Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution

Stephen F. Cohen. Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 18881938. Rev. Ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Stephen F. Cohen's biography of Nikolai Bukharin, first published in 1973, is an attempt to do much more than simply produce a political biography of a prominent Bolshevik who fell from grace with Stalin in the late 1920s and was executed on trumpedup charges during the great purge a decade later. It is also, and more importantly, an attempt to produce a new general perspective on the fate of the Russian Revolution, and to argue that a viable, more "liberal" alternative path to Stalinism existed in Soviet Russia a path whose prime exponent was Bukharin although it was not in the end the path that was followed.

Conventional historiography of the Soviet experience in the postLenin era has concentrated on the two polar figures of Stalin and Trotsky. Their programs "socialism in one country" versus worldrevolutionary socialism were clearly and fundamentally in ideological conflict, and the conflict was equally stark between the men themselves. Trotsky's long exile and eventual murder at the hands of a Stalinist assassin made him a romantic figure in the hagiography of antiStalinist Communist thinkers. By the same token, Trotsky was the primary devilfigure in the eyes of Stalinist orthodoxy, and therefore the prime target of invective by official Soviet writers both in Stalin's own day and

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urth and final section examines the radicalized labor movement that existed on the eve of the war, and out of which the Bolshevik Party would emerge to dominate Russia after the fall of the czarist regime three years later. At the turn of the twentieth century, only a very small fraction of the population of the Russian Empire were factory workers in the major cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg. The two cities had a total of about 270,000 factory workers, or much less than one percent of the population of the country. A nearly equal number of "industrial" workers worked in nonfactory conditions, primarily small artisanal workshops.1 In orthodox Marxist thought, as it had developed at that time, it was these workers, and almost no others, who were viewed as the crucial vanguard of the proletariat and the crucible of revolution. These workers alone experienced the full division and concentration of labor which, in Marxist thought, led to the development and maturation of a proletarian identity, and therefore to revolutionary consciousness. Such a small pool of ________ 1p. 23. "vanguard" workers, in so large and ruralized a country, were naturally ignored as a force by Marxist theorists in the We

Category: History - B