Bukharin Nikolai Ivanovich real name. Memoria

Bukharin in disgrace

Works by N. I. Bukharin

Film incarnations

(September 27 (October 9) 1888, Moscow - March 15, 1938, Kommunarka execution site, Moscow region) - Russian economist, Soviet political, state and party figure. Academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1929).

Activities before the revolution

Born into a family school teacher Ivan Gavrilovich Bukharin (1862-1940), who since 1893 lived in Chisinau, where his father worked as a tax inspector. He studied at the 1st Moscow Gymnasium. After graduating from high school, he studied at the economics department of the Faculty of Law of Moscow University (in 1911 he was expelled for participating in revolutionary activities).

During the revolution of 1905-1907, together with his best friend Ilya Ehrenburg took an active part in student demonstrations organized by students of Moscow University. In 1906 he joined the RSDLP, joining the Bolsheviks. At the age of 19, together with Grigory Sokolnikov, he organized a youth conference in Moscow in 1907, which was later considered the predecessor of the Komsomol.

In 1908-1910, he was a member of the Moscow Committee of the RSDLP, and worked in trade unions. At this time, he became close to V.M. Smirnov and met his future wife N.M. Lukina. In June 1911, he was arrested and exiled for 3 years to Onega (Arkhangelsk province); in the same year he escaped from exile. He was hiding in the apartment of V. M. Shulyatikov, waiting for documents. Then he went illegally to Hanover, and in the fall of 1912 to Austria-Hungary.

Abroad, Bukharin met Lenin, with whom he subsequently maintained friendly relations. In Vienna, he also met with Stalin, whom he helped in working with German-language sources in preparing the article “Marxism and the National Question.” While in exile, he continued to educate himself, studying the works of both the founders of Marxism and utopian socialists, as well as his contemporaries. A. A. Bogdanov had a particularly strong influence on the formation of Bukharin’s views.

In 1914, with the outbreak of World War I, he was arrested by the Austrian-Hungarian authorities on suspicion of espionage and deported to Switzerland. In 1915, through France and England, he moved to Stockholm. Lived in Sweden under a false name Moisha Dolgolevsky. According to the recollections of Bukharin’s wife A.M. Larina, he was called by the same name later, in conversations with her father Mikhail Lurie (Yuri Larin): “until recently, when he came to his father, Nikolai Ivanovich called himself that. He rang the doorbell, not As soon as you open it, you can already hear his infectious laughter: “Open, Moisha Abe Pincus Dovgolevsky has come!”

Despite the fact that emigrants were forbidden to interfere with Swedish politics, he wrote for Scandinavian left-wing newspapers and participated in a meeting of an emigrant club, which the Swedish police considered a front revolutionary organization. He was arrested on March 23, 1916 in an apartment on Salmetargatan, where he lived with two other Bolsheviks (Yuri Pyatakov and Evgenia Bosh). At the police station he gave his name as Moisha Dolgolevsky. After several weeks of imprisonment in April 1916, he was expelled from Sweden to Norway, lived in Christiania (Oslo), Copenhagen, and from October 1916 - in New York (USA), where he met Leon Trotsky and Alexandra Kollontai and edited (from January 1917) together with Trotsky newspaper " New world».

In 1915, he wrote the work “World Economy and Imperialism,” devoted to the analysis of the characteristics of capitalism at the beginning of the 20th century. This work was positively assessed by Lenin, who wrote a preface to it (not published before the revolution) and used a number of its provisions in his work “Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism” (1916). On the other hand, in the discussion among Social Democrats about the right of nations to self-determination that began with the outbreak of the First World War, Bukharin opposed the position of Lenin and his supporters (in particular, Stalin and Zinoviev). Lenin called the corresponding views of Bukharin and Pyatakov, who joined him, a “caricature of Marxism” and regarded them as a relapse of the economism of the 1890s, associated with the inability to distinguish political issues from economic ones.

After the February Revolution of 1917, Bukharin immediately decided to return to his homeland, but returned to Russia only in May 1917, since he was arrested in Japan, through whose territory he was returning. In Chelyabinsk he was arrested by local authorities for campaigning among soldiers and sailors.

"The favorite of the whole party." Theorist and economist

In 1917, he was elected a member of the Central Committee of the RSDLP(b), after which he worked in the Moscow Party Committee and edited the printed publication Izvestia of the Moscow Military Revolutionary Committee. He carried out active propaganda work during the October Revolution of 1917, taking radical left positions. John Reed, in Ten Days That Shook the World, argues that Bukharin was considered "more left-wing than Lenin." For many years with a short break in 1918 - Chief Editor newspaper "Pravda" and in fact the leading party ideologist. Prepared proposals for the nationalization of industry and the creation of economic management bodies headed by the Supreme Council of the National Economy (VSNKh).

In 1917-1918, as editor of the “left-communist” newspaper “Kommunist”, he was the leader of the “left” communists, together with other “left” communists, as well as the left Socialist Revolutionaries, he opposed both the signing of peace with the Germans in Brest-Litovsk and the position the head of the Soviet delegation, Leon Trotsky, demanding the continuation of the line towards the world proletarian revolution. Later, during the discussion initiated in 1923 by Trotsky about factions in the CPSU(b), he admitted that during the discussion Treaty of Brest-Litovsk Some of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries invited him to participate in the arrest of Lenin for 24 hours and the creation of a coalition socialist government from opponents of the peace treaty with the Central Powers. The Left Social Revolutionaries argued that this government would be able to break the treaty and continue the revolutionary war, but Bukharin flatly refused to participate in the conspiracy against the leader of the party and the state. Some time after the signing of the Brest Peace Treaty, he went over to Lenin’s side, as evidenced by Bukharin’s return to the post of editor-in-chief of Pravda. September 25, 1919 Bukharin became a victim terrorist attack: he was wounded by a bomb thrown by anarchist terrorists into the premises of the Moscow Committee of the RCP (b) in Leontyevsky Lane.

In May 1918, he published the widely known brochure “Program of the Communists (Bolsheviks),” in which he theoretically substantiated the need for labor service for the non-labor classes. After the publication of the works “Political Economy of the Rentier” and “World Economy and Imperialism” he became one of the leading economic theorists of the RCP (b). In 1919-1920 he was a member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern.

In October 1919, together with Yevgeny Preobrazhensky, he wrote the book “The ABC of Communism,” which subsequently went through more than 20 reprints. In May 1920, he wrote (partially co-authored with Georgy Pyatakov) the work “Economy of the Transition Period. Part I: General theory transformation process." These works were generally positively received by Lenin, who, however, believed that Bukharin considered a number of issues from the point of view not of Marxism, but of the “universal organizational science” developed by A. A. Bogdanov, and also criticized the author for his overly pompous style of presentation. Of interest is Lenin’s comic review of the book “Economy of the Transition Period,” which parodies Bukharin’s passion for foreign language vocabulary:

In general, Bukharin’s works of 1918-1921 were written under the strong impression of the practice of “war communism,” associated with the widespread use of non-economic coercion in the country’s economy. Typical quote:

In the “trade union debate” of 1920-1921, Bukharin took a position that he himself considered as a “buffer” between the main parties to the dispute: Lenin and Trotsky. He tried to prove that the disagreement between the participants in the discussion was based on a misunderstanding and resembled the dispute between a person calling a glass a glass cylinder and a person calling the same glass a drinking instrument. Lenin (who considered Bukharin’s position to be a variety of Trotskyist) used the example of Bukharin with a glass for a popular presentation of some views of Marxism, which, from his point of view, were not understood by Trotsky and Bukharin (Lenin’s reasoning later became known as the “dialectics of the glass”).

Summing up his observations of Bukharin’s activities, Lenin gave her the following characteristics, which later became widely known:

The struggle against Trotsky and differences with Stalin

Since November 1923, he has been actively fighting the “Trotskyist” Left Opposition. Lenin's death on January 21, 1924 was a serious mental blow for Bukharin, who was one of the leader's best comrades. Bukharin responded to the death of the founder of the Soviet state with a sincere and emotional appeal from the Central Committee of the RCP(b). After Lenin's death, he was transferred to the Politburo of the Central Committee (June 2, 1924) and became one of the most influential leaders of the party and state. Like Zinoviev, he opposed making Lenin’s “Testament” widely public. During this period, Bukharin became a close friend of Stalin, who in one of his conversations characterized the leading members of the party as follows: “You and I, Bukharchik, are the Himalayas, and everyone else is small spots” (Bukharin belonged to the few top leaders of the party and the country who addressed Stalin on “you” and called him Koba in his speeches; Stalin, in turn, called Bukharin “Nikolasha” or “Bukharchik”). Bukharin provided significant support to Stalin in the struggle against Trotsky (1923-1924), Kamenev and Zinoviev (1925-1926) and in the final defeat of Trotsky (1927). According to some reports, he supervised the deportation of Trotsky to Verny in 1928.

Having analyzed the reasons for the failures of “war communism,” Bukharin became an active supporter of the new economic policy proclaimed by Lenin. After Lenin's death, he emphasized the need for further economic reforms in line with the NEP. At this time, Bukharin put forward the famous slogan (1925), addressed to the peasants: “Get rich, accumulate, develop your economy!”, pointing out that “the socialism of the poor is lousy socialism” (later Stalin called the slogan “not ours”, and Bukharin refused from your own words). At the same time, Bukharin also took part in the development of the Stalinist theory of “socialism in one single country,” opposed to Trotsky’s idea of permanent world revolution.

In 1928 he spoke out against increased collectivization, proposing an evolutionary path when cooperation and the public sector (multi-structured economy) would gradually economically displace individual farming, and the kulaks would not be subject to physical elimination as a class, but would gradually be equalized with the rest of the village residents. In his article “Notes of an Economist,” published in Pravda, Bukharin declared the only acceptable crisis-free development of the agricultural and industrial sectors, and all other approaches (primarily Stalin’s) were “adventuristic.” This, however, contradicted Stalin’s course towards general collectivization and industrialization (moreover, Stalin’s program was to a certain extent influenced by Trotsky’s views on the need for forced industrialization, which Stalin had rejected as unrealizable just three years earlier).

Bukharin in disgrace

A week later, the Politburo condemned Bukharin’s speech, and in a polemic, in response to the General Secretary’s demand to “stop the line of inhibition of collectivization,” he called Stalin a “petty eastern despot.” In November 1928, the Plenum of the Central Committee called the position of Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky a “right deviation” (as opposed to Trotsky’s “left deviation”). At the April Plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission (1929), Stalin said that “yesterday we were still personal friends, now we disagree with him in politics.” The plenum completed the “defeat of Bukharin’s group,” and Bukharin himself was removed from his posts. Refusing to “repent,” on November 17, 1929, he was removed from the Politburo of the Central Committee. Soon, some of the members of the Communist International who supported Bukharin’s position, led by people from the American Communist Party, were expelled from the Comintern, forming the “International Communist Opposition.” But Bukharin himself admitted his mistakes a week later and declared that he would wage “a decisive struggle against all deviations from the general line of the party and, above all, against the right deviation.” At the XVII Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (1934), in his speech he stated: “The duty of every party member is to rally around Comrade Stalin as the personal embodiment of the mind and will of the party.” In 1934 he was transferred from member to candidate member of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks.

Manager and journalist. Bukharin and the intelligentsia

Bukharin, due to the breadth of his knowledge, was considered (along with Lenin, Trotsky and Lunacharsky) one of the most erudite representatives of the Bolshevik party after it came to power. Bukharin was fluent in French, English and German languages. IN Everyday life He was friendly and affable, and remained approachable in communication.

In 1929-1932 he was a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Economic Council of the USSR, head of the scientific and technical department. Since 1932 - member of the board of the People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry of the USSR. At the same time (1931-1936) he was the publisher of the popular science and public magazine “Socialist Reconstruction and Science” (“SoReNa”). Bukharin was one of the editors and an active participant in the first edition of the TSB. The foreign intelligentsia (in particular, Andre Malraux) had a project to put Bukharin at the head of the editorial office of the unrealized international “Encyclopedia of the 20th Century”.

On January 12, 1929, he was elected a full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences in socio-economic sciences. “The candidacy of Comrade Bukharin stands less firmly (than Pokrovsky - Note): formally, academicians refer to the “journalistic nature of his works,” but essentially in their narrow circle they express fears that the election of Comrade. Bukharin, as one of the leaders of the Comintern, “could create all sorts of complications for the Academy in its international relations,” “damage its authority,” etc. Based on the fact that the Academy is unlikely to go to a political demonstration, which it would be in in this case voting out this candidacy, it can be considered that Comrade. Bukharin will be elected,” the commission monitoring the elections to the Academy of Sciences reported to the Politburo in October 1928. Since 1930, Chairman of the Commission on the History of Knowledge (KIZ), since 1932, Director of the Institute of History of Science and Technology of the USSR Academy of Sciences, formed on the basis of KIZ, which ceased to exist in 1938.

From 1934 until the second half of January 1937, he served as editor-in-chief of the Izvestia newspaper, in which he attracted the best journalists and writers of the time to collaborate, and paid a lot of attention to the content and even design of the newspaper. In February 1936, he was sent abroad by the party to repurchase the archives of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that belonged to the German Social Democratic Party, which were taken to a number of European countries after the Nazis came to power in Germany.

The party, however, soon distanced itself from this speech. At the same time, Bukharin had previously actively participated in the posthumous campaign against Yesenin and “Yeseninism,” and his participation in it was largely determined by the then internal party struggle with Trotsky (who spoke with positive assessments of Yesenin’s work). In 1927, in the newspaper Pravda, Bukharin published an article “Evil Notes”, later published as a separate book, where he wrote that

Yesenin’s poetry is essentially a peasant who has half turned into a “bunch-merchant”: in patent leather boots, with a silk lace on an embroidered shirt, the “bunch” falls to the leg of the “empress” today, tomorrow he licks an icon, the day after tomorrow he smears mustard on the nose of a gentleman in a tavern. , and then “spiritually” laments, cries, is ready to hug the dog and make a contribution to the Trinity-Sergius Lavra “in honor of the soul.” He can even hang himself in the attic from the inner emptiness. “Sweet”, “familiar”, “truly Russian” picture!

Ideologically Yesenin represents the most negative traits Russian village and the so-called “national character”: massacre, internal greatest indiscipline, deification of the most backward forms public life at all.

Subsequently, in a report at the first congress of Soviet writers, Bukharin spoke about Yesenin, “a sonorous guslar songwriter, a talented lyric poet,” although critically, but much more warmly, putting him on a par with Blok and Bryusov as “old” poets who reflected the revolution in your creativity.

Caricature artist

Bukharin was a talented cartoonist who depicted many members of the Soviet elite. Many of his cartoons are unique. His cartoons of Stalin are considered the only portraits of the leader made from life, and not from photographs.

Death

In 1936, during the First Moscow trial (over Kamenev, Zinoviev and others), the defendants gave evidence (immediately published) against Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky, who allegedly created the “right bloc.” Tomsky shot himself that same day. Bukharin learned about the case brought against him while on vacation in Central Asia. Immediately after the trial, on September 1, 1936, Bukharin wrote to Voroshilov: “The cynic killer Kamenev is the most disgusting of people, human carrion. I’m terribly glad that the dogs were shot” (perhaps with the expectation of showing this letter to Stalin). But on September 10, 1936, Pravda reported that the USSR Prosecutor's Office had stopped the investigation into Bukharin and others.

In January 1937, during the Second Moscow Trial, charges of conspiratorial activity were again brought against Bukharin, and he was confronted with the arrested Radek. In February 1937 he went on a hunger strike in protest against the accusations against him of involvement in conspiratorial activities, but after Stalin’s words: “To whom are you presenting an ultimatum, the Central Committee?” - stopped it. At the Plenum of the Central Committee in February 1937, he was expelled from the party and arrested on February 27. He insisted on his innocence (including in letters to Stalin); wrote an open letter to the party, which reached us in the late 1980s, recorded by his wife from memory. While in prison (in the internal prison at Lubyanka), he worked on the books “Degradation of Culture under Fascism”, “Philosophical Arabesques”, on the autobiographical novel “Times”, and also wrote poetry. These texts have now been published ( N. I. Bukharin. Prison manuscripts, vol. 1-2, M., 1996).

So that there are no misunderstandings, I tell you from the very beginning that for the sake of the world (society) I 1) am not going to take back anything from what I wrote; 2) I don’t intend to ask you for anything in this sense (and in connection with this), I don’t want to beg you for anything that would take the matter off the rails on which it is rolling. But for yours personal information I write. I cannot leave this life without writing you these last lines, for I am overwhelmed by torment, which you must know about.

1. Standing on the edge of an abyss from which there is no return, I give you my dying wish honestly that I am innocent of those crimes that I confirmed during the investigation...

...There is some big and bold political idea of a general cleansing a) in connection with the pre-war period, b) in connection with the transition to democracy. This purge captures a) the guilty, b) the suspicious, and c) the potentially suspicious. They couldn't get by here without me. Some are neutralized in one way, others in a different way, and others in a third way. The safety net is that people inevitably talk about each other and forever instill distrust in each other (judging by myself: how angry I was with Radek, who trashed me! And then I myself went down this path...). In this way, management has complete guarantee. For God's sake, don't misunderstand that I'm secretly reproaching you here, even in reflection with myself. I have grown so much out of baby's diapers that I understand that big plans big ideas and great interests overshadow everything, and it would be petty to raise the question of your own person along with world-historical tasks that lie primarily on your shoulders.

But this is where I have the main torment and the main painful paradox. 5) If I were absolutely sure that this is exactly what you think, then my soul would be much calmer. Well then! It is necessary, it is necessary. But believe me, my heart flows with a hot stream of blood when I think that you can believe in my crimes and in the depths of your soul you yourself think that I am really guilty of all the horrors. Then what happens? That I myself am helping a number of people lose their lives (starting with myself!), that is, I am doing deliberate evil! Then there is no justification for this. And everything gets confused in my head, and I want to scream and bang my head against the wall: after all, I become the cause of the death of others. What to do? What to do?…

...8) Let me finally move on to my last small requests: a) it’s easier for me to die a thousand times than to survive the upcoming process: I just don’t know how I can cope with myself - you know my nature; I am not an enemy of either the party or the USSR, and I will do everything in my power, but these forces in such a situation are minimal, and heavy feelings rise in my soul; I would, forgetting shame and pride, beg on my knees for this not to happen. But this is probably no longer possible, I would ask, if possible, to give me the opportunity to die before the trial, although I know how harshly you look at such matters; c) if I am facing a death sentence, then I ask you in advance, I conjure you directly with everything that is dear to you, to replace the execution with the fact that I myself drink poison in the cell (give me morphine so that I fall asleep and don’t wake up). For me this point is extremely important, I don’t know what words I should find to beg for this as a mercy: after all, politically it won’t hinder anything, and no one will know that. But let me spend my last seconds the way I want. Have mercy! You, knowing me well, will understand. I sometimes look with clear eyes into the face of death, just as I know well that I am capable of brave deeds. And sometimes the same me is so confused that nothing remains in me. So if I am destined to die, I ask for a cup of morphine. I pray for this... c) I ask you to let me say goodbye to my wife and son. The daughter doesn’t need it: she will feel too sorry for her, it will be hard, just like for Nadya and her father. And Anyuta is young, she will survive, and I want to say my last words to her. I would ask to be given a meeting with her before the trial. The arguments are as follows: if my family sees what I confessed to, they may commit suicide out of surprise. I have to somehow prepare for this. It seems to me that this is in the interests of the matter and in its official interpretation...

(from Bukharin’s letter to Stalin dated December 10, 1937)

Bukharin was one of the main defendants (along with Rykov) in the show trial in the case of the Anti-Soviet Right-Trotskyist Bloc. Like almost all other defendants, he admitted guilt and partly gave the expected testimony. In his last word, however, he made an attempt to refute the accusations brought against him. Although Bukharin nevertheless stated: “The monstrosity of my crimes is immeasurable,” he did not directly confess to any specific episode.

March 13, 1938 Military Collegium Supreme Court The USSR found Bukharin guilty and sentenced him to death penalty. Bukharin's death sentence was imposed on the basis of the decision of a commission headed by Mikoyan, the members of the commission were: Beria, Yezhov, Krupskaya, Ulyanova, Khrushchev. The petition for pardon was rejected, and two days later he was shot in the village. Kommunarka, Moscow region, buried there.

Shortly before the execution, Bukharin composed a short message addressed to the future generation of party leaders, which his third wife A.M. memorized. Larina:

I'm leaving this life. I bow my head not before the proletarian axe, which must be merciless, but also chaste. I feel helpless in front of the infernal machine, which, probably using the methods of the Middle Ages, has gigantic power, fabricates organized slander, and acts boldly and confidently. There is no Dzerzhinsky, the wonderful traditions of the Cheka, when the revolutionary idea guided all its actions, justified cruelty towards enemies, and protected the state from all kinds of counter-revolution, gradually became a thing of the past. Therefore, the Cheka bodies have earned special trust, special honor, authority and respect. Currently, for the most part, the so-called NKVD bodies are a degenerated organization of unprincipled, decayed, well-endowed officials who, using the former authority of the Cheka, for the sake of Stalin’s morbid suspicion, I’m afraid to say more, in the pursuit of orders and glory, do their vile deeds, by the way, not realizing that they are simultaneously destroying themselves - history does not tolerate witnesses to dirty deeds!

May 21, 1938 General meeting The USSR Academy of Sciences excluded N. I. Bukharin from the list of full members and from the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In the “cult” film “Lenin in 1918” (1939), in one of the episodes Bukharin was depicted as a conspirator plotting an assassination attempt on Lenin.

On April 13, 1956, the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee adopted a decision “On the study of open trials in the case of Bukharin, Rykov, Zinoviev, Tukhachevsky and others,” after which on December 10, 1956, a special commission made a decision regarding Stalin’s abuses, but refused to rehabilitate Bukharin, Rykov, Zinoviev and Kamenev based on “their many years of anti-Soviet struggle.” Nikolai Bukharin, like most of those convicted in this process, except for Genrikh Yagoda (who was not rehabilitated at all), was rehabilitated only in 1988 (February 4) and in the same year posthumously reinstated in the party (June 1988) and in the USSR Academy of Sciences (May 10 1988).

Family

His first marriage was in 1911 to Nadezhda Lukina (his cousin, the sister of N.M. Lukin, who was also Nikolai Bukharin’s cousin), with whom they lived for about 10 years; she was arrested on the night of May 1, 1938. and shot on March 9, 1940
The second time (1921-1929) he was married to Esther Gurvich (1895-1989). From this marriage - daughter Svetlana (1924-2003). Despite this family’s renunciation of Bukharin back in 1929, both mother and daughter ended up in camps, from which they emerged only after Stalin’s death.
The third time (from 1934) he was married to the daughter of party leader Yu. Larin, Anna (1914 - 1996), who also went through the camps and is known as a memoirist; she lived to see her husband's rehabilitation. Bukharin’s son from Anna Larina is Yuri (b. 1936), artist; grew up in an orphanage under the name Yuri Borisovich Gusman, knowing nothing about his parents. He received his new surname from his adoptive mother Ida Guzman, the aunt of his real mother. Now he bears the last name Larin and patronymic Nikolaevich.
Bukharin's grandson, Nikolai Yurievich Larin (b. 1972), devoted his life to football. Heads (as of 2010) the children's and youth football school of the State Educational Institution Education Center "Chertanovo" in Moscow.

Writings attributed to Bukharin

In 1924, the emigrant poet Ilya Britan published a brochure “For I am a Bolshevik!”, which contained the text of a letter allegedly received from one of the leaders of the Bolshevik party. The letter was not signed, but rumors spread that the author was Bukharin. In March 1928, the French newspaper La Revue universelle published a translation of the letter into French, under the title "Boukharine: Un document sur le Bolchevisme." Some historians believe that the author of this document is indeed Bukharin. The letter contains extremely frank, revealing statements about the activities of the Bolshevik leadership, in particular it says:

Works by N. I. Bukharin

Political Economy of the Rentier 1914/1919
World economy and imperialism 1915
Program of the Communists (Bolsheviks) M., 1918
(co-authored with E. Preobrazhensky) The ABC of Communism: a popular explanation of the program of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). - M., 1919.
Economy in Transition 1920
Theory of historical materialism 1921
Attack (collection of articles) 1924
Capital accumulation and imperialism 1925
Syndicalism and communism // Pravda. - 1921. January 25.
About the world revolution, our country, culture and so on (Response to Academician I. Pavlov). L.: Gosizdat, 1924.
Statement of the XIV Moscow Gubernia Party Conference // Pravda. - 1925. December 13.
Fight for new people. The role of personnel in the transition period (from a report in Leningrad on February 5, 1923) // Bukharin N. The struggle for personnel. M.-L.: Young Guard, 1926.
Notes from an economist // Pravda. - 1928. September 30.
Darwinism and Marxism. Introductory article to the book “The Origin of Species” by Charles Darwin, Moscow-Leningrad: OGIZ-Selkhozgiz, 1935.
Political economy of the rentier. Orbit, 1988
Sketches. State Technical and Theoretical Publishing House, 1988 ISBN 5-212-00225-7
Selected works. Publishing House of Political Literature, 1988 ISBN 5-250-00634-5
Selected works. Science, 1988 ISBN 5-02-025779-6
Problems of the theory and practice of socialism. - M., 1989 ISBN 5-250-01026-1
Methodology and planning of science and technology. Science, 1989 ISBN 5-02-008530-8
The path to socialism. The science. Novosibirsk, 1990 ISBN 5-02-029630-9
Revolution and culture. Foundation named after N. I. Bukharina, 1993 ISBN 5-250-02351-7
Prisoner of Lubyanka. Prison manuscripts of Nikolai Bukharin. - M.: Airo-XXI; RGTEU, 2008 ISBN 978-5-91022-074-8
On the formulation of the problems of historical materialism (1923)
Time. Novel. Preface and commentary by B.Ya. Frezinsky. M. Progress. 1994

Film incarnations

?? (Lenin in 1918, 1939, first version)
Konstantin Shain (Mission to Moscow, 1943)
?? (Oath, 1946)
Oleg Tabakov (“Strokes to the portrait of V. I. Lenin”, 1969)
Alexey Safonov (“Train to Tomorrow”, 1970)
Alexander Romantsov (Enemy of the People - Bukharin, 1990)

Name: Nikolay Bukharin

Age: 49 years old

Activity: political, state and party figure

Family status: was married

Nikolai Bukharin: biography

The biography of Soviet party leader Nikolai Bukharin is unique and in many ways tragic. He was not an “ordinary” Bolshevik, he did not go through the Civil War, but at the same time he managed to become one of the most prominent revolutionaries. Bukharin spoke several languages and had encyclopedic knowledge, was an experienced journalist and a master of persuasion, but eloquence did not help him convince his colleagues of his innocence.

Childhood and youth

Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin was born in Zamoskvorechye, on Bolshaya Ordynka, on September 27 (October 9), 1888. His parents worked as primary school teachers. In 1893, the family moved to Chisinau, where father Ivan Gavrilovich received the position of tax inspector, but after 4 years they returned back to the capital.

Little Kolya studied brilliantly and graduated from high school with a gold medal. After school, he became a student at the Faculty of Law at Moscow University. By that time, Bukharin was already actively interested in politics and even managed to join the Bolshevik Party, so he had to combine his studies with work in trade unions. When he organized a youth conference in the capital, which anticipated the Komsomol movement, he was 19 years old.

Career and party activities

The first arrest occurred already in 1909. This incident and the two subsequent ones did not turn out to be anything serious for Bukharin, but they exhausted the patience of the authorities, so in 1911 he was expelled from Moscow to the Arkhangelsk province. A few months later, with the help of friends, he fled from his place of exile abroad - first to Hanover, and then to Austria-Hungary. It was there that he met and.

In emigration, Nikolai Ivanovich continued his self-education and carefully studied the works of utopian socialists and classics of Marxism. When did the first one begin? World War, the Austrian-Hungarian authorities hastened to get rid of the potential spy and deported Bukharin to Switzerland. After this, the politician changed several more European cities, but did not take root in any of them, so he went to the USA.

In October 1916, in New York, Bukharin made acquaintance with. Together they worked on editing the magazine "New World". Nikolai Ivanovich’s first major work, “World Economy and Imperialism,” was written in 1915. Lenin read it carefully and generally assessed it positively, but then he and the author disagreed on issues of self-determination of nationalities.

When the February Revolution took place in Russia, Bukharin wanted to immediately return to his homeland, but he only got to the capital in May - he was arrested first in Japan, through whose territory he was returning, and then in Vladivostok for agitating among sailors and soldiers.

In 1917, he became a member of the Central Committee of the RSDLP, took a radical leftist position and began to conduct active propaganda activities. Nikolai Ivanovich returned from abroad with excellent journalistic training, so he became the founder and editor-in-chief of the newspaper Pravda, and later the publication Kommunist.

This time was fruitful for creative work. Bukharin quickly became one of the main theorists of communism of that time: in his “Program of Communists (Bolsheviks”), “The ABC of Communism” and “Economics of Communism” the need for labor service was substantiated, transformation processes in the national economy were analyzed, and ways to solve society’s problems were proposed from the perspective of Marxism .

Lenin respected his colleague’s theoretical research, but Bukharin’s position on some issues caused him concern. He reproached him for being too scholastic and enthusiastic foreign vocabulary, and considered the theses presented in the books “not entirely Marxist.”

Documentary film about Nikolai Bukharin

In 1919, Bukharin suffered from a terrorist attack organized by anarchists - the criminals threw a bomb at the party premises in Leontyevsky Lane. The injuries were serious, but he was able to recover and resume work.

In 1923, Nikolai Ivanovich supported Lenin in the fight against Trotsky’s opposition. The death of the leader in January 1924 was a severe mental blow - he considered him his closest friend, and Lenin himself in recent years even called him his son. In his “Testament”, Vladimir Ilyich noted that Bukharin is a most valuable person, rightfully bearing the title of the party’s favorite.

The departure of an influential comrade-in-arms freed up a place for him in the party leadership - in the same year Nikolai Ivanovich became a member of the Politburo. During this period, his friendly relations with Stalin strengthened, but in 1928 they separated over collectivization issues. Bukharin tried to convince his colleagues not to physically oust the “kulaks”, but to gradually equalize their rights with the rest of the village residents.

Joseph Vissarionovich spoke out sharply against it, and a year later the “Bukharin group” was defeated at the next plenum, and he himself was deprived of all posts. Within a week of his resignation, the politician agreed to publicly admit his “mistakes,” so he was again admitted to leadership, but this time in the scientific and technical sector.

In 1932, Bukharin headed the People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry of the USSR. At the same time, he was engaged in publishing work and initiated the creation of the “Big Soviet encyclopedia" Despite loud statements, the politician did not give up hope for democratization, since he did not approve of Stalin’s harsh dictatorship. Nikolai Ivanovich warmly welcomed the creation of the USSR Constitution, not knowing that many of its provisions would remain only written down on paper.

Repression and imprisonment

In 1936, fellow party members first accused him of trying to create a “right bloc” together with Rykov and Tomsky. At that time, the investigation was stopped for unnamed reasons, but just a year later Bukharin was again suspected of conspiratorial plans. The politician insisted on his innocence, wrote letters of protest and even went on a hunger strike, but this did not help - on February 27, 1937, he was arrested.

In the internal prison at Lubyanka, Nikolai Ivanovich worked on the books “Philosophical Arabesques”, the novel “Times” and a collection of poems. He partially admitted guilt, without confessing to any specific episode, and in his last word he again tried to declare his innocence.

Personal life

The personal life of the party leader was stormy. Misfortune and death awaited everyone who connected their fate with him. Nikolai Bukharin was married three times; his first wife, Nadezhda Lukina, was also his cousin. They married in 1911 and lived together for more than 10 years. They had no children together - the woman suffered from a spinal disease and could not move without a special corset.

Even after the divorce, she maintained friendly relations with Bukharin: when she was arrested in 1938, she until the last denied any guilt and did not believe in bad intentions ex-husband. The painful interrogations lasted 2 years, after which Lukina was shot.

The politician's second wife was Esther Gurvich. Their life together lasted 8 years, she gave birth to his daughter Svetlana. During the First Moscow Trial, the family immediately renounced Bukharin, but this did not save them - both mother and daughter ended up in camps and left them only after Stalin’s death.

Bukharin entered into his third marriage, which turned out to be the shortest, in 1934. His chosen one was Anna Larina, the daughter of a party colleague, who went into exile after the execution of her husband. They had a son, Yuri, who grew up knowing almost nothing about his parents. Later he was adopted and received the surname of his adoptive mother - Guzman. Bukharin's grandson, Nikolai Larin, became a football coach and headed a children's sports school in Moscow.

Along with Lunacharsky and Lenin, Bukharin was considered one of the most intelligent representatives of the party. He was fluent in 3 languages, was known as an excellent speaker and was famous for his ability to quickly find a common language with any person.

A film from the series “More Than Love” about the love of Nikolai Bukharin and Anna Larina

In addition, Nikolai Ivanovich was an excellent caricaturist, willingly drew caricatures of his party comrades and even published works on the pages of Pravda. He owns the only portraits of Stalin painted from life, and not from photographs.

He supported many writers - ,. He had a difficult relationship with Bukharin - at one time he considered him a “harmful” author who glorified vices, but after the poet’s suicide he softened his public statements about him.

Death

On March 13, 1938, the former party functionary was sentenced to death. The convict in letters to the leader begged to bring him a cup of morphine, “so that he can fall asleep and not wake up,” but he was denied an easy death. The politician was taken to the village of Kommunarka near Moscow and shot, his body was buried not far from this place.

An interesting fact is that Nikolai Ivanovich was predicted to die at the hands of his comrades in his youth. A German clairvoyant in 1918 informed him that he would be executed in his own country, and he, who dreamed of transforming Russia and gaining the glory of a revolutionary, was very surprised and annoyed by what he heard.

Several films are dedicated to the fate of the politician - the documentaries “Nikolai Bukharin - Hostage of the System” and “More than Love” (dedicated to his relationship with Anna Larina), as well as the feature film “Enemy of the People Bukharin”, where Alexander Romantsov played the main role.

Proceedings

1914 – “The political economy of the rentier. The theory of value and profit of the Austrian school"
1923 – “World Economy and Imperialism”
1918 – “Program of the Communists (Bolsheviks)”
1919 – “Class struggle and revolution”
1919 – “The ABCs of Communism: A Popular Explanation of the Program of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)”
1920 – “Economy in Transition”
1923 – “The crisis of capitalism and the communist movement”
1924 – “The Theory of Historical Materialism”
1928 – “Notes of an Economist”
1932 – “Goethe and His Historical Significance”
1932 – “Darwinism and Marxism”
2008 – “Prisoner of Lubyanka. Prison manuscripts of Nikolai Bukharin"

Russian economist, Soviet statesman and party leader. Academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1929).

Activities before the revolution

He was born into a family as the son of a school teacher. From 1893 he lived in Chisinau, where his father worked as a tax inspector.

After graduating from high school, he studied at the economics department of the law faculty of Moscow University (in 1911 he was expelled for participating in revolutionary activities). During the revolution of 1905-07, together with his best friend Ilya Ehrenburg, he took an active part in student demonstrations organized by students of Moscow University. In 1906 he joined the RSDLP, joining the Bolsheviks. At the age of 19, together with Grigory Sokolnikov, he organized the 1907 youth conference in Moscow, which was later considered the predecessor of the Komsomol.

In 1908-1910 - member of the Moscow Committee of the RSDLP, worked in trade unions. At this time he became close to V.M. Smirnov and met his future wife N.M. Lukina.

In June 1911 he was arrested and exiled for 3 years to Onega (Arkhangelsk province), in the same year he escaped from exile and illegally went to Hanover, then to Austria-Hungary.

In 1914, with the outbreak of World War I, he was arrested by the Austrian-Hungarian authorities on suspicion of espionage and deported to Switzerland. From 1914 he lived in London, from 1915 - in Stockholm. In April 1916 he was expelled from Stockholm, lived in Christiania (Oslo), Copenhagen, from October 1916 - in New York (USA), where he met Leon Trotsky and Alexandra Kollontai and edited (from January 1917) together with Trotsky the magazine “New World” "

In 1915 he wrote the work “World Economy and Imperialism,” devoted to the analysis of the characteristics of capitalism at the beginning of the 20th century. This work was positively assessed by Lenin, who wrote a preface to it (not published before the revolution) and used a number of its provisions in his work “Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism” (1916). On the other hand, in the discussion among Social Democrats about the right of nations to self-determination that began with the outbreak of the First World War, Bukharin opposed the position of Lenin and his supporters (in particular, Stalin and Zinoviev). Lenin called the corresponding views of Bukharin and Pyatakov, who joined him, a “caricature of Marxism” and regarded them as a relapse of the economism of the 1890s, associated with the inability to distinguish political issues from economic ones.

After the February Revolution of 1917, Bukharin immediately decided to return to his homeland, but returned to Russia only in May 1917, since he was arrested in Japan, through whose territory he was returning. In Vladivostok he was arrested by local authorities for campaigning among soldiers and sailors.

"The favorite of the whole party." Theorist and economist

In 1917 he was elected a member of the Central Committee of the RSDLP(b), after which he worked in the Moscow Party Committee and edited the printed publication Izvestia of the Moscow Military Revolutionary Committee. He carried out active propaganda work during the October Revolution of 1917, taking radical leftist positions. John Reed, in Ten Days That Shook the World, argues that Bukharin was considered "more left-wing than Lenin." For many years, with a short break in 1918, he was the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Pravda and, in fact, the leading party ideologist. Prepared proposals for the nationalization of industry and the creation of economic management bodies headed by the Supreme Council of the National Economy (VSNKh).

In 1917-1918, as the editor of the “left-communist” newspaper “Kommunist”, he was the leader of the “left” communists, together with other “left” communists, as well as the left Socialist Revolutionaries, he opposed both the signing of peace with the Germans in Brest-Litovsk and the position of the head Soviet delegation of Leon Trotsky, demanding the continuation of the line for the world proletarian revolution. Later, during a discussion about factions in the CPSU (b), initiated in 1923 by Trotsky, he admitted that during the discussion of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty, some of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries invited him to participate in the arrest of Lenin for 24 hours and the creation of a coalition socialist government from opponents of the peace treaty with the Central Powers. The Left Social Revolutionaries argued that this government would be able to break the treaty and continue the revolutionary war, but Bukharin flatly refused to participate in the conspiracy against the leader of the party and the state. Some time after the signing of the Brest Peace Treaty, he went over to Lenin’s side, as evidenced by Bukharin’s return to the post of editor-in-chief of Pravda. On September 25, 1919, Bukharin became a victim of a terrorist attack: he was wounded by a bomb thrown by anarchist terrorists into the premises of the Moscow Committee of the RCP (b) in Leontyevsky Lane.

In May 1918 he published the widely known brochure “Program of the Communists (Bolsheviks),” in which he theoretically substantiated the need for labor service for the non-labor classes. After the publication of the works “Political Economy of the Rentier” and “World Economy and Imperialism” he became one of the leading economic theorists of the RCP (b). In 1919-1920 he was a member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern.

In October 1919, together with Evgeniy Preobrazhensky, he wrote the brochure “The ABC of Communism,” which subsequently went through more than 20 reprints. In May 1920 he wrote (partially co-authored with Georgy Pyatakov) the work “Economy of the Transition Period. Part I: General theory of the transformation process." These works were generally positively received by Lenin, who, however, believed that Bukharin considered a number of issues from the point of view not of Marxism, but of the “universal organizational science” developed by A. A. Bogdanov, and also criticized the author for his overly pompous style of presentation. Of interest is Lenin’s comic review of the book “Economy of the Transition Period,” which parodies Bukharin’s passion for foreign language vocabulary:

The excellent qualities of this excellent book are somewhat diminished, since they are limited by the fact that the author does not sufficiently substantiate his postulates...

From “Recensio academica” by V. I. Lenin on the book “Economy of the Transition Period”

From the point of view of a large historical scale, proletarian coercion in all its forms, from executions to labor conscription, is, paradoxically as it may sound, a method of developing communist humanity from the human material of the capitalist era.

"Economy in Transition", Chapter X

Summing up his observations of Bukharin’s activities, Lenin gave her the following characteristics, which later became widely known:

Bukharin is not only the most valuable and largest theoretician of the party, he is also legitimately considered the favorite of the entire party, but his theoretical views can very doubtfully be classified as completely Marxist, because there is something scholastic in him (he never studied and, I think, never understood quite dialectic).

From “Letter to the Congress” by V. I. Lenin

The struggle against Trotsky and differences with Stalin

“alism” (later Stalin called the slogan “not ours”, and Bukharin retracted his words). At the same time, Bukharin also took part in the development of the Stalinist theory of “socialism in one single country,” opposed to Trotsky’s idea of permanent world revolution.

In 1928 he spoke out against increased collectivization, proposing an evolutionary path when cooperation and the public sector (multi-structured economy) would gradually economically displace individual farming, and the kulaks would not be subject to physical elimination as a class, but would gradually be equalized with the rest of the village residents. In the article “Notes of an Economist” published in Pravda (September 30, 1928), Bukharin declared the only acceptable crisis-free development of the agricultural and industrial sectors, and all other approaches (primarily Stalin’s) were “adventuristic.” This, however, contradicted Stalin’s course towards general collectivization and industrialization (moreover, Stalin’s program was to a certain extent influenced by Trotsky’s views on the need for forced industrialization, which Stalin had rejected as unrealizable just three years earlier).

Bukharin in disgrace

A week later, the Politburo condemned Bukharin’s speech, and in a polemic, in response to the General Secretary’s demand to “stop the line of braking collectivization,” he called Stalin a “petty eastern despot.” In November 1928, the Plenum of the Central Committee called the position of Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky a “right deviation” (as opposed to Trotsky’s “left deviation”). At the April Plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission (1929), Stalin said that “yesterday we were still personal friends, now we disagree with him in politics.” The plenum completed the “defeat of Bukharin’s group,” and Bukharin himself was removed from his posts. Refusing to “repent,” on November 17, 1929, he was removed from the Politburo of the Central Committee. Soon, some of the members of the Communist International who supported Bukharin’s position, led by people from the American Communist Party, were expelled from the Comintern, forming the “International Communist Opposition.” But Bukharin himself admitted his mistakes a week later and declared that he would wage “a decisive struggle against all deviations from the general line of the party and, above all, against the right deviation.” At the XVII Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (1934), in his speech he stated: “The duty of every party member is to rally around Comrade Stalin as the personal embodiment of the mind and will of the party.” In 1934 he was transferred from member to candidate member of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks.

Manager and journalist. Bukharin and the intelligentsia

Bukharin, due to the breadth of his knowledge, was considered (along with Lenin and Lunacharsky) one of the most erudite representatives of the Bolshevik party after it came to power. Bukharin was fluent in French, English and German. In everyday life he was friendly and affable, and remained approachable in communication.

Bukharin's name was associated with the hopes of some of the intelligentsia of that time for improving the state's policy towards it. Bukharin had a warm relationship with Maxim Gorky (Bukharin would later be accused at trial of involvement in Gorky’s murder); Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak used his help in conflicts with the authorities. In 1934, Bukharin gave a speech at the First Congress of Soviet Writers, where he rated Pasternak extremely highly and also criticized the “Komsomol poets.” The party, however, soon distanced itself from this speech. At the same time, Bukharin had previously participated in the posthumous persecution of Yesenin, publishing in 1927 in the newspaper Pravda the article “Evil Notes,” which was later published as a separate book.

Bukharin wrote that

Ideologically, Yesenin represents the most negative features of the Russian village and the so-called “national character”: scuffles, internal greatest indiscipline, deification of the most backward forms of social life in general.

Constitution

The embodiment of Bukharin’s hopes for democratization and the rejection of the harsh dictatorship of one party was the Constitution of the USSR of 1936, the draft of which Stalin, according to numerous testimonies, instructed Bukharin to write almost single-handedly (with the participation of Radek). The Constitution contained a list of fundamental rights and freedoms, eliminated the differences in rights of citizens based on social origin that existed in the USSR until then, and other provisions that marked the completion of the revolution and the formation of a unified Soviet society. Formally, it was the most democratic constitution in the world. However, under the conditions of that time, many of the democratic provisions of this constitution, which received the name “Stalinist”, remained only on paper.

Death

In January 1937, during the Second Moscow Trial, Bukharin was again accused of being involved in conspiratorial activities, and he was confronted with the arrested Radek. In February 1937 he went on a hunger strike in protest against accusations of his involvement in conspiratorial activities, but after Stalin’s words: “To whom are you presenting an ultimatum, the Central Committee?” - stopped it. At the Plenum of the Central Committee in February 1937, he was expelled from the party and arrested on February 27. He insisted on his innocence (including in letters to Stalin); wrote an open letter to the party, which reached us in the late 1980s, recorded by his wife from memory. While in prison (in the internal prison at Lubyanka), he worked on the books “Degradation of Culture under Fascism”, “Philosophical Arabesques”, on the autobiographical novel “Times”, and also wrote poetry. Now these texts have been published (N.I. Bukharin. Prison manuscripts, vol. 1-2, M., 1996).

He was one of the main accused (along with Rykov) at the show trial in the case of the “Anti-Soviet right-wing Trotskyist bloc” (Third Moscow trial). Like almost all other defendants, he admitted guilt and partly gave the expected testimony. In his last word, however, he made an attempt to refute the accusations brought against him. Although Bukharin nevertheless stated: “The monstrosity of my crimes is immeasurable,” he did not directly confess to any specific episode. On March 13, 1938, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR found Bukharin guilty and sentenced him to death. The petition for pardon was rejected, and two days later he was shot in the village. Kommunarka, Moscow region, buried there.

Family

Bukharin's first marriage was to Nadezhda Lukina (his cousin), who was arrested in 1938 and soon died in the camps.

The second time (1921-1929) he was married to Esther Gurvich (born 1895). From this marriage - daughter Svetlana (b. 1923). Despite this family’s renunciation of Bukharin back in 1929, both mother and daughter ended up in camps, from which they emerged only after Stalin’s death.

The third time (from 1934) he was married to the daughter of party leader Yu. Larin, Anna, who also went through the camps and is known as a memoirist; she lived to see her husband's rehabilitation. Bukharin's son from Anna Larina is Yuri (b. 1936), artist; grew up in an orphanage under the name Yuri Borisovich Gusman, knowing nothing about his parents. He received his new surname from his adoptive mother Ida Guzman, the aunt of his real mother. Now he bears the last name Larin and patronymic Nikolaevich.

Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (1888-1938) - Soviet politician, academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1928). Participant in the Revolution of 1905-07 and the October Revolution of 1917. In 1917-18, leader of the “left communists”. In 1918-29 he was editor of the newspaper Pravda, and at the same time in 1919-29 a member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern.

In 1929-32 Nikolai Bukharin was a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Council of the National Economy of the USSR, and from 1932 a member of the board of the People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry. In 1934-37 editor of Izvestia. Member of the Party Central Committee in 1917-34. Member of the Politburo of the Central Committee in 1924-29. Candidate member of the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee in 1923-24. Member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Central Executive Committee of the USSR.

The very structure of the bourgeois court protects the bourgeoisie.

Bukharin Nikolai Ivanovich

In con. 20s Nikolai Bukharin opposed the use of emergency measures during collectivization and industrialization, which was declared “a right deviation in the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks).” Works on philosophy and political economy. Repressed; rehabilitated posthumously.

Nikolai Bukharin, Soviet statesman and party leader, professional revolutionary.

We can only have two parties: one in power, the other in prison.

Bukharin Nikolai Ivanovich

Family. Bolshevik high school student

Nikolai Bukharin was born into the family of a teacher, a graduate of the Faculty of Mathematics of Moscow University; his mother was an elementary school teacher. Already during his studies, thanks to his father, Bukharin developed an interest in natural history, literature and painting. Until the end of his life, Bukharin collected scientifically significant collections of birds and butterflies; his deep knowledge of literature and painting allowed him to later become one of the best Soviet literary critics and art critics of that time.

In 1905, at the height of the revolutionary events, Nikolai Bukharin, together with his younger gymnasium friend, began working in the Moscow city organization of the Bolsheviks. In 1906, as a graduating high school student, Bukharin joined the RSDLP(b).

Proletarian coercion in all forms, from executions to labor conscription, is a method of developing communist humanity from the human material of the capitalist era

Bukharin Nikolai Ivanovich

Professional revolutionary

In 1907-1910 Nikolai Bukharin studied at the economics department of the law faculty of Moscow University. Bukharin paid little attention to his studies, since he led the propaganda and illegal activities of the Bolsheviks among students. Bukharin was expelled from the university due to his arrest; in 1911 he was exiled to Arkhangelsk, then to Onega, from there he fled through Moscow to Hanover.

In exile, Bukharin worked in Bolshevik and socialist organizations in Germany, Austria-Hungary, Switzerland, and the Scandinavian countries. In 1912 in Krakow he met V.I. Lenin. At the Social Democratic Conference in Bern in 1915, he sharply criticized Lenin’s views on the issue of self-determination of nations, Lenin’s slogan of Russia’s defeat in the imperialist war and the idea of “universal peace.”

In 1915, Nikolai Bukharin published the book “World Economy and Imperialism,” which contained the same theoretical errors as the works of Hilferding and Lenin. In October 1916, Bukharin began collaborating, and in January 1917 he actually headed the editorial office of the newspaper “New World” in New York (the organ of Russian Social Democracy). A member of the editorial board of the New World was L. D. Trotsky, with whom Bukharin’s relationship did not work out and soon developed into mutual hostility.

In the bloody struggle against capital, the working class cannot refuse capital punishment. But a purely objective comparison of the proletarian court with the court of the bourgeois counter-revolution reveals the extreme softness of the workers' judges in comparison with the executioners of bourgeois justice

Bukharin Nikolai Ivanovich

In April 1917, Nikolai Bukharin returned to his homeland, where fateful events unfolded not only for Russia, but for the whole world. Bukharin, the most prominent representative of the young generation of the “Leninist guard” of professional revolutionaries, endlessly cut off from life due to their unnatural existence, took an active part in them.

After October

In the spring and summer of 1917, Nikolai Bukharin followed in the wake of Lenin’s policies, but at a meeting of the party’s Central Committee on September 15, 1917, he voted to hide and burn Lenin’s letters calling for an armed uprising from the party. During the days of the October Revolution, Bukharin headed the editorial office of Izvestia of the Moscow Military Revolutionary Committee. According to eyewitnesses, during a report on the bloody October events in Moscow, Bukharin burst into tears. However, speaking on January 5, 1918 at the opening of the Constituent Assembly, it was Bukharin who threatened its deputies with civil war: “the question of the power of the revolutionary proletariat... is a question that will be resolved by that very civil war, which no spells... can be stopped.”

Kamenev is a cynic killer, the most disgusting of people, human carrion. I'm terribly glad that the dogs were shot. (September 1, 1936, letter to Kliment Voroshilov)

Bukharin Nikolai Ivanovich

After the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly, the question of peace with Germany arose, on which Nikolai Bukharin sharply disagreed with Lenin, who advocated peace on any terms. Bukharin led the “left opposition” (see “Left Communists”), which had an advantage in the Central Committee. The theory of “revolutionary” put forward by Bukharin guerrilla warfare“against the regular German army only says that Bukharin and his supporters in the Central Committee (Bubnov, Felix Dzerzhinsky, Krestinsky, Uritsky, etc.) completely inadequately perceived the real state of affairs. However, Bukharin, like most party leaders, assigned the Russian revolution the role of only a fuse, from which the world revolution was supposed to break out. Hence the logic of Nikolai Bukharin: let the German defeat Russia and thereby transfer the flame of revolution to Europe.

After signing the “obscene” Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on March 3, 1918, Bukharin returned to editing Pravda, the decision-making body of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party. He fully justified the “Red Terror” that began after the assassination attempt on Vladimir Lenin on August 30, 1918, although he could not help but understand, as even a half-educated lawyer, that the combination of the functions of investigative, judicial and execution bodies in the Cheka could not but give rise to monstrous atrocities and arbitrariness. Millions of victims civil war, famine, epidemics, destruction of the country's economy, and the savagery of the surviving population, Bukharin considered “inevitable costs of the revolution.”

In the field of political economic theory, Nikolai Bukharin's views underwent sharp fluctuations. In 1918 he advocated the nationalization of only the largest enterprises; in his works “The ABC of Communism” (1919) and “Economy of the Transition Period” (1920) he advocated draconian measures of military communism, for total government regulation distributions. With the beginning of the NEP, Bukharin makes a 180 turn. In 1923, in Pravda, Bukharin argued that the USSR was doomed to “slowly grow into socialism for many decades,” “the socialism of the poor is lousy socialism” (1925) and, finally, the famous: “To everything The peasantry, all its layers must be told: get rich, accumulate, develop your economy.” At the XIV Party Congress in December 1925, Bukharin was sharply criticized for such a “petty-bourgeois” position.

Know, comrades, that on the banner that you will carry in your victorious march to communism, there is also a drop of my blood. (“Letter-testament” of Bukharin, addressed to the “future generation of party leaders”)

Bukharin Nikolai Ivanovich

In March 1919, Nikolai Bukharin was elected as a candidate member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, and in June 1924 - a member of the Politburo, which he remained until November 1929. These years are the peak of his party career. In 1919-1929 he served as a member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern and its presidium. In 1928 he was elected a full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. When academician Bukharin Stalin sent to Leningrad to convince the disloyal Nobel laureate, Academician Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, in the correctness of the chosen socialist path of development, the malicious old man first of all inquired from his “colleague” if he knew the multiplication table.

"The Party's Favorite"

In Lenin's so-called testament, “Letter to the Congress,” Nikolai Bukharin was called “the favorite of the entire party.” After the death of the leader, he became the idol, first of all, of the party youth, who were drawn to Bukharin after the decline of Trotsky’s star in 1925. This special position of Bukharin was greatly facilitated by his personal qualities: outwardly attractive, accessible, democratic, free from money-grubbing and arrogance characteristic of most communist leaders; in the unchanged costume of the era of “revolutionary romanticism” - a simple shirt, leather jacket, boots. Cheerful, noisy, infecting the Bolshevik youth with his irrepressible energy and enthusiasm, Bukharin was the only pure intellectual among the Bolshevik leaders. There is an unsolvable riddle in Bukharin’s political biography - the “favorite of the party” was completely devoid of lust for power. “I personally have always lacked the pathos of power” (from Bukharin’s letter to Stalin, 1936). For a politician of the first magnitude, this is a unique phenomenon.

Around Nikolai Bukharin a group of intellectual, talented youth of very different origins (children of prominent Bolsheviks and prominent cadets) formed, which was called the “Bukharin school.” Almost all of them were repressed and died in the Stalinist meat grinder.

Supporters of Nikolai Bukharin were also members of the Moscow Party Committee (N.A. Uglanov and others), in the Politburo Bukharin was recognized as their leader by A.I. Rykov (chairman of the Council of People's Commissars), M.P. Tomsky (head of trade unions). Bukharin’s constant political opponent, G. E. Zinoviev, complained in 1925 that Bukharin received “a monopoly on the political and literary representation of the party, on all political and educational work.” Indeed, Nikolai Bukharin was not only the editor of Pravda and the theoretical journal of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (Bolshevik) (since 1924), but also a member of the editorial boards of countless periodicals, encyclopedias, and academic publications.

With all these trump cards in his hands, Nikolai Bukharin intended to enter into an alliance with Stalin in order, thanks to Stalin’s organizational power, to make his economic program the party’s program. But Stalin needed Bukharin and his “school” even more, since Stalin’s group suffered from intellectual weakness; The Secretary General relied on the young partycrats he had trained, skilled in apparatus games, but completely devoid of their own political ideas (V. M. Molotov, G. M. Malenkov, etc.).

Stalin also needed Nikolai Bukharin as a means, as a battering ram, to crush Zinoviev, Kamenev and Trotsky. The “favorite of the party” had to contrast their Marxist-programmatic casuistry with his own, and then share the fate of the defeated enemies. Stalin saw right through Bukharin; Bukharin, taking Stalin's friendship at face value, showed amazing political blindness. Stalin unmistakably used Bukharin's enormous authority and his impeccable reputation, with the help of which the Secretary General secured victory for himself in the fight against his stronger opponents, the Leninist guard, which led him to sole power.

In the Stalin-Bukharin alliance, the first dealt with organizational and hardware issues, and Nikolai Bukharin dealt with the theory of Marxism, propaganda, economic program, and the Comintern. Fundamental differences emerged in socio-economic policy: Bukharin insisted on expanding the NEP, and Stalin insisted on its curtailment, on accelerated industrialization and forced collectivization. Nevertheless, Stalin defended Nikolai Bukharin from the attacks of ardent Stalinists: “We will not allow our Bukharchik to be offended.” But after the defeat of the “new opposition” in 1927, Bukharin and his supporters were accused of “right deviation,” that is, of opposing “de-peasantization” and “defending the kulak.”

In July 1928, Nikolai Bukharin secretly proposed a political alliance to Kamenev, who recorded their conversation (the recording later became known). With his passionate accusations against Stalin, Bukharin deprived his group and himself of the last chance of salvation: “Stalin’s course leads to the death of the revolution. Stalin is an unprincipled intriguer; he changes his program settings depending on who he wants to destroy. Having expelled Trotsky from Moscow, he wants to deal with Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky and their like-minded people.” The time had come for merciless apparatus reprisals against right-wing deviationists. The Lenin Guard seemed to meekly await their fate. Only in “Notes of an Economist” (“Pravda”, September 1928) and in a speech on January 24, 1929 “Lenin’s Political Testament” did Bukharin dare to point out that Stalin’s policies in the city and countryside came into complete contradiction with the ideas latest articles Lenin (“On Cooperation”, etc.). Conclusions followed in November 1929, when at the Plenum of the Central Committee Nikolai Bukharin was removed from the Politburo and removed from his post as editor of Pravda.

In 1930, following Nikolai Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky were released from their posts. The Moscow party committee was cleared of Bukharinites, and the party press was cleared of students of his school.

Political agony

Despite the humiliating demotion (in 1930 he was offered the position of head of the sector of the Supreme Economic Council of the USSR), he agreed to take this post. Bukharin publicly repented and promised to fight decisively “against all deviations from the general line of the party and, above all, against the right deviation.” Rykov and Tomsky joined him. But in 1933 Nikolai Bukharin broke off personal relations with them, essentially betraying his many years of like-minded people.

In 1934, Nikolai Bukharin received a new appointment - the post of editor of the newspaper Izvestia of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. In the same year, Bukharin married for the third time to young Anna Larina, the adopted daughter of a prominent Menshevik and then Bolshevik Yu. Larin. A purely personal event became a political circumstance - now Stalin had a reliable means of forcing “Bukharchik” to lie to himself and his party comrades in order to save his beloved wife and soon-to-be-born son. Another important event occurred in Bukharin’s life in August 1934 - he was assigned to make the main report at the opening of the first Congress of Soviet Writers, which was received ambiguously by the writers’ meeting.

In 1935-1936, by order of the Secretary General, Nikolai Bukharin, who was under continuous open surveillance, worked on the Constitution of the USSR, which went down in history under the name Stalin's, although in fact it should be called Bukharin's. He is particularly successful in the section on civil and democratic rights. In the spring of 1936, Stalin sent Bukharin and his wife abroad to retrieve the archives of German Social Democracy, including the manuscripts of Marx (the archives were taken from fascist Germany B. Nikolaevsky, a prominent Menshevik, a famous historian-archivist of Russian Social Democracy).

Nikolai Bukharin visited Prague, Berlin, Copenhagen, Paris. In European capitals he met with Mensheviks, former Bolsheviks, foreign communists, and famous cultural figures; he was extremely frank with everyone and, first of all, in his assessment of Stalin and his fate - “now he will kill me,” Bukharin no longer had any illusions on this score. He was advised not to return to Moscow, but Bukharin could not do this, believing that by emigrating he would erase his Bolshevik past.

In the summer of 1936, the Central Committee granted Nikolai Bukharin a vacation, which he decided to spend in the Pamirs. From there he sent letters of loyalty to Stalin, calling him by his old party nickname “Koba”. Meanwhile, the trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev was taking place in Moscow, at which they gave falsified testimony against Bukharin. He immediately returned to Moscow and tried to get an appointment with senior officials in the state, but no one accepted him. Then Bukharin wrote a letter addressed to members of the Politburo, in which he swore allegiance to Stalin: “In all areas, I defended the party line and Stalin’s leadership with genuine conviction... Which one? Abandon collective farms when they grow faster and become richer in the public field”; “victorious milestones: industrialization, collectivization, destruction of the kulaks, two great five-year plans, care for people, mastery of technology and Stakhanovism, prosperous life, new constitution”; “that the scoundrels [Zinoviev and Kamenev] were shot - great, the air immediately cleared.” But Nikolai Bukharin already understood that most of their fantastic confessions were the result the most severe torture. No one answered the letter, then Bukharin decided to turn to Voroshilov, who answered him in the Stalinist spirit: “vile attacks,” “vile epithets,” “scoundrel.”

Bukharin did not calm down and, anticipating an imminent arrest, wrote a letter to “The future generation of party leaders,” which his wife memorized. Thanks to her, it reached the “future generation.” The red thread running through the entire letter is the thought: “the filter of history will inevitably wash away the dirt from my head sooner or later,” but in the letter it is impossible to find an answer to the question of why, in fact, the party’s activities turned into a tangle of monstrous crimes.

In February 1937, Nikolai Bukharin was arrested in connection with the Right-Trotskyist anti-Soviet bloc. At the trial, which took place on March 2-13, 1938 in Moscow in the House of Unions, Bukharin took full responsibility for the fictitious crimes of the never-existing right-wing Trotskyist bloc and did not admit a single specific charge (from mixing crushed glass in food to preparing the murder of Lenin in 1918 and Stalin in the 1930s). Bukharin’s first words at the trial, “I plead guilty... for the entire range of crimes committed by this counter-revolutionary organization,” made his further fight with prosecutor A. Ya. Vyshinsky and the chairman of the court, Ulrich, meaningless. Those who did not believe in Nikolai Bukharin’s guilt were themselves doomed; ordinary party members were, as a rule, illiterate, and they could not understand and appreciate Bukharin’s cunning maneuvers during the trial. On March 15, 1938, Bukharin, Rykov, G. G. Yagoda, the former People's Commissar of the NKVD, and others were shot. Rumors circulated in Moscow that Bukharin and Rykov met death courageously, unlike Zinoviev and Kamenev. Soon Bukharin's wife was arrested, she spent about twenty years in camps and exile, their tiny son was brought up in various orphanages and for a long time didn't know whose son he was.

In 1988, during the years of “perestroika,” Nikolai Bukharin was rehabilitated and reinstated in the party. An unjustified apology for Bukharin began as a theorist of Marxism, an opponent of Stalin and a democrat. But his theoretical legacy depreciated with every year of glasnost and understanding of the market economy. And this is not surprising, since Bukharin was not a research scientist. Nevertheless, the tragic fate of Bukharin, who in Stalin’s “Short Course of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)” was assigned the role of Lenin’s would-be assassin, deserves the most careful and objective consideration as the most prominent representative of the Leninist guard.

Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin - quotes

Pavlov makes a mistake, because Poland is not a defeated country at all. But this lapsus can be excused.

The relationship of the working class to the peasantry is structured here, too, according to the type of relationship of the planter to the colonial object of exploitation. As we see, this “point of view” is completely “coordinated” with the reasoning of Comrade. Preobrazhensky about “exploitation”. In other words, this is not an accidental slip of the tongue, not a lapsus linguae, not an “unfortunate expression”; at comrade Preobrazhensky has its own sequence, has its own logic; but this “logic” and this “consistency” is the logic and consistency of a systematically developed error.

Proletarian coercion in all forms, from executions to forced labor, is a method of developing communist humanity from the human material of the capitalist era.

The very structure of the bourgeois court protects the bourgeoisie. The proletarian court is a fair court.

Was born Nikolai Bukharin in the family of a teacher, a graduate of the Faculty of Mathematics of Moscow University, his mother is a primary school teacher. Already during his studies, thanks to his father, Bukharin developed an interest in natural history, literature and painting. Until the end of his life, Bukharin collected scientifically significant collections of birds and butterflies; his deep knowledge of literature and painting allowed him to later become one of the best Soviet literary critics and art critics of that time. In 1905, at the height of the revolutionary events, together with his younger gymnasium friend, he began working in the Moscow city organization of the Bolsheviks. In 1906, as a graduating high school student, Bukharin joined the RSDLP(b).
In 1907-1910 Bukharin studied at the economics department of the law faculty Moscow University. Bukharin paid little attention to his studies, since he led the propaganda and illegal activities of the Bolsheviks among students. Bukharin was expelled from the university due to his arrest; in 1911 he was exiled to Arkhangelsk, then to Onega, from there he fled through Moscow to Hanover. In exile he worked in Bolshevik and socialist organizations in Germany, Austria-Hungary, Switzerland, and the Scandinavian countries. In 1912 in Krakow he met. At the Social Democratic Conference in Bern in 1915, he sharply criticized Lenin’s views on the issue of self-determination of nations, Lenin’s slogan of Russia’s defeat in the imperialist war and the idea of “universal peace.”
In 1915, Bukharin published the book “World Economy and Imperialism,” which contained the same theoretical errors as the works of Hilferding and Lenin. In October 1916, Bukharin began collaborating, and in January 1917 he actually headed the editorial office of the newspaper “New World” in New York (the organ of Russian Social Democracy). A member of the editorial board of “New World” was Bukharin, with whom Bukharin’s relationship did not work out and soon developed into mutual hostility. In April 1917, Bukharin returned to his homeland, where fateful events unfolded not only for Russia, but for the whole world. Bukharin, the most prominent representative of the young generation of the “Leninist guard” of professional revolutionaries, endlessly cut off from life due to their unnatural existence, took an active part in them.

Bukharin after October

Spring and summer 1917 Bukharin followed in the wake of Lenin's policies, but at a meeting of the party's Central Committee on September 15, 1917, he voted to hide and burn Lenin's letters calling for an armed uprising from the party. During the days of the October Revolution, Bukharin headed the editorial office of Izvestia of the Moscow Military Revolutionary Committee. According to eyewitnesses, during a report on the bloody October events in Moscow, Bukharin burst into tears. However, speaking on January 5, 1918 at the opening of the Constituent Assembly, it was Bukharin who threatened its deputies with civil war: “the question of the power of the revolutionary proletariat... is a question that will be resolved by that very civil war, which no spells... can be stopped.”
After the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly, the question of peace with Germany arose, on which Bukharin sharply disagreed with Lenin, who advocated peace on any terms. Bukharin led the “left opposition”, which had an advantage in the Central Committee. The theory of “revolutionary guerrilla war” against the regular German army put forward by Bukharin only says that Bukharin and his supporters in the Central Committee (Bubnov, Dzerzhinsky, Krestinsky, Uritsky, etc.) completely inadequately perceived the real state of affairs. However, Bukharin, like most party leaders, assigned the Russian revolution the role of only a fuse, from which the world revolution was supposed to break out. Hence Bukharin’s logic: let the German defeat Russia and thereby transfer the flame of revolution to Europe.
After signing the "obscene" Treaty of Brest-Litovsk On March 3, 1918, Bukharin returned to editing Pravda, the decision-making body of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party. He fully justified the “Red Terror” that began after the assassination attempt on Lenin on August 30, 1918, although he could not help but understand, as even a half-educated lawyer, that the combination of the functions of investigative, judicial and execution bodies in the Cheka could not but give rise to monstrous atrocities and arbitrariness. Bukharin considered millions of victims of civil war, famine, epidemics, the destruction of the country's economy, and the savagery of the surviving population to be “inevitable costs of the revolution.”

Bukharin's political economic views

In the field of political economic theory, views Bukharin underwent sharp fluctuations. In 1918 he advocated the nationalization of only the largest enterprises; in his works “The ABC of Communism” (1919) and “Economy of the Transition Period” (1920) he advocated draconian measures of war communism and total state regulation of distribution. With the beginning of the NEP, Bukharin made a 180 turn. In 1923, in Pravda, he argued that the USSR was doomed to “slowly grow into socialism for many decades,” “the socialism of the poor is lousy socialism” (1925) and, finally, the famous: “To everything The peasantry, all its layers must be told: get rich, accumulate, develop your economy.” At the XIV Party Congress in December 1925, Bukharin was sharply criticized for such a “petty-bourgeois” position.
In March 1919, Bukharin was elected as a candidate member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, and in June 1924 - a member of the Politburo, which he remained until November 1929. These years are the peak of his party career. In 1919-1929 he served as a member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern and its presidium. In 1928 he was elected a full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. When academician Bukharin was sent to Leningrad to convince the disloyal Nobel laureate, academician I.P. Pavlova, in the correctness of the chosen socialist path of development, the malicious old man first of all asked his “colleague” if he knew the multiplication table.

Bukharin is the favorite of the party

In Lenin’s so-called testament, “Letter to the Congress,” Bukharin was called "the favorite of the whole party." After the death of the leader, he became the idol, first of all, of the party youth, who were drawn to Bukharin after the decline of Trotsky’s star in 1925. This special position of Bukharin was greatly facilitated by his personal qualities: outwardly attractive, accessible, democratic, free from money-grubbing and arrogance characteristic of most communist leaders; in the unchanged costume of the era of “revolutionary romanticism” - a simple shirt, leather jacket, boots. Cheerful, noisy, infecting the Bolshevik youth with his irrepressible energy and enthusiasm, Bukharin was the only pure intellectual among the Bolshevik leaders. There is an unsolvable riddle in Bukharin’s political biography - the “favorite of the party” was completely devoid of lust for power. “I personally have always lacked the pathos of power” (from Bukharin’s letter to Stalin, 1936). For a politician of the first magnitude, this is a unique phenomenon.
Around Bukharin, a group of intellectual, talented youth of very different origins (children of prominent Bolsheviks and prominent cadets) formed, called “Bukharin’s school.” Almost all of them were repressed and died in the Stalinist meat grinder. Bukharin’s supporters were also members of the Moscow Party Committee (N.A. Uglanov); the Politburo recognized Bukharin as their leader A. I. Rykov(Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars), M. P. Tomsky(head of trade unions). Constant political opponent of Bukharin, G. E. Zinoviev, complained in 1925 that Bukharin received “a monopoly on the political and literary representation of the party, on all political and educational work.” Indeed, Bukharin was not only the editor of Pravda and the theoretical journal of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (Bolshevik) (since 1924), but also a member of the editorial boards of countless periodicals, encyclopedias, and academic publications.
With all these trump cards in his hands, Bukharin intended to enter into an alliance with Stalin in order, thanks to Stalin’s organizational power, to make his economic program the party’s program. But Stalin needed Bukharin and his “school” even more, since Stalin’s group suffered from intellectual weakness; The Secretary General relied on the young partycrats he had trained, skilled in apparatus games, but completely devoid of their own political ideas ( V. M. Molotov, G. M. Malenkov). Stalin also needed Bukharin as a means, as a battering ram, to crush Zinoviev, Kamenev and Trotsky. The “favorite of the party” had to contrast their Marxist-programmatic casuistry with his own, and then share the fate of the defeated enemies. Stalin saw right through Bukharin; Bukharin, taking Stalin's friendship at face value, showed amazing political blindness. Stalin unmistakably used Bukharin's enormous authority and his impeccable reputation, with the help of which the Secretary General secured victory for himself in the fight against his stronger opponents, the Leninist guard, which led him to sole power.
In the Stalin-Bukharin alliance, the first dealt with organizational and hardware issues, and Bukharin dealt with the theory of Marxism, propaganda, the economic program, and the Comintern. Fundamental differences emerged in socio-economic policy: Bukharin insisted on expanding the NEP, and Stalin insisted on its curtailment, on accelerated industrialization and forced collectivization. Nevertheless, Stalin defended Bukharin from the attacks of ardent Stalinists: “We will not allow our Bukharchik to be offended.” But after the defeat of the “new opposition” in 1927, Bukharin and his supporters were accused of “right deviation,” of opposing “de-peasantization,” and “defending the kulak.”
In July 1928, Bukharin secretly proposed a political alliance to Kamenev, who recorded their conversation (the recording later became known). With his passionate accusations against Stalin, Bukharin deprived his group and himself of the last chance of salvation: “Stalin’s course leads to the death of the revolution. Stalin is an unprincipled intriguer; he changes his program settings depending on who he wants to destroy. Having expelled Trotsky from Moscow, he wants to deal with Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky and their like-minded people.” The time had come for merciless apparatus reprisals against right-wing deviationists. The Lenin Guard seemed to meekly await their fate. Only in “Notes of an Economist” (Pravda, September 1928) and in a speech on January 24, 1929 “Lenin’s Political Testament” did Bukharin dare to point out that Stalin’s policies in the city and countryside came into complete contradiction with the ideas of Lenin’s last articles (“On cooperation”, etc.). Conclusions followed in November 1929, when at the Plenum of the Central Committee Bukharin was removed from the Politburo and removed from his post as editor of Pravda. In 1930, following Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky were released from their posts. The Moscow party committee was cleared of Bukharinites, and the party press was cleared of students of his school.

Bukharin's political agony

Despite the humiliating relegation Nikolai Bukharin(in 1930 he was offered the position of head of the sector of the Supreme Economic Council of the USSR), he agreed to take this post. Bukharin publicly repented and promised to fight decisively “against all deviations from the general line of the party and, above all, against the right deviation.” Rykov and Tomsky joined him. But in 1933 Bukharin broke off personal relations with them, essentially betraying his many years of like-minded people.

In 1934, Bukharin received a new appointment - the post of editor of the newspaper Izvestia of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. In the same year, Bukharin married for the third time to young Anna Larina, the adopted daughter of a prominent Menshevik and then Bolshevik Yu. Larin. A purely personal event became a political circumstance - now Stalin had a reliable means of forcing “Bukharchik” to lie to himself and his party comrades in order to save his beloved wife and soon-to-be-born son. Another important event occurred in Bukharin’s life in August 1934 - he was assigned to make the main report at the opening of the first Congress of Soviet Writers, which was received ambiguously by the writers’ meeting.
In 1935-1936, by order of the Secretary General, Bukharin, who was under continuous open surveillance, worked on the Constitution of the USSR, which went down in history under the name Stalin's, although in fact it should be called Bukharin's. He is particularly successful in the section on civil and democratic rights. In the spring of 1936, Stalin sent Bukharin and his wife abroad for the archives of German Social Democracy, including the manuscripts of Marx (the archives were taken from fascist Germany by B. Nikolaevsky, a prominent Menshevik, a famous historian-archivist of Russian Social Democracy). Bukharin visited Prague, Berlin, Copenhagen, Paris. In European capitals he met with Mensheviks, former Bolsheviks, foreign communists, and famous cultural figures; he was extremely frank with everyone and, first of all, in his assessment of Stalin and his fate - “now he will kill me,” Bukharin no longer had any illusions on this score. He was advised not to return to Moscow, but Bukharin could not do this, believing that by emigrating he would erase his Bolshevik past.
In the summer of 1936, the Central Committee granted Bukharin a vacation, which he decided to spend in the Pamirs. From there he sent letters of loyalty to Stalin, calling him by his old party nickname “Koba”. Meanwhile, the trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev was taking place in Moscow, at which they gave falsified testimony against Bukharin. He immediately returned to Moscow and tried to get an appointment with senior officials in the state, but no one accepted him. Then Bukharin wrote a letter addressed to members of the Politburo, in which he swore allegiance to Stalin: “In all areas, I defended the party line and Stalin’s leadership with genuine conviction... Which one? Abandon collective farms when they grow faster and become richer in the public field”; “victorious milestones: industrialization, collectivization, destruction of the kulaks, two great five-year plans, care for people, mastery of technology and Stakhanovism, prosperous life, new constitution”; “that the scoundrels [Zinoviev and Kamenev] were shot - great, the air immediately cleared.” But Bukharin already understood that most of their fantastic confessions were the result of severe torture. No one answered the letter, then Bukharin decided to turn to Voroshilov, who answered him in the Stalinist spirit: “vile attacks,” “vile epithets,” “scoundrel.”
Bukharin did not calm down and, anticipating an imminent arrest, wrote a letter to “The future generation of party leaders,” which his wife memorized. Thanks to her, it reached the “future generation.” The red thread running through the entire letter is the thought: “the filter of history will inevitably wash away the dirt from my head sooner or later,” but in the letter it is impossible to find an answer to the question of why, in fact, the party’s activities turned into a tangle of monstrous crimes.
In February 1937, Bukharin was arrested in connection with the Right-Trotskyist anti-Soviet bloc. At the trial, which took place on March 2-13, 1938 in Moscow in the House of Unions, Bukharin took full responsibility for the fictitious crimes of the never-existing right-wing Trotskyist bloc and did not admit a single specific charge (from mixing crushed glass in food to preparing the murder of Lenin in 1918 and Stalin in the 1930s). Bukharin’s first words at the trial, “I plead guilty... for the entire range of crimes committed by this counter-revolutionary organization,” made his further fight with prosecutor A. Ya. Vyshinsky and the chairman of the court, Ulrich, meaningless. Those who did not believe in Bukharin’s guilt were themselves doomed; ordinary party members were, as a rule, illiterate, and they could not understand and appreciate Bukharin’s cunning maneuvers during the trial.

On March 13, 1938, Bukharin, Rykov, G. G. Yagoda, the former People's Commissar of the NKVD, and others were shot. Rumors circulated in Moscow that Bukharin and Rykov met death courageously, unlike Zinoviev And Kameneva. Soon Bukharin’s wife was arrested, she spent about twenty years in camps and exile, their tiny son was brought up in various orphanages and for a long time did not know whose son he was.

Rehabilitation of Bukharin

In 1988, during the years of “perestroika,” Bukharin was rehabilitated and reinstated in the party. An unjustified apology for Bukharin began as a theorist of Marxism, an opponent of Stalin and a democrat. But his theoretical legacy depreciated with every year of glasnost and understanding of the market economy. And this is not surprising, since Bukharin was not a research scientist. Nevertheless, the tragic fate of Bukharin, who in Stalin’s “Short Course of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)” was assigned the role of Lenin’s would-be assassin, deserves the most careful and objective consideration as the most prominent representative of the Leninist guard.