, the first Soviet Ambassador to China

Bukharin had acted as Mandelstam's political protector since 1922. According to Mandelstam's wife, Nadezhda, "M. owed him all the pleasant things in his life. His 1928 volume of poetry would never have come out without the active intervention of Bukharin. The journey to Armenia, our apartment and ration cards, contracts for future volumes – all this was arranged by Bukharin." Bukharin wrote to Stalin, pleading clemency for Mandelstam, and appealed personally to the head of the NKVD, Genrikh Yagoda. It was Yagoda who told him about Mandelstam's Stalin Epigram, after which he refused to have any further contact with Nadezhda Mandelstam, who had lied to him by denying that her husband had written "anything rash" – but continued to befriend Pasternak.

Soon after Mandelstam's arrest, Bukharin was delegated to prepare the official report on poetry for the First Soviet Writers' Congress, in August 1934. He could not any longer risk mentioning Mandelstam in his speech to the congress, but did devote a large section of his speech to Pasternak, whom he described as "remote from current affairs ... a singer of the old intelligensia ... delicate and subtle ... a wounded and easily vulnerable soul. He is the embodiment of chaste but self-absorbed laboratory craftsmanship". His speech was greeted with wild applause, though it greatly offended some of the listeners, such as the communist poet Semyon Kirsanov, who complained: "according to Bukharin, all the poets who have used their verses to participate in political life are out of date, but the others are not out of date, the so-called pure (and not so pure) lyric poets."

When Bukharin was arrested two years later, Boris Pasternak displayed extraordinary courage by having a letter delivered to Bukharin's wife saying that he was convinced of his innocence.

Increasing tensions with Stalin

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, after mass collectivization was largely completed and the worst was over. 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".

However, Sergey Kirov, First Secretary of the Leningrad Regional Committee 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 700,000 people were to perish as Stalin eliminated all past and potential opposition to his authority. Some historians believe that Kirov's assassination in 1934 was arranged by Stalin himself, despite the lack of 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.

Great Purge

Bukharin in London, 1931

In February 1936, shortly before the purge started in earnest, Bukharin was sent to Paris by Stalin to negotiate the purchase of the 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 Larina, 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 the 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 the 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 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.

Trial

Bukharin and Rykov, shortly before the trial in 1938.

Stalin was for a long time undecided on Bukharin and Georgy Pyatakov. After receiving Nikolay Yezhov's written evidence denouncing Bukharin, Stalin declined to sanction his arrest. Nevertheless, after 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. Photostatic evidence shows that Stalin's first impulse was to simply exile Bukharin, without sending him to trial. In the end, Bukharin was killed, but according to historian Alec Nove, "the road to his demise was not a straight one".

Bukharin was tried in the Trial of the Twenty One on 2–13 March 1938 during the Great Purge, 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". In a trial meant to be the culmination of previous show trials, it was 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.

The verdict at the Trial of the Twenty-One.

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 passionate anti-Communists eventually.

Bukharin wrote letters to Stalin while imprisoned, attempting without success to negotiate his innocence in the case of the alleged crimes, his eventual execution, and his hoped for release.

If I'm to receive the death sentence, then I implore you beforehand, I entreat you, by all that you hold dear, not to have me shot. Let me drink poison in my cell instead (let me have morphine so that I can fall asleep and never wake up). For me, this point is extremely important. I don't know what words I should summon up in order to entreat you to grant me this as an act of charity. After all, politically, it won't really matter, and, besides, no one will know a thing about it. But let me spend my last moments as I wish. Have pity on me!

In his letter of 10 December 1937, Bukharin suggests becoming Stalin's tool against Trotsky, but there's no evidence Stalin ever seriously considered Bukharin's offer.

If, contrary to expectation, my life is to be spared, I would like to request (though I would first have to discuss it with my wife) the following:

• ) that I be exiled to America for x number of years. My arguments are: I would myself wage a campaign [in favour] of the trials, I would wage a mortal war against Trotsky, I would win over large segments of the wavering intelligentsia, I would in effect become Anti-Trotsky and would carry out this mission in a big way and, indeed, with much zeal. You could send an expert security officer [chekist] with me and, as added insurance, you could detain my wife here for six months until I have proven that I am really punching Trotsky and Company in the nose, etc.

• ) But if there is the slightest doubt in your mind, then exile me to a camp in Pechora or Kolyma, even for 25 years. I could set up there the following: a university, a museum of local culture, technical stations and so on, institutes, a painting gallery, an ethnographic museum, a zoological and botanical museum, a camp newspaper and journal.

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 given 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. Anastasius Mikoyan and Molotov affirmed, long afterwards, that Bukharin had never been tortured. The available documents on his stay in prison do not give any indication of torture going beyond extremely harsh conditions of confinement. But Bukharin complains of suffering from hallucinations and he obviously fears anything that could threaten those close to him. He resisted the investigators for three months, then, fromJune 1937, he wrote with them, in several stages, confessions which he still tried to limit but which he promised not to withdraw publicly  . However, as he presents his own defense, he has a "tactic" (which enrages the prosecutor Vyshinsky ): he recognizes the "sum total of his crimes" and his responsibility for everything that is attributed to the "block of rightists and Trotskyists”, but he denies having knowledge of most of the particular “crimes”. He also refused to admit at the hearing his participation in alleged plots against Lenin, and other espionage matters, which were not included in the investigation.

As a result, it gives observers some examples of the inconsistency of the entire trial  . Bukharin, consciously, leaves clues for those who would like the truth, and, for those who have not yet understood, he says, at the very end of his last declaration, that to lead to their conviction by the court, "the Confessions of the accused are not obligatory. The confession of the accused is a medieval legal principle”  . The trial which is ending being entirely based on a weaving of confessions and denunciations of repentants, it is therefore based on little, but these confessions, he says, are important because they signify what Bukharin calls: "the defeat internal forces of counter-revolution. This sounds like a declaration of renunciation, all the stronger since he adds: “you have to be Trotsky not to disarm”, and he immediately denounces him – this is the only apparent denunciation of this last speech – as “the main driving force of the movement”, the one who was at the source of the “most violent positions”. He made contradictory statements during this trial.

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 pleaded 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. Bukharin wants to “hold on”  , but he is desperate. He finally decided to go on a hunger strike, and he called out to his tormentors in the Central Committee: “I cannot kill myself with a bullet, because people will say that I committed suicide to harm the Party; on the other hand, if I die, so to speak, of illness, what do you lose?… But tell me what you lose. If I'm a saboteur, a son of a female dog, etc., what's the point of complaining? ". As he comes up against a wall of hatred and sneers, he cries: “But understand that it is difficult for me to live! »  . He is not defending a policy like in 1929, but his dignity as a man who has not betrayed, who does not want to do anything that could politically harm his Party and for whom it is now “impossible to live”. “Certainly, if I am not a man, then there is nothing to understand”  .

There are several interpretations of Bukharin's motivations (besides 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 of course he could not say so in the trial) but also of the impending threat of fascism. Bukharin says goodbye to his family. During the following thirteen months, locked up in Lubyanka , he searched for how to answer like a man the questions he wrote, from the start of his imprisonment, on a piece of paper: “(c) If you die, what will you take with you? you with you? In the name of what ? Especially at the present stage (d) If you live – how to live and why? (e) Everything personal is being discarded (f) In both cases there is only one conclusion”  . He restates these questions in his final statement of the trial and says what that conclusion is. The “positive facts which shine in the Soviet Union” have “definitively disarmed him”, he can die in the name of the USSR, just as he could live for it.

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 the 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.

Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Communist Party and French author and Nobel laureate Romain Rolland, 1935

The state prosecutor, Andrey Vyshinsky, characterized Bukharin as an "accursed crossbreed of fox and pig" who supposedly committed a "whole nightmare of vile crimes".

While in prison, he wrote at least four book-length manuscripts including a lyrical autobiographical novel, How It All Began, a 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 Rolland 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 at the Kommunarka shooting ground, but the announcement of his death was overshadowed by the Nazi Anschluss of Austria.

The act of rehabilitation of Bukharin

According to Zhores and Roy Medvedev in The Unknown Stalin (2006), Bukharin's last message to Stalin stated "Koba, why do you need me to die?", which was written in a note to Stalin just before his execution. "Koba" was Stalin's nom de guerre, and Bukharin's use of it was a sign of how close the two had once been. The note was allegedly 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. Their son, Yuri Larin (born 1936), was sent to an orphanage in an attempt to keep him safe from the authorities, and also lived to see his rehabilitation. His first wife, Nadezhda, died in a labor camp after being arrested in 1938. His second wife, Esfir' Gurvich, and their daughter Svetlana Gurvich-Bukharina (born 1924), were arrested in 1949, but survived past 1988, though they had lived in fear of the government their whole lives.

Bukharin’s methodology

[ Edit | Edit source ] Despite his reputation as a "very valuable and important theoretician", Lenin continued in his testament  that Bukharin's views "can only with great reservations be considered fully Marxist" because "there is something scholastic in him" and he further stated: "he has never studied dialectics and, I believe, has never fully understood it".

The correctness of this statement is demonstrated by Bukharin's philosophical work Theory of Historical Materialism: A Plain Textbook of Marxist Sociology , in which his method, which suffers greatly from undialectical one-sidedness, is confidently argued out.

Bukharin wrote this book at the same time as he wrote The Economics of the Transfer Period - in 1920/1921. It was finally published in 1922. It is one of Bukharin's most widely read works and has been translated into many languages. It provides an insight into his method, which is considered a constant element in Bukharin's thinking and political actions and which is the origin of his shift from the left-radical voluntarist wing to the right-reformist anti-voluntarist wing.

His method always forced him to choose one or the other, rather than showing respect to all aspects of two dialectical opposites and recognizing their mutual struggle and influence. This mechanistic approach is clearly visible in the following points:

Historical materialism as sociology

[ Edit | Edit source ] Unlike Marx , Lenin or other (later mainly western) Marxists, for Bukharin historical materialism was not the analysis of changes in a society which are determined by objective and subjective conditions, but a science which, like any other, is based on definable laws. For him, historical materialism thus becomes a social science. The various social processes are taken apart and examined in other sciences. After reassembling them, the historical-materialist view of history can then be determined mechanically. Bukharin, in the theory of historical materialism:

“ Among the social sciences there are two important sciences that do not consider a single area of ​​social life, but the whole life of society in all its complexity; ... Such sciences are history on the one hand and sociology on the other. ... History traces and describes how the stream of social life ran at such and such a time in such and such a place. ... Sociology, on the other hand, raises general questions. ... This shows the relationship between history and sociology. Since sociology discovers the general laws of human development, it serves as a method for history. ”

Since science in a class society falls apart into two classes, he defines historical materialism as the “sociology of the working class.”

People no longer make "their own history ... under immediately existing, given and inherited circumstances," as Marx described it in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte . Rather, for Bukharin, people - regardless of their goals - are beings who are determined by the "social result," which is "an unconscious, elementary something."

With his supposed underemphasis on people as subjects, as actors in society, he refers to a point of view of Feuerbach and this also leads him to regard people as “living machines”  who are determined in economic conditions regardless of any goals.

Principle of causality versus teleology

[ Edit | Edit source ] Of course, Bukharin did not deny that people can set goals. But a goal requires someone to set it. People can do that, but regardless of this personally set goal, there is no measurable law that proves that this goal will be realized and thus have an impact on society. At the level of society, there can be no such thing as a predetermined plan or goal, since there is no supra-social being, such as a god, according to whose goals society acts. So he fundamentally rejects the effects of goals:

“ Above all, we must reject the concept of a goal that is not set by anyone. That is exactly the same as talking about thoughts without thinking beings... In reality, when people talk about an ‘inherent’ goal, they also implicitly presuppose the existence of a certain subtle and incomprehensible ‘inner force’ that sets itself this goal. This mysterious force has little to do with the God that we roughly imagine as a bearded old man, but in fact there is also a God at play here, invisibly. ... Teleology... here leads straight to theology. ... ” [

The laws governing the phenomena of society do not present themselves as a goal- or purpose-determined ordering of events, but merely as causal laws. Every thing or every event has a cause. This strict rejection of teleology makes, for example, any organization of individuals in society that pursues specific goals, such as political parties, irrelevant.

Furthermore, Bukharin argues that the actions of individuals are directly determined by an economic basis.

Determinism versus indeterminism

[ Edit | Edit source ] Determinism had the greatest impact on the distortion of Marxism by theoreticians in Stalinist Russia. Bukharin, together with Bogdanov, was the founder of the extremely heterogeneous Russian philosophical group of "mechanists", who believed that the phenomena of the world could in principle be completely "reduced" to physical phenomena, or at least traced back to them:

“ The changes in the organism, the physiological cause has created a certain desire. ”

The reason for this lay in the regularity of social phenomena:

“ If social phenomena are lawful and if they are the result of human actions, then the actions of each individual must also depend on something. This leads us to the conclusion that man and his will are not free, but bound, also subject to laws. ”

For Bukharin, the only correct standpoint is determinism, which he distinguishes from Kautsky's fatalism. For "fatalism is the belief in the blind, inevitable fate, the 'fate' that weighs on everything and to which everything is subject." Instead of blind, inevitable fate, he puts blind, inevitable historical necessity.

His understanding of Marxism does not fundamentally deny the will of man, but the will of man is directly and immediately determined by his economic existence. Marxism explains the will of man and it can explain it because it inevitably arises from a historical necessity:

“ When Marxists organize the Communist Party and lead it into struggle, this is also an expression of historical necessity, which expresses itself precisely through the will and actions of the people. ”

His one-sided answer to the question of either 'causality or teleology' or 'determinism or indeterminism' - "We must therefore decide which standpoint is the right one" - leads to a completely mechanical Marxism in which Marxist dialectics has no place. He describes his interpretation of the dialectic in a similarly mechanical way.

Balance versus dialectical struggle

[ Edit | Edit source ] After the October Revolution and the capitalist-economic collapse in Russia, Bukharin asked himself how society could survive despite the collapse and what the basis for a stable social system would be.

Influenced by Marx, Bukharin argues that change comes about through internal contradictions or their struggle. But while Marx, in his dialectical materialism, emphasizes change, Bukharin emphasizes stability - the balance of contradictions. He develops his theory through his observations in natural science.

Animals are adapted to a certain environment. The fish to water. The mole to the earth. If the animals were thrown into a different environment, they would immediately perish. It is similar with the movements of the celestial bodies. The earth orbits the sun and does not fall on it.

“ We observe a similar phenomenon in society. Whether rightly or wrongly, society exists in nature: more or less it is ‘adapted’ to it, in one way or another it is in equilibrium with nature. The various parts of society, as far as society lives, are also so adapted to one another that their simultaneous existence is possible: how many years did capitalism exist with capitalists and workers! From all these examples it is clear that it is actually one and the same thing, namely equilibrium. ”

This equilibrium is not absolutely unchanging - he describes it as equilibrium in motion. The dialectical triad of thesis, antithesis and synthesis is deformed in Bukharin so that the original equilibrium, the thesis, is negated by an antithesis lying outside it and thus reaches a higher level (a new equilibrium), the synthesis. Change no longer flows, as with Heraclitus , Hegel or Marx, it jumps from one stable level to the next.

This view is consistent with his view as a war communist, where he believed that the capitalist equilibrium in the West could only be upset by a revolutionary war from outside.

While for Lenin, for example, due to his Marxist-dialectical view, it was possible for the dictatorship of the proletariat and state capitalism to coexist, for Bukharin there was a clear break between the one equilibrium system (dictatorship of the proletariat) and the other (state capitalism).

During war communism, Bukharin did everything to ensure that social necessity was fulfilled at the next level and he threw himself into the fight in a completely voluntaristic manner so that predestination was fulfilled. But when he reached the next stage - with the introduction of the New Economic Policy - he did everything to ensure that this new equilibrium was not disturbed. He thus became an important representative of the New Economic Policy.

Political stature and achievements

Bukharin delivers the welcome speech at the meeting of Young Communist International, 1925

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:

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, 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 communism in the Soviet Union.

Bukharin alongside Trotsky have been viewed by some scholars as representing political alternatives to Stalinism. In part, due to their de facto leadership of the Right Opposition and Left Opposition which was at variance with Stalin. These core differences ranged from areas related to economics, foreign policy and cultural matters. Since Gorbachev's perestroika, Bukharin's economic model was seen by many as a historical alternative. The New Economic Policy of 1922 - introduced to cushion the catastrophic consequences of the civil war - was intended to provide the ideological basis for liberalizing the economy in the 1980s. On the other hand, Bukharin himself had vigorously fought against any deviation from the party line and ideologically prepared the ground for the emergence of the totalitarian Stalinist system.

His ideas, especially in economics and the question of market socialism, later became highly influential in the Chinese socialist market economy and Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms.

British author Martin Amis argues that Bukharin was perhaps the only major Bolshevik to acknowledge "moral hesitation" by questioning, even in passing, the violence and sweeping reforms of the early Soviet Union. Amis writes that Bukharin said "during the Civil War he had seen 'things that I would not want even my enemies to see'."

Works

Books and articles

• 1915: Toward a Theory of the Imperialist State
• 1917: Imperialism and World Economy
• 1917: The Russian Revolution and Its Significance
• 1918: Anarchy and Scientific Communism
• 1918: Programme of the World Revolution
• 1919: Economic Theory of the Leisure Class (written 1914)
• 1919: Church and School in the Soviet Republic
• 1919: The Red Army and the Counter Revolution
• 1919: Soviets or Parliament
• 1920: The ABC of Communism (with Evgenii Preobrazhensky)
• 1920: On Parliamentarism
• 1920: The Secret of the League (Part I)
• 1920: The Secret of the League (Part II)
• 1920: The Organisation of the Army and the Structure of Society
• 1920: Common Work for the Common Pot
• 1921: The Era of Great Works
• 1921: The New Economic Policy of Soviet Russia
• 1921: Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology
• 1922: Economic Organization in Soviet Russia
• 1923: A Great Marxian Party
• 1923: The Twelfth Congress of the Russian Communist Party
• 1924: Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital
• 1924: The Theory of Permanent Revolution
• 1926: Building Up Socialism
• 1926: The Tasks of the Russian Communist Party
• 1927: The World Revolution and the U.S.S.R.
• 1928: New Forms of the World Crisis
• 1929: Notes of an Economist
• 1930: Finance Capital in Papal Robes. A Challenge!
• 1931: Theory and Practice from the Standpoint of Dialectical Materialism
• 1933: Marx's Teaching and Its Historical Importance
• 1934: Poetry, Poetics and the Problems of Poetry in the U.S.S.R.
• 1937–1938: How It All Began, a largely autobiographical novel, written in prison and first published in English in 1998.

Cartoons

Bukharin was a cartoonist who left many cartoons of contemporary Soviet politicians. The renowned artist Konstantin Yuon 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 the biographies of Soviet officials. Russian historian Yury Zhukov stated that Nikolai Bukharin's portraits of Joseph Stalin were the only ones drawn from the original, not from a photograph.

Bibliography

See also: Bibliography of the Russian Revolution and Civil War and Bibliography of Stalinism and the Soviet Union

• Bergmann, Theodor, and Moshe Lewin, eds. Bukharin in retrospect (Routledge, 2017).
• Biggart, John. "Bukharin and the origins of the 'proletarian culture' debate" Archived 6 March 2019 at the Wayback Machine. Soviet Studies 39.2 (1987): 229–246.
• Biggart, John. "Bukharin's Theory of Cultural Revolution" in: Anthony Kemp-Welch (Ed.), The Ideas of Nikolai Bukharin. Oxford: Clarendon Press (1992), 131–158.
• Coates, Ken (2010). Who Was This Bukharin?. Nottingham: Spokesman. ISBN 978-0-85124-781-6.
• Cohen, Stephen F. (1980). Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-502697-7.
• Gregory, Paul R. (2010). Politics, Murder, and Love in Stalin's Kremlin: The Story of Nikolai Bukharin and Anna Larina. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press. ISBN 978-0-8179-1034-1.
• Kotkin, Stephen (2014). Stalin: Volume 1: The Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928.
• Littlejohn, Gary. "State, plan and market in the transition to socialism: the legacy of Bukharin". Economy and Society 8.2 (1979): 206–239.
• Service, Robert (2004). Stalin: A Biography. Pan Books. ISBN 0-330-41913-7.
• Smith, Keith. "Introduction to Bukharin: economic theory and the closure of the Soviet industrialisation debate". Economy and Society 8.4 (1979): 446–472.
• A. Andreev; D. Tsygankov, eds. (2010). Imperial Moscow University: 1755–1917: encyclopedic dictionary. Moscow: Russian political encyclopedia (ROSSPEN). pp. 108–109. ISBN 978-5-8243-1429-8.

Primary sources

• Bukharin, Nikolaĭ, and Evgeniĭ Alekseevich Preobrazhenskiĭ. ABC of Communism (Socialist Labour Press, 1921). online Archived 8 April 2023 at the Wayback Machine
  • Fitzpatrick, Sheila. "The ABC of Communism Revisited". Studies in East European Thought 70.2–3 (2018): 167–179.
• Bukharin, Nikolaĭ Ivanovich. Selected Writings on the State and the Transition to Socialism (M. E. Sharpe, 1982).

External links

• Nikolai Bukharin archive Archived 25 April 2006 at the Wayback Machine at marxists.org
• Bukharin's death-cell letter to Stalin
• How it all began, Bukharin's last letter to his wife
• A site dedicated to Bukharin
• A Bolshevik Love Story Archived 15 August 2014 at the Wayback Machine, Mises Institute
• February–March Plenum discussions transcript (in Russian) on which Bukharin was finally defeated, humiliated and expelled from Party Archived 25 January 2017 at the Wayback Machine
• Some of Bukharin's famous cartoons Archived 2 July 2020 at the Wayback Machine
• Newspaper clippings about Actually Existing Napoleon/sandbox in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW