Victor Serge produced many first class political books, historical works, and novels. Thus far, I've been most impressed with Serge's Memoirs of a Revolutionary, which gave me a deep appreciation for the cosmopolitan Serge's political, aesthetic, literary, philosophical, and moral talents. Although Serge's Midnight in the Century covers same themes as that non-fiction masterpiece, it isn't his best novel. While too overtly polemical to be a great novel, Serge's novel is filled with witty dialogue, deep philosophical observations about the nature of human beings and nature, exquisite sentences, and insightful character descriptions. A work of striking moral and political sophistication, Serge's Midnight in the Century is nevertheless a relatively thinly disguised indictment of Stalinism. His protagonists all share the author's political views, and therefore find themselves persecuted by the revolution they once served. Midnight in the Century does offer profoundly illuminating glimpses of the human cost of totalitarianism.
In a sense, the Midnight in the Century's take on Stalinism resembles Koestler's Darkness at Noon or even Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, which it precedes. But Serge is an unwavering follower of Trotsky, and so his critique of Stalinism is directly concerned with the way in which Stalin and his cronies have betrayed socialism. From Serge's point of view, Stalininism was the Russian Revolution's Thermidor, a form of counterrevolution. Serge's characters do debate the extent to which they owe some modicum of allegiance to the government they helped to bring about. They also debate the historical meaning of Stalinism. Yet ultimately they classify Stalinism as a form of State Capitalism, and avow that true revolutionaries need to "start again" to build a true proletarian government.
In the end, the book tells readers a lot about Soviet terror. We understand that people are put into cells for little reason, or no reason whatsoever. We understand the Old Bolsheviks, Social Revolutionaries, and religious zealots suffer equally at the ends of a brutal state apparatus. We understand that arrests are motivated by jealousy, by chaotic government processes, or crude economic mandates and absurd planning mechanisms which require culprits. We know that Soviet justice is not justice at all, and that even innocent people can be shot with scarcely a pretense of a judicial process. But reading the book now, one is most struck by the viewpoint of a Trotskyite. While we know that Stalin was paranoid about Trotsky and his followers, this book makes one wonder if Stalin wasn't right to fear this form of sustained, informed, courageous, and socialist critique. Communists were steeled in the art of anti-capitalist and anti-colonialist rhetoric. But they were probably much less comfortable debating their erstwhile allies who were actually arguing that the Soviet government had betrayed the true principles of the revolution. Serge's characters charge Stalin and his government with every sort of villainy, from famine, to Chinese massacres, to the rise of fascism, to economic ruin. But their worst charge is that Stalin has ended any pretense of worker democracy and socialist fraternity.
Showing posts with label Arthur Koestler. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Arthur Koestler. Show all posts
Monday, October 1, 2018
Wednesday, October 1, 2014
Richard Wright
Taking a break from Soviet history, or so I thought, I recently completed Richard Wright's autobiography, Black Boy. The book, rich in dialogue and descriptive details and told from the unwavering perspective of a bewildered juvenile, begins with a brilliant and compelling examination of his early years in the Deep South. Growing up in and around Jackson, Mississippi, Wright suffered enormously from a culture of economic inequality, systematic violence, and psychological terror. Life in Jackson during the 1920s was extremely difficult. African-Americans were denied access to almost every basic human right, including meaningful employment, reasonable levels of health care and education, and even the ability to consistently put food on the table. The Southern culture of terror infected African-American family life, and helped to turn Wright's immediate family, and many of his friends, into co-conspirators. Wright's sophisticated analysis of white racism is withering. Under the constant threat of white intimidation or retaliation, Wright's family members lived incomplete lives, engaging in domestic violence, petty crime, and frenzied religious experience. Wright himself grew up hungry, physically abused, undereducated, and fearful of being hurt or killed by defenders of white privilege.
Incredibly, Richard Wright escaped the conditions to which he was born. His courage, moral genius, work ethic, and budding literary talent helped him to move from the Deep South, first to Memphis, and ultimately to Chicago. In Chicago, Wright's story perhaps inevitably merged with the subject of this blog, namely world communism. The second half of Black Boy traces Wright's involvement with Chicago's communist movement. In Chicago, Wright became heavily involved with Communist, or Communist-inspired cultural and political clubs. Wright's fascination with Communism is instructive. Although Black Boy's literary talent is perhaps best illustrated by his depiction of his early life in Mississippi, the two halves of the book work together to explain something vital about American and indeed global history. And that is that Wright found hope in Communism as a result of America's complete moral failure in the area of race relations. Why did so many black Chicagoans worship the name of Lenin? Clearly, their general religiosity didn't make this a natural alliance. Still, America's Jim Crow laws made African-Americans look seriously at any leader who promised to break down barriers of racial as well as class exploitation.
Wright ultimately revolted against some of Communism's worst excesses. He was appalled, for instance, by the Party's political witch hunts against alleged Trotskyites. Yet Wright's ambivalence about the Communist Party's peculiar methodology should be set again the writer's interest in the Party's noble goal. Abrham Terz (a.k.a., Andrei Sinyavsky), the author of a treatise on Socialist Realism, reminds us of just how appealing that goal could be. For Tertz, Communism offered people the most glorious vision imaginable, better than anything Westerners had invented since the rise of Christianity. Communism promised utopia, and claimed to make sense of everything, including America's history of racial oppression.
The link between African-American aspirations and Soviet promises is an interesting one, deserving of much fuller exploration. Only recently, I noted that Koestler met up with one African-American intellectual in the heart of Soviet Asia during the 1930s. Others have described Robeson's infatuation with the Soviet Union and its constitutional "guarantees" for racial equality. But the links between African-American intellectual currents and Soviet ones are not simple. Ironically, in Black Boy, Wright attributes Communist treachery in Chicago to the lessons that the world Communist Party had learned under the Russian tsars. And of course his most famous novel, Native Son, seems to have been inspired by Dostoevsky's pre-revolutionary--even anti-revolutionary, novel, Crime and Punishment.
Incredibly, Richard Wright escaped the conditions to which he was born. His courage, moral genius, work ethic, and budding literary talent helped him to move from the Deep South, first to Memphis, and ultimately to Chicago. In Chicago, Wright's story perhaps inevitably merged with the subject of this blog, namely world communism. The second half of Black Boy traces Wright's involvement with Chicago's communist movement. In Chicago, Wright became heavily involved with Communist, or Communist-inspired cultural and political clubs. Wright's fascination with Communism is instructive. Although Black Boy's literary talent is perhaps best illustrated by his depiction of his early life in Mississippi, the two halves of the book work together to explain something vital about American and indeed global history. And that is that Wright found hope in Communism as a result of America's complete moral failure in the area of race relations. Why did so many black Chicagoans worship the name of Lenin? Clearly, their general religiosity didn't make this a natural alliance. Still, America's Jim Crow laws made African-Americans look seriously at any leader who promised to break down barriers of racial as well as class exploitation.
Wright ultimately revolted against some of Communism's worst excesses. He was appalled, for instance, by the Party's political witch hunts against alleged Trotskyites. Yet Wright's ambivalence about the Communist Party's peculiar methodology should be set again the writer's interest in the Party's noble goal. Abrham Terz (a.k.a., Andrei Sinyavsky), the author of a treatise on Socialist Realism, reminds us of just how appealing that goal could be. For Tertz, Communism offered people the most glorious vision imaginable, better than anything Westerners had invented since the rise of Christianity. Communism promised utopia, and claimed to make sense of everything, including America's history of racial oppression.
The link between African-American aspirations and Soviet promises is an interesting one, deserving of much fuller exploration. Only recently, I noted that Koestler met up with one African-American intellectual in the heart of Soviet Asia during the 1930s. Others have described Robeson's infatuation with the Soviet Union and its constitutional "guarantees" for racial equality. But the links between African-American intellectual currents and Soviet ones are not simple. Ironically, in Black Boy, Wright attributes Communist treachery in Chicago to the lessons that the world Communist Party had learned under the Russian tsars. And of course his most famous novel, Native Son, seems to have been inspired by Dostoevsky's pre-revolutionary--even anti-revolutionary, novel, Crime and Punishment.
Sunday, February 9, 2014
Arthur Koestler's The Invisible Writing
Once upon a time, every bookish American seemed to have a copy of the
postwar phenomenon, The God That Failed. As a bookish as well as
politically active person, my mother naturally had a copy of the book on her
bookshelves. As an emerging atheist, I liked Richard Crossman's title and read The
God That Failed before I was old enough to make sense of it. Looking back,
I suspect that this compilation of six essays about the evils of communism,
including a famous entry Arthur Koestler, helped to keep liberal-minded
Americans like my mother firmly on the side of America and her democratic
allies. Or, if the confessions of these particular former communists didn't
necessarily sway people like my mother to steer clear of communism, then the
logic behind these essays surely did.
For those who believed in social justice, communism had its allurements,
but these allurements weren’t offset by the creed’s anti-democratic and indeed
totalitarian tendencies.
Arthur Koestler's brilliant examination of the logic of the Soviet Show Trials of the late 1930s, Darkness at Noon, was even more damning. The book revealed that even communism’s best and brightest defenders, men who resembled Old Bolshevik cosmopolitan thinkers such as Nikolai Bukharin, were ensnared by the vicious sophistry of Marxist-Leninist logic. There is something truly astounding about Koestler's ability to get inside the mind of the Bolshevik victimizers/victims. But then Koestler was once a die-hard communist, so it's not altogether surprising that he should be able to accurately depict both the enchanting but ultimately malevolent aspects of modern Europe’s greatest quasi-religious faith.
Koestler’s perspective on communism remains educational. Reading the second half of his memoirs, The Invisible Writing, one is reminded that communism transcended Russia’s frontiers. Koestler, a Hungarian communist with intimate ties to Hungarian, German, Spanish, and British communism, to name just a few dimensions of his truly transnational political activity, even spent a considerable amount of time in Stalin’s Russia during the 1930s. What’s remarkable about his sojourn in the Soviet Union is that the outlines of Stalin’s criminality were already so clearly visible. Although a “true believer” at the time, Koestler’s independent habits of mind never entirely left him. True to his profession as a journalist, Koestler witnessed a backward, bureaucratic, and secret police-infested society in close detail.
Visiting Russia for the first time, Koestler didn’t intend to critique the Soviet experiment. In fact, his ties to the German Communist Party and Comitern meant that he was expected to praise the Soviet Union at nearly every turn. Some friendly criticism could be tolerated, but only as a smoke screen to cover his fundamental support for the Soviet Union’s political trajectory. If he encountered any signs of poverty or technological backwardness, Koestler was expected to attribute these failings to the legacy of absolutism or capitalism more generally. But Koestler’s encounter with Soviet reality was devastating, and may have led to an open rupture much earlier, if the rise of the fascists in Germany hadn’t overshadowed his Russian observations.
Koestler’s brilliant description of the Soviet Union is particularly valuable insofar as he was given the opportunity to travel to many of the country’s diverse regions, including the Caucasus, the Ukraine, and Turkish republics. Incredibly, even before the Great Terror, Koestler's description of the country revealed many of the Terror’s adumbrations, as well as many of the Soviet Union’s other faults, including provincial-level show trials, social prejudice, concentration camps, censorship, propaganda, cultural philistinism, extreme centralization,poor economic planning, consumer goods shortages, overcrowding, housing shortages, long lines, famine, party privilege, political disenfranchisement, and the hyperactivity of the internal security organs.
Koestler's Soviet travel writing is perseptive, trenchant, critical, and wickedly truthful. Most interestingly, Koestler juxtaposes his original, sympathetic, depictions of his Soviet adventures with his subsequent, post-Soviet analysis, of the same phenonomena. The contrast is striking. Originally, Koestler, like most communists and fellow travellers, went out of his way to explain Soviet failings as bourgeois or even feudal atavisms. If something didn't work well, this was a legacy of tsarism which the modern, Soviet government was diligently working to correct.
Some quotations from The Invisible Writing:
"The history of mankind would start with the World Revolution; all that went before was merely a choatic, barbaric overture."
"It is not the Terror, but the existence of this ubiquitous organization without which nothing can be done, and which alone is capable of getting things done, that defines the structure of the totalitarian police state."
"There has never been a society in which a rigid, hierarchical order so completely determined every citizen's station in life and governed all his activities."
"This traditional hierarchic system, formerly confidened to the civil service, now embraces the entire nation."
"The only goods easily obtainable in Kharkov in 1932 were fly-paper, contraceptives and postage stamps."
"I have always had a deep longing for the primeval chaos, a nostalgia for the apocalpyse; and here I found myself in the middle of both."
"...for the tradition-bound people of Asia the enforced voyage in the time-machine amounted to their deportation into a disconsolate and incomprehensible world."
"The G.P.U., like the gods, are capricious."
"In Russia it is not considered a sign of cowardice to behave in an affable manner towards people of whom one is afraid, and personal pride is not considered a virtue."
"To complete the nightmare, there was my own deep-rooted feeling of guilt towards the proletariat of which Werner was the perfect symbol--the deformed street-urchin, the cat-killer, the hunted and persecuted..."
"...like all the men whom I met in Tiflis, he was a heavy and expert wine drinker."
"Why," she asked pathetically, "Why is it that the leaves die wherever we go?" In retrospect my overall impression of life in Russia has become tinged with the sadness and desolation of this remark."
"...even a travelling salesman may notice that a sunset lends color to the sky."
"This twin policy of centralization--plus atomization is a basic feature of the Soviet regime."
"The drab streets, the unrelieved shabiness and poverty, the grim pomposity of everything said and written, the all-pervading atmosphere of the reformatory school. The feeling of being cut off from the rest of the world."
"The overwhelming bleakness of an industrialized Neanderthal."
"And yet I remained a Communist. I had learned that facts had to be appreciated not on their face value, but in a dynamic way."
"Why do you talk in a whisper?" he asked. "Do I?" I said, "I thought I was talking normally." "In Berlin you used to yell, and now you whisper," he said. "That is all I want to know about Russia."
"Berlin and Moscow were distant abstractions, and their two dictators shadowy, legendary figures like Nero and Caligula."
"Our association was to end in a ghastly scene which still haunts my imagination."
"His deatg was, fittingly, announced to his sisters by the giggling and spluttering village idiot."
"...the Kremlin Borgias."
Arthur Koestler's brilliant examination of the logic of the Soviet Show Trials of the late 1930s, Darkness at Noon, was even more damning. The book revealed that even communism’s best and brightest defenders, men who resembled Old Bolshevik cosmopolitan thinkers such as Nikolai Bukharin, were ensnared by the vicious sophistry of Marxist-Leninist logic. There is something truly astounding about Koestler's ability to get inside the mind of the Bolshevik victimizers/victims. But then Koestler was once a die-hard communist, so it's not altogether surprising that he should be able to accurately depict both the enchanting but ultimately malevolent aspects of modern Europe’s greatest quasi-religious faith.
Koestler’s perspective on communism remains educational. Reading the second half of his memoirs, The Invisible Writing, one is reminded that communism transcended Russia’s frontiers. Koestler, a Hungarian communist with intimate ties to Hungarian, German, Spanish, and British communism, to name just a few dimensions of his truly transnational political activity, even spent a considerable amount of time in Stalin’s Russia during the 1930s. What’s remarkable about his sojourn in the Soviet Union is that the outlines of Stalin’s criminality were already so clearly visible. Although a “true believer” at the time, Koestler’s independent habits of mind never entirely left him. True to his profession as a journalist, Koestler witnessed a backward, bureaucratic, and secret police-infested society in close detail.
Visiting Russia for the first time, Koestler didn’t intend to critique the Soviet experiment. In fact, his ties to the German Communist Party and Comitern meant that he was expected to praise the Soviet Union at nearly every turn. Some friendly criticism could be tolerated, but only as a smoke screen to cover his fundamental support for the Soviet Union’s political trajectory. If he encountered any signs of poverty or technological backwardness, Koestler was expected to attribute these failings to the legacy of absolutism or capitalism more generally. But Koestler’s encounter with Soviet reality was devastating, and may have led to an open rupture much earlier, if the rise of the fascists in Germany hadn’t overshadowed his Russian observations.
Koestler’s brilliant description of the Soviet Union is particularly valuable insofar as he was given the opportunity to travel to many of the country’s diverse regions, including the Caucasus, the Ukraine, and Turkish republics. Incredibly, even before the Great Terror, Koestler's description of the country revealed many of the Terror’s adumbrations, as well as many of the Soviet Union’s other faults, including provincial-level show trials, social prejudice, concentration camps, censorship, propaganda, cultural philistinism, extreme centralization,poor economic planning, consumer goods shortages, overcrowding, housing shortages, long lines, famine, party privilege, political disenfranchisement, and the hyperactivity of the internal security organs.
Koestler's Soviet travel writing is perseptive, trenchant, critical, and wickedly truthful. Most interestingly, Koestler juxtaposes his original, sympathetic, depictions of his Soviet adventures with his subsequent, post-Soviet analysis, of the same phenonomena. The contrast is striking. Originally, Koestler, like most communists and fellow travellers, went out of his way to explain Soviet failings as bourgeois or even feudal atavisms. If something didn't work well, this was a legacy of tsarism which the modern, Soviet government was diligently working to correct.
Some quotations from The Invisible Writing:
"The history of mankind would start with the World Revolution; all that went before was merely a choatic, barbaric overture."
"It is not the Terror, but the existence of this ubiquitous organization without which nothing can be done, and which alone is capable of getting things done, that defines the structure of the totalitarian police state."
"There has never been a society in which a rigid, hierarchical order so completely determined every citizen's station in life and governed all his activities."
"This traditional hierarchic system, formerly confidened to the civil service, now embraces the entire nation."
"The only goods easily obtainable in Kharkov in 1932 were fly-paper, contraceptives and postage stamps."
"I have always had a deep longing for the primeval chaos, a nostalgia for the apocalpyse; and here I found myself in the middle of both."
"...for the tradition-bound people of Asia the enforced voyage in the time-machine amounted to their deportation into a disconsolate and incomprehensible world."
"The G.P.U., like the gods, are capricious."
"In Russia it is not considered a sign of cowardice to behave in an affable manner towards people of whom one is afraid, and personal pride is not considered a virtue."
"To complete the nightmare, there was my own deep-rooted feeling of guilt towards the proletariat of which Werner was the perfect symbol--the deformed street-urchin, the cat-killer, the hunted and persecuted..."
"...like all the men whom I met in Tiflis, he was a heavy and expert wine drinker."
"Why," she asked pathetically, "Why is it that the leaves die wherever we go?" In retrospect my overall impression of life in Russia has become tinged with the sadness and desolation of this remark."
"...even a travelling salesman may notice that a sunset lends color to the sky."
"This twin policy of centralization--plus atomization is a basic feature of the Soviet regime."
"The drab streets, the unrelieved shabiness and poverty, the grim pomposity of everything said and written, the all-pervading atmosphere of the reformatory school. The feeling of being cut off from the rest of the world."
"The overwhelming bleakness of an industrialized Neanderthal."
"And yet I remained a Communist. I had learned that facts had to be appreciated not on their face value, but in a dynamic way."
"Why do you talk in a whisper?" he asked. "Do I?" I said, "I thought I was talking normally." "In Berlin you used to yell, and now you whisper," he said. "That is all I want to know about Russia."
"Berlin and Moscow were distant abstractions, and their two dictators shadowy, legendary figures like Nero and Caligula."
"Our association was to end in a ghastly scene which still haunts my imagination."
"His deatg was, fittingly, announced to his sisters by the giggling and spluttering village idiot."
"...the Kremlin Borgias."
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Historian Paul Gregory's Guest Blog on New Bukharin Book
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
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
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