Soviet Roulette would like to extend its heartfelt thanks to Paul Gregory for this gracious guest blog related to his new book on Nikolai Bukharin and Anna Larina. The book is well-written, well-researched, and offers new insights into Bukharin, Stalin, and early Soviet politics. It's also a tragic love story.
Re-Examining Nikolai Bukharin: Forty Years Later
By Paul R. Gregory
Author of Politics, Murder, and Love in Stalin’s Kremlin: The Story of Nikolai Bukharin and Anna Larina (Hoover Press, 2010)
Available on Amazon
My Politics, Murder, and Love in Stalin’s Kremlin: The Story of Nikolai Bukharin and Anna Larina (Hoover Press 2010) follows Stephen Cohen’s Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography (1973) by almost forty years. Cohen reintroduced Bukharin – a figure whom Stalin wished eradicated from memory -- to students of Russian history. It contributed to memorable events, such as Anna Larina’s autobiography and Gorbachev’s rediscovery of Bukharin’s ideas. Written before the archival revolution, Cohen captured Bukharin’s finest hour in his final statement to the court in March of 1938 and the essence of Bukharin’s economic thought and his political career. We hope to look forward to a new edition from Cohen.
My Story of Nikolai Bukharin and Anna Larina is not a biography. Rather, it tells of the love affair between the 26-year older Nikolai and Anna against the backdrop of the power struggle. The reader learns much about Stalin through his treatment of his friends and enemies (Bukharin was both). I tell their story in a series of scenes taken from memorable moments in their lives, and in many instances I use their own words as extracted from transcripts, letters, interrogation protocols, and Anna’s autobiography. The Soviet party archives, which began to be released for scholarly use in the early 1990s, offer a rare opportunity to write history using the very words of those who made history. An example of the use of verbatim dialog is the brutalization of Bukharin before the Central Committee, where Bukharin, weakened by a hunger strike, tries to defend his hunger strike before a jeering mob at the February-March 1937 plenum:
Bukharin: Comrades, I plead with you not to interrupt because it is very difficult for me to speak. In my letter I described my psychological condition as it should be understood as a person. If, of course, I am not a human being, then there is nothing to understand. But I consider myself a human being and that I have the right to write about my psychological condition in this particularly difficult moment of my life. And in this regard, there was no attempt to frighten or deliver ultimatums.
Stalin: And your hunger strike?
Bukharin: And I’ll continue my hunger strike. I wrote to you, because I, in despair, grasped at this option. I wrote to a narrow circle because, with such accusations hanging over me, it is impossible to live. I am not able to shoot myself because then they’ll say that I committed suicide to harm the party; but if I die, as from a disease, what would you lose from this?
Voice: Blackmail!
Bukharin: But understand how difficult it is for me to live.
Stalin: And is it easy for us?
The love story of Nikolai and Anna is one of the great romances and political intrigues of the twentieth century, yet most educated readers no longer recognize Bukharin’s name. Their story is a combination of Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and Pasternak’s Zhivago, as Anna disappears into the Gulag and exile before reemerging to fight for his rehabilitation. As Robert Conquest writes in the foreword, the book “works as a romance or even thriller.” Indeed it has all the elements of a thriller – mock and real executions, spy-mistresses, threats, intimidation, blackmail, romantic jealousy, torture, pleas for mercy, while introducing the fundamentally different visions for Russia that Bukharin and Stalin expressed in their own debates and in their own words.
We cannot examine the life of Nikolai Bukharin without asking two questions: First, did he have a good chance to win the power struggle? Cohen suggests that Bukharin had powerful allies and could have won had he been willing to go public early with his disagreements with Stalin. E. H. Carr, on the other hand, dismissed Bukharin as a relatively insignificant figure, romanticized by his tragic fate. My own view is that a Bukharin-like figure was unlikely to win in the rough-and-tumble of Bolshevik politics, whereas the worst is likely to rise to the top. Politics, Murder and Love in Stalin’s Kremlin shows Stalin consistently outwitting Bukharin and his allies, not by chance but by his willingness to do anything and everything to win.
The second question is whether Bukharin was guilty of the charges for which he was executed. In this regard, it is clear that after his political defeat in 1929, Bukharin retired from politics. He cut off relations with his former allies and students. He hoped that by keeping his nose clean he could survive. He miscalculated. For Stalin, anyone who had opposed him earlier or might oppose him again was too dangerous to leave alive. Stalin, however, could not openly sentence potential opponents to death on such grounds. He therefore had to force his victims to confess to horrendous crimes that even Western journalists would consider worthy of death. We must remember that in an absolute dictatorship, the dictator is free to define what is a capital offense. Stalin’s definition was very broad.
Stalin was purported to have remarked that the death of one person is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic. In my previous work on Stalin’s terror, I indeed focused on the statistic. Yet Stalin continues to have considerable appeal in Russia despite widespread knowledge of his incredible brutality. My book focuses on the tragedy of one man, his wife, and child. Perhaps the tale of one man, who experienced personally Stalin’s brutality, will have a greater impact on the way Stalin is viewed than the statistics of his cruelty.
Paul Gregory
Research Fellow, Hoover Institution
Cullen Professor of Economics, University of Houston
Showing posts with label Anna Larina. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anna Larina. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Gregory, Cohen, and Laqueuer on Bukharin
Let's talk about Nikolai Bukharin, shall we? And let me say up front that my wordiness on this topic isn't merely sparked by the review copy of the newly published book, Politics, Murder, and Love: The Story of Nikolai Bukharin and Anna Larina in Stalin's Kremlin, that Paul Gregory's publicist was gracious enough to send to me (Hoover Press). No, I also happened to be thinking about Bukharin as a result of reading an essay by one of my favorite Sovietologists, Walter Laqueuer, entitled "War Against the Peasants; The Bukharin Alternative," found in his essay collection, Stalin: The Glasnost Revelations.
According to Laqueur, who is never anything but clear-headed and trenchant, Bukharin did not in fact offer a serious alternative to Stalin or to Stalism as an economic philosophy or indeed political creed. Of course, Bukharin was a much more humane and urbane man than Stalin or Stalin's cronies, whether or not they survived the purges (and very few did). Although he was at first a Bolshevik Leftist, he made exceptions and eventually came down fairly firmly in favor of a more moderate policy toward the peasantry.
On the other hand, Laqueur reminds us that Bukharin's economic philosophy did not break in fundamental ways with either Lenin or Stalin. All leading Bolsheviks accepted the basic economic tenants that squeezed the peasants and transferred wealth to the cities. Moreover, whereas Soviet economics can hardly be divorced from Soviet politics, Bukharin was the first to denounce Trotsky and his allies, and was often more shrill in his denunciations of political rivals than his early ally Stalin.
It's a truism to say that Bukharin suffered from the Original Sins of Bolshevism. That is, he believed in Lenin's economic policies as well as his political intolerance, and eschewed political pluralism and democracy. Even so, Bukharin is a sympathetic and tragic figure. Steven Cohen's famous biography overstates the case but does a great deal to illuminate the positive aspects of Bukharin the man and thinker. (And Gregory and Laqueur both point to that work's enormous influence inside Russia 40 years previously). Bukharin was, to be sure, intelligent, witty, creative, well-liked (by Bolsheviks), and even courageous in his own way.
Even so, Laqueur and Gregory are right to point out that Bukharin was not a serious alternative to Stalin as a politician. Notwithstanding his fans in the late Soviet period, Bukharin had no real constituency or even important governmental post. He had no great instict for intrigue. He didn't possess the requisite ruthlessness demanded by Soviet-style "collective rule." Bukharin was also known, as Gregory also points out, for a certain personal unsteadiness or emotionalism. He was never a serious competitor for power.
All that being so, Bukharin remains a fascinating story. Paul Gregory's biography reveals all of the pathos of Bukharin's downfall, which was a mixture (almost necessarily under the circumstances) of courage and cowardliness. In the end, it was almost impossible to be courageous in Stalin's Russia, so Bukharin's intermittent resistance deserves a good deal of praise. More interesting, is Gregory's incorporation of Bukharin's love life into this downward spiral from the Politburo and Pravda to jail and execution. Anna Larina, younger than her new husband by decades, supported her husband every step of the way, and sacrificed her youth by spending the next twenty years in the gulag. She was lucky to have lived. After Stalin, in the spirit of the Decembrist wives, Anna maintained a campaign to rehabilitate her husband, yet this rehabilitation didn't happen until much, much later.
According to Laqueur, who is never anything but clear-headed and trenchant, Bukharin did not in fact offer a serious alternative to Stalin or to Stalism as an economic philosophy or indeed political creed. Of course, Bukharin was a much more humane and urbane man than Stalin or Stalin's cronies, whether or not they survived the purges (and very few did). Although he was at first a Bolshevik Leftist, he made exceptions and eventually came down fairly firmly in favor of a more moderate policy toward the peasantry.
On the other hand, Laqueur reminds us that Bukharin's economic philosophy did not break in fundamental ways with either Lenin or Stalin. All leading Bolsheviks accepted the basic economic tenants that squeezed the peasants and transferred wealth to the cities. Moreover, whereas Soviet economics can hardly be divorced from Soviet politics, Bukharin was the first to denounce Trotsky and his allies, and was often more shrill in his denunciations of political rivals than his early ally Stalin.
It's a truism to say that Bukharin suffered from the Original Sins of Bolshevism. That is, he believed in Lenin's economic policies as well as his political intolerance, and eschewed political pluralism and democracy. Even so, Bukharin is a sympathetic and tragic figure. Steven Cohen's famous biography overstates the case but does a great deal to illuminate the positive aspects of Bukharin the man and thinker. (And Gregory and Laqueur both point to that work's enormous influence inside Russia 40 years previously). Bukharin was, to be sure, intelligent, witty, creative, well-liked (by Bolsheviks), and even courageous in his own way.
Even so, Laqueur and Gregory are right to point out that Bukharin was not a serious alternative to Stalin as a politician. Notwithstanding his fans in the late Soviet period, Bukharin had no real constituency or even important governmental post. He had no great instict for intrigue. He didn't possess the requisite ruthlessness demanded by Soviet-style "collective rule." Bukharin was also known, as Gregory also points out, for a certain personal unsteadiness or emotionalism. He was never a serious competitor for power.
All that being so, Bukharin remains a fascinating story. Paul Gregory's biography reveals all of the pathos of Bukharin's downfall, which was a mixture (almost necessarily under the circumstances) of courage and cowardliness. In the end, it was almost impossible to be courageous in Stalin's Russia, so Bukharin's intermittent resistance deserves a good deal of praise. More interesting, is Gregory's incorporation of Bukharin's love life into this downward spiral from the Politburo and Pravda to jail and execution. Anna Larina, younger than her new husband by decades, supported her husband every step of the way, and sacrificed her youth by spending the next twenty years in the gulag. She was lucky to have lived. After Stalin, in the spirit of the Decembrist wives, Anna maintained a campaign to rehabilitate her husband, yet this rehabilitation didn't happen until much, much later.
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