Stalin's Most Formidable Opponent

...Cohen is less generous to Bukharin's opponents...

...he suspects ulterior motives in Trotsky's championing of intraparty democracy...

...What is more, Cohen overlooks the truth Bukharin finally realized in defeat and confided to Lev Kamenev: "Disagreements between us and Stalin are many times more serious than were our disagreements with you...

...Reviewed by Peter Kenez Associate Professor of History, University of California, Santa Cruz Arthur Koestler did well in choosing Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin as a model for the hero of Darkness at Noon...

...only Lenin's had...

...Now, in Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin has found a first-rate biographer...

...Observed in the Bukharinist mirror, major figures of the Revolution are distorted...

...Yet, as Cohen indicates, in the late '20s Bukharin had a filial respect for Lenin, frequently supported his own positions with quotations from the dead man, and was in some sense the con-tinuer of Lenin's work...

...he finds no occasion to mention the man's exceptional organizational ability and his stirring oratory...

...From the founding of the Party to the fall of Bukharin the examples of embittered dispute are numerous...

...Surely they were better able to engage in concerted action than were the Mensheviks or t...

...He asserts that the War Commissar was not interested in questions of philosophy...

...event, but since Bukharin was a theorist, in his case it has particular drawbacks...

...Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution is an important book, as well as a labor of love...

...Bukharin's position had no "hard kernel of logic...

...Indeed...

...Cohen argues that Bukharin's position in repudiating the idea of peace with capitalist countries and opposing the treaty of Brest-Litovsk had a "hard kernel of logic," and he asserts that the Left-Communist notion of revolutionary warfare foreshadowed the activities of Soviet partisans against the Nazis in World War II and the tactics of Mao Tse-tung in the Chinese Revolution...

...If Cohen is arguing that the major figures of Bolshevism interpreted Marxism each in his own way, and that they disagreed with one another over questions of theory and praxis, then he is banging on an open door...

...Trotsky was as much a champion of cultural pluralism as Bukharin, however, and his defense of intra-party democracy is just as important today as Bukharin's notion of balanced economic growth...

...With regard to the biography itself, it should be noted that Cohen writes Bukharinist history: He describes things from his hero's point of view and, implicitly or explicitly, tries to present Bukharin in the most favorable light...

...Only on page 352, for instance, and then somewhat apologetically, does the author reveal that Bukharin married twice, and for some years between lived with another woman...

...Facts about the private lives of Bolshevik leaders may simply not be available, yet it would have been interesting to have Cohen speculate about the influence of Bukharin's personality on his shift from an extremely radical position in 1917-19 to one of relative moderation during the decade of the 1920s...

...Perhaps Trotsky would have suppressed his opponents had he been given the chance...

...they trusted his leadership and were taken in by his ability to appear as a sober statesman, a man of the golden middle...

...Cohen's handling of the question of inevitability raises a similar problem...

...And he had impeccable credentials as a theorist, an internationalist and a favorite of Lenin...

...Cohen sees Bukharin as a precursor of "socialism with a human face," contending in his preface and his epilogue that Bukharin's ideas are more relevant in the age of post-Stalinism than are Trotsky's...

...Cohen likewise treats Trotsky unfairly...

...Not being a determinist, 1 can easily accept the contention that the purges were not preordained...

...Although I disagree with much of Cohen's treatment and will explain why, I want to make clear that he has thoroughly researched his subject and capably placed Bukhara's views and actions in their proper historical context...

...We hear of Lenin only in the context of his disagreements with Bukharin, and since Cohen always sides with the younger man, a reader has difficulty seeing that the leader of the Russian Revolution was a person of uncommon abilities...

...Interestingly, it is Stalin's genius in the contest for leadership which emerges most clearly in this book...

...One can too easily forget that Lenin and Trotsky often succeeded precisely because they were "bad theorists...

...At the same time, there is nothing in this book to contradict those who maintain that repression has an internal logic, with every repressive act creating an atmosphere wherein additional and more far-reaching terrorist acts become possible...

...Compared to Stalin and the heirs of Stalin, all the Bolshevik leaders were tolerant democrats and liberals...

...In his preface Cohen sets himself a double task: to prove that the Bolshevik party was far more diverse in character than is often imagined, and that the outcome of the Revolution (i.e., Stalinism) was not predetermined...

...He lucidly describes the great debates of the period and raises some of the basic issues of revolutionary history...

...This approach would have limitations in any...

...Social Revolutionaries...

...Economists like Yevgeny Preobrazhensky were far quicker to appreciate the magnitude of the economic tasks facing the country than was Bukharin...

...Cohen convincingly demonstrates that Bukharin was Stalin's most formidable opponent...

...He had a remarkable political sense, allowing him to reap maximum benefit from a move without ever going too far, while his patience, his capacity to wait for exactly the right moment to act, distinguished him from his competitors...

...If Lenin had been "guided by theory," though—that is, seduced by the prospect of "revolutionary warfare" —Germany's troops undoubtedly would have overthrown the young Soviet government in a matter of days...

...The Leftist opposition of the '20s fares no better...

...Bukharin, on the other hand, was restrained by his past and by his political philosophy from turning to his constituency—the lower- and middle-level Party organizations and the country as a whole...

...Stalin carried the argument one step further...

...The quintessential victim of Stalinism, Bukharin represented what was most attractive in Bolshevik leaders: He was a courageous revolutionary, an articulate man fully at home in the world of ideas and, given his profession, an altogether decent human being...

...The reality of the matter, however, is that Bukharin contributed to Trotsky's downfall, and not vice versa...

...The Left was also correct in maintaining that given the prevailing conditions, only the peasantry could pay for industrialization...

...Had Stalin been assassinated in 1928, the Soviet Union would have become a very different, and no doubt more tolerable, country...

...As Cohen so well describes, Stalin triumphed over Bukharin because the General Secretary had weapons in his arsenal that were not available to others...

...Members of the Politburo voted with Stalin because they preferred what he stood for at the time...

...A Trotsky or a Zinoviev had support within the Party that Stalin could neutralize through clever tactics, but Bukharin stood for a policy that was genuinely popular inside and outside the Party...

...Even Bukharin, after years of debates, came to accept the soundness of many of the Leftist criticisms...

...Cohen rightly dismisses the idea that Stalin came out on top because he succeeded in filling important Party positions with nonentities who automatically sided with him on any issue...

...Unfortunately, my quarrels with it begin even before the narrative itself does...

...Still, the Bolsheviks won and, more important, stayed in power, at least partly as a result of their essential unity...

...This study unquestionably offers an exhaustive description of Buk-harin's theoretical outlook, but a 495-page biography should tell more about the man...

...Unity is a relative concept...

...Marxist theory, after all, did not allow for the Russian Revolution...

...Bukharin voted for the removal of prominent Bolsheviks from the Politburo...

...Surely, too, they benefited not only from the disunity of their enemies but also from the fact that the groups opposed to them actually fought wars against one another...