Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution

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 trumped-up 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 post-Lenin era has concentrated on the two polar figures of Stalin and Trotsky. Their programs "socialism in one country" versus world-revolutionary 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 anti-Stalinist 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 neo-conservative Brezhne

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ce in the Stalinist power structure, and submitted in the end to execution with little struggle. He was not cut out to be a hero, in his lifetime or afterward. Yet he did, Cohen argues, present the possibility of an alternative and more benign path to socialist development, one which -- if followed -- might have vastly rewritten the history of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the Soviet era, in 1917, Bukharin belonged to the radical "left" faction among the Bolsheviks, and he continued to be a radical, often supportive of harsh measures, in the civil war years. But as Soviet authority was firmly established, Bukharin drifted to the Soviet "right," as then defined (which is almost the opposite of contemporary Russian usage). He was a key figure in the development of the NEP of the 1920s, which accepted market relationships, especially in the countryside, and private ownership of land. At that time, he and Stalin were allies as what we would call moderates and pragmatists. Bukharin, however, was neither a shrewd politician nor a sophisticated economist. The rapid economic recovery in the early NEP years he expected would be self-maintaining; he gravely underestimated the problems of expanding (as opposed to restori
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Approximate Word count = 1267
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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