Bukharin I Bol’Shevistskaia Revoliutsiia

This is the first full-scale political-intellectual biography in English of one of the greatest of the “Old Bolsheviks.” For more than two decades Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin’s career was central to the turbulent history of Soviet Russia and the international communist movement—from his important contributions to Lenin’s original leadership through his post-1917 political roles as Politburo member, editor of Pravda, head of the Comintern, chief theoretician and, for three years co-leader with Stalin of the Communist Party to his bizarre trial and subsequent execution by Stalin in 1938 as an “enemy of the people.” Yet the extraordinary career of this youngest and most brilliant of the original Soviet leaders remains relatively unknown because for so long the party has officially proscribed and distorted his life and his role in history.

Now, using new Russian materials and sharply re-evaluating the old, Stephen F. Cohen of Princeton University gives us Bukharin whole. Here is his complex and eventful life from his years as schoolboy revolutionary in Czarist Russia and wandering young émigré in Western Europe and the United States: his vital part in the earliest formulations of Bolshevik ideology; the moving personal relationship with Lenin (Bukharin was regarded as Lenin’s “favorite”), which survived Bukharin’s sharp and frequent criticism of Leninist policy; and his essential role in his party’s revolutionary triumph of 1917. Bukharin’s rise to and fall from power are carefully and brilliantly traced, with special focus on the development of his theories and programmatic ideas during the critical period between Lenin’s death in 1924 and the ascendancy of Stalin in 1929.

Above all, with its rich historical-political background, the book moves beyond its success as biography to revise many prevailing interpretations and to provide an important re-examination of the formative decades of the Soviet Union. Breaking with a long-held view of the post-Lenin years, for example, Professor Cohen demonstrates that it was Bukharin rather than Trotsky whose vision and leadership most crucially challenged Stalinism. Bukharin emerges as not simply the most important political victim of the Moscow Purge Trials but also the leading Bolshevik spokesman for a peaceful, moderate alternative to the Stalinist prescription for bringing Russia into the twentieth century—and the principal advocate of a more humane and consensual communist society.