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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 in the neoconservative Brezhnev era.

It was also in the interest of most Western historians to concentrate on Stalin and Trotsky  especially on Stalin  and to relatively ignore Bukharin. To Western scholars of a Marxist bent, Trotsky was a more vivid and romantic figure, as noted above. To the anticommunist mainstream in the West, as much as to Stalinist orthodoxy in the Soviet Union, Stalin himself was the only figure that really mattered. The basic ...

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Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 06:37, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1702846.html