The Favorite of the Party
FEUER, LEWIS S.
The Favorite of the Party THE TRIAL OF BUKHARIN By George Katkov Stein & Day. 255 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by LEWIS S. FEUER Professor of Sociology, University of Toronto I hope George Katkov's The...
...Evidently, despite tremendous internal resistance, Bukharin was rethinking and re-evaluating his past revolutionary ideology against the historical evidence...
...Bukharin's child was one of the signers...
...Bukharin could never declare the more obvious truth: If Stalin wants the country to be fully unified against Hitler, let him stop tyrannizing the people, let him allow freedom of discussion...
...Stalin, however, wanted the Right-wingers to share the responsibility for his forcible, destructive collectivization of the farms, and would not tolerate the "method of resignations...
...A dual psychology arose...
...His tactics and the dissensions which he promoted among the Russian Socialists aroused suspicion...
...We see him, in Katkov's book, talking in Paris to Mensheviks Theodore and Lydia Dan about the "compulsive vindictiveness" of Stalin, this "small, vicious man, no, not a man but a devil," who hated anyone with superior abilities...
...Even on trial, therefore, they perpetuated the elements of the Lenin mythology...
...Evidently, to his mind every scientific intellectual, like Bukharin, was essentially a Judas...
...Each one of us can discern this in his own soul, although I will not engage in a far-reaching psychological analysis...
...Here, indeed, was the tragedy of the Bolshevik intellectuals: They had fashioned an order in which they were almost inevitably the creatures of spiteful mediocrities and anti-intellectuals...
...For no other political trial in modern times has so poignantly demonstrated the impotence and ultimate self-immolation of the revolutionary intellectual within a totalitarian dictatorship: Submerging himself in the historical process as its presumable agent, the revolutionary finds himself its misused, cast-off tool...
...There are some excellent photographs in Katkov's book, especially of the courtroom spectators and of denunciations being read at a Moscow factory meeting...
...Today, the Soviet regime continues to suppress the truth of the Moscow trials...
...Trotsky once described Bukharin's trait of softness, his yielding to the most recent stronger personality...
...The spectacle of this man bending his knees, as he said, in self-vilification before the Party is a rebuke to those who speak glibly of Marxist humanism...
...He was a writer, and in desperation he retired from politics to write sociological essays as head of the Research Department in the Ministry of Heavy Industry...
...When Robert Hunter, the American Socialist who pioneered the study of poverty, met Lenin at the International Congress in 1907, the rumor about Lenin was "that he was a paid emissary of the Russian police...
...But no official announcement followed...
...But Bukharin could not sustain his insight during the ordeal of a year in prison, where he was isolated and deprived of all news, except for the pabulum the secret police fed him...
...There is, for instance, scant reference to the fact that during the '30s he married a young woman with whom he had a child...
...Bukharin hoped in 1928 to win the Communist party to his moderate stand...
...in the Soviet Union he had little chance to do that...
...What is lacking in Katkov's absorbing book is a full characterization of his subject, a depiction of the personal strains under which Bukharin labored...
...In a brilliant cross-examination, quoted here at length, Bukharin demolished the testimony by which the prosecutor, Andrei Vyshinsky, tried to prove he had plotted against Lenin's life...
...The great Soviet oppositionists, Martov, Trotsky and Bukharin, seem in a strange way to have defined defeatist roles for themselves...
...perhaps understandably, in view of the pitfalls of psychological study...
...Further, people in varied walks of life, occupations, professions, or business can enter, leave and re-enter politics as they wish...
...The drama of the self-immolating tribune appears to have attracted their characters more than the exercise of power...
...Thus Bukharin became the editor of Pravda...
...That philosophers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre have tried to apologize for the Moscow trials indicates how weak intellectuals can become with their sickness of self-contempt...
...He had, in fact, written of the "military-feudal exploitation of the peasantry" just the year before...
...Perhaps our visiting scholars at the International Congress of Historians in Moscow next summer might ask to see them...
...Stalin, the Tbilisi theological student, once told Lion Feuchtwanger: "You Jews have created one eternally true legend-that of Judas...
...His reply to Michels' "iron law of oligarchy" in an earlier sociological book was likewise halting, while his references to Alek-sandr Bogdanov, who foresaw the advent of a technocratic elite, were generally quite friendly and favorable...
...Recently, 23 children of Communists murdered in Soviet purges signed a petition protesting the present trend to re-Stalinization...
...In the United States, Britain or France, Bukharin would have been able to expose Stalin for what he was...
...And Maxim Gorky in November 1917 wrote of his "lack of morality," his "utterly pitiless attitude, worthy of a nobleman, toward the lives of the popular masses...
...They worshipped Lenin because he, overcoming this tendency to weakness, had to their great surprise brought them power and several years of satisfied lieutenancy...
...They rested on the alleged activities of three men-mikhail Tomsky, Abel Yenukidze and Lev Karakhan...
...The issues raised by Bukharin's Right-wing group were in the long run central to the peace of Europe...
...But he never explored deeply the "dual psychology" of his -In Hegel's phrase?contrite consciousness...
...Lenin called him "the favorite of the Party...
...Each succumbed at critical times to the fetish of a unity that required them to make all the sacrifices: Martov defended Lenin's dictatorship during the Civil War without demanding any concession to the Mensheviks...
...Bukharin lied about himself because he felt this was the way he could contribute to a united Soviet stand against the menace of Hitler...
...Trotsky consented to the suppression of Lenin's testament in order to prove to the Stalinists that he was a good Bolshevik...
...In his last speech to the court, Bukharin dwelled on the psychological aspect of his case...
...The Bolshevik intellectuals were more concerned to prove their purity in defeat and self-sacrifice, even while right...
...Psychologically," he said, he began to regard the gigantic factories of "Socialist industrialism" as a "monstrous glutton which consumed everything," depriving the people of badly needed articles...
...Bukharin admitted in his final courtroom plea that although in 1917 he never pitied the White Guards whom the Bolsheviks had killed, in 1929, for humanitarian reasons, he felt compassion for the expropriated peasants...
...Such cases ultimately become landmarks in the history of freedom...
...In a liberal democracy, where the power of party machines is circumscribed, one can appeal to the public at large over the heads of organization hacks...
...Nikolai Bukharin was the most intellectual, sympathetic and humane of the Bolshevik leaders...
...But the Moscow trials of 1936-38 will always fill one with depression and remain signposts of human degradation, the shattering evidence of how a totalitarian Communist order can maim and pervert its noblest citizens...
...So long as such reports are forgotten and Lenin remains a sacred totem of the Soviet mind, an infantile subservience will remain the principal characteristic of even its relatively emancipated intellectuals...
...The political trials in the USSR, in 1969 as well as in 1938, provide the most powerful witnesses against the Soviet society...
...The forerunner of Milo-van Djilas and Alexander Dubcek, he was the last Bolshevik advocate of a policy that might conceivably have evolved toward a "humanist socialism...
...Stalin was set on winning, even though he was wrong...
...From the Smolensk Archives, we know that the ablest students among the young were drawn to his ideas...
...As Katkov shows, the charges of espionage against Bukharin collapsed utterly during his trial...
...The first had committed suicide, and the other two had conveniently been shot "administratively...
...Soviet intellectuals, and indeed most intellectuals generally, are still unable to see Lenin clearly for what he was-a fanatic who worked to destroy the only liberal democratic government Russia ever had, and who wrecked the only Assembly to be chosen in a free election in the more than 50 years of Communist rule...
...Though the odds are unequal, if the accused is truly sustained by a sense of justice, his indictment is transformed into one of the system...
...I wish he had also included the fine pictures of Bukharin and his friends used by Gerd Ruge in his pictorial biography of Pasternak...
...In the middle of a 1931 philosophical piece, he suddenly quoted in Spanish the lines from Calderon: "All life is a dream, and the dreams are a dream...
...And it dawned on Bukharin that he and his comrades had ushered in one of the most anti-intellectual systems of the modern world...
...Since Bukharin's trial was designed to assuage the doubts of the "West European and American intellectuals" concerning its veracity, he assured them that neither hypnotism nor Dostoevskian psychology was required to explain his "confessions...
...He tried to write so that people could read between the lines, but with time the intervening spaces became smaller and smaller...
...His widow appealed in the Khrushchev era for her husband's rehabilitation, and in September 1962, as the French journalist Michel Tatu informs us, the Premier received her privately...
...It seems to me probable," he declared, "that every one of us sitting here in the dock suffered from a peculiar duality of mind...
...The delusion and antirationality embedded in the Communist psyche still obtain...
...In his essay "Culture in Two Worlds," for example, written after the "Congress of the Victors" in 1934, Bukharin talked of the narrow, technical, Philistine culture arising in Soviet society, and referred negatively to the "one-man management" Stalin was extolling at the time...
...When Stalin said "Cadres decide everything," he knew that within a totalitarian system the power of the Party machine overwhelmed the feeble resource of ideas...
...As Katkov writes: "In a society like Stalin's Russia the published views of a single individual can make for less impact on political life than they would in an open society...
...The "judges" in 1938 had before them many volumes of preliminary hearings...
...He wanted to continue Lenin's New Economic Policy, and to safeguard individual peasant farming...
...A scientific thinker, Bukharin wished to continue to apply his method of analysis even to the new Communist society, but the Soviets would only tolerate apologists and ideologists...
...When Bertrand Russell talked with Lenin in 1920, he sensed a cruel, narrow, sadistic man...
...They also demanded that the decision taken by the 23rd Party Congress to construct a monument to the memory of Stalin's victims be fulfilled...
...For as Katkov explains, had Bukharin prevailed, a "Molo-tov-Ribbentrop pact could hardly have come into existence," and we might have been spared World War II...
...He argued against Max Weber's notion that societies are evolving toward bureaucratic systems, but his rebuttal was curiously unconvincing and lacking in energy...
...Intellectuals should return to their earlier, fresher, and more realistic impressions of Lenin...
...Thus Captain Alfred Dreyfus-undistinguished, but not pretending to be otherwise-became a symbol for the dignity of the average man, with his simple claim for justice in the republic against the corps of the military elite...
...Trotsky, in 1903, with the honesty of an as yet un-Bolshevized perception, described him as a "disorganizer," given to "demagogic lies" and determined to make himself "dictator" of a "barracks regime...
...In an emotional scene, he told her that Bukharin had been exonerated of the alleged crimes for which he was executed in 1938...
...By 1936, though, Bukharin was desperate...
...A political trial pits an individual against the social system...
...There arose what in Hegel's philosophy is called a most unhappy mind...
...both show an array of expressionless faces, conditioned to repress any spontaneous feeling or thought...
...This may well have been the source of Bukharin's "contrite consciousness...
...There was, and today still remains, something of this latently quiescent and submissive quality in all the Soviet oppositionists...
...Lenin, he continued, felt "himself justified in performing with the Russian people a cruel experiment," using "his cronies?his slaves," and manipulating people "like a chemist in a laboratory...
...Reviewed by LEWIS S. FEUER Professor of Sociology, University of Toronto I hope George Katkov's The Trial of Bukharin will be much studied...
...A surviving friend of Bukharin's told me in Moscow that fear for his family's safety was an undoubted factor in Bukharin's final capitulation...
...Reading the writings of Bukharin's last years, a rather astonishing impression arises: One feels that the "biggest theoretician of the Party," as Lenin described him, had on the basis of the accumulating evidence and further reflection, begun to entertain the most basic misgivings concerning the character of Communist society and the Bolshevik Revolution...
...Katkov, too, has on the whole chosen not to embark on this type of inquiry...
Vol. 52 • December 1969 • No. 23
