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Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (Russian: Николай Иванович Бухарин), (October 9 (September 27 Old Style) 1888 - March 13, 1938) was a Bolshevik revolutionary and then a Soviet politician, and intellectual.
Bukharin was born in Moscow, where his parents were primary school teachers. His political life began at 16 when together with his lifelong friend, Ilya Ehrenburg, he participated in student activities at Moscow University related to the Russian Revolution of 1905. Together with many other young activists he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1906, becoming a member of the Bolshevik faction. Together with Grigorii Sokolnikov, he worked organizing young people and convened the 1907 national youth conference in Moscow, considered later as the founding of the Komsomol. By age 20 he was a member of the Moscow Committee of the party. This Committee was heavily infiltrated by the Okhrana, the czarist secret police, and as a leader Bukharin became an person of interest. During these years he became closely associated with N. Osinskii and Vladimir Mikhailovich Smirnov and met his future wife, Nadezhda Mikhailovna Lukina, sister of Nikolai Lukin. They married soon after his exile.
After brief imprisonment Bukharin was exiled to Onega in Arkhangelsk 1911. He soon appeared in Hanover. In exile he continued his education and became, after Lenin, a major Bolshevik theorist. Unusual for a Russian Marxist, he developed an interest in non-Marxist economic theories as well as those of Marxist theoreticians who deviated from Bolshevik positions such as Aleksandr Bogdanov.
Whilst in exile, he wrote several books and edited the newspaper Novy Mir (New Peace) with Leon Trotsky and Alexandra Kollontai. During the war, he wrote a small book on imperialism, from which Vladimir Lenin later drew some of the ideas he put forward in his larger and better known work, Imperialism - The Highest Stage of Capitalism (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/). Bukharin, upon his return to Russia, became one of the leading Bolsheviks in Moscow and was elected to the Central Committee. After the revolution, he also became editor of Pravda.
Bukharin led the opposition of the Left-Communists to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, arguing instead for the Bolsheviks to continue the war effort, and turn it into a world-wide push for Proletarian Revolution. He later changed his mind and accepted Lenin's policies, encouraging the development of the New Economic Policy in 1921. Some consider that such a drastic change of position from left to right suggests that Lenin was correct when he remarked in his testament that Bukharin had never fully understood Marxism and dialectics. After Lenin's death, Bukharin became a full member of the Politburo in 1924, and the president of the Communist International (Comintern) in 1926.
After 1926, Bukharin, now regarded as leading the right-wing of the Communist Party, became an ally of the "centre" of the party, which was led by Stalin and which constituted the ruling group after Stalin broke his earlier alliance with Kamenev and Zinoviev. It was Bukharin who developed the thesis of Socialism in one country, which argued that socialism (in Marxist theory, the lower stage of Communism) could be developed in a single country, and even one as underdeveloped as Russia. This new idea stated that revolution need no longer be encouraged in the capitalist countries, since Russia could and should achieve socialism alone. The thesis would become a hallmark of Stalinism long after Bukharin had died in the purges of the 1930s.
When Bukharin opposed Stalin's proposed collectivization of agriculture in 1928, Stalin attacked Bukharin's views and forced him to confess that his views were wrong. Afterwards, Bukharin lost his position in the Comintern in April 1929 and was expelled from the Politburo in November. He and his supporters in the Soviet Union were termed the Right Opposition. Supporters of Bukharin internationally, led by Jay Lovestone of the Communist Party USA, were expelled from the Comintern and formed an international "Right Opposition" to promote their views.
Bukharin was rehabilitated by Stalin for a short period and was made editor of Izvestia in 1934.
Arrested in 1937, Bukharin was tried in March 1938 as part of the Trial of the Twenty One during the Great Purges, for "conspiring to overthrow the Soviet state". He was forced to make a "confession" of his crimes, and was shot by the NKVD.
He was officially rehabilitated by the Soviet state under Mikhail Gorbachev in 1988.
See also: Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Further reading
- Anna Larina, This I Cannot Forget: The Memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin's Widow, W. W. Norton, 1991, hardcover, 384 pages, ISBN 0393030253
- Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A political biography, 1888-1938, Knopf, 1973, hardcover, 495 pages, ISBN 0394460146; trade paperback, Oxford University Press, 1980, ISBN 0195026977; trade paperback, Vintage Books, ISBN 0394712617
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