Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin

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. He joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1906, becoming a member of the Bolshevik faction in 1908. He was exiled from Russia by the Czar's government in 1911. He did not return until just before the February Revolution of 1917, having lived in Austria, Switzerland, Sweden and the USA.

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.

External link

Nikolai Bukharin archive at marxists.org (http://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/index.htm)

fr:Nikolaï Boukharine nl:Nikolaj Boecharin

Categories: 1888 births | 1938 deaths | Russian politicians | Old Bolsheviks

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Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin

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