Nikolai Bukharin is the editor of which newspaper. Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin biography

Bukharin Nikolai Ivanovich (1888-1938), Soviet politician.

Born on October 9, 1888 in Moscow in the family of a teacher. In 1905, he began working in the Moscow city organization of the Bolsheviks, and in 1906, as a high school student, he joined the RSDLP (b).

In 1907-1910 studied at the economics department of the Faculty of Law of Moscow University, from where he was expelled due to his arrest.

In 1911, Bukharin was exiled to Onega (Arkhangelsk province), from there he fled to Moscow, and then to Hanover (Germany). During his emigration he worked in Germany, Austria-Hungary, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and the USA.

He became acquainted with the experience of the European labor movement, the leaders of social democracy, mastered foreign languages, studied sociology and political economy, and attended classes at the University of Vienna. In April 1917, Bukharin returned to Russia via Japan and at the VI Congress of the RSDLP (b) became a member of the Central Committee, entering the senior party leadership.

During the October Uprising in Moscow, Bukharin was the editor-in-chief of Izvestia of the Moscow Military Revolutionary Committee. In 1918, he was elected a member of the Constituent Assembly from the Bolshevik Party, and he joined the editorial board of the newspaper Pravda. In 1918-1929 was the editor-in-chief of Pravda, while also being a member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern (1919-1929).

In 1925, Bukharin, together with I.V. Stalin, headed the new leadership in the Central Committee, but, sharply disagreeing with him on the issue of the further development of the country (1929), he was removed from the Politburo (November 12, 1929) and removed from post of editor-in-chief of Pravda.

In 1929-1932 he held less important posts. In 1935-1936 Bukharin took part in writing and editing the Constitution of the USSR.

On February 27, 1937, he was arrested in the case of the right-Trotskyist anti-Soviet bloc and on March 15, 1938, he was executed in Moscow. In 1988 he was rehabilitated and reinstated in the party.

N.I. Bukharin (1888 -1938) was one of the leading ideologists of Bolshevism; in 1918-1928 he edited the newspaper Pravda. In the first years of Soviet power, Bukharin took an ultra-left position, then he became one of the leaders of the Social Democratic wing in the party. But, in any role, he was characterized by extreme nihilism and hatred of the Russian people.

Having seen in Nikolai Bukharin a dear “democratic” soul - the whole set of qualities of a “leader with a human face” - psychological instability, ambition, weakness of will, verbiage, lack of firmness (in the words of V.I. Lenin, “soft as wax”), complete absence administrative qualities, irresponsibility, a penchant for political adventurism - the anti-communist “new thinker” Mikhail Gorbachev put forward the thesis that in the person of the “party favorite” Bukharin, the Soviet people had a real alternative to I.V. Stalin and that if Bukharin’s line had won, then history The Soviet Union could have taken a different, more “civilized” and “humane” path.

And the wholesale, en masse, indiscriminate rehabilitation of all state criminals except Yagoda, carried out by the notorious “Alexander Yakovlev commission” with the wording “due to the lack of corpus delicti” - and the restoration of enemies of the people in the ranks of the CPSU, was a prelude to the counter-revolutionary coup of the 90s years of the twentieth century, as a result of which new Bukharins came to power, destroyed the fruits of the labor efforts of many generations, spun as much as they could, and continue to spin the wheel of history back, “lowered” the once heroic Soviet people, continue to pour slop on its glorious past, its highest culture , his ideals and his immortal leaders...

Since the journalism of the last decade has not hammered into the mass consciousness any other alternatives to Stalin, let us take the trouble to reflect on the extent to which Bukharin’s personality corresponded to the qualities of a leader, or, translated into modern jargon, a political leader.

"Party Favorite"

From Lenin’s “Letter to the Congress”: “Bukharin is not only the most valuable and greatest theoretician of the party, he is also rightfully 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 I didn’t study and, I think, never fully understood dialectics).”

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, with his iron logic, would never have written like that if he had been in good health: on the one hand, “the most valuable and greatest theoretician of the party” and “the favorite of the entire party,” and on the other, “there is something scholastic in him” and “ he never studied”, “never fully understood dialectics”...

But what assessment of this man was given a few years later by one of his supporters and ardent opponents of Stalin, Martemyan Ryutin (even without textual analysis, it is clear to the naked eye that Ryutin was well acquainted with Lenin’s view of the “party favorite”: “If Bukharin is like the theoretician of Marxism and Leninism, with all his mistakes and blunders, with all his inclination towards the mechanical method of thinking, remains a major figure, then as a political leader he turned out to be below all criticism. An intelligent but short-sighted person, honest but spineless, quickly falling into panic, confusion and prostration, incapable of a serious and long-term political struggle with a serious political opponent, easily intimidated; sometimes carried away by the masses, sometimes disappointed in them, unable to organize the party masses and lead them, but on the contrary, himself in need of constant and vigilant leadership from the side of others - this is Bukharin as a political leader.”

Bukharin – ideologist of violence

During the struggle around the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty, the meaning of which was to “sacrifice space to gain time,” Bukharin turned out to be one of Lenin’s main opponents, who enthusiastically called for a merciless revolutionary war until the complete victory of the World Revolution, even at the cost of the destruction of the Soviet Republic. He said: “Let the Germans beat us. By maintaining our republic, we are losing the chances of an international movement.” At the same time, he himself did not intend to take up arms and was ready to emigrate to South America in case of failure. The Left Social Revolutionaries, as Bukharin himself later said, even suggested that he arrest Lenin for a day and declare war on Germany, which he, of course, did not dare to do.

Bukharin became the “largest theoretician of the party” when, in collaboration with the economist Preobrazhensky, he published the book “The ABC of Communism,” which became a popular textbook for party youth. Here are some excerpts from this tutorial:

“The very structure of the bourgeois court protects the bourgeoisie. The proletarian court is a fair court,” “In the bloody struggle with 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.”

Complaining about the “extreme softness” of the proletarian court, Bukharin theoretically substantiates the need for revolutionary violence not only against class enemies, but also against all humanity: “Proletarian coercion in all forms, from executions to labor service, is a method of developing communist humanity from human material of the capitalist era."

Did he think of himself as an object of revolutionary violence? Hardly. But the fact remains: the main theorist of the ideology of violence was none other than Bukharin himself. And it was Bukharin (not Lenin and not Stalin) who owned the words he said immediately after the Bolsheviks gained power: “We can only have two parties: one in power, the other in prison.”

Bukharin instead of Stalin?

Until 1928, Nikolai Bukharin and Joseph Stalin were not only political allies, but also quite close friends. Until then, they had been engaged in fierce disputes with the left opposition led by Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev. But on July 11, 1928, Bukharin made an unexpected visit to his longtime irreconcilable enemy Lev Kamenev. They talk for a long time and continue the conversation the next morning. “Lenin Guardsman” Bukharin asks “Lenin Guardsman” Kamenev, who took notes during the conversation, to consider it confidential. “In a voice trembling with excitement” (Kamenev noted this in his notes), Bukharin said that Stalin was pursuing an internal political line that was detrimental to the cause of the revolution. As the only way out of the difficulties with grain procurements, he proposes emergency measures, which means a return to the policy of “war communism.” Stalin’s position that resistance (“who will win?”) should increase in proportion to the growth of socialism is “idiotic illiteracy”, this is a formula that will lead the country of the Soviets to disaster. (This is where the “greatest theoretician of the party” made a blunder: life confirmed Stalin’s brilliant thesis about the intensification of the class struggle as socialism developed. As soon as Khrushchev abandoned party purges, abandoned the principle of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the party nomenklatura of the CPSU began to disintegrate - careerism, komchvanism, protectionism , fraternity, unheard of privileges, as a result of which in almost four decades (and this is precisely what the safety margin of Stalin’s socialism turned out to be) the party elite completely degraded, establishing the most brutal bourgeois-criminal dictatorship over the proletariat - L.B.).

Discussing with Kamenev the possibility of changes in the composition of the Politburo, wishful thinking, Bukharin spoke of “the readiness of some of its members (in particular, Ordzhonikidze and Voroshilov) to prefer Kamenev and Zinoviev to Stalin and Molotov. (On this occasion, in a letter to Ordzhonikidze in June 1929, Voroshilov wrote: “Bukharin is a rubbish person and is capable of speaking the most vile lies to his face, while making a particularly innocent and holy-vile expression on his always Jesuitical face).” Bukharin told Kamenev: “The disagreements between us and Stalin are many times more serious than all our disagreements with you. He will cut our throats." At the same time, he dropped a meaningful phrase: “This time his displacement will not occur through the Central Committee.” The Swiss communist Jules Humbert-Droz later recalled that around the same time Bukharin admitted to him that he would even agree to the murder of Stalin.

It was, of course, not for nothing that Kamenev took shorthand notes of the content of his conversation with Bukharin. Having made the appropriate summary: “It was all ingratiation. I don’t believe a single word he says,” Kamenev introduced this sensational document to his like-minded people and soon published it in the Trotskyist “Bulletin of the Opposition,” published in Paris.

Having learned about this, Stalin showed excellent restraint, saying: “In the old days they said about the philosopher Plato: We love Plato, but we love the truth even more. The same could be said about Bukharin: We love Bukharin, but the truth, but the party, but we love the Comintern even more.”

Stalin never resolved a single issue individually, but always collectively. And at the end of January - beginning of February 1929, a joint meeting of the Politburo and the Presidium of the Central Control Commission was held, where Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky were charged with factional activities, and they, in turn, made a statement against Stalin. Then I.V. Stalin launched a counterattack: “Sad as it may be, we have to state the fact of the formation in our party of a special Bukharin group consisting of Bukharin, Tomsky, Rykov. This is a group of right-wing deviationists whose platform calls for slowing the pace of industrialization, curtailing collectivization and freeing private trade. Members of this group naively believe in the saving role of the fist. Their trouble is that they do not understand the mechanism of class struggle and do not see that in fact the kulak is the sworn enemy of Soviet power. Lenin was a thousand times right when back in 1916, in a letter to Shlyapnikov, he noted that Bukharin was “diabolically unstable in politics.” And now, to top it all, it turned out that Bukharin, on behalf of the entire group, was conducting behind-the-scenes negotiations with Kamenev with the aim of creating a factional bloc of Bukharinites and Trotskyists, directed against the party and its Central Committee.”

Let us note: Bukharin was an opponent of forced industrialization, without which during the pre-war decade it would have been impossible to create the material and technical base of Victory. Refusal to collectivize agriculture would make Soviet industry dependent on the whims of the kulaks, for whom Bukharin put forward the slogan “Get rich!” (the notorious Bukharin theory of “the growing of the fist into socialism”), and freedom of private trade would even lead to the restoration of capitalism in a technically backward (if Bukharin’s program is adopted) agrarian country, which on the eve of the war would objectively lead the Soviet Union to inevitable defeat, even if all the cavalrymen of the Civil War taken together would act against the Fuhrer’s considered invincible motorized army.

This is without taking into account the political and personal qualities of the alternative leader - the “favorite of the party”, who could allow himself at a Politburo meeting, for example, to stand upside down on the sofa and stand like that for a minute - a liberty unforgivable even for “Bukharchik”.

(Note: having adopted Bukharin’s slogan “Get rich!”, pursuing Bukharin’s policy of deindustrialization and decollectivization of agriculture, the current gentlemen-comrades have gone even further along the path of the complete elimination of public property and the recognition of private property as sacred and inviolable - L. B.)

Koba's Longsuffering

Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky were removed from the posts they held in April 1929, but six months later, after they admitted their mistakes, they were appointed to less responsible posts. Bukharin, for example, was appointed editor-in-chief of Izvestia (and before that he headed the newspaper Pravda).

He continued to live in the Kremlin, next door to Stalin, whom he still called “Koba,” and he, as before, called him “Bukharchik,” and, as always, they addressed each other as “you.” Moreover, although Stalin could not help but be annoyed that Bukharin kept a small zoo on the territory of the Kremlin, Koba put up with this.

It is known that even at the height of their friendship, Stalin more than once took Bukharin under his protection from the attacks of the Trotskyist opposition: “Do you want Bukharin’s blood?!” We won’t give you his blood, so you know.”

At the 17th Party Congress in 1934, Bukharin concluded his speech with the words: “Long live our party, this is the greatest fighting partnership, a partnership of seasoned fighters, hard as steel, courageous revolutionaries who will win all victories under the leadership of the glorious field marshal of the proletarian forces, the best of the best - Comrade Stalin!

These words offended Stalin. Having met Bukharin on the stairs in the evening, he said friendly: “Bukharchik... Why did you call Comrade Stalin some kind of field marshal? Comrade Stalin is an ordinary soldier of the party, like the rest of us... It’s not good to distribute ranks in the party, Nikolai. It would be better to invite a lonely little guy to drink tea and jam.”

In the summer of that year, Stalin called to congratulate Bukharin on a good report on poetry at the First Congress of Writers. He said that he especially liked the statement about Demyan Bedny, that he was in danger of falling behind the times.

In 1935, Stalin, at a banquet organized for graduates of military academies, made a toast in honor of Bukharin: “Let’s drink, comrades, to Nikolai Ivanovich, we all love and know him, and whoever remembers the old will be out of sight!”

In the same year, the twice-divorced 47-year-old N. Bukharin married 16-year-old Anna Larina, who idealized him, the daughter of the famous Menshevik Larin, whom the “morally stable” “favorite of the party”, who was old enough to be her father, took possession of, not waiting for her to come of age, but already at the following year, 1936, Stalin sent him to Paris with his young wife: it was against the rules to send him abroad with his wife - perhaps Stalin did not want Bukharin to return back to the USSR, where clouds continued to gather over him. But, looking ahead, I will say that Bukharin has returned...

In Paris, Bukharin negotiated with the Mensheviks Dan and Nikolaevsky about the purchase of the archives of Karl Marx. During his two-month stay in Paris, he once unexpectedly came to Dan’s house and for some reason spoke in detail about Stalin for several hours. Dana's wife left memories of this. In a conversation, he jokingly noted that the Bolsheviks’ interest in Marx was so great that they would even agree to purchase his remains in order to transport them to Moscow. Fantasizing further, he said that in this case a monument to Marx would be erected immediately. And a monument to Stalin will be erected nearby - taller and larger. Stalin would read Capital with a pencil in his hand to make corrections in the margins of this book. Bukharin continued: “Marx, of course, is not threatened by anything from him, except to appear to the Russian worker as a dwarf in comparison with the great Stalin. No, no, Stalin is a small, evil man, but no, not a man at all, but a devil.”

“I wrote a letter to Klim Voroshilov...”

And four months after his return, in August 1936, having learned about the finale of the political trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev, Nikolai Bukharin wrote a letter to Kliment Voroshilov on September 1, 1936, where he called Kamenev a “cynic killer,” “the most disgusting of people, human carrion." “I’m terribly glad that the dogs were shot,” wrote Bukharin. And this despite the fact that at this trial, charges of criminal offenses were first made against him personally, as well as against Rykov and Tomsky. Having learned about these testimonies, Tomsky shot himself on August 22, but to “Bukharchik” everything seemed to blow away...

One would think that the gloating of one of V.I.’s closest associates. Lenin in relation to other former members of the top leadership, who considered themselves to be part of the so-called “Leninist” guard, which Stalin supposedly innocently destroyed, has a personal background: we remember how unceremoniously Lev Kamenev acted with Bukharin, but the trouble is that the former editor-in-chief “ Pravda,” this, in Trotsky’s words, “ruthless polemicist,” who wrote “hundreds of furious articles” against him, could not otherwise express his political emotions except through shameless abuse. It was with his light hand that the tradition of an unbridled style was established in Pravda for many years (feuilletons by Zaslavsky, caricatures by B. Efimov and Kukryniksov, signatures by Marshak).

“Bukharin’s polemical style,” writes academician D.V. Kolesov, - resembles an angry dog ​​barking and is quite akin to the style of Goebbels’s propaganda, especially when she harped on the crimes of the “bourgeois world.” Bukharin ranges from unbridledness to peremptoryness at best. Neither Trotsky, nor Zinoviev, nor Stalin had a similar style of polemic. And even the most hot-tempered of all - Lenin - only allowed himself to vent his soul in one or two “strong” epithets. But all the vocabulary? - In no case". (D.V. Kolesov. The struggle after the victory. M. “Flint”. 2000. P. 113).

An inglorious end

From the last word of the defendant Bukharin at an open trial (evening session on March 12, 1938):

“At the very beginning of the trial, when asked by the presiding citizen whether I confessed myself guilty, I answered with a confession.

I repeat once again, I plead guilty to treason against the socialist homeland, the most serious crime that can be, to organizing kulak uprisings, to preparing terrorist acts, to belonging to an underground anti-Soviet organization...

I can assume a priori that Trotsky and other allies in crime, and the 2nd International, especially since I talked about this with Nikolaevsky, will try to defend us, in particular me. I reject this defense, because I stand on my knees before the country, before the party, before all the people. The enormity of my crimes is immeasurable, especially at the new stage of the USSR’s struggle. With this consciousness I await the verdict..."

While in the internal prison of the NKVD of the USSR, Bukharin, sentenced to death, appealed to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on March 13, 1938.”

In his petition for pardon, Bukharin wrote:

“I ask the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR for a pardon. I consider the court’s verdict to be fair retribution for the gravest crimes I have committed... I do not have a single word of protest in my soul. For my crimes I should have been shot ten times. The proletarian court made a decision that I deserved for my criminal activities, and I am ready to bear the well-deserved punishment and die, surrounded by just indignation, hatred and contempt of the great heroic people of the USSR, whom I so vilely betrayed...

I am glad that the power of the proletariat crushed everything criminal that saw me as its leader and of which I really was the leader...

I ask the Presidium of the Supreme Council for mercy and mercy...

I am firmly convinced that years will pass, great historical milestones will be crossed under the leadership of Stalin, and you will not complain about the act of mercy and mercy that I ask of you. I will try with all my might to prove to you that this gesture of proletarian generosity was justified.”

An extract from protocol No. 2 of March 14, 1938 of the meeting of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR stated:

“Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin’s petition for pardon.

The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR decided:

The petition for pardon of Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin, convicted by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR on March 13, 1938 in the case of the anti-Soviet “right-Trotskyist bloc” to capital punishment - execution - was rejected.

Secretary of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR

(A. Gorkin).”

Anechka Larina, who was romantically in love with her hero, according to her own admission (Izvestia. No. 283. October 9, 1988, p. 3), made half a century later, “had a faint hope that Bukharin would die proudly... This hope was unfounded. and was born only out of great love for Nikolai Ivanovich.”

Obviously, Bukharin’s so-called “letter-testament”, addressed to the “future generation of party leaders,” is connected with this recognition, the final words of which are: “Know, comrades, that on the banner that you will carry in your victorious march to communism, there is also a drop of my blood.” According to Bukharin's widow, he dictated this letter to her and forced her to memorize it before his arrest, after which the letter was destroyed... Unconvincing. Most likely, this is also the fruit of “great love”, which became the most sensational publication of 1988.

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 the family of 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 Erenburg, 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 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 in Swedish politics, he wrote for Scandinavian left-wing newspapers and participated in a meeting of the 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 the 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, 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 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 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 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 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:

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 “Buharchik”). 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. 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 would be the case 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.

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 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 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.

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 your personal information I am writing. 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 word of honor 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 swaddling clothes that I understand that big plans, big ideas and big interests overshadow everything, and it would be petty to raise the question of your own person along with the 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.

On March 13, 1938, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR found Bukharin guilty and sentenced him to death. 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!

On May 21, 1938, the General Meeting of the USSR Academy of Sciences excluded N. I. Bukharin from the number 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)

September 27 (October 9) 1888 - Moscow, March 15, 1938] - Russian philosopher, politician, economist. He studied at Moscow University at the economics department of the law faculty. He was an active member of the Bolshevik Party, occupying leading positions in it (member of the Politburo of the Party Central Committee in 1924-29). In 1929 he was elected academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences, in 1934-36 he headed the Institute of the History of Natural Sciences and Technology, and initiated the creation of the journal Sorena (Socialist Reconstruction and Science). Arrested in 1937, shot in 1938, rehabilitated in 1977. The assessment of Bukharin's philosophical work is ambiguous. Thus, D. Lukács and A. Gramsci consider his socio-philosophical concept as an expression of economic determinism of the Marxist kind; others (S. Cohen, A. Mayer) characterize it as a theoretical innovation of Bolshevism. In his most famous socio-philosophical work devoted to the analysis of historical materialism, Bukharin considered it not as a party ideology, but as a scientific theory that produces social knowledge at the level of world traditions (“Theory of Historical Materialism.” M., 1921). Bukharin is considered (for example, I. Stalin) the creator of the “NEP philosophy”, based on his “theory of equilibrium”. In the latter, some researchers of his life and work see a tool for social analysis of modern times and a method for solving the problems of modernization in third world countries. In his last work, written at Lubyanka, “Philosophical Arabesques (Dialectical Essays),” Bukharin develops a number of new topics (practice and methods of mastering reality, technique and technology, criticism of the racial ideology of fascism, etc.), while remaining a supporter of Leninism.

Op.; The theory of historical materialism. M., 1921; Darwinism and Marxism. M-, 1932; Iebr. prod. M., 1990; Philosophical arabesques (dialectical essays). - “VF”, 1993, No. 6.

Lit.: Bukharin I.I. Man, politician, scientist. M.. 1989; Kun M. Bukharin: his friends and enemies. M., 1992; Haynes M. Nikolai Bukharin and the transition from capitalism to socialism. L., 1985.

Excellent definition

Incomplete definition ↓

BUKHARIN Nikolai Ivanovich

27.09(9.10). 1888, Moscow - 15.03. 1938) - politician, economist, philosopher. Studied at Moscow University in the economics department. legal department In 1911 he was arrested and exiled. In exile, sharing the positions of the Bolsheviks, he took an active part in the revolutionary movement. After the February Revolution of 1917 he returned to his homeland. From the end 1917 to 1929 - executive editor of the newspaper. "Is it true". In 1924, he was elected a member of the Politburo, held leadership positions in the Central Committee, the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, and the Executive Committee of the Comintern, becoming its chairman in 1926. He worked at the Institute of Red Professors, the Communist Academy, the Institute of K. Marx and F. Engels. Since 1929 - Academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In 1934-1936. at the Supreme Economic Council, headed the Institute of History of Natural Sciences and Technology, participated in the publication of the journal. "Sorena" ("Socialist Reconstruction and Science"), created on his initiative. He was accused of counter-revolutionary activities and expelled from the VKShchb). In 1937 he was arrested and in March 1938 he was sentenced to death. In 1988 he was rehabilitated. B.’s worldview guidelines were formed already in his gymnasium years. From his fascination with Pisarev’s ideas, he moved on to Marxism, which attracted him with the “extraordinary logical harmony” of the concept (see: Bukharin N.I. Izbr. trudy. L., 1988. P. 9). The first theoretical works are devoted to economic issues ("Political Economy of the Rentier" (1914); "World Economy and Imperialism" (1915); "Towards the Theory of the Imperialist State" (1915), etc.), in which the concept of imperialism and its policies is presented , the prospects for the socialist revolution are considered. After the revolution of 1917, sharing ideas about the economic and political backwardness of Russia, he appealed to the idea of ​​a world socialist revolution. The ideology of “war communism” was embodied in the book written jointly with E. Preobrazhensky. "The ABCs of Communism" (1920). In “Economy of the Transition Period” (1920), on the question of the possible construction of socialism, B. moved away from the traditional Marxist concept of socialism growing in the depths of capitalism, and, thus, adapted Marx’s theory to the conditions of backward Russia; He saw the basis for such a construction in the process of systematic and organized work of the proletariat, and at that time he considered the core of this work to be revolutionary violence, coercion as a method of developing communist humanity from modern human material. era. B.'s most famous socio-philosophical work is “The Theory of Historical Materialism” (1921). He considered historical materialism as a scientific theory that produces social knowledge. Systematizing its basic categories, B. introduced new interpretations for orthodox Marxism of the relationship between nature and society as the main determinant of social evolution as a whole, productive forces, economic basis, superstructure and their mutual influence. He distinguishes between the concepts of “superstructure” and “ideology,” which were identified by the majority of Marxists of those years; explored the diversity of the mediation of basic relations by superstructural ones; introduced the concept of material culture. Mn. the provisions of biological labor (the understanding of “mechanical” and “organic”, the characteristics of the dialectical method based on the theory of equilibrium, etc.) became the subject of philosophical discussions in the 20s. After 1917, B.'s interest in the philosophical foundations of the economic, political, and organizational problems he raised increased. This was largely due to the identification of the theoretical originality of Leninism and Marxism in general. B. did not accept those that spread in the 20s. versions neither about the exclusively political orientation of Lenin's creativity, which opposed Lenin - the theorist to Lenin - practice, nor about the identification of Leninism and Marxism. For him, Lenin was a thinker, but “the significance of Lenin as a unique thinker of the greatest intellectual force, and, moreover, an intellectual force of a new type, just emerging in history, is far from clear” (Bukharin N.I. Lenin as a type of thinker // Pravda. 1926. April 23). B.'s political and ideological sympathies also determined his theoretical evolution. In party journalism, ser. 20s B. formulates an alternative to the course of socialist construction proposed by Trotsky, opposing total political coercion to socialism. He emphasized the importance of economic methods in managing economic processes, considered cooperation as a prototype of the socialist economy, and noted the role of scientific and technological progress in strengthening socialist forms of economic management. B. did not remove the slogan of class struggle, but demanded to move away from its military-political forms and move on to peaceful economic ones. In recent years, B.'s interest has focused on issues of the organization of science, the history of science, technology and culture. The assessment of B.'s philosophical creativity is ambiguous. Some researchers, starting with D. Lukács, K. Korsch, A. Gramsci, consider his socio-philosophical concept as an apologetics of objectivism, mechanism, and economic determinism of the Marxist kind. Others (S. Cohen, A. Mayer, K. Tarbak, U. Stehr) characterize it as a theoretical development, a contribution of Bolshevism, one of the latest manifestations of Russian pluralism. Marxist thought. Formulating his attitude to Marxism, B. proceeded from the fact that “Marxism is a class ideology... a revolutionary teaching” (The Teachings of Marx and its Historical Significance / in Izbr. Trudy. L., 1988. P. 120, 121). In sociological terms, Marxism is the ideology of the revolutionary proletariat of the era of capitalism; Logically, Marxism is a scientific system, “a scientific worldview, scientific practice” (Ibid. p. 126). In relation to the analysis of society, B. considered the most important scientific principle to be the principle of balance, consistency, and integrity. Basic the general pattern is the desire of systems for balance, which meant, firstly, the correspondence of the elements of the system to each other, and secondly, the correspondence of the system to the surrounding external environment. A violation of internal or external balance is restored at the previous level (a “stable equilibrium” is achieved) or at a new level, higher or lower than the previous one (progress or regression), then we are talking about “moving equilibrium”. Society is an open developing system that exchanges matter and energy with the external environment - nature and, therefore, is in moving equilibrium. “It is established and immediately violated, again established on a new basis and again violated, etc.” (Theory of historical materialism. M., 1921. P. 75). Society progresses when exchange with nature is carried out in its favor; it, as it were, “sucks up” the energy accumulated in nature. This unequal exchange, which occurs through the disruption and restoration of the balance between society and nature, is nothing more than the development of the productive forces that underlies society as a whole. With the help of certain general scientific categories (causality, system, equilibrium), B. sought, on the one hand, to substantiate the actual materialistic side of historical mathematics (the primacy of the economy, social production, productive forces), on the other, to clarify its dynamic mechanisms, to show the nature of social evolution . The concept of equilibrium in the sense of correspondence, proportionality is primary, in its view, in relation to the concept of contradiction, since contradiction is a violation of equilibrium within or outside the system. B. viewed historical materialism as identical to sociological theory. His justification for the structure of society, social determinism, the relationship between material and ideal factors of social evolution contains the argumentation of leading non-Marxist sociologists - E. Durkheim, M. Weber, R. Michels, E. Pareto (see: Sorokin on Bukharin // Sociological Research . 1988. No. 6). This allowed him to give an analysis of the company, essentially, from the standpoint of system-functional analysis. Society “is the broadest system of interacting people, embracing all their long-term interactions and relying on their labor connection.” The main “social connection is the connection of people in production. The broadest community of people is the world economy” (Theory of Historical Materialism. pp. 95, 100). B. does not use the concept of “socio-economic formation”. He talks about social systems, social forms. He views the development of social forms - capitalism, feudalism, etc. as “a series of links in a common chain, touched from one end and the other” (Ibid. p. 72).

The system then existing in the country seemed to him to be an independent social form, occupying the position of a link between capitalism and socialism. This is where the idea of ​​“growing” of this system into the future social system - socialism - arises. B. considered the structure of society as the relationship of people to nature (productive forces), their relationship to each other (production relations and other social connections), and social consciousness. “Society could not exist if the structure of things, the structure of people and the structure of ideas did not correspond to each other” (Ibid. p. 148). The imbalance between these components ultimately determines the movement of any social system. One of the main problems of B.'s creativity was the problem of science as rational knowledge of objective laws. This character of science stemmed from his understanding of causality. In terms of causal explanation, the science of society is not fundamentally different from the sciences of nature. The idea of ​​the universality of historical necessity dominates in B.'s social and philosophical work, bringing his views closer to supporters of economic determinism. But the primacy of practice was the starting point in his worldview. For him, the “problem of the external world” was the “problem of its transformation” (Theory and Practice of Historical Materialism. M.; Leningrad, 1931. P. 8), while the problem of knowledge acts as an integral part of the problem of transforming the world. B. opposed the absolutization of logical thinking; he considered the absolute, mechanical dissection of the so-called spiritual life into closed spheres of feelings and intellect, or conscious and unconscious, or directly sensory and logical, completely incorrect. These are not separate moments of abstract categories. These are - dialectical quantities that make up unity" (Poetry, poetics and tasks of poetic creativity in the USSR. M., 1934. P. 11). Thinking in images is a necessary component of spiritual knowledge of the world. The result is not “a scientific reflection of reality, but a sensory-generalized picture of a phenomenological series, not an essence, but a phenomenon” (Ibid. p. 12). Speaking about B.'s contribution to social theory, they call a kind of “NEP philosophy” (Cohen S. Bukharin: a political biography. M., 1989. P. 385), the basis of which was the theory of equilibrium. Equilibrium presupposes social harmony, stability, civil peace, in contrast to orthodox Bolshevism, which is supposedly aimed at exacerbating class antagonisms and eliminating non-proletarian strata. The theory of equilibrium created the basis for the conceptual understanding of social changes in the world of the 20-30s. XX century On its basis, Bukharin's versions of the theory of imperialism, the theory of revolution and the theory of modernization of society were developed. It became Bukharin’s platform in his disputes with the left opposition, and then with Stalin, on the possibility of balanced, proportionate economic development of the Soviet Union. Today, Bukharin's theory of equilibrium is considered by many. by its researchers as a tool for social analysis of modern times, as a method for solving the problems of modernization in Third World countries.

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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 guerrilla war” against the regular German army put forward by Bukharin 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. 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.”

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 war communism and total state regulation of distribution. 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 towards 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, of the correctness of the chosen socialist path of development, the sarcastic old man first 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 of Lenin’s last articles (“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 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).

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 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, 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 did not 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.

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.