Bukharin's Fate
Cohen, Stephen F.
I wrote [the prison manuscripts] mostly at night, literally wrenching them from my heart. I fervently beg you not to let this work disappear . . . Don't let this work perish. I repeat and...
...BUT WE now know that Bukharin was also bargaining for something else, second in importance only to his family...
...Though not a politician with any sympathy for the Soviet founding fathers, he knew of Anna Larina through her best-selling 1988 memoir and was moved by her desire to learn everything about her husband...
...His entire biography is excised from the nation's official history, his name lingering only in the epithet "enemy of the people...
...The boy who fell in love with painting became the revolutionary who ruefully admitted having had to choose between art and politics...
...I repeat and emphasize: This is completely apart from my personal fate...
...Even the writing of the novel, the only one he ever undertook, can be traced to the literary enthusiasms young Kolya inherited from his underachieving but beloved father...
...At first he tried to limit his "crimes" to a history of "theoretical mistakes" and "political opposition," but those concessions were far from what was needed...
...What better way to wed Stalin to Bukharin's policies...
...Seventeen months after the trial, Stalin's pact with Hitler helped unleash world war while leaving Soviet borders virtually defenseless when Nazi armies came in June 1941...
...Lenin, with whom he had a periodically feuding but essentially sonlike relationship, called him the "golden boy of the revolution," the "favorite of the entire Party," and its "biggest theorist...
...Working on a previous prison manuscript, he had assured Stalin that it "calmed me somewhat...
...Forced to participate in the grotesque spectacle, if only in the hope of saving his family, his tactic was to accept personal responsibility for Stalin's general indictment while denying all its specific charges: "I plead guilty to...
...Suddenly, however, with the end of the Soviet Union and his own office, Gorbachev no longer controlled any of the archives...
...Finally he agreed to take on the part of leader of the "counterrevolutionary criminal bloc," but he continued to be vague about specific misdeeds...
...Thus were Bukharin's widow, son, and daughter, the historian Svetlana Gurvich, able to encounter him anew across an enormous chasm of time and suffering...
...IKOLAI IVANOVICH BUldlarill was only one of Stalin's millions of victims, but his fate was special...
...Five nights later he began the unfinished novel...
...Let a new, second Bukharin grow—let him even be called Petrov" Whether or not Stalin already knew the ruse, they were, of course, one and the same Kolya...
...Probably they are not, but the archive is so vast and its history so long and secretive that not even Lubyanka's current staff seems to be certain...
...Unlike so many other victims, he seems not to have been physically tortured in prison...
...The novel was published separately in Moscow in 1994, the manuscripts on politics, culture, and philosophy, with selections from the poems, in two volumes in 1996...
...It has always been possible to imagine those terrible conditions, but only recently have terror-era archives begun to reveal more about what hapBUKHARIN S FATE pened to him during the year between his arrest and execution...
...But it was not yet the end of his novelistic alter ego...
...His memories had been refreshed by romance earlier in the 1930s, when he, his brother, their father, and even cousin Manya/Nadezhda related their life stories to his new wife Anna...
...The literary scholar Boris Frezinsky has praised Bukharin's "outstanding writer's memory for all of life's details," his "lush and vivid language," and his "panorama of social, political, and artistic life...
...With those developments on his mind, Bukharin completed the first prison manuscript, Socialism and Its Culture, at an astonishing pace, evidently within four weeks of being permitted to write, mainly because it was the second part of a larger work begun before his arrest to be called The Crisis of Capitalist Culture and Socialism...
...If those armed and tough men could be taken and broken so quickly, there would be no way out for him...
...Alone among Soviet leaders, he had worried about fascism as a new phenomenon and special menace ever since the early 1920s...
...But most were actually "preserved forever"—as they were often stamped—by the terror apparatus itself, buried in the ever swelling archives (vaults seems a more fitting word) of the NKVD and of the chief terrorist, Stalin...
...The venerable children's writer and poet Valentin Berestov ranks the novel among the "best accounts of childhood in Russian literature...
...Bukharin probably knew that the twentysecond chapter, where the manuscript of the novel breaks off, would be his last...
...By 1937 entire generations of Russian revolutionaries, Bukharin's in particular, were being massacred in Stalin's terror, their biographies and ideals criminalized in the name of their own once-sacred cause...
...For that, he might have written exclusively about his lifelong passions for nature or art, which are secondary themes of the novel...
...As weeks turned into BUKHARIN S FATE months, and tightly handwritten pages into large manuscripts, Bukharin more and more wanted his prison writings to survive him: "Have pity...
...Reliving the death of his youngest brother three decades before, he wrote: "The sooner it's all ended, the better...
...None of it has ever been found...
...And while the Communist Party maintained its repressive political monopoly, it permitted much more social, intellectual, and cultural diversity than would ever again be the case until the Gorbachev years...
...And writers were being shot for less literary sedition than Bukharin's fleeting mirror images of Stalin's regime in its considerably paler czarist predecessor...
...They were excavated, at my initiative, fifty-four years later, in 1992...
...Protesting that socialism could not be achieved through "military-feudal exploitation," he warned that Stalin's policies were leading to "a police state...
...But none of its unique remaining materials, not even remote historical ones, can be seen except on instruction of the president or his chief of staff...
...Scores of incinerators no doubt were also flaming in provincial Lubyankas throughout Russia and the other Soviet republics...
...In late 1929, as catastrophe unfolded across the land, the new Stalinist majority stripped Bukharin of all real power or influence over political events, though he remained a nominal member of the Party Central Committee and later served as editor of the government newspaper Izvestia until his arrest on February 27, 1937...
...Translated into many languages, it established him as a major Marxist thinker and the Party's "biggest theorist...
...Eventually a leader untainted by past crimes comes to power determined to repudiate the tyrant and undo his political legacy...
...Special permission is required from the ministry in order to see any of its files...
...The Russian Presidential Archive, where Stalin's enormous personal archive is kept, is even more inaccessible...
...Knowing it could be reversed at any moment, the Lubyanka author tried to ensnare his captor in what he was writing...
...The Lubyanka prisoner had only one thing to offer: his willingness to satisfy Stalin's profound need for his participation in the macabre trial...
...In order to achieve this, he must fully exonerate the martyred founding father, who immediately becomes a cherished historical figure and symbol of long-awaited change...
...This essay is abridged and adapted from a longer version that is the introduction to How It All Began, by Nikolai Bukharin, translated by George Shriver, copyright ©1998 by Columbia University Press...
...THE SOVIET judge who formally reopened Bukharin's case files in 1988—the year Bukharin was finally exonerated at Mikhail Gorbachev's insistence—remarked, "He was a fighter to the end, despite the conditions in which he found himself...
...or with an old regime that promoted people "who seemed to have been born for police interrogation, provocation, and torture chambers" and under which the "best heads are cut off, the flower of the nation, as though by a mowing machine...
...Immediately after sentencing Bukharin to death, Stalin demanded another humiliating ritual, a formal plea for mercy...
...Bukharin's own story was to stand for all his boyhood contemporaries who soon would be swept into power by a revolution they so wanted and who, twenty years later, would be destroyed in its aftermath...
...The kind of philosophy Bukharin outlined here was not the same as the Stalinist version of Marxism, a Marxism crucified...
...To our surprise, the former NKVD/KGB archive, under the Ministry of Security, responded promptly and more or less positively...
...Private enterprise and market relations were officially encouraged, especially in peasant agriculture, small-scale manufacturing, and retail trade...
...Some less significant holdings have been transferred to open repositories...
...An educated and softmannered man who had begun his NKVD career specializing in intellectual cases, he must have been specially chosen for Bukharin's...
...During his year in prison Bukharin wrote several (evidently revealing) undelivered letters to his wife...
...There is also the somewhat enigmatic title Bukharin put on the manuscript, Vremena, whose Russian meaning suggests an unending process of time linking the past, present, and future...
...Those rare glimpses of Bukharin's condition in prison are from four letters he sent to Stalin from his cell between April and December 1937...
...Its urgent importance for Bukharin was clear from his letters to Stalin begging him to save the first volume and publish both quickly, under a pseudonym if necessary, with a preface by the Kremlin leader...
...From the central Lubyanka Prison in the late 1930s, "a sootstained chimney . . . sprinkled Moscow with the ash of incinerated manuscripts...
...For Bukharin, "culture" meant modern civilization...
...Rumors circulate about his prison manuscripts, but four more years pass before they can be retrieved from the despot's classified documents...
...And most Soviet readers, with their instinct for interpreting what could not be written, would have guessed that the author of such lines was somewhere in a successor to those czarist prisons where "behind thick walls, interrogations went on, uninterrupted, through the nights...
...We might wonder how Bukharin recalled those distant childhood years in such detail after decades of political upheaval and his own wide-ranging travels and activities...
...BUKHARIN FINISHED his solitary Lubyanka effort to redeem Soviet Marxism just as Stalin's regime was celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the Communist revolution, overnight on November 7-8,1937...
...An authentic despot has the personal power to make time for what truly interests him, no matter how petty it may seem...
...Not even Lenin's letters were safe, a number of important ones evidently having been destroyed along with his old comrades who had received them...
...But Bukharin gives us an additional explanation in the third chapter: "Children, like grown-ups, have their superstitions, prejudices, heartfelt dreams, ideals, and unforgettable incidents in life, which are stored in the memory forever and which suddenly, at terrible or tragic moments in life, come swimming into consciousness, surprisingly vivid, in full detail, down to the wrinkles in somebody's face or a spider's web illuminated by the evening sun...
...In addition to the later world-famous Kolya Petrov-Bukharin, for example, four of the main characters became well known in Moscow political society after 1917: his father, Ivan...
...Lubyanka, of course, was such a terrible and tragic moment...
...We cannot be certain how far Bukharin hoped to take his story and Russia's, though clues strongly suggest that he wanted the novel to encompass or culminate in 1917...
...But because his name continues to be anathematized by the despot's successors, all his prison writings remain buried in secret state archives for more than half a century...
...Have pity...
...This third prison manuscript mattered greatly to Bukharin...
...Whatever the full truth, he provided his prisoner with writing materials and books, boosted his morale, and watched the manuscripts grow...
...Not on me, on the work...
...Right up to his arrest, Bukharin used all his personal BUKHARIN'S FATE authority to urge, in passionate articles and speeches, that the Soviet Union put itself at the head of the antifascist struggle and collective European security...
...Economic Policy, or simply NEP, which for many citizens would be a "golden era" in Soviet history...
...with a predecessor "officialdom, the chinovniks of all varieties . . . thick-headed, arrogant, and `patriotic,' the kind who threw the word Yid around contemptuously...
...Many themes first raised and discussed by Bukharin were new for Marxist philosophers even in the 1960s...
...He goes out to buy sausage and comes back with a canary...
...RFADERS OF the novel, How It All Began, may wonder about Bukharin's other prison manuscripts...
...An unembellished memoir would have been too dangerous and less likely to survive...
...As the pseudo-judicial proceedings moved toward their inexorable outcome, Stalin, through his mouthpiece-prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky, leveled an exceptional accusation against Bukharin: "The hypocrisy and perfidy of this man exceed the most perfidious and monstrous crimes known to the history of mankind...
...In return for going through with the trial, Bukharin wanted assurances of their well-being...
...As new troubles spread across the land, only a few citizens any longer care about a founding father whose political creation no longer exists...
...Forced to stand trial as the last original Bolshevik, Bukharin was also the last great antifascist of the Soviet 1930s...
...After Lenin's death in 1924, as his heirs on the ruling Politburo and Central Committee split into factions warring over power and DISSENT / Spring 1998 n 59 BUKHARIN'S FATE policy, Bukharin became NEP's greatest interpreter and defender...
...When his trial finally began, the proceedings were filmed on Stalin's orders by NKVD cameramen...
...Always a fragile personality—"soft" and "artistic," according to people who knew himBukharin was already debilitated by months of persecution and a hunger strike undertaken before his arrest...
...Amid all the political, economic, and social upheavals of the Soviet 1930s, Stalin received and at least scanned an enormous volume of confiscated materials, commonly scrawling on them the instruction "Send to the archive" or, more evocatively, "Let all this 'material' lie deep in the archive...
...Not a few foolish Western observers, it might be remembered, from foreign Communists to the American ambassador in Moscow, actually believed the charges, or said they did...
...Even when shown a large quantity of documents, as I have been, one cannot be sure they are complete...
...No professional writer, which Bukharin certainly was, would consider any major work complete without revisions, even further drafts...
...Even though he lacked most of the books needed for such a wide-ranging treatise (Kogan apparently gave him a few from the prison library and from his own collection), it was full of erudition and remarkably precise references...
...How It All Began was written as an autobiographical novel, but it is virtually a memoir...
...In barely one year, while constantly being interrogated and tormented about his family and the next ordeal that awaited him, this middle-aged intellectual, so often said to have been weak, found the moral and physical stamina to write four books (the equivalent of about fourteen hundred typewritten pages)—a study of modern politics and culture, a philosophical treatise, a thick volume of thematic poems, and an unfinished novel about his childhood in prerevolutionary Russia...
...Sometimes called the Kremlin Archive, it passed in 1991 from Gorbachev's control to Boris Yeltsin's...
...and his first cousins, Nikolai and "Manya" Yablochkin, who were actually Nikolai and Nadezhda Lukin—he by then a prominent Bolshevik revolutionary and historian, and she Bukharin's first wife...
...Nonetheless, I still was optimistic in 1991 that he would soon authorize release of the manuscripts...
...Later Stalin's political police and its successor, the NKVD and KGB, destroyed masses of paper when Hitler's armies approached in 1941, again when Nikita Khrushchev's revelations threatened the organy in the 1950s, and once again, now shredding instead of burning, after the failed putsch against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991...
...Kogan was, of course, a loyal agent of the terror— he was awarded an Order of Lenin in murderous 1937—but his few surviving traces suggest a complex relationship with his famous victim during their months together in Lubyanka...
...For many years to come, Bukharin's trial would be an enthralling and emblematic mystery of twentieth-century politics, the subject 6o n DISSENT / Spring 1998 of philosophy and fiction: Why had he—indeed, all the illustrious old Bolsheviks put in the dock—confessed to preposterously false charges...
...There is no satisfactory explanation for why the "Boss," as his top henchmen called him among themselves, allowed so much incriminating evidence to be preserved—Was it his seminary education or his self-ordained role as "greatest scholar on the planet"?—but for this, if nothing else, the nation could be grateful...
...Those special tributes alone were more than enough to doom him in Stalin's Terror, which swept away virtually the entire original elite of the Soviet Union...
...An unanswered question therefore often haunts surviving members of a victim's family and historians: Do missing materials confiscated during Stalin's terror still exist...
...Indeed, it is astonishing that not a single frame of film or photograph showing the faces of the defendants at this most infamous political trial of this most visual century has ever been made public...
...My work in that storehouse of historical horrors soon began...
...When Philosophical Arabesques was published in postcommunist Russia, an eminent Moscow philosopher noted the "illusions Bukharin shared with many Communists of that time" but emphasized his "secret polemic with Stalinism...
...Some examples are well known and especially lamented...
...Interrogations usually began late at night and continued into the early morning hours...
...Hoping to help her husband, Anna Larina was allowed to meet Kogan once and thought she saw "unspeakable remorse in his eyes...
...The Kremlin Inquisitioner, on the other hand, had unconstrained power of life and death over Bukharin's large family, most ominously over his twenty-three-year-old wife, Anna Larina, whom Bukharin, at almost forty-six, had married three years earlier...
...It is this that Bukharin wanted us to understand—how they began to identify with the "lower orders of society," to "look at the world from the bottom up instead of from the top down," and why "this world of misery entered [their] soul forever...
...Of all the documents found in archives, they are the most painful to read...
...In 1921, after four years of draconian political and economic measures that helped win the civil war but left the economy in ruins, Lenin introduced a fundamental change of course known as the New...
...His "grief and boundless anguish" brought on episodes of "hallucinatory delusions," even occasional loss of vision, and though he seems to have always revived, his "physical and spiritual strength [were] weakening...
...THE ROLE I unexpectedly played in this saga was an outgrowth of my biography of Bukharin, first published in the United States in 1973 and eventually in the Soviet Union in 1989, and my close personal relationship with his widow and son from the time we first met surreptitiously in 1975 in pre-glasnost Moscow...
...When we finally retrieved the manuscripts half a century later, we decided to publish all of them unedited, if only to honor the circumstances in which he wrote them...
...Stalin must have interpreted the letter as Bukharin intended, "I would not be able to play my role," and gave the order...
...Immediately following his arrest in February 1937, NKVD men hauled away a "mountain of paper" from his Kremlin apartment, the truck "overflowing" with materials, including unpublished manuscripts, photographs, letters from Lenin, and other historical documents...
...But if we still honor a handful of political figures who understood the dangers of appeasement and fought it, we might add their counterpart in Lubyanka to the list...
...fascism was its mortal crisis and socialism its only possible salvation...
...Not on me, on the work...
...Bukharin no doubt knew of Stalin's secret diplomacy, already under way, that would lead to the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939...
...Political in overt ways that the novel was not, they had to be written on a razor's edge between what he wanted to say—to the despot and to posterity— and the desperate plight of his family...
...And yet a great many forbidden manuscripts and other materials did survive Stalin's long reign of terror and its aftermath...
...The first volume, The Degradation of Culture and Fascism, was among the papers taken from his apartment and never found, but the nature of the overall project is clear...
...ONETHELESS, archives have now told us more about Bukharin's fate, however _ grudgingly and fragmentarily, than we ever expected to learn...
...Along with autobiographical themes that reappear in the novel, they express his intense love for Anna, longing for their brief life together, and yearnings to be free...
...Regretting his own extremist views during the civil war, he now warned repeatedly against the abuses of power inherent in the Party's political monopoly and ideological zealotry...
...By the mid-1930s that worry had grown into profound alarm: not only was Hitlerism in power and ever more virulent, Stalin was speaking publicly of the Nazi Fuhrer as merely another capitalist dictator with whom he could do realpolitik business...
...For the next nine months Bukharin went along with the Lubyanka inquisitioners, but haggled stubbornly over the terms of his confession...
...Bukharin went on trial in March 1938 without knowing that his wife and son had been taken from their Moscow apartment nine months earlier, Anna to begin a twenty-year journey through Stalin's prisons, labor camps, and Siberian exile, and Yuri a two-decade odyssey under another family name through foster homes and orphanages...
...not long after, he, too, was arrested and shot...
...Even under a pseudonym and without its specific family history, the novel could not have been published in the despot's Soviet Union...
...All his prison manuscripts were written not only at an astonishing pace but with almost no corrections...
...a novel must have seemed the safest approach and, after the strain of composing three rigorously aesopian manuscripts, the freest...
...Except when taken through always dark corridors to an interrogation room, he was confined in a tiny cell harshly lit around the clock by a naked bulb, alone for months but periodically with a cell mate who was actually an informer...
...how "sedition had crept" into the homes of loyal czarist parents and why boys privileged to study at an elite gimnaziya embraced the "gleaming weapons of Marxism...
...His tenacious recalcitrance may have been one reason why the trial was postponed at least twice...
...For Anna Larina, 64 n DISSENT / Spring 1998 who died in 1996, there was just enough time left, with the help of family and friends, to ready her husband's last writings for publication in his homeland...
...But Bukharin knew, as he had made clear before his arrest, that the Stalinist regime, much like Hitler's, was growing into an "omnipotent 'total state' that de-humanizes everything except leaders and 'super-leaders.' " Socialism and Its Culture tried to overcome that nightmarish paradox...
...Composed after midnight, when he was returned to his cell from those nocturnal interrogations, they can be read as a chronicle of his emotional state and a quest for spiritual escape...
...It is not known whether Stalin read them carefully, but he certainly looked at them...
...Several unpublished works by Isaac Babel and the great scientist Nikolai Vavilov suffered the same fate...
...From 1925 to 1928 Bukharin and Stalin led the Party's pro-NEP majority against the several left oppositions headed by Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev...
...Within a few minutes I was in his government office while he spoke on the telephone to archive administrators, and within a few weeks photocopies of the four manuscripts were in our hands...
...Certainly no one in Stalin's Russia would have been permitted to say, as does one of Bukharin's characters long before it actually happened, "You have transformed your party into a barracks...
...But we can never know how many manuscripts, eminent correspondence, government documents, photographs, films, and even paintings perished in the bloody years from 1929 to 1953, when Stalin's regime tried to repress anything that deviated from its falsification of almost everything...
...but many more were systematically destroyed by the terror regime...
...The Russian Huck Finn ("Kolya's hero") with a classical education, who dismayed his mother and grandmother by already knowing "everything he's not supposed to," grew into the most iconoclastic and intellectual member of the Soviet leadership...
...Believing that the Bukharin family was the legal and moral heir to his works, and had a juridical right in the "new, democratic Russia" to examine all files related to his case, she formally named me her proxy and requested that relevant archives give me full access to the materials...
...Among other things they promised he would live if he played the role well...
...In the Soviet Marxist imagination, the revolution of 1917 was a kind of nexus between Russia's previous history, ongoing developments, and communist future...
...The first seven chapters were written by mid-January 1938, when he thought the trial was about to begin and his time had run out...
...But on June 1 he capitulated and began inventing "testimony," probably because he learned that the country's top military commanders had now been arrested and forced to sign statements incriminating him...
...and Bukharin's thirteen-year-old daughter, Svetlana, by a previous marriage...
...Bukharin wrote two, on March 13 and 14, 1938, the first perfunctory but the second an elaborate profession of complete political and psychological repentance: "The former Bukharin has already died...
...Those writings are the most remarkable discovery of our archival investigation into Bukharin's Lubyanka fate...
...By then Bukharin seems to have understood that he was doomed, which meant the antifascist manifesto would not be published, and to have begun thinking about his posthumous legacy...
...art is long" for his Russian students as "The belly is short, but the thing is long...
...As a result, How It All Began was the least self-censored of Bukharin's Lubyanka manuscripts, though it, too, was laced with antiStalinism...
...As the trial went on, he tried to show—through double-talk, code words, evasion, and digressions— that the criminal accusations were really political falsifications and the doomed Bolsheviks actually the revolution's true leaders whose non-Stalinist conceptions of socialism were being eradicated...
...Then Bukharin went on to discredit his whole "confession" (and allude to the torment being inflicted in Stalin's prisons) with a simple aside: "The confession of the accused is a medieval principle of jurisprudence...
...The poems were written during the months when Bukharin was being intensely pressured for the false testimony Stalin demanded...
...Two days later he is shot in a secret execution cell, his place of burial never discovered...
...He then buried them deep in his personal archive, the deepest archaeological recess of the Terror Era...
...But the long, densely rambling letters can also be interpreted more complexly, particularly in light of other evidence that Bukharin remained "a fighter to the end," as part of a cruelly inequitable negotiation...
...No NKVD censor or interrogator would have overlooked, for example, the contemporary parallels with a czar tightening "all the DISSENT / Spring 1998 n 67 BUKHARIN'S FATE screws in the terrible system of power...
...Two sections of the volume, one entitled "Lyrical Intermezzo," are especially moving...
...Normally we would be deeply moved by the tragic fate of the book and its author, but they are products of the Soviet experience, about which most of us have little if any such sentiment...
...Nor was it a good political moment...
...All four, along with almost everything else he wrote in Lubyanka, were sent by his jailers to the Kremlin Boss...
...Here, too, Bukharin failed...
...Bukharin believed deeply in those historic Soviet missions, even while knowing they were being terribly deformed under Stalin, and a final opportunity to testify on their behalf was another reason he agreed to stand trial...
...In addition, Stalin's modernizing goals, however brutally pursued, were his as well...
...Barely twentynine years old when the Bolsheviks took power, he was the youngest, most genuinely popular, and perhaps most interesting intellectual member of the Communist leadership...
...It, too, was written very quickly, because "much of it was in my head...
...But it was Bukharin's role in the 1920s that would make him Stalin's most important purge victim in the 1930s...
...That person deserves our public gratitude, but I still do not feel free to name him, even though he has since left Yeltsin's side...
...He had already started another "big" project, Philosophical Arabesques, now considering it the "most important thing" and his most "mature work...
...A once beloved founding father is falsely accused of terrorism and treason against the state he helped create and is arrested by the bloody despot who now rules it...
...Bukharin remained loyal, even in Lubyanka, to Marxism and the Soviet Union...
...In July 1992, ironically during the opening session of the Communist Party trial, I cornered one of Yeltsin's closest and most influential associates...
...68 n DISSENT / Spring 1998...
...Even before Stalin's ruthless measures of 1929-1933 had destroyed NEP and left perhaps ten million peasants dead or enslaved in a vastly swollen Gulag of forced labor camps, Bukharin presciently understood their "monstrously one-sided" intent—and their consequences...
...Tormented in prison for a year and completely cut off from the outside world, he is forced to stand trial and publicly confess to having been a vile enemy of the political ideas and aspirations to which he had devoted his life and had symbolized for almost twenty years...
...Multicolored pictures of pre-1917 Russia, sympathetic portrayals of doomed classes, and humanistic characterizations of future Leninists were already forbidden...
...Though he hoped Socialism and Its Culture would reach a world "at the crossroads of history," it was, in effect, a book-length policy memorandum to Stalin...
...It was the same Bukharin who then appeared at the show trial so carefully planned by Stalin and found ways "to tear it to bits...
...For a biographer or any historian of the terror, they are an unexpected view into the soul of a condemned man...
...But the contents of How It All Began hardly suggest that emotional escape from Lubyanka was its primary purpose...
...Nor is little Kolya's raucous humor uncharacteristic of the zestful man later renowned as a Kremlin caricaturist and punster...
...Unknown to anyone except the despot and a few jailers, who are themselves soon shot, the victim managed to write four book-length manuscripts during his year in prison, even while being coerced into his scripted role at the show trial...
...In the bureaucratic language of an official investigation, it is reported that the last prose fiction of Boris © Copyright 1998 by Stephen F. Cohen...
...For three full months Bukharin adamantly refused to "confess" despite prospects of physical torture, threats against his family, and shattering face-to-face confrontations with his cherished young protégés who had been brutally beaten into giving lurid testimony against him...
...I am too close to the manuscript, and too lacking in literary judgment, to comment on Bukharin's achievements, but several Russian readers have already done so...
...Indeed, How It All Began may be the most authoritative firsthand account we have of how and why so many of csarist Russia's best and brightest young people had already defected on the eve of the twentieth century's most fateful revolution...
...I quickly learned, however, that not even the top archive officials of the new Russian state could authorize access to the Presidential Archive, where the manuscripts and other essential materials were held...
...And the people who kept this manuscript under lock and key . . . are guilty not simply of degrading Marxism, which was transformed into ideological solder, but of a barbaric attitude toward . . . culture, and not only Russian culture...
...It, too, only Stalin could grant...
...On several occasions high-level emissaries from Stalin—notably the NKVD chief, Nikolai Yezhov, and the prosecutor, Vyshinsky—came to deal personally with him...
...Perhaps the most popular explanation, elaborated in Arthur Koestler's famous novel Darkness at Noon, argued that Bukharin, morally bankrupt and sincerely repentant for his past opposition, willingly confessed as a last service to Stalinism...
...The end of Communist rule had diminished public interest in all the Soviet founding fathers, and the new government seemed interested only in archival documents that would discredit Gorbachev and enhance its upcoming trial of the Communist Party...
...his brother, Vladimir ("Volodya...
...Misled into believing that they would be given to his family, he expected 66 n DISSENT / Spring 1998 his elderly father, a great lover of literature, to "polish the poems and the novel...
...Used by arrangement with Columbia University Press...
...Consider two subsequent examples...
...While researching that book from afar, I came across vague reports that Bukharin had written some kind of manuscript in prison, as indeed he hinted at the trial, but neither I nor his family, who were still living with an official stigma, could learn anything more for many years...
...others were frantically discarded by their owners in fear of such nocturnal visits...
...only one of them has ever been found...
...Assurances were given, but falsely...
...In his next-to-last prison letter to Stalin, he said it was to be a "big novel," which presumably meant in scope and content and thus including "The Great Revolution...
...Bukharin prison letter to Stalin, 1937 Manuscripts do not burn...
...Another postponement, to early March, allowed him to write fifteen more...
...Bukharin was not seen again publicly until March 2, 1938, when the last and most spectacular Moscow show trial opened in a glare of international media attention...
...And Kolya's childhood passion for assembling menageries wherever the family migrated remained with Bukharin everywhere he later lived, from Moscow's Hotel Metropol to the Kremlin, their abandoned denizens still running wild after his execution...
...Like his later courtroom statements they must be read on two levels, the outwardly conformist and inwardly polemical, for the nonStalinist meanings embedded in obligatory Stalinist ritual...
...Gorbachev, although sympathetic to the request, was already locked in a bitter political struggle with Communist Party opponents who resented his revelations about Soviet history and particularly about those kinds of "Party documents...
...In that respect, the second manuscript was an expansive poetic rendition of the first...
...Don't let it be lost...
...When Bukharin was taken to be shot, three of his prison manuscripts evidently were still in his cell, including the novel, the other having been confiscated months before...
...The impish and athletic schoolboy "monkey" was still walking on his hands and springing from trees over courtyard walls in the 1920s and 1930s, now for the amusement of an ailing Lenin and Maxim Gorky...
...Despite the opening of many former Soviet archives, access to two of the most important ones remains highly restricted and much of their historical material yet to be declassified...
...memories of childhood and a loving family may have eased his adult sorrows...
...There are hints he may have been given drugs...
...In 1921 he had published a philosophical work, Historical Materialism, that immediately became a canon of international communism...
...Mikhail Bulgakov THE HISTORY of Nikolai Bukharin's novel is almost certainly unique— even in the dismal twentieth century with its mountain of literature written by people doomed by politics...
...Thus did his personal papers grow year by year and decade by decade into a vast and long impenetrable repository of forbidden history and culture...
...rOR TODAY'S readers, however, the importance and pleasures of How It All Began lie not in its polemic with Stalinism but in its intimate portrayal of Russian society and a characteristic family on the eve of a great upheaval...
...Once inside Lubyanka in 1937 Bukharin was given almost no news of the outside world, but by the time of his arrest Hitler and Mussolini were in power, their military ambitions clear, and the Spanish Civil War under way...
...58 n DISSENT / Spring 1998 BUKHARIC S FATE Pilnyak, arrested with him in 1937, "has not been preserved...
...The "tragedy of this manuscript," he continued, was in having been kept hidden for so long: If the ideas Bukharin developed in this manuscript had been made known even in the 1950s or 1960s, they could have led to a fundamentally new Marxist philosophical vision...
...A political man to the end, Bukharin chose autobiography as his last subject for a political reason...
...Other readers, including historians, single out its description of everyday existence in the empire's remote provinces, particularly Bessarabia, re-creation of the sights and smells of old Moscow, and portraits of Russia's halfimpoverished lower-middle classes, from which so many revolutionaries sprang...
...Why did Bukharin choose to write about the beginning of his life at its very end...
...None of the people are invented or really disguised...
...Bukharin's letters carefully apprised Stalin of his projects, even proposing he write a preface for one of them...
...Above all, little Kolya Petrov of the novel is fully recognizable in the legendary Nikolai Bukharin of Soviet history...
...Exactly how Bukharin managed to write the manuscripts in those circumstances is left to our imagination...
...Filled with lachrymose professions of "true devotion" and "enormous love" for his persecutor, along with fantasies of being freed to live under a pseudonym, they assured Stalin, "I acknowledge myself to be entirely yours" and "I would 62 n DISSENT / Spring 1998 be ready to carry out any of your demands...
...the sum total of crimes committed by this counterrevolutionary organization, irrespective of whether or not I knew of, or whether or not I took a direct part in, any particular act...
...Reunited only in 1956, both survived to be present at Bukharin's rehabilitation in 1988...
...He never stopped telling the novel's story of his hapless Latin teacher, a native Czech, who translated the proverb "Life is short...
...Bukharin desperately wanted to believe them but he never really did, and repeatedly asked to be given poison, "like Socrates," instead of being shot...
...Imagine, therefore, the history of How It All Began apart from its geography and politics...
...Most of the nearly two hundred poems were reflections on previous centuries— particularly their great thinkers, cultural figures, and rebels—and an epic telling of Soviet history from 1917 to the 1930s, culminating in the ongoing "struggle of two worlds," socialist humanism and fascism...
...he no longer lives on this earth...
...In his final statement Bukharin again "confessed" to the indictment but then, according to a foreign correspondent in the courtroom, "proceeded . . . to tear it to bits...
...In 1992 Anna Larina, now almost eighty and ill with cancer, and I took a different apDISSENT / Spring 1998 63 BUKHARIN'S FATE proach...
...Even today, however, more, not everything, is the correct word...
...The "other analogous reasons," most fearfully the DISSENT / Spring 1998 n 61 BUKHARIN S FATE fate of his family, became inescapable...
...their infant son, Yuri...
...Whatever the literary quality of the poems—expert Russian opinion is mixed—they are of compelling interest...
...Advised by a Russian friend, I identified a person who might have the power and inclination to help...
...Where, for example, are Bukharin's own personal papers, a large and rich collection accumulated during an extraordinary life of revolution, power, and writing...
...It could be done only by someone at the highest levels of the Yeltsin government...
...Elderly friends and members of Bukharin's extended family who were still alive when the novel was obtained in the 1990s were amazed by how accurately he had portrayed those people...
...Bukharin had neither time nor paper for such perfections...
...Those reels might tell us what actually happened in the courtroom, but they have disappeared...
...He was shot the next night...
...Though the most surprising of his BUKHARIN'S FATE prison manuscripts, it is consistent with the Soviet leader who wrote extensively about literature and culture, gathered the best writers around the newspapers he edited, and repeatedly did what he could to protect three of Russia's greatest and most endangered poetsOsip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, and Nikolai Zabolotsky...
...Unless more documents are uncovered, all we can know with certainty is that Bukharin wrote mostly at night and early morning, sleeping sporadically in the harsh light that blurred his vision, working without a typewriter, sources he needed, or even a reliable supply of paper, using the backs of used sheets when he ran out...
...Uncharacteristic of a man so absorbed with contemporary politics and theory, the last manuscript was an unfinished novel about his childhood...
...BULGAKOV WAS wrong: manuscripts do burn, and many did in Stalin's Soviet Union...
...On behalf of Anna Larina, her artist son, Yuri Larin, and myself, I began asking for the manuscripts...
...It argued effusively for the "humanist" potential of the Soviet system while pleading with the despot for its humanization, even a "transition to democracy," so that the nation could play its essential antifascist role...
...Even the twenty-two chapters found in Stalin's archives, which take Nikolai "Kolya" Petrov (Nikolai "Kolya" Bukharin) to about age fifteen and Russia to the eve of the failed revolution of 1905, a kind of dress rehearsal for 1917, are themselves unfinished...
...STEPHEN F. COHEN is professor of politics and Russian studies at Princeton University...
...The prison writings of a martyred founding father embraced by the last Soviet leader served neither purpose...
...Twentyone defendants sat in the dock, several of them prominent old Bolsheviks, but for Stalin it was the inquisition and confession of Bukharin that really mattered...
...He spent his last year "dangling between life and death" in Stalin's top factory of false confessions, Lubyanka Prison, fully in the hands of NKVD "investigators" who were under pressing orders to "prepare" him for the trial...
...Throughout his imprisonment Bukharin tried desperately to "bargain" with Stalin...
...The only other person who probably knew was a shadowy thirty-five-yearold Lubyanka officer directly in charge of interrogating and preparing him for the trial, Captain Lazar Kogan...
...You have killed all freedom of criticism among yourselves and you want to extend this barracks to include everything and everyone...
...And when Stalin himself turned against NEP at the end of the 1920s, for a draconian kind of rapid industrialization based on forcing the country's 125 million peasants into state-run collective farms, Bukharin's adamant protests put him at the head of the so-called right opposition...
...For his sake and theirs, he wanted to leave behind a personal testimony of how it had really been—a testament to the idealism that had led them as young students to become Marxist radicals in czarist Russia—and how, he still hoped, it might be...
...Though isolated, Bukharin witnessed firsthand the fate of his contemporaries, having been brought face to face with childhood friends who also were being tortured into falsifying his life and their own...
...In fact Bukharin did not really confess, as was clear even from the edited transcript of the trial published at the time in the heavily censored Soviet press...
...Some were lost indifferently in the crude haste of millions of arrests, searches, and confiscations...
...The still proud and intellectually ambitious Lubyanka inmate wanted to respond to those challenges and complete his long-standing project of DISSENT / Spring 1998 • 65 BUKHARIN'S FATE bringing nineteenth-century Marxism fully into the twentieth century...
...A man for whom politics had always meant writing—his publications numbered in the hundreds—Bukharin wanted permission, exceedingly unusual in that place of debasement, to write in his cell: "I simply would not be able to survive here if not permitted to use paper and pen...
...Nor does this zealously guarded citadel of secrets make known a list of its full holdings, though we have learned they include the original typed stenograph of Bukharin's trial with handwritten "corrections" by Stalin and his hanging judge, Vasily Ulrikh...
...His books include Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, Rethinking the Soviet Experience, and Sovieticus...
...Some were saved in secret acts of private courage— by relatives and friends of victims who took the great risk of hiding poems, letters, and photographs for decades...
...Two might be interpreted simply as the pathetic pleadings of a completely broken man...
...Another large batch of related materials soon followed, just before that archive's doors again slammed shut...
...We should not be too surprised...
...Finally they are published in the martyr's homeland, but by now the vast state he helped found has broken apart, even its name discarded...
...Bukharin immediately understood, as he wrote to Stalin from prison, that "they can do with me here anything they want...
...The NKVD archive, which contains most of the records from the "investigation and interrogation" of Bukharin in prison, is still under the control of its Russian successor organization...
...By his seventh month in prison, September 1937, Bukharin had largely completed a second manuscript, a collection of poems of "universal scope" entitled The Transformation of the World...
...Stalin could not really obliterate that reputation, but serious intellectual and political challenges to Marxism, in addition to the theory and practice of fascism, had arisen since 1921...
...But all the other agonies inflicted in Lubyanka—over his family and closest friends, his impending trial, his historical reputation— were enough to leave his "soul shattered and in torment...
...Asked to make admissions that "contradict my whole life, my entire being," as he also wrote to Stalin, Bukharin refused "to slander myself out of fear or for other analogous reasons...
...Only in 1988 did an aide to Gorbachev, who had read and publicly remarked on my book, tell me privately that not one but four such manuscripts existed in closed archives...
Vol. 45 • April 1998 • No. 2
