Bukharin real name and surname. Nikolai Bukharin - biography, photos

Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin. Born on September 27 (October 9), 1888 in Moscow - died on March 15, 1938 in Kommunarka (Leninsky district, Moscow region). Soviet political, state and party leader. Member of the Central Committee of the party (1917-1934), candidate member of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (1934-1937). Candidate member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) (1919-1924), member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) (1924-1929). Candidate member of the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) (1923-1924). Academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1929).

Born into the family of school teachers Ivan Gavrilovich Bukharin (1862-1940) and Lyubov Ivanovna Izmailova (d.1915). From 1893, the family lived in Chisinau for four years, where Ivan Gavrilovich worked as a tax inspector. Then again in Moscow, where Nikolai studied at the First Gymnasium, after graduating from which, from 1907, he studied at the economics department of the Faculty of Law of Moscow University, from where he was expelled in 1911 due to his arrest for participating in revolutionary activities.

During the revolution of 1905-1907, together with his best friend Ilya Erenburg, he took an active part in student demonstrations organized by students of Moscow University. In 1906 he joined the RSDLP, joining the Bolsheviks. At the age of 19, together with Grigory Sokolnikov, he organized a youth conference in Moscow in 1907, which was later considered the predecessor of the Komsomol.

In 1908-1910 - a member of the Moscow Committee of the RSDLP, worked in trade unions. At this time, he became close to V.M. Smirnov and met his future wife N.M. Lukina. In June 1911, he was arrested and exiled for 3 years to Onega (Arkhangelsk province); in the same year he escaped from exile. He was hiding in the apartment of V. M. Shulyatikov, waiting for documents. Then he went illegally to Hanover, and in the fall of 1912 to Austria-Hungary.

In 1912, in Krakow, Bukharin met with whom he subsequently maintained friendly relations. While in exile, he continued to educate himself, studying the works of both the founders of Marxism and utopian socialists, as well as his contemporaries. A. A. Bogdanov had a particularly strong influence on the formation of Bukharin’s views.

In 1914, with the outbreak of World War I, he was arrested by the Austrian-Hungarian authorities on suspicion of espionage and deported to Switzerland. In 1915, through France and England, he moved to Stockholm. In Sweden he lived under a false name, Moisha Dolgolevsky.

Despite the fact that emigrants were forbidden to interfere in Swedish politics, he wrote for Scandinavian left-wing newspapers and participated in a meeting of the emigrant club, which the Swedish police considered a front revolutionary organization. He was arrested on March 23, 1916 in an apartment on Salmetargatan, where he lived with two other Bolsheviks (Yuri Pyatakov and Evgenia Bosh). At the police station he gave his name as Moisha Dolgolevsky. After several weeks of imprisonment in April 1916, he was expelled from Sweden to Norway, lived in Christiania (Oslo), Copenhagen, and from October 1916 - in New York (USA), where he met Leon Trotsky and Alexandra Kollontai and edited (from January 1917) together with Trotsky, the newspaper “New World”.

In 1915, he wrote the work “World Economy and Imperialism,” devoted to the analysis of the characteristics of capitalism at the beginning of the 20th century. Lenin wrote a preface to it (not published before the revolution) and used a number of its provisions in his work “Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism” (1916). On the other hand, in the discussion among Social Democrats about the right of nations to self-determination that began with the outbreak of the First World War, Bukharin opposed the position of Lenin and his supporters (in particular, Zinoviev). Lenin called the corresponding views of Bukharin and Pyatakov, who joined him, a “caricature of Marxism” and regarded them as a relapse of the economism of the 1890s, associated with the inability to distinguish political issues from economic ones.

In 1917, he was elected a member of the Central Committee of the RSDLP(b), after which he worked in the Moscow Party Committee and edited the printed publication Izvestia of the Moscow Military Revolutionary Committee. He carried out active propaganda work during the October Revolution of 1917, taking radical left positions. John Reed, in Ten Days That Shook the World, argues that Bukharin was considered "more left-wing than Lenin." For many years, with a short break in 1918, he was the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Pravda and, in fact, the leading party ideologist. Prepared proposals for the nationalization of industry and the creation of economic management bodies headed by the Supreme Council of the National Economy (VSNKh).

In 1917-1918, as editor of the “left-communist” newspaper “Kommunist”, he was the leader of the “left” communists, together with other “left” communists, as well as the left Socialist Revolutionaries, he opposed both the signing of peace with the Germans in Brest-Litovsk and the position the head of the Soviet delegation, demanding the continuation of the line towards a world proletarian revolution. Later, during a discussion about factions in the CPSU (b), initiated in 1923 by Trotsky, he admitted that during the discussion of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty, some of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries invited him to participate in the arrest of Lenin for 24 hours and the creation of a coalition socialist government from opponents of the peace treaty with the Central Powers. The Left Social Revolutionaries argued that this government would be able to break the treaty and continue the revolutionary war, but Bukharin flatly refused to participate in the conspiracy against the leader of the party and the state. Some time after the signing of the Brest Peace Treaty, he went over to Lenin’s side, as evidenced by Bukharin’s return to the post of editor-in-chief of Pravda. On September 25, 1919, Bukharin became a victim of a terrorist attack: he was wounded by a bomb thrown by anarchist terrorists into the premises of the Moscow Committee of the RCP (b) in Leontyevsky Lane. As a result of the explosion in Leontyevsky Lane, 12 people were killed and 55 were injured.

In May 1918, he published the widely known brochure “Program of the Communists (Bolsheviks),” in which he theoretically substantiated the need for labor service for the non-labor classes. After the publication of the works “Political Economy of the Rentier” and “World Economy and Imperialism” he became one of the leading economic theorists of the RCP (b). In 1919-1920 he was a member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern.

In October 1919, together with Yevgeny Preobrazhensky, he wrote the book “The ABC of Communism,” which subsequently went through more than 20 reprints. In May 1920, he wrote (partially co-authored with Georgy Pyatakov) the work “Economy of the Transition Period. Part I: General theory of the transformation process." These works were generally positively received by Lenin, who, however, believed that Bukharin considered a number of issues from the point of view not of Marxism, but of the “universal organizational science” developed by A. A. Bogdanov, and also criticized the author for his overly pompous style of presentation.

In the “trade union debate” of 1920-1921, Bukharin took a position that he himself considered as a “buffer” between the main parties to the dispute: Lenin and Trotsky. He tried to prove that the disagreement between the participants in the discussion was based on a misunderstanding and resembled the dispute between a person calling a glass a glass cylinder and a person calling the same glass a drinking instrument. Lenin (who considered Bukharin’s position to be a variety of Trotskyist) used the example of Bukharin with a glass for a popular presentation of some views of Marxism, which, from his point of view, were not understood by Trotsky and Bukharin (Lenin’s reasoning later became known as the “dialectics of the glass”).

Summing up his observations of Bukharin’s activities, Lenin gave her the following characteristics, which later became widely known:

Bukharin is not only the most valuable and largest theoretician of the party, he is also legitimately considered the favorite of the entire party, but his theoretical views can very doubtfully be classified as completely Marxist, because there is something scholastic in him (he never studied and, I think, never understood quite dialectic).

Since November 1923, he has been actively fighting the “Trotskyist” Left Opposition. Lenin's death on January 21, 1924 was a serious mental blow for Bukharin, who was one of the leader's closest comrades. Bukharin responded to the death of the founder of the Soviet state with a sincere and emotional appeal from the Central Committee of the RCP(b). After Lenin's death, he was transferred to the Politburo of the Central Committee (June 2, 1924) and became one of the most influential leaders of the party and state. Like Zinoviev, he opposed making Lenin’s “Testament” widely public. During this period, Bukharin became a close friend of Stalin, who in one of his conversations characterized the leading members of the party as follows: “You and I, Bukharchik, are the Himalayas, and everyone else is small spots” (Bukharin belonged to the few top leaders of the party and the country who addressed Stalin on “you” and called him Koba in his speeches; Stalin, in turn, called Bukharin “Nikolasha” or “Buharchik”). Bukharin provided significant support to Stalin in the struggle against Trotsky (1923-1924), Kamenev and Zinoviev (1925-1926) and in the final defeat of Trotsky (1927). According to some reports, he supervised the deportation of Trotsky to Verny in 1928.

With the release of Zinoviev from the post of chairman of the ECCI at the VII plenum of the ECCI (November-December 1926), Bukharin took the leading position in the Comintern.

Having analyzed the reasons for the failures of “war communism,” Bukharin became an active supporter of the new economic policy proclaimed by Lenin. After Lenin's death, he emphasized the need for further economic reforms in line with the NEP. At this time, Bukharin put forward the famous slogan (1925), addressed to the peasants: “Get rich, accumulate, develop your economy!”, pointing out that “the socialism of the poor is lousy socialism” (later Stalin called the slogan “not ours”, and Bukharin refused from your own words). At the same time, Bukharin also took part in the development of the Stalinist theory of “socialism in one single country,” opposed to Trotsky’s idea of permanent world revolution.

In 1928 he spoke out against increased collectivization, proposing an evolutionary path when cooperation and the public sector (mixed-structure economy) would gradually economically displace individual farming, and the kulaks would not be subject to elimination as a class, but would gradually be equalized with the rest of the village residents. In the article “Notes of an Economist” published in Pravda, Bukharin declared the only acceptable crisis-free development of the agricultural and industrial sectors, and all other approaches (primarily Stalin’s) were “adventuristic.” This, however, contradicted Stalin's course towards general collectivization and industrialization.

The Politburo condemned Bukharin’s speech, and in a polemic, in response to the General Secretary’s demand to “stop the line of inhibition of collectivization,” he called Stalin a “petty eastern despot.” In November 1928, the Plenum of the Central Committee called the position of Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky a “right deviation” (as opposed to Trotsky’s “left deviation”).

On January 30, 1929, N.I. Bukharin wrote a statement to the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks regarding the fabrications being spread about him. On February 9, 1929, N.I. Bukharin, A.I. Rykov and M.P. Tomsky sent a joint statement to the Joint meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and the Presidium of the Central Control Commission.

At the April Plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission (1929), Stalin said that “yesterday we were still personal friends, now we disagree with him in politics.” The plenum completed the “defeat of Bukharin’s group,” and Bukharin himself was removed from his posts. Stalin proposed appointing Bukharin to the honorable, but extremely thankless post of People's Commissar of Education, but Bukharin himself asked to be given the quiet position of head of the Scientific and Technical Directorate of the Supreme Council of the National Economy. K. E. Voroshilov wrote on June 8, 1929 to G. K. Ordzhonikidze:

Bukharin begged everyone not to appoint him to the People's Commissariat for Education and proposed, and then insisted on, NTU. I supported him in this, several other people supported him, and with a majority of one vote (against Koba) we carried it through.

On June 19, 1929, at the Tenth Plenum of the ECCI, Bukharin was removed from his post as a member of the Presidium of the ECCI; he was charged politically with the fact that he was “slipping into an opportunistic denial of the fact of the increasing weakening of capitalist stabilization, which inevitably leads to the denial of the growth of a new upsurge of the revolutionary labor movement " Refusing to “repent,” on November 17, 1929, he was removed from the Politburo of the Central Committee. Soon, some of the members of the Communist International who supported Bukharin’s position, led by people from the American Communist Party, were expelled from the Comintern, forming the “International Communist Opposition.” But Bukharin himself admitted his mistakes a week later and declared that he would wage “a decisive struggle against all deviations from the general line of the party and, above all, against the right deviation.” At the XVII Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (1934), in his speech he stated: “The duty of every party member is to rally around Comrade Stalin as the personal embodiment of the mind and will of the party.” In 1934 he was transferred from member to candidate member of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks.

Bukharin was considered (along with Lenin, Trotsky, Lunacharsky, Bonch-Bruevich and Chicherin) one of the most erudite representatives of the Bolshevik Party after it came to power. Bukharin was fluent in French, English and German. In everyday life he was friendly and affable, and remained approachable in communication. Colleagues called him “Kolya the balabolka.”

In 1929-1932 he was a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Economic Council of the USSR, head of the scientific and technical department. Since 1932 - member of the board of the People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry of the USSR. In 1931-1936, he was the publisher of the popular science and public magazine “Socialist Reconstruction and Science” (“SoReNa”). Bukharin was one of the editors and contributor to the first edition of the TSB. The foreign intelligentsia (in particular, Andre Malraux) had a project to put Bukharin at the head of the editorial office of the unrealized international “Encyclopedia of the 20th Century”.

On January 12, 1929, he was elected a full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences in socio-economic sciences.

Since 1930, Chairman of the Commission on the History of Knowledge (KIZ), since 1932, Director of the Institute of History of Science and Technology of the USSR Academy of Sciences, formed on the basis of KIZ, which ceased to exist in 1938. Bukharin promoted the theory of the possibility of a transition from the dictatorship of the proletariat to socialist humanism, and thought about a revolution in science as a reflection of the revolution in society.

From February 26, 1934 to January 16, 1937, editor-in-chief of the Izvestia newspaper. In February 1936, he was sent abroad by the party to repurchase the archives of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that belonged to the German Social Democratic Party, which were taken to a number of European countries after the Nazis came to power in Germany.

Bukharin's name was associated with the hopes of some of the intelligentsia of that time for improving the state's policy towards it. Warm relations connected Bukharin with (Bukharin would later be accused at trial of involvement in the murder of Gorky); Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak used his help in conflicts with the authorities. In 1934, Bukharin gave a speech at the First Congress of Soviet Writers, where he rated extremely highly and also criticized the “Komsomol poets”:

This is a poet-song singer of the old intelligentsia, who became the Soviet intelligentsia... Pasternak is original... This is his strength, because he is infinitely far from the template, cliché, rhymed prose... This is Boris Pasternak, one of the most remarkable masters of verse in our time, strung on the threads of his creativity not only a whole string of lyrical pearls, but also gave a number of deep sincerity revolutionary things.

The party, however, soon distanced itself from this speech. Bukharin participated in the posthumous campaign against “Yeseninism”; his participation in it was largely determined by the internal party struggle with Trotsky (who made positive assessments of Yesenin’s work). In 1927, in the newspaper Pravda, Bukharin published an article “Evil Notes,” later published as a separate book, where he wrote:

Yesenin’s poetry is essentially a peasant who has half turned into a “bunch-merchant”: in patent leather boots, with a silk lace on an embroidered shirt, the “bunch” falls to the leg of the “empress” today, tomorrow he licks an icon, the day after tomorrow he smears mustard on the nose of a gentleman in a tavern. , and then “spiritually” laments, cries, is ready to hug the dog and make a contribution to the Trinity-Sergius Lavra “in honor of the soul.” He can even hang himself in the attic from the inner emptiness. “Sweet”, “familiar”, “truly Russian” picture! Ideologically, Yesenin represents the most negative features of the Russian village and the so-called “national character”: scuffles, internal greatest indiscipline, deification of the most backward forms of social life in general.

Subsequently, in a report at the first congress of Soviet writers, Bukharin spoke about Yesenin, “a sonorous guslar songwriter, a talented lyric poet,” although critically, but much more warmly, putting him on a par with Blok and Bryusov as “old” poets who reflected the revolution in your creativity.

Bukharin was a cartoonist who depicted many members of the Soviet elite. His cartoons of Stalin are considered the only portraits of the “leader” made from life, and not from photographs.

In 1936, during the First Moscow trial (over Kamenev, Zinoviev and others), the defendants gave evidence (immediately published) against Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky, who allegedly created the “right bloc”. Bukharin learned about the case brought against him while on vacation in Central Asia. Immediately after the trial, on September 1, 1936, Bukharin wrote to Voroshilov: “The cynic killer Kamenev is the most disgusting of people, human carrion. I’m terribly glad that the dogs were shot.” But on September 10, 1936, Pravda reported that the USSR Prosecutor's Office had stopped the investigation into Bukharin and others.

In January 1937, during the Second Moscow Trial, charges of conspiratorial activity were again brought against Bukharin, and he was confronted with the arrested Radek. In February 1937 he went on a hunger strike in protest against the accusations against him of involvement in conspiratorial activities, but after Stalin’s words: “To whom are you presenting an ultimatum, the Central Committee?” - stopped it. At the Plenum of the Central Committee in February 1937, he was expelled from the party and arrested on February 27. He insisted on his innocence (including in letters to Stalin); wrote an open letter to the party, which reached us in the late 1980s, recorded by his wife from memory. While in prison (in the internal prison at Lubyanka), he worked on the books “Degradation of Culture under Fascism”, “Philosophical Arabesques”, on the autobiographical novel “Times”, and also wrote poetry. These texts have now been published.

“So that there are no misunderstandings, I tell you from the very beginning that for the world (society) I 1) do not intend to take back anything from what I wrote; 2) I do not do anything in this sense (and in connection with this) I don't intend to ask you, I don't want to beg for anything that would take the matter off the rails on which it is rolling. But for your personal information I am writing. I cannot leave this life without writing you these last lines, because I there are torments that you should know about.

1. Standing on the edge of an abyss from which there is no return, I give you my dying word of honor that I am innocent of those crimes that I confirmed during the investigation...

...There is some big and bold political idea of a general cleansing a) in connection with the pre-war period, b) in connection with the transition to democracy. This purge captures a) the guilty, b) the suspicious, and c) the potentially suspicious. They couldn't get by here without me. Some are neutralized in one way, others in a different way, and others in a third way. The safety net is that people inevitably talk about each other and forever instill distrust in each other (judging by myself: how angry I was with Radek, who trashed me! And then I myself followed this path...). In this way, management has complete guarantee. For God's sake, don't misunderstand that I'm secretly reproaching you here, even in reflection with myself. I have grown so much out of baby's swaddling clothes that I understand that big plans, big ideas and big interests overshadow everything, and it would be petty to raise the question of your own person along with the world-historical tasks that lie primarily on your shoulders.

But this is where I have the main torment and the main painful paradox. 5) If I were absolutely sure that this is exactly what you think, then my soul would be much calmer. Well then! It is necessary, it is necessary. But believe me, my heart flows with a hot stream of blood when I think that you can believe in my crimes and in the depths of your soul you yourself think that I am really guilty of all the horrors. Then what happens? That I myself am helping a number of people lose their lives (starting with myself!), that is, I am doing deliberate evil! Then there is no justification for this. And everything gets confused in my head, and I want to scream and bang my head against the wall: after all, I become the cause of the death of others. What to do? What to do?…

…8) Let me finally move on to my last small requests: a) it’s easier for me to die a thousand times than to survive the upcoming process: I just don’t know how I can cope with myself - you know my nature; I am not an enemy of either the party or the USSR, and I will do everything in my power, but these forces in such a situation are minimal, and heavy feelings rise in my soul; I would, forgetting shame and pride, beg on my knees for this not to happen. But this is probably no longer possible, I would ask, if possible, to give me the opportunity to die before the trial, although I know how harshly you look at such matters; c) if I am facing a death sentence, then I ask you in advance, I conjure you directly with everything that is dear to you, to replace the execution with the fact that I myself drink poison in the cell (give me morphine so that I fall asleep and don’t wake up). For me this point is extremely important, I don’t know what words I should find to beg for this as a mercy: after all, politically it won’t hinder anything, and no one will know that. But let me spend my last seconds the way I want. Have mercy! You, knowing me well, will understand. I sometimes look with clear eyes into the face of death, just as I know well that I am capable of brave deeds. And sometimes the same me is so confused that nothing remains in me. So if I am destined to die, I ask for a cup of morphine. I pray for this... c) I ask you to let me say goodbye to my wife and son. The daughter doesn’t need it: she will feel too sorry for her, it will be hard, just like for Nadya and her father. And Anyuta is young, she will survive, and I want to say my last words to her. I would ask to be given a meeting with her before the trial. The arguments are as follows: if my family sees what I confessed to, they may commit suicide out of surprise. I have to somehow prepare for this. It seems to me that this is in the interests of the matter and in its official interpretation..."

(from Bukharin’s letter to Stalin dated December 10, 1937)

“Bukharin was one of the main defendants (along with Rykov) in the trial of the “Anti-Soviet Right-Trotskyist Bloc.” Like almost all other defendants, he admitted guilt and partially testified. In his last word, he made an attempt to refute the charges brought against him. Although Bukharin still and declared: “The monstrosity of my crimes is immeasurable,” he did not directly confess to any specific episode. Bukharin’s literary and philosophical exercises are a screen behind which Bukharin tries to hide from his final exposure. Philosophy and espionage, philosophy and sabotage, philosophy and sabotage, philosophy and murder - like genius and villainy - two things do not go together! I don’t know of other examples - this is the first example in history of how a spy and murderer wields philosophy like crushed glass to dust his victim’s eyes before smash her head with a robber’s flail!”(A. Ya. Vyshinsky at the morning court hearing of March 11, 1938 in the case of the Bukharin-Trotskyist bloc, quoted from the Judicial Report of the Bukharin-Trotskyist trial)

On March 13, 1938, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR found Bukharin guilty and sentenced him to death. Bukharin's death sentence was imposed on the basis of the decision of a commission headed by Mikoyan, the members of the commission were: Beria, Yezhov, Krupskaya, Khrushchev. The petition for pardon was rejected, and two days later he was shot at the Kommunarka training ground in the Moscow region, and was buried there.

Shortly before the execution, Bukharin composed a short message addressed to the future generation of party leaders, which his third wife A. M. Larina memorized:

“I am leaving this life. I bow my head not before the proletarian axe, which must be merciless, but also chaste. I feel my helplessness before the infernal machine, which, probably using the methods of the Middle Ages, has gigantic power, fabricates organized slander, acts boldly and confidently.

No, the wonderful traditions of the Cheka, when the revolutionary idea guided all its actions, justified cruelty towards enemies, and protected the state from all kinds of counter-revolution, gradually became a thing of the past. Therefore, the Cheka bodies have earned special trust, special honor, authority and respect. Currently, for the most part, the so-called NKVD bodies are a degenerated organization of unprincipled, decomposed, well-endowed officials who, using the former authority of the Cheka, for the sake of Stalin’s morbid suspicion, I’m afraid to say more, in the pursuit of orders and glory, do their vile deeds, By the way, not realizing that they are simultaneously destroying themselves - history does not tolerate witnesses to dirty deeds!”

On May 21, 1938, the General Meeting of the USSR Academy of Sciences excluded N. I. Bukharin from the number of full members and from the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In the “cult” film “Lenin in 1918” (1939), in one of the episodes Bukharin was depicted as a conspirator plotting an assassination attempt on Lenin.

On April 13, 1956, the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee adopted a decision “On the study of open trials in the case of Bukharin, Rykov, Zinoviev, Tukhachevsky and others,” after which on December 10, 1956, a special commission refused to rehabilitate Bukharin, Rykov, Zinoviev and Kamenev on the basis of “their long-term anti-Soviet struggle." Bukharin, like most of those convicted in this process, except for Genrikh Yagoda (who was not rehabilitated at all), was rehabilitated only in 1988 (February 4) and in the same year posthumously reinstated in the party (June 1988) and in the USSR Academy of Sciences (May 10, 1988) ).

Family:

His first marriage was in 1911 to Nadezhda Lukina (his cousin, the sister of N.M. Lukin, who was also Nikolai Bukharin’s cousin), with whom they lived for about 10 years; she was arrested on the night of May 1, 1938. and shot on March 9, 1940

The second time (1921-1929) he was married to Esther Gurvich (1895-1989). From this marriage - daughter Svetlana (1924-2003). This family renounced Bukharin back in 1929. The third time (since 1934) he was married to the daughter of party leader Yu. Larin, Anna (1914-1996), who wrote memoirs about the years of imprisonment. Son of Bukharin and Anna Larina - Yuri (1936-2014), artist; grew up in an orphanage under the name Yuri Borisovich Gusman, knowing nothing about his parents. He received his new surname from his adoptive mother Ida Guzman, the aunt of his real mother. Then he bore the surname Larin and patronymic Nikolaevich.

Bukharin's grandson, Nikolai Yurievich Larin (b. 1972), devoted his life to football. Heads (as of 2010) the children's and youth football school of the State Educational Institution Education Center "Chertanovo" in Moscow.

In 1924, the emigrant poet Elijah Briton published the brochure “For I am a Bolshevik!”, which contained the text of a letter allegedly received from one of the leaders of the Bolshevik party. The letter was not signed, but rumors spread that the author was Bukharin. In March 1928, the French newspaper La Revue universelle published a translation of the letter into French, under the title "Boukharine: Un document sur le Bolchevisme."

Russian economist, Soviet statesman and party leader. Academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1929).

Activities before the revolution

He was born into a family as the son of a school teacher. From 1893 he lived in Chisinau, where his father worked as a tax inspector.

After graduating from high school, he studied at the economics department of the law faculty of Moscow University (in 1911 he was expelled for participating in revolutionary activities). During the revolution of 1905-07, together with his best friend Ilya Ehrenburg, he took an active part in student demonstrations organized by students of Moscow University. In 1906 he joined the RSDLP, joining the Bolsheviks. At the age of 19, together with Grigory Sokolnikov, he organized the 1907 youth conference in Moscow, which was later considered the predecessor of the Komsomol.

In 1908-1910 - member of the Moscow Committee of the RSDLP, worked in trade unions. At this time he became close to V.M. Smirnov and met his future wife N.M. Lukina.

In June 1911 he was arrested and exiled for 3 years to Onega (Arkhangelsk province), in the same year he escaped from exile and illegally went to Hanover, then to Austria-Hungary.

Abroad, Bukharin met Lenin, with whom he subsequently maintained friendly relations. In Vienna, he also met with Stalin, whom he helped in working with German-language sources in preparing the article “Marxism and the National Question.” While in exile, he continued to educate himself, studying the works of both the founders of Marxism and utopian socialists, as well as his contemporaries. A. A. Bogdanov had a particularly strong influence on the formation of Bukharin’s views.

In 1914, with the outbreak of World War I, he was arrested by the Austrian-Hungarian authorities on suspicion of espionage and deported to Switzerland. From 1914 he lived in London, from 1915 - in Stockholm. In April 1916 he was expelled from Stockholm, lived in Christiania (Oslo), Copenhagen, from October 1916 - in New York (USA), where he met Leon Trotsky and Alexandra Kollontai and edited (from January 1917) together with Trotsky the magazine “New World” "

In 1915 he wrote the work “World Economy and Imperialism,” devoted to the analysis of the characteristics of capitalism at the beginning of the 20th century. This work was positively assessed by Lenin, who wrote a preface to it (not published before the revolution) and used a number of its provisions in his work “Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism” (1916). On the other hand, in the discussion among Social Democrats about the right of nations to self-determination that began with the outbreak of the First World War, Bukharin opposed the position of Lenin and his supporters (in particular, Stalin and Zinoviev). Lenin called the corresponding views of Bukharin and Pyatakov, who joined him, a “caricature of Marxism” and regarded them as a relapse of the economism of the 1890s, associated with the inability to distinguish political issues from economic ones.

After the February Revolution of 1917, Bukharin immediately decided to return to his homeland, but returned to Russia only in May 1917, since he was arrested in Japan, through whose territory he was returning. In Vladivostok he was arrested by local authorities for campaigning among soldiers and sailors.

"The favorite of the whole party." Theorist and economist

In 1917 he was elected a member of the Central Committee of the RSDLP(b), after which he worked in the Moscow Party Committee and edited the printed publication Izvestia of the Moscow Military Revolutionary Committee. He carried out active propaganda work during the October Revolution of 1917, taking radical leftist positions. John Reed, in Ten Days That Shook the World, argues that Bukharin was considered "more left-wing than Lenin." For many years, with a short break in 1918, he was the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Pravda and, in fact, the leading party ideologist. Prepared proposals for the nationalization of industry and the creation of economic management bodies headed by the Supreme Council of the National Economy (VSNKh).

In 1917-1918, as the editor of the “left-communist” newspaper “Kommunist”, he was the leader of the “left” communists, together with other “left” communists, as well as the left Socialist Revolutionaries, he opposed both the signing of peace with the Germans in Brest-Litovsk and the position of the head Soviet delegation of Leon Trotsky, demanding the continuation of the line for the world proletarian revolution. Later, during a discussion about factions in the CPSU (b), initiated in 1923 by Trotsky, he admitted that during the discussion of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty, some of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries invited him to participate in the arrest of Lenin for 24 hours and the creation of a coalition socialist government from opponents of the peace treaty with the Central Powers. The Left Social Revolutionaries argued that this government would be able to break the treaty and continue the revolutionary war, but Bukharin flatly refused to participate in the conspiracy against the leader of the party and the state. Some time after the signing of the Brest Peace Treaty, he went over to Lenin’s side, as evidenced by Bukharin’s return to the post of editor-in-chief of Pravda. On September 25, 1919, Bukharin became a victim of a terrorist attack: he was wounded by a bomb thrown by anarchist terrorists into the premises of the Moscow Committee of the RCP (b) in Leontyevsky Lane.

In May 1918 he published the widely known brochure “Program of the Communists (Bolsheviks),” in which he theoretically substantiated the need for labor service for the non-labor classes. After the publication of the works “Political Economy of the Rentier” and “World Economy and Imperialism” he became one of the leading economic theorists of the RCP (b). In 1919-1920 he was a member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern.

In October 1919, together with Evgeniy Preobrazhensky, he wrote the brochure “The ABC of Communism,” which subsequently went through more than 20 reprints. In May 1920 he wrote (partially co-authored with Georgy Pyatakov) the work “Economy of the Transition Period. Part I: General theory of the transformation process." These works were generally positively received by Lenin, who, however, believed that Bukharin considered a number of issues from the point of view not of Marxism, but of the “universal organizational science” developed by A. A. Bogdanov, and also criticized the author for his overly pompous style of presentation. Of interest is Lenin’s comic review of the book “Economy of the Transition Period,” which parodies Bukharin’s passion for foreign language vocabulary:

The excellent qualities of this excellent book are somewhat diminished, since they are limited by the fact that the author does not sufficiently substantiate his postulates...

From “Recensio academica” by V. I. Lenin on the book “Economy of the Transition Period”

In general, Bukharin’s works of 1918-1921 were written under the strong impression of the practice of “war communism,” associated with the widespread use of non-economic coercion in the country’s economy. Typical quote:

From the point of view of a large historical scale, proletarian coercion in all its forms, from executions to labor conscription, is, paradoxically as it may sound, a method of developing communist humanity from the human material of the capitalist era.

"Economy in Transition", Chapter X

Summing up his observations of Bukharin’s activities, Lenin gave her the following characteristics, which later became widely known:

From “Letter to the Congress” by V. I. Lenin

The struggle against Trotsky and differences with Stalin

Since November 1923, he has been actively fighting the “Trotskyist” Left Opposition. Lenin's death on January 21, 1924 was a serious mental blow for Bukharin, who was one of the leader's best comrades. Bukharin responded to the death of the founder of the Soviet state with a sincere and emotional appeal from the Central Committee of the RCP(b). After Lenin's death, he was transferred to the Politburo of the Central Committee (June 2, 1924) and became one of the most influential leaders of the party and state. Like Zinoviev, he opposed making Lenin’s “Testament” widely public. During this period, Bukharin became a close friend of Stalin, who in one of his conversations characterized the leading members of the party as follows: “You and I, Bukharchik, are the Himalayas, and everyone else is small spots” (Bukharin belonged to the few top leaders of the party and the country who addressed Stalin on “you” and called him Koba in his speeches; Stalin, in turn, called Bukharin “Nikolasha” or “Buharchik”). Bukharin provided significant support to Stalin in the struggle against Trotsky (1923-1924), Kamenev and Zinoviev (1925-1926) and in the final defeat of Trotsky (1927). According to some reports, he supervised the deportation of Trotsky to Verny in 1928.

“alism” (later Stalin called the slogan “not ours”, and Bukharin retracted his words). At the same time, Bukharin also took part in the development of the Stalinist theory of “socialism in one single country,” opposed to Trotsky’s idea of permanent world revolution.

In 1928 he spoke out against increased collectivization, proposing an evolutionary path when cooperation and the public sector (multi-structured economy) would gradually economically displace individual farming, and the kulaks would not be subject to physical elimination as a class, but would gradually be equalized with the rest of the village residents. In the article “Notes of an Economist” published in Pravda (September 30, 1928), Bukharin declared the only acceptable crisis-free development of the agricultural and industrial sectors, and all other approaches (primarily Stalin’s) were “adventuristic.” This, however, contradicted Stalin’s course towards general collectivization and industrialization (moreover, Stalin’s program was to a certain extent influenced by Trotsky’s views on the need for forced industrialization, which Stalin had rejected as unrealizable just three years earlier).

Bukharin in disgrace

A week later, the Politburo condemned Bukharin’s speech, and in a polemic, in response to the General Secretary’s demand to “stop the line of braking collectivization,” he called Stalin a “petty eastern despot.” In November 1928, the Plenum of the Central Committee called the position of Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky a “right deviation” (as opposed to Trotsky’s “left deviation”). At the April Plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission (1929), Stalin said that “yesterday we were still personal friends, now we disagree with him in politics.” The plenum completed the “defeat of Bukharin’s group,” and Bukharin himself was removed from his posts. Refusing to “repent,” on November 17, 1929, he was removed from the Politburo of the Central Committee. Soon, some of the members of the Communist International who supported Bukharin’s position, led by people from the American Communist Party, were expelled from the Comintern, forming the “International Communist Opposition.” But Bukharin himself admitted his mistakes a week later and declared that he would wage “a decisive struggle against all deviations from the general line of the party and, above all, against the right deviation.” At the XVII Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (1934), in his speech he stated: “The duty of every party member is to rally around Comrade Stalin as the personal embodiment of the mind and will of the party.” In 1934 he was transferred from member to candidate member of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks.

Manager and journalist. Bukharin and the intelligentsia

Bukharin, due to the breadth of his knowledge, was considered (along with Lenin and Lunacharsky) one of the most erudite representatives of the Bolshevik party after it came to power. Bukharin was fluent in French, English and German. In everyday life he was friendly and affable, and remained approachable in communication.

In 1929-1932 he was a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Economic Council of the USSR, head of the scientific and technical department. Since 1932 - member of the board of the People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry of the USSR. At the same time (1931-1936) he was the publisher of the popular science and public magazine “Socialist Reconstruction and Science” (“SoReNa”). Bukharin was one of the editors and an active participant in the first edition of the TSB. The foreign intelligentsia (in particular, Andre Malraux) had a project to put Bukharin at the head of the editorial office of the unrealized international “Encyclopedia of the 20th Century”.

From 1934 until the second half of January 1937, he served as editor-in-chief of the Izvestia newspaper, in which he attracted the best journalists and writers of the time to collaborate, and paid a lot of attention to the content and even design of the newspaper. In February 1936, he was sent abroad by the party to repurchase the archives of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that belonged to the German Social Democratic Party, which were taken to a number of European countries after the Nazis came to power in Germany.

Bukharin's name was associated with the hopes of some of the intelligentsia of that time for improving the state's policy towards it. Bukharin had a warm relationship with Maxim Gorky (Bukharin would later be accused at trial of involvement in Gorky’s murder); Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak used his help in conflicts with the authorities. In 1934, Bukharin gave a speech at the First Congress of Soviet Writers, where he rated Pasternak extremely highly and also criticized the “Komsomol poets.” The party, however, soon distanced itself from this speech. At the same time, Bukharin had previously participated in the posthumous persecution of Yesenin, publishing in 1927 in the newspaper Pravda the article “Evil Notes,” which was later published as a separate book.

Bukharin wrote that

Ideologically, Yesenin represents the most negative features of the Russian village and the so-called “national character”: scuffles, internal greatest indiscipline, deification of the most backward forms of social life in general.

Constitution

The embodiment of Bukharin’s hopes for democratization and the rejection of the harsh dictatorship of one party was the Constitution of the USSR of 1936, the draft of which Stalin, according to numerous testimonies, instructed Bukharin to write almost single-handedly (with the participation of Radek). The Constitution contained a list of fundamental rights and freedoms, eliminated the differences in rights of citizens based on social origin that existed in the USSR until then, and other provisions that marked the completion of the revolution and the formation of a unified Soviet society. Formally, it was the most democratic constitution in the world. However, under the conditions of that time, many of the democratic provisions of this constitution, which received the name “Stalinist”, remained only on paper.

Death

In 1936, during the First Moscow trial (over Kamenev, Zinoviev and others), the defendants gave evidence (immediately published) against Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky, who allegedly created the “right bloc”. Tomsky shot himself that same day. Bukharin learned about the case brought against him while on vacation in Central Asia. Immediately after the trial, on September 1, 1936, Bukharin wrote to Voroshilov: “The cynic killer Kamenev is the most disgusting of people, human carrion. I’m terribly glad that the dogs were shot” (perhaps with the expectation of showing this letter to Stalin). But on September 10, 1936, Pravda reported that the USSR Prosecutor's Office had stopped the investigation into Bukharin and others.

In January 1937, during the Second Moscow Trial, Bukharin was again accused of being involved in conspiratorial activities, and he was confronted with the arrested Radek. In February 1937 he went on a hunger strike in protest against accusations of his involvement in conspiratorial activities, but after Stalin’s words: “To whom are you presenting an ultimatum, the Central Committee?” - stopped it. At the Plenum of the Central Committee in February 1937, he was expelled from the party and arrested on February 27. He insisted on his innocence (including in letters to Stalin); wrote an open letter to the party, which reached us in the late 1980s, recorded by his wife from memory. While in prison (in the internal prison at Lubyanka), he worked on the books “Degradation of Culture under Fascism”, “Philosophical Arabesques”, on the autobiographical novel “Times”, and also wrote poetry. Now these texts have been published (N.I. Bukharin. Prison manuscripts, vol. 1-2, M., 1996).

He was one of the main accused (along with Rykov) at the show trial in the case of the “Anti-Soviet right-wing Trotskyist bloc” (Third Moscow trial). Like almost all other defendants, he admitted guilt and partly gave the expected testimony. In his last word, however, he made an attempt to refute the accusations brought against him. Although Bukharin nevertheless stated: “The monstrosity of my crimes is immeasurable,” he did not directly confess to any specific episode. On March 13, 1938, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR found Bukharin guilty and sentenced him to death. The petition for pardon was rejected, and two days later he was shot in the village. Kommunarka, Moscow region, buried there.

On April 13, 1956, the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee adopted a decision “On the study of open trials in the case of Bukharin, Rykov, Zinoviev, Tukhachevsky and others,” after which on December 10, 1956, a special commission made a decision regarding Stalin’s abuses, but refused to rehabilitate Bukharin, Rykov, Zinoviev and Kamenev based on “their many years of anti-Soviet struggle.” Nikolai Bukharin, like most of those convicted in this process, except for Genrikh Yagoda (who was not rehabilitated at all), was rehabilitated only in 1988 (February 4) and in the same year posthumously reinstated in the party (June 1988) and in the USSR Academy of Sciences (May 10 1988).

Family

Bukharin's first marriage was to Nadezhda Lukina (his cousin), who was arrested in 1938 and soon died in the camps.

The second time (1921-1929) he was married to Esther Gurvich (born 1895). From this marriage - daughter Svetlana (b. 1923). Despite this family’s renunciation of Bukharin back in 1929, both mother and daughter ended up in camps, from which they emerged only after Stalin’s death.

The third time (from 1934) he was married to the daughter of party leader Yu. Larin, Anna, who also went through the camps and is known as a memoirist; she lived to see her husband's rehabilitation. Bukharin's son from Anna Larina is Yuri (b. 1936), artist; grew up in an orphanage under the name Yuri Borisovich Gusman, knowing nothing about his parents. He received his new surname from his adoptive mother Ida Guzman, the aunt of his real mother. Now he bears the last name Larin and patronymic Nikolaevich.

The biography of Soviet party leader Nikolai Bukharin is unique and in many ways tragic. He was not an “ordinary” Bolshevik, he did not go through the Civil War, but at the same time he managed to become one of the most prominent revolutionaries. Bukharin spoke several languages and had encyclopedic knowledge, was an experienced journalist and a master of persuasion, but eloquence did not help him convince his colleagues of his innocence.

Childhood and youth

Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin was born in Zamoskvorechye, on Bolshaya Ordynka, on September 27 (October 9), 1888. His parents worked as primary school teachers. In 1893, the family moved to Chisinau, where father Ivan Gavrilovich received the position of tax inspector, but after 4 years they returned back to the capital.

Little Kolya studied brilliantly and graduated from high school with a gold medal. After school, he became a student at the Faculty of Law at Moscow University. By that time, Bukharin was already actively interested in politics and even managed to join the Bolshevik Party, so he had to combine his studies with work in trade unions. When he organized a youth conference in the capital, which anticipated the Komsomol movement, he was 19 years old.

Career and party activities

The first arrest occurred already in 1909. This incident and the two subsequent ones did not turn out to be anything serious for Bukharin, but they exhausted the patience of the authorities, so in 1911 he was expelled from Moscow to the Arkhangelsk province. A few months later, with the help of friends, he fled from his place of exile abroad - first to Hanover, and then to Austria-Hungary. It was there that he met and.

In emigration, Nikolai Ivanovich continued his self-education and carefully studied the works of utopian socialists and classics of Marxism. When World War I began, the Austrian-Hungarian authorities hastened to get rid of the potential spy and deported Bukharin to Switzerland. After this, the politician changed several more European cities, but did not take root in any of them, so he went to the USA.

In October 1916, in New York, Bukharin made acquaintance with. Together they worked on editing the magazine "New World". Nikolai Ivanovich’s first major work, “World Economy and Imperialism,” was written in 1915. Lenin read it carefully and generally assessed it positively, but then he and the author disagreed on issues of self-determination of nationalities.

When the February Revolution took place in Russia, Bukharin wanted to immediately return to his homeland, but he only got to the capital in May - he was arrested first in Japan, through whose territory he was returning, and then in Vladivostok for agitating among sailors and soldiers.

In 1917, he became a member of the Central Committee of the RSDLP, took a radical leftist position and began to conduct active propaganda activities. Nikolai Ivanovich returned from abroad with excellent journalistic training, so he became the founder and editor-in-chief of the newspaper Pravda, and later the publication Kommunist.

This time was fruitful for creative work. Bukharin quickly became one of the main theorists of communism of that time: in his “Program of Communists (Bolsheviks”), “The ABC of Communism” and “Economics of Communism” the need for labor service was substantiated, transformation processes in the national economy were analyzed, and ways to solve society’s problems were proposed from the perspective of Marxism .

Lenin respected his colleague’s theoretical research, but Bukharin’s position on some issues caused him concern. He reproached him for excessive scholasticism and enthusiasm for foreign vocabulary, and considered the theses presented in the books to be “not entirely Marxist.”

Documentary film about Nikolai Bukharin

In 1919, Bukharin suffered from a terrorist attack organized by anarchists - the criminals threw a bomb at the party premises in Leontyevsky Lane. The injuries were serious, but he was able to recover and resume work.

In 1923, Nikolai Ivanovich supported Lenin in the fight against Trotsky’s opposition. The death of the leader in January 1924 was a severe mental blow - he considered him his closest friend, and Lenin himself in recent years even called him his son. In his “Testament”, Vladimir Ilyich noted that Bukharin is a most valuable person, rightfully bearing the title of the party’s favorite.

The departure of an influential comrade-in-arms freed up a place for him in the party leadership - in the same year Nikolai Ivanovich became a member of the Politburo. During this period, his friendly relations with Stalin strengthened, but in 1928 they separated over collectivization issues. Bukharin tried to convince his colleagues not to physically oust the “kulaks”, but to gradually equalize their rights with the rest of the village residents.

Joseph Vissarionovich spoke out sharply against it, and a year later the “Bukharin group” was defeated at the next plenum, and he himself was deprived of all posts. Within a week of his resignation, the politician agreed to publicly admit his “mistakes,” so he was again admitted to leadership, but this time in the scientific and technical sector.

In 1932, Bukharin headed the People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry of the USSR. At the same time, he was engaged in publishing work and initiated the creation of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Despite loud statements, the politician did not give up hope for democratization, since he did not approve of Stalin’s harsh dictatorship. Nikolai Ivanovich warmly welcomed the creation of the USSR Constitution, not knowing that many of its provisions would remain only written down on paper.

Repression and imprisonment

In 1936, fellow party members first accused him of trying to create a “right bloc” together with Rykov and Tomsky. At that time, the investigation was stopped for unnamed reasons, but just a year later Bukharin was again suspected of conspiratorial plans. The politician insisted on his innocence, wrote letters of protest and even went on a hunger strike, but this did not help - on February 27, 1937, he was arrested.

In the internal prison at Lubyanka, Nikolai Ivanovich worked on the books “Philosophical Arabesques”, the novel “Times” and a collection of poems. He partially admitted guilt, without confessing to any specific episode, and in his last word he again tried to declare his innocence.

Personal life

The personal life of the party leader was stormy. Misfortune and death awaited everyone who connected their fate with him. Nikolai Bukharin was married three times; his first wife, Nadezhda Lukina, was also his cousin. They married in 1911 and lived together for more than 10 years. They had no children together - the woman suffered from a spinal disease and could not move without a special corset.

Even after the divorce, she maintained friendly relations with Bukharin: when she was arrested in 1938, she until the last denied any guilt and did not believe in the bad intentions of her ex-husband. The painful interrogations lasted 2 years, after which Lukina was shot.

The politician's second wife was Esther Gurvich. Their life together lasted 8 years, she gave birth to his daughter Svetlana. During the First Moscow Trial, the family immediately renounced Bukharin, but this did not save them - both mother and daughter ended up in camps and left them only after Stalin’s death.

Bukharin entered into his third marriage, which turned out to be the shortest, in 1934. His chosen one was Anna Larina, the daughter of a party colleague, who went into exile after the execution of her husband. They had a son, Yuri, who grew up knowing almost nothing about his parents. Later he was adopted and received the surname of his adoptive mother - Guzman. Bukharin's grandson, Nikolai Larin, became a football coach and headed a children's sports school in Moscow.

Along with Lenin, Bukharin was considered one of the most intelligent representatives of the party. He was fluent in 3 languages, was known as an excellent speaker and was famous for his ability to quickly find a common language with any person.

A film from the series “More Than Love” about the love of Nikolai Bukharin and Anna Larina

In addition, Nikolai Ivanovich was an excellent caricaturist, willingly drew caricatures of his party comrades and even published works on the pages of Pravda. He owns the only portraits of Stalin painted from life, and not from photographs.

He supported many writers - ,. He had a difficult relationship with Bukharin - at one time he considered him a “harmful” author who glorified vices, but after the poet’s suicide he softened his public statements about him.

Death

On March 13, 1938, the former party functionary was sentenced to death. The convict in letters to the leader begged to bring him a cup of morphine, “so that he can fall asleep and not wake up,” but he was denied an easy death. The politician was taken to the village of Kommunarka near Moscow and shot, his body was buried not far from this place.

An interesting fact is that Nikolai Ivanovich was predicted to die at the hands of his comrades in his youth. A German clairvoyant in 1918 informed him that he would be executed in his own country, and he, who dreamed of transforming Russia and gaining the glory of a revolutionary, was very surprised and annoyed by what he heard.

Several films are dedicated to the fate of the politician - the documentaries “Nikolai Bukharin - Hostage of the System” and “More than Love” (dedicated to his relationship with Anna Larina), as well as the feature film “Enemy of the People Bukharin”, where Alexander Romantsov played the main role.

Proceedings

1914 – “The political economy of the rentier. The theory of value and profit of the Austrian school"
1923 – “World Economy and Imperialism”
1918 – “Program of the Communists (Bolsheviks)”
1919 – “Class struggle and revolution”
1919 – “The ABCs of Communism: A Popular Explanation of the Program of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)”
1920 – “Economy in Transition”
1923 – “The crisis of capitalism and the communist movement”
1924 – “The Theory of Historical Materialism”
1928 – “Notes of an Economist”
1932 – “Goethe and His Historical Significance”
1932 – “Darwinism and Marxism”
2008 – “Prisoner of Lubyanka. Prison manuscripts of Nikolai Bukharin"

Historical portrait

Years of life: 1888-1938

Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin is a revolutionary, a prominent political and statesman, academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences since 1929, one of the leaders of the Bolshevik Party and the first Soviet state.

In 1936 he was unreasonably repressed and executed. Rehabilitated only in 1988.

The main areas of activity of Bukharin N.I. and their results

One of the directions activities were party and government work. Bukharin N.I. joined the party in 1906, at the age of 18, and remained devoted to it until the end of his life. Before the revolution, he was actively involved in party work. He was arrested more than once and expelled from the economics department of the Faculty of Law of Moscow State University in 1910 for revolutionary activities. Since 1911 - in exile.

Abroad, he met the leaders of the international labor movement. In 1917, he took an active part in the preparation and conduct of the October Revolution. During the uprising he was editor of the newspaper Izvestia of the Moscow Military Revolutionary Committee.

After the victory of the revolution, he held important party posts: he was a member of the party Central Committee, and from 19245-1929 - a member of the Politburo of the party Central Committee. For many years he was the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Pravda (in 1918-1929), at the same time in 1919-1929 he was a member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern, the de facto leader of the international labor movement.

After the death of Lenin V.I. he, along with Stalin, became one of the leaders of the party (1925-1929), pursuing a moderate policy that was supposed to lead to the modernization of the economy and the construction of socialism. However, in 1928-1929 he had to lead the anti-Stalinist opposition, since he did not agree with the harsh methods of Stalin’s leadership, especially in carrying out collectivization and industrialization. In addition, Bukharin developed the theory of “building socialism in one country,” as well as the theory of “the gradual development of the fist into socialism,” which contradicted Stalin’s views. Bukharin was a symbol of resistance to the development of Stalinism in the 30s.

As a result, he was removed from senior positions and began to occupy more humble positions. However, he continued to be actively involved in party work and took an active part in the writing of the 1936 Constitution.

The life of a communist ended tragically: he was accused of participating in the anti-Soviet right - the Trotskyist bloc in 1938 and was shot.

The result of this activity- active participation in revolutionary work, in the construction of a new Soviet state. Bukharin N.I. was one of the party leaders, Leninists, on whom the fate of the country directly depended. However, he fell into the circle of people whom V.I. Stalin was getting rid of. , going to the heights of power. Authority, intelligence, activity, hard work of Bukharin N.I. - all this, Stalin believed, constituted competition for him. Therefore Bukharin N.I. died, like many hundreds and thousands of people accused of treason and espionage, who were in fact people loyal to the party.

Another direction activities of Bukharin N.I. was a scientific work. He created many works on the theory of political struggle and economics. These are works such as: “World Economy and Imperialism” (1915), “The Theory of Historical Materialism” (1923), “The Teachings of Marx and Its Historical Significance” (1933) and others.

N.I. Bukharin highly appreciated. Lenin V.I. In his famous “Letter to the Congress” he called him the largest and most valuable theorist of the Bolshevik Party. The popularity of N.I. Bukharin and his scientific works was not only in Russia, but also far beyond its borders.

Bukharin N.I. in his works he noted the class nature of the state, advocated the dictatorship of the proletariat, and adhered to Marxist-Leninist views. He, like all Leninists of that era, supported violence, believing that the state could not exist without it, without dictatorship. He believed that “state coercion under a proletarian dictatorship is a method of building a communist society.” Under the concept of “coercion” he included both executions and labor service. These thoughts are expressed in the chapter “Non-economic” coercion in the transition period” in the work “Economy of the Transition Period”. It is about this chapter that Lenin V.I. wrote: “This chapter is excellent!”

Speaking about democracy, he singles out “proletarian democracy”, which has the right to “expropriate expropriators”, then democracy should not be for everyone.

Bukharin N.I. did a lot to praise and theoretically substantiate the regime of the new socialist republic. As a result, he himself became a victim of the Bolshevik-terrorist regime.

The result of this activity– numerous works that set out the theoretical foundations of building socialism and the principles of the new Soviet system.

Thus, Bukharin N.I. – one of the leaders of the revolutionary movement in Russia and the world, an active participant in the construction of socialism. Lenin called him the “favorite” of the party. Bukharin N.I. was always part of the inner circle of Lenin, and then Stalin. Speaking about the era of preparation and implementation of the October Revolution, the construction of socialism in the USSR, the first years of the Soviet state, one cannot help but mention the name of N.I. Bukharin, who is at the center of the political and state life of the country. After rehabilitation in 1988, he was reinstated in the party, and the title of Academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences was returned to him.

Material prepared by: Melnikova Vera Aleksandrovna

Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (1888-1938) - Russian scientist-economist, revolutionary, journalist, prominent statesman and political figure.

Biography of Bukharin briefly

Nikolai Ivanovich's parents are school teachers. Already in his youth, Bukharin took part in the events of the first Russian revolution, and in 1906 he became a member of the RSDLP.

Bukharin's pre-revolutionary biography is very similar to the biographies of many Bolshevik revolutionaries: participation in the revolutionary struggle, arrest, exile, escape from exile, emigration.

In exile, Bukharin became close to Lenin and quickly became one of the leading theoreticians and ideologists of the party. In May 1917, Nikolai Ivanovich returned to Russia and after the Bolshevik victory, he held important party and government positions - member of the Central Committee of the RSDLP(b), member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, editor-in-chief of the newspaper Pravda, member of the executive committee of the Comintern.

“The favorite of the whole party” (Lenin’s words) in his economic works proved the inevitable collapse of capitalism, and in the popular presentation of the party program “The ABC of Communism” he expressed the main tenets of the ideology of Bolshevism, substantiated the need for violence and labor conscription.

After Lenin's death, Bukharin is one of the most popular leaders of the party and state. At the same time, many contemporaries, and he himself, emphasized Bukharin’s lack of desire for absolute power.

Nikolai Ivanovich was a supporter of the NEP, which inevitably led to a confrontation with Stalin. Bukharin condemned Stalin's course towards accelerated and general collectivization and industrialization. As a result of a long political struggle, Stalin managed to break the will of Bukharin and his supporters, and then destroy them physically.

Bukharin's main activities

Active revolutionary activity;
party activities;
scientific work;
editorial and journalistic activities.

Results of Nikolai Bukharin's activities

He occupied leading party positions;
writing works on economics and political philosophy;
formation and popularization of the ideology of Bolshevism.

In the activities of N.I. Bukharin, it is customary to see the possibility of a different path of development of the country instead of the established economic and political platform of I.V. Stalin. In 1988 N.I. Bukharin was rehabilitated.