A
VOICE FROM THE DEAD
Introduction
to
by
Nikolai Ivanovich
Bukharin
(1888-1938)
This
is a voice from the dead. It is a voice speaking to a time that never
heard
it, a time that never had a chance to hear it. It is only speaking now
to a time not very well disposed to hearing it.
This
text was written in 1937 in the dark of the night in the depths of the
Lubyanka prison in
Perhaps
the most remarkable thing about this text is that it was written at
all.
Condemned not by an enemy but by his own comrades, seeing what had been
so magnificently created being so catastrophically destroyed,
undergoing
shattering interrogations, how was he not totally debilitated by
despair
? Where did this author get the strength,
the composure, the faith in the future that was necessary to write this
treatise of philosophy, this passionate defence of the intellectual
tradition
of marxism and the political project of socialist construction ?
Nikolai
Ivanovich Bukharin was a tragic true believer. He was the youngest,
most
intellectual, most sensitive, most sparkling of the original bolshevik
leaders. He was extremely popular, both at home and abroad. Lenin held
him in particular affection and esteem, despite polemicising against
him
in key controversies along the way.Such
was possible then. The early years of the revolution were full of
problems
and possibilities, of dreams and dilemmas and debates. The
bolsheviks were stunned to find that they had seized state power and
they
scurried about trying to figure out what to do with it. They were
trying
to do something that had never been done before. Everything was open to
question. Everything needed to be re-thought and re-created. They were
in new territory with no maps to guide them. Bukharin
was energetically engaged in exploring and mapping the new terrain. He
was involved in virtually all of the important debates of the era: from
agricultural and industrial policy to scientific and artistic
questions. He
was always on the move, striding around Moscow in his peaked cap,
russian
blouse, leather jacket and high boots, generating an atmosphere of
intellectual
excitement and fun, embodying 'an
aura of bohemia come to power'.1
Bukharin
is the personification of a path not taken. His life and death will
always
be particularly poignant because of that. He
was 29 at the time of the revolution and 49 when he died. He was a
member
of the politbureau and central committee of the Communist Party of
the
Bukharin
stood for what he called 'socialist humanism', socialism with a human
face,
socialism with an open mind, socialism with an honest voice, socialism
with an outstretched hand. He advocated a more evolutionary path to
socialism,
an opening of a process where a society would grow into socialism,
where
those who questioned might be persuaded and not necessarily coerced or
executed, where theoretical questions were settled by theoretical
debates
and not by accusations of treason, purges of editorial boards and
disappearances
in the night. Bukharin was inclined
to be bold and passionate in open polemics and to be somewhat guileless
and sometimes even naïve in the face of covert political
manoeuvring. It
has been the downfall of many a politician intellectual. It is a sad
fact
of life that unscrupulousness confers a decided advantage in struggles
for power.
After
this most consequential struggle for power came the frenzy of the first
five year plan, a titanic and turbulent struggle to collectivise
agriculture,
to build heavy industry, to achieve in ten years what took a hundred
years
in other countries. It was declared to be the time of 'the new turn on
all fronts of socialist construction', the time of 'shattering
transformations',
not only in politics, industry and agriculture, but in philosophy, art,
education, science, in absolutely every aspect of the social
order. There
was intensified pressure to 'bolshevise' every institution, every
academic
discipline, every artistic form. The
intelligentsia was told that the time for ideological neutrality was
over.
They had to declare themselves for marxism and for the dialectical
materialist
reconstruction of their disciplines or evacuate the territory. All the
debates that had raged in the 1920s, whether between marxism and other
intellectual trends or between different trends within marxism, were
sharply
closed down through the 1930s. There was to be one correct line on
every
question. Any deviation was considered to be not only mistaken but
treacherous. There
was resistance in many areas. Geneticists fought back against attempts
by brash bolshevisers to override the process of scientific discovery.
Bukharin sided with those such as Vavilov who were standing up to
Lysenko.
In
philosophy there had been a debate throughout the 1920s between those
who
were grounded in the empirical sciences and emphasised the materialist
aspect of dialectical materialism and those who were more grounded in
the
history of philosophy, particularly Hegel, and emphasised the
dialectical
dimension of dialectical materialism. It has been an ongoing tension in
the history of marxism and it was healthy and natural for it to it to
play
itself out in the atmosphere of intellectual ferment and institutional
transformation in the early days of soviet power. Philosophy was
considered
to be integral to the social order. Political leaders, particularly
Lenin
and Bukharin, participated in philosophical debates as if these issues
were matters of life and death, of light and darkness. Even while
preoccupied
with urgent affairs of state, they polemicised passionately on
questions
of epistemology, ontology, ethics and aesthetics. 2
Bukharin
developed in and through these debates. At first he sided with the
mechanists.
At one point, he even confessed to “a certain heretical inclination to
the empirio-critics”.3 He believed that marxists should
study
the most advanced work in the natural and social sciences and cleanse
itself
of the lingering idealism inherent in quasi-mystical hegelian
formulations.
In Historical Materialism, published in 1921 and used as a
basic
text in higher party schools, he interpreted dialectics in terms of
equilibrium:
of conflict of forces, disturbance of equilibrium, new combination of
forces,
restoration of equilibrium.4 Although Bukharin was not
uneducated
in classical german philosophy, others who were more steeped in this
tradition
underlined the origins of marxism in this intellectual culture and
criticised
Bukharin accordingly. Lenin was one who did so and stated that
Bukharin,
although he was the party’s outstanding theorist, had not quite
understood
dialectics.
Prominent
comintern intellectuals, such as Korsch and Lukacs, associated with a
neo-kantian-neo-hegelian
interpretation of marxism, which went even further in this direction
than
the soviet neo-hegelian
Although
there was growing pressure to short circuit such debates with demagogic
rhetoric, Bukharin considered contending arguments seriously. In the
midst
of these debates, Engels’s Dialectics of Nature and Lenin’s Philosophical
Notebooks were published and both sides were emphasising different
passages and claiming the texts as authority for their views. Bukharin
seriously studied them and was particularly influenced by Lenin’s Philosophical
Notebooks, which dealt with problems in philosophy and the natural
sciences, but paid great attention to the history of philosophy in
general
and Hegel in particular. He also reflected on Lenin’s earlier criticism
of him on the question of dialectics. In his writings in the
1930s,
he came to a new understanding of dialectics and to the relationship of
marxism to its philosophical progenitors.
In
1931 Bukharin led the soviet delegation to the international history of
science congress in
In
1933 Bukharin edited Marxism and Modern Thought, a collection
of
essays published by the academy of sciences to commemorate the 50th
anniversary of the death of Marx. Here he took greater note of the
hegelian
roots of marxism. He underlined Marx’s
excellent knowledge of the history of philosophy and argued that
marxism
took up all that was rational and progressive in the thousands of years
of philosophical development.He
considered dialectics to be the 'algebra of revolution', demonstrating
the transitory character of every form, the interrelatedness of all
things,
the indivisibility of analysis and synthesis, the logic of
contradictory
processes and universal connections. Nevertheless, he still put a heavy
emphasis on natural science and repudiated “hegelian panology”. He
engaged
in a polemic contrasting marxism with all other philosophical trends of
the times, even while acknowledging the grains of truth in all of them:
logical positivism, pragmatism, gestalt, neo-kantianism,
neo-hegelianism.8
These were the themes he took up again at much greater length in his
prison
cell in 1937 in this manuscript.
Bukharin
was a cosmopolitan intellectual, exposed to an array of intellectual
influences
and accustomed to mixing with intellectuals of many points of view and
arguing the case for marxism in such milieux. So were others who found
themselves between the covers of Science at the Crossroads and Marxism
and Modern Thought: Hessen, Zavadovsky, Vavilov, Kolman, Uranovsky,
Deborin. They were coming under increasing pressure from a younger
generation
who had come up under the revolution, never been abroad, knew no
foreign
languages, had no detailed knowledge of either the empirical sciences
or
the history of philosophy, had never read books enunciating other
points
of view. They were brash and often ruthless. They were more inclined to
cite the authority of the classic marxist texts and current party
decrees
than to engage in philosophical argument. They were taking over as
professors,
directors of institutes and members of editorial boards, increasingly
occupying
positions of authority over learned scholars of international
reputation. Not
that all of the younger generation were in this mould. There were
others,
many of them trained by and loyal to Bukharin, but they did not
survive.
They were arrested, interrogated and executed.
These
developments in soviet intellectual life were inextricably tied to the
rhythms of soviet political and economic life. The way forward with the
first five year plan was far from smooth and uncomplicated. There was
violent
resistance to the collectivisation of agriculture and peasants were
burning
crops and slaughtering livestock rather than surrender. There was one
disaster
after another in the push to industrialisation. There was a fundamental
contradiction between the advanced goals that were to be achieved and
the
level of expertise in science, engineering, agronomy, economics, indeed
a general cultural level, needed to achieve them. There was panic and
confusion
and desperation. There was reckless scapegoating. Breakdowns, fires,
famine,
unfulfilled targets were put down to sabotage and espionage. There was
a blurring of the lines between bungling and wrecking, between
association
with defeated positions and treason, between contact with foreign
colleagues
and conspiracy with foreign powers.
The
country was pictured as full of spies and wreckers and agents of
imperialist
powers who wanted to disrupt every aspect of soviet life in every
possible
way, from agriculture and industry to philosophy and physics. Fascism
was
on the rise in
The
assassination of
Through
these years, Bukharin could feel the social order unravelling. His own
room for manouveur was constantly shifting. He was often denounced, but
occasionally honoured, in the official discourse. In response to
periodic
demands that he not only accept defeat but renounce his views, he
sometimes
refused, sometimes capitulated, often compromised. He
was always negotiating the terms in which he could speak or act.He
continued to embody a critical alternative, although in increasingly
aesopian
forms of expression. He sincerely
acknowledged the successes of the five year plan, accepted the drive to
intensified industrialisation and threw his energies into state
planning.
He did continue to advocate freedom in intellectual and artistic life
and
agonised over the climate of fear overtaking every area of life. “Cats
are clawing at my soul” he told the young Anna Larina.9
His
relationship with Stalin was a merry-go-round of mixed signals. Stalin
played with him, expressing admiration and affection, all the while
scheming
against him, jealous of his intellectual acuity and all round
popularity
and vengeful against any alternative to his absolute authority, as his
meglomania swept all into a hurricane of destruction. Bukharin had
reason
to know of Stalin’s personality and plotting and he did know, yet he
was
sometimes seduced into believing in a better side to him and hoping
that
appealing to it would bring results. They lived and worked in close
proximity
to each other, first in exile and later in the Metropol and
Kremlin. After
Stalin’s wife Nadya committed suicide, Stalin asked Bukharin to change
apartments with him, as the memory was too painful. In the same
bedroom,
where she was driven to her death, Bukharin went through his last agony
before his arrest, feeling all the possibilities of life closing down
on
him. Nevertheless, all through the terror, right to the very end, he
wrote 'Dear Koba' letters, refuting the charges against him, protesting
his
innocence,
believing, not believing, that, if only Stalin could see what the NKVD
was doing, where things were going wrong, that he would put it right.
There
were three spectacular show trials in which whole original nucleus of
the
party, with the exception of Lenin and Stalin, were represented as
involved
in a fantastic conspiracy to assassinate party leaders, to sabotage
industry,
to foment peasant uprisings, to spy for foreign powers, to overthrow
socialism
and to restore capitalism. Zinoviev, Kamenev and others were sentenced
to death in August 1936. Radek, Pyatakov,
Sokolnikov and others were sentenced to death or long terms of
imprisonment
in January 1937. There was much testimony
at these trials implicating Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky, preparing the
scenario
for the third trial.
To Anna Larina, who became Bukharin's
wife, we owe an intimate account of his last months as he awaited
arrest,
humiliation and death. For the most
part he confined himself to the bedroom of his Kremlin apartment 'like
a caged beast'. His mood changed constantly. He
received mounting depositions of testimony against him, much of it from
trusted comrades, describing a vast conspiracy to subvert soviet power,
to restore capitalism, to cede soviet territory to foreign powers, to
assassinate
Lenin, Kirov, Stalin. At times he
was totally mystified by what seemed to be “some inexplicable
witchcraft”. At
times he became numbed to the horror of deceit and betrayal and wild
irrationality
and he became detached and listless. Then
it would seem sharp and vivid again and he would flare suddenly into a
fierce rage. He plunged into the depths of despair. He felt “banished
from
life like a leper”. He heard of the
suicide of Tomsky. He considered suicide himself, as did Rykov. At
other
times, he had surges of hope that the truth would triumph and he would
be vindicated. He imagined scenarios
in which he might live in the countryside with his young wife and see
his
new son grow and pursue his interests in art and science. There
were times when he found the composure and commitment to write a book
on
the culture of fascism. He went on hunger strike to try to bring the
central
committee to its senses. He was immersed
in an excruciating internal struggle:
“Nikolai
Ivanovich both understood and refused to understand”10
He
attended the central committee and was confronted with monstrous
allegations,
face to face with his accusers impeaching themselves as well as him. He
returned home to say 'I have returned from hell, a temporary hell, but
there can be doubt that I will fall into it for good.' 11
He
resigned himself to this hell, this disgrace, this death. He
decided to reach across the hopelessness of his time to hope in
posterity.
On the eve of his arrest, he composed a letter to a future generation
of
party leaders and asked Anna to memorise and then destroy it.
“I
am leaving life…I am helpless before an infernal machine that seems to
use medieval methods, yet possesses gigantic power, fabricates
organised
slander, acts boldly and confidently…Storm clouds hang over the party…I
knew nothing about secret organisations. Together with Rykov and
Tomsky,
I expounded my views openly. Since the age of 18, I have been a member
of the party, and always the goal of my life has been the struggle for
the interests of the working class, for the victory of socialism. These
days the newspaper with the hallowed name Pravda prints the
most
contemptible lie that I, Nikolai Bukharin, wanted to destroy the
achievement
of October, to restore capitalism…If I was more than once mistaken
regarding
methods of building socialism, may my descendants judge me no more
severely
than did Vladimir Ilyich. We were the first to pursue the same goal by
an as yet untrodden path. The times, the mores, were different. I turn
to you, the future generation of party leaders, on whom will fall the
historic
mission of clearing the monstrous cloud of crimes that in these
terrible
days is growing more and more grandiose, spreading like wildfire and
smothering
the party…In what may be the last days of my life, I am certain that
sooner
or later the filter of history will inevitably wash the filth from my
head.
I was never a traitor. I would have unhesitatingly traded my own life
for
Lenin’s. I loved
It
was many years before that letter could be received by those to whom it
was sent.
On
For
thirteen months he was imprisoned and interrogated in the Lubyanka. For
three months, he resolutely refused to confess. Then
came a period of extended negotiation, threats and promises. It
is likely that he made concessions to save the lives of his family and
to have his prison writings published. He
had little reason to believe that any promises made to him would be
honoured,
but he held on to whatever thin thread of belief he could grasp.
During
this period of thirteen months between his arrest and execution, he
wrote
four book length manuscripts.13 He also wrote letters to
Stalin
about his prison writings, begging him to let them be published:
“I
wrote [the prison manuscripts] mostly at night, literally wrenching
them
from my heart. I fervently beg you not to let this work disappear …
Don’t
let this work perish… This is completely apart from my personal
fate” 14
The
first was Socialism and Its Culture, a sequel to his book The
Degradation of Culture and Fascism that he was writing before his
arrest.
Together these were to constitute a two part work to be called The
Crisis
of Capitalist Culture and Socialism. Bukharin
considered the quick publication of this work “at a crossroads of
history”
to be an urgent matter, devoted as it was to positioning the
The
next was a collection of poems entitled The Transformation of the
World.
Most of them were poetic reflections on the same themes as preoccupied
him in his prose writings. These were of epic scope, sweeping though
the
history of the world and seeing socialism as the culmination of
humanistic
struggle of the centuries. Some were also a chronicle of his emotional
state, his love for Anna, his longing to be free.
The
third was Philosophical Arabesques. This loomed large in his
struggle
to speak in a substantial voice to his own times as well as to later
times.
He desperately hoped that it could be preserved and somehow published.
He must have had surges of expectation that this could be possible, in
spite of so much evidence to the contrary, to invest such a massive
effort
in it and to address the world in it as he did. He wrote to Anna that
she
would be given the manuscripts in his cell at that time, putting
particular
emphasis on Philosophical Arabesques:
“The
most important thing is that the philosophical work not be lost. I
worked
on it for a long time and put a great deal into it; it is a very mature
work in comparison to my earlier writings, and, in contrast to them,
dialectical
from beginning to end” 15
Philosophical
Arabesques
was an ambitious systematic work of philosophy. The title might arouse
an expectation of a collection of fragmentary or even whimsical
epigrams,
but it was not that. It marshalled the motif of arabic art to refer to
a series on discourses on various themes interwoven with each other to
form an intricate pattern. This approach to philosophy set marxism
within
the whole history of philosophy, within the whole battle of ideas of
world
culture of his times. It was a highly polemical text, engaging
seriously
with virtually every major intellectual trend of its times. It
displayed
an astute knowledge of the intellectual life of the epoch and the world
historical context from which it emerged. He saw the grain of truth in
every previous philosophy and saw marxism in continuity with the
centuries
long struggle to conceptualise the universe. He acknowledged the
partial
perspectives in each of the contemporary trends contending with marxism
and argued that marxism superseded every one-sided view of the world to
bring philosophy to a higher synthesis than had ever been achieved. It
was an integrative and grounded way of thinking that offered a fresh
way
into the complex new problems of the era.
This
was in contrast to another approach to marxism, which was prevailing in
the
Bukharin
began his treatise in a sweeping world historical style, characterising
the epoch with exuberant energy as a time of titantic struggle between
an old order dying and a new order being born, a time of revaluation of
all values. As an integral part of this struggle, marxism was proving
to
be the ultimate philosophy, holding its head high, winning the battle
of
ideas, interacting and arguing with all other philosophies, uniquely
aware
of the socio-historical context of all texts, supremely involved in
shaping
the world that other philosophies only conceptualised at a distance,
indeed
going on to the street as a fighting force. He portrayed opposing
philosophies
as turning away from an integration of reason and emotion and action
into
one cul de sac or another, each seeking one at the expense of the
others,
whether fixating on exact sciences or categorical imperatives or solemn
hymns to blood and iron. From this launching pad, he addressed his
readers
(presumably the world audience there for his previous books):
“Here the author wishes to
proceed along an avenue of thought, an avenue lined with enigmatic
sphinxes
that have torn many brains apart, but have also been able to play on
the
sublime harp of creativity. Let us go then to look once again at these
old familiar figures and to gaze into their mysterious eyes.”
There
were shifts of style in the manuscript, some of them due to the
circumstances
in which it was written, which allowed for little proofreading or
revision,
but also because he was consciously making concessions to the style in
which philosophical polemics of the day were written in order to
convince
adherents of alternative positions on their own terrain that their
arguments
were full of holes. Some of such
passages taking up battle on the 'field of pure reason', on the terms
of
adversaries, might have been a bit tedious, but certainly no more so
than
the texts being addressed. He was
at his best, however, when putting their arguments into wider and
earthier
context and highlighting the contrasts in the light of day.
In
his polemic against solipsism, for example, he called attention to the
irony of a world where people ate and drank, killed and died, made
stone
axes and electric generators and learned to determine the chemical
composition
of stars, while philosophers argued that it was all an illusion, that
the
whole symphony of the world played only in the solitary consciousness.
Arguing constantly that ideas were social products and not immaculate
conceptions
in the minds of philosophers, he linked solipsism to the trajectory of
class societies and how thinkers had become more and more remote from
material
practice. Going through a whole panoply of forms of subjective
idealism,
encompassing a cast of characters from Pyrrho to Kant to Eddington, he
played out the polemic in several acts: from a purely logical exercise,
where they at first seemed invincible, but could be reduced to a series
of non sequiturs; to a demonstration of the contradiction of word and
deed,
where the world inevitably asserted its iron priority against the
arrogance
of spirit attempting to swallow all; to an argument based in sociology
of knowledge, showing how class societies divided all of humanity’s
vital
activities and fixed them in different sections of the population and
could
not achieve an integral overview.
So
he argued on multiple levels, traversing the whole history of
philosophy
and taking on the whole array of modern currents, showing their roots
in
previous ideas as well as in contemporary experience. He engaged in
polemics
against positivism and mechanistic materialism, but the weight of his
emphasis
was on many forms of idealism from hegelian rationalism to primitivist
mysticism. Always he stressed the resurgence of the world and the flesh
against the arrogance of spirit and the tendency of the "I" to consume
the world. He traced this through
the evolution of the division of labour in which the theoretician
became
possible, but became one-sided, impoverished, atomised as mental and
manual
labour became increasing disconnected. With the degeneration of
capitalism,
its radius of cognition tended to diminish.
There
was a strong emphasis on the sociology of knowledge. Every concept was
a condensation of collective labour, a product of centuries of social
history.
Every mode of production generated a characteristic mode of thought. He
portrayed capitalist intellectual culture as flying off in all
directions,
chasing one myopic version of reality after another and argued that
only
socialism could generate unified vision.
The
picture of socialism articulated here was by this stage highly
romanticised,
but it was an attempt to reconnect with the vision of the society that
they had sought to create and had believed was really coming into
being.
Indeed something had been created, however imperfectly, and he was
clinging
to that in a kind of desperate hope that it could reassert itself
against
the forces that were destroying it. His prison writing was a struggle
to
play a role in that still.
The
gap between the picture of soviet society in the text and the society
imprisoning
and defaming its true believers was a product of prison conditions and
complex bargaining and compromising in order to achieve publication.
Certainly
the genuflections to Stalin as great thinker as well as great leader
must
be read primarily in this way. Nevertheless I believe that there was a
more complicated, more conflicted psychology involved. There had to be
some kind of complex dialectic of hope and despair, a striving that was
surging and falling, powerful and powerless, not only in relation to
his
own fate, but for the whole world historical experiment in socialism,
playing
itself out within him for him to persist in this work. He still
believed,
despite everything, that the foundations for true human liberation were
being laid in a new mode of production and a new mode of representation.
There
was much attention to classical german philosophy. He wanted to prove
himself,
even posthumously, to Lenin, on questions of philosophy and to
vindicate
himself against the charge that he had not adequately grasped the
meaning
of the dialectic and that he had not given due weight to the origins of
marxism in hegelian philosophy. His knowledge of the history of
philosophy
was impressively erudite and his references were remarkably accurate,
particularly
considering the scant resources available to him in prison. He did have
access to a number of philosophical texts from the prison library and
through
the indulgence of his somewhat intellectual interrogator Kogan. He did
become more consciously dialectical, but he did not go in the direction
of a neo-hegelian interpretation of marxism.Quoting
Lenin, he was wary of the 'mysticism of the idea' and remained
resolutely
materialist in emphasis.
He
stressed the study of the empirical sciences as well as the history of
philosophy. He believed that theoretical tensions in various
disciplines,
including the natural sciences, were at root questions of philosophy,
but
that problems of philosophy could only be resolved by a transformation
of the social order. Only marxism provided the grounding for a unity of
theory and practice, for a new form of theoretical practice (a term not
invented by Althusser). A synthesis of knowledge was only possible in
the
movement toward socialism. There was formidable thinking being done
along
these lines, thinking at the foundations of science, but it was being
done
by those who were being purged, by those who were dying. NI Vavilov did
not have long to live, nor had Hessen or Uranovky, but Lysenko and
Prezent
were thriving and denouncing Bukharin as representing the “powers of
darkness”
for soviet science. Nevertheless Bukharin
wrote in glowing terms of what was being accomplished by soviet
science,
not only in compromised conformity to the stultifying official
discourse,
but in buoyant aspiration for it to be so.
There
are other passages that might make a contemporary reader wince. His
references
to 'old women of both sexes' as an image of cringing superstition make
it hard for a 21st century feminist, and a no longer young
one
at that, to come to his defence. He
was a man of his times, an advanced thinker and an ardent
revolutionary,
but still a man of his times.
Perhaps
the most jarring note to those of us who live today is the breathless
talk
of capitalism in its death throes. He exuded a strong sense of living
at
a time of an old order dying and a new one being born. Perhaps my
generation
had our own sense of a crisis of social order and radical new
possibilities
during the rise of a new left that an old bolshevik would have found
strange
indeed. But we have lived on to see capitalism not only survive but
thrive
and to be succeeded by another generation, who might or might not be
critical
of it, but find it increasingly impossible to imagine an alternative to
it.
And
what a sad story to tell them is that of the attempted alternative that
was the
“Despite all the horrors
prepared for us prisoners by fate, life went on. Life! It is all
powerful!
It cuts a path for itself, like the delicate fairy-ring mushrooms
pushing
up through hard thick asphalt” 17
This,
along with the particular determination of one who had at core a
philosophical
vision and a political cause, is all that could explain what Bukharin
wrote
next, the last thing he ever wrote. It pulsed with energy and zest for
life. It
was an autobiographical novel called Vremena (literally The
Times),
published in russian in 1994 and in english in 1998 as How It
All
Began. The title reflected
his desire to show the origins of the revolution in the higher impulses
that gave birth to it. It represented a radical shift in style from his
previous writings.It was more personal,
more vivid, more earthy, less alienated. Communists of his generation
were
not much inclined to write in an experiential mode. It
was virtually a memoir, even if names were changed. He must have
believed,
even if by a tattered thread, that this would give it a chance of
publication,
even if under a pseudonym. There was, however, no chance. As Cohen, who
played such an important role in finally bringing it to publication,
observed:
“Multicolored pictures of
pre-1917
The book was beautifully written.
It was full of the colour and detail of the natural world, of social
classes,
of religious traditions, of literary texts, of philosophical systems,
of
political debates. The portraits of personalities were psychologically
astute. In contrast to his polemics
on Kant in the philosophical manuscript he had just completed, he went
back his first encounter with Kant and conveyed how phenomena and
noumena
and antinomies and categories had all danced in his head like
mysterious
monsters, how transcendental idealism and categorical imperatives were
like cold pieces of intestine that you could fill with whatever you
wanted,
but could give no living answers to living questions. He also
recaptured
his discovery of marxism and how the world seemed in ferment and how
arguments
flared and passions blazed as they moved toward the revolution of 1905.
Knowing that he was about to die,
he was reviewing his life and the very meaning of life. He did so in a
way that was remarkably, even astoundingly, full of the joy of life,
considering
what tragedy was engulfing him and extinguishing the joy of life on
such
a grand scale. The book broke off
in mid-sentence. Reading it, even
knowing it to be an unfinished work ended by its author’s death, there
comes a jolt, bringing some kind of unexpected immediacy to the
realisation
of what a living striving person had life seized from him, the sort of
person who was taken to be shot dead just as he was writing this text
so
full of life. In his last letters, preparing to die, while still
pleading
to live, he had particularly asked not to be shot, but instead to be
given
poison 'like Socrates'. Nevertheless
he was shot. He was dead.
While
writing the novel, he went on trial, one of the most famous trials in
the
history of the world. He confessed
to the general charges, but he sparred with the prosecutor on specific
charges, refuted testimony of others, denied even knowing some of his
alleged
co-conspirators. He formulated his
very confession with subordinate clauses that virtually contradicted
the
main assertions:
“I
plead guilty to …the sum total of crimes committed by this
counter-revolutionary
organisation, irrespective of whether or not I knew of, whether or not
I took direct part in, any particular act” 19
He
was walking a tightrope, hoping that he was playing enough of the role
written for him in this drama to save his family and his manuscripts,
yet
departing from the script enough to communicate as much of the truth as
he could rescue within this act of the tragedy.He
refuted charges of espionage. He denied any involvement in political
assassinations,
especially of Lenin:
“I
refute the accusation of having plotted against the life of Vladimir
Ilyich,
but my counter-revolutionary confederates, and I at their head,
endeavoured
to murder Lenin's cause, which is being carried on with such tremendous
success by Stalin.” 20
The
voice of the true believer constantly burst through, even in the guise
of a tortuous twisted logic:
“The
extreme gravity of the crime is obvious, the political responsibility
immense,
the legal responsibility such that it will justify the severest
sentence.
The severest sentence would be justified, because a man deserves to be
shot ten times over for such crimes. This I admit quite categorically
and
without any hesitation at all. I want briefly to explain the facts
regarding
my criminal activities and my repentance of my misdeeds.I
already said when giving my main testimony during the trial, that it
was
not the naked logic of the struggle that drove us, the
counter-revolutionary
conspirators, into this stinking underground life, which has been
exposed
at this trial in ail its starkness. This naked logic of the struggle
was
accompanied by a degeneration of ideas, a degeneration of psychology, a
degeneration of ourselves… As this process advanced all the time very
rapidly
under the conditions of a developing class struggle, this struggle, its
speed, its existence, acted as the accelerator, as the catalytic agent
of the process which was expressed in the acceleration of the process
of
degeneration…It took place amidst colossal socialist construction, with
its immense scope, tasks, victories, difficulties, heroism.And
on this basis, it seems to me probable that every one of us sitting
here
in the dock suffered from a peculiar duality of mind, an incomplete
faith
in his counter-revolutionary cause… Hence a certain semi-paralysis of
the
will, a retardation of reflexes… this was due not to the absence of
consistent
thought, but to the objective grandeur of socialist construction… A
dual
psychology arose…Even I was sometimes carried away by the eulogies I
wrote
of socialist construction, although on the morrow I repudiated this by
practical actions of a criminal character…We came out against the joy
of
the new life with the most criminal methods of struggle…The logic of
this
struggle led us step by step into the blackest, quagmire. And it has
once
more been proved that departure from the position of bolshevism means
siding
with political counter-revolutionary banditry. Counter-revolutionary
banditry
has now been smashed, we have been smashed, and we repent our frightful
crimes.” 21
As other commentators have suggested,
his trial testimony, as well as his prison manuscripts, must be read as
a coded attempt to communicate covertly something sometimes utterly at
odds with what he was asserting overtly. Certainly this final
declaration
in court was that. The dual psychology could better be read as an
analysis
of the prosecutors rather than the defendants.
Nevertheless, despite all the
codifications and equivocations and refutations, he admitted to leading
a counter-revolutionary bloc engaging in terrorist activities devoted
to
restoring capitalism. It was a bitter slander against himself and his
comrades.
It was acquiescing in deception and humiliation. His declarations of
loyalty
to his prosecutors, most particularly to Stalin, were insincere or
conflicted,
but his affirmation of the cause of socialism was utterly sincere.
Looking
back on his testimony and trial, Anna Larina asserted:
“But the most amazing thing
is that, despite everything, the time of shining hopes had not passed
for
him. He would pay for these hopes with his head. Moreover, one reason
for
his preposterous confessions in the dock – incomplete, but sufficiently
egregious confessions – was precisely this: he still hoped that the
idea
to which he had dedicated his life would triumph” 22
The
sentence of death was passed on Bukharin as well as on Rykov, Yagoda
and
others, including Trotsky in absentia. The world looked on. A number of
international observers were convinced as were many soviet citizens.
Those
who were not convinced were often fearful or confused. Communists
abroad
were disoriented, even traumatised, by the drama. They might have found
the scenario of betrayal and espionage unbelievable, but the
alternative
interpretation was unthinkable.
The whole history of the revolution
was rewritten. Books of Bukharin, indeed of all the purged, disappeared
from libraries. Photographs were doctored to erase their presence from
seminal events. Soon after the trial
came the publication of The History of the Communist Party of
the
The interaction between philosophy
and politics in these decades was quite complex. During the political
debates
and the purges and accompanying all the abrupt twists and turns of
comintern
policy, the exhortation to “think dialectically, comrade” was used to
justify
the wildest irrationality and arbitrariness. When war came, Stalin
worried
about the suppression of habits of rationality and ordered that
textbooks
on formal logic be written and disseminated in the belief that rational
thinking was necessary to the war effort. There was a corresponding
de-emphasis
on the dialectic and on Hegel. Stalin declared Hegel’s philosophy to be
an aristocratic reaction to the french revolution, which had as much to
do with whipping up anti-german feeling after the nazi invasion of
soviet
territory than with any considered judgement on the history of
philosophy.
There was an increasing emphasis on russian patriotism, even in the
approach
to history and science and philosophy. Many theories and discoveries
deriving
from elsewhere were re-attributed to russians.23
After the war, life normalised
in some respects, but the stultification of intellectual and political
life continued. There was a new campaign against bourgeois
cosmopolitanism
that re-inforced all of the worst tendencies to intellectual conformism
and cowardice. After the death of Stalin in 1953 and a new struggle for
power came the 20th party congress in 1956 and Khrushchev’s
devastating revelations and condemnations, full of vivid details of
false
accusations and mass repressions, even quotes from agonised letters of
the accused and their last words before execution.
There was a time of thaw when
truth was spoken in public, when victims were released from camps, when
economic and political reforms were debated. Bukharin’s wife and son
were
reunited. Many of those who had been purged were rehabilitated,
including
a number of defendants in the big show trials. Bukharin and the other
most
high profile defendants, Rykov, Zinoviev, Kamenev, were not
rehabilitated,
even though the quashing of the charges against their supposed
co-conspirators
made the charges against them even more incredible and incoherent.
There
was ongoing resistance, especially from those implicated. It applied
particularly
to Bukharin, because of his association with an attractive alternative.
In 1961 Anna Larina finally delivered Bukharin’s last testament to a
party
control commission investigating the case for his rehabilitation. In
1962
Pospelov, a central committee member close to Khrushchev, stated
unequivocally
to an all-union conference of historians, that neither Bukharin nor
Rykov
was a spy or a traitor.24 However by 1964 opponents
of
reform
were again ascendant and Khrushchev was replaced by Brezhnev.
There was a revival of Bukharin’s
ideas, even though his name was still under official ban, from 1956 in
the
I
lived in
On one occasion, when I was asked
to give a lecture outlining my research at the
Despite
fabricated charges, forced confessions, judicial execution, banned
books
and falsified histories, Bukharin did break through to posterity and
did
so with a frayed but unbroken thread of continuity. Wolfe asked in 1957:
“Why
is it that [Bukharin’s} heresy, so often condemned, so often refuted,
so
often punished, is so often resurrected? Why does this ghost not keep
to
his grave, though the stake is driven into his corpse again and again?”25
He
was known, not only to scholars who wanted to know history truthfully,
but also to activists who wanted to shape history meaningfully and
progressively.
He had been a prominent political figure internationally in the 1920s.
He was known throughout the world as a theoretician of the revolution.
His books were published abroad in many languages and many editions,
particularly
The ABC of Communism and Historical Materialism. They
were
manuals in political schools. Even after he fell from power as a
politician
at the highest level, he continued to publish at home and abroad in the
1930s. He led the soviet delegation to the international history of
science
congress in
Bukharin
was fortunate to have attracted a biographer of the stature and
persistence
of Stephen Cohen. His work Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution
published in 1973 brought Bukharin to life for me as for many others.
It
was an important source in writing about Bukharin in my own book Marxism
and the Philosophy of Science that I was writing in the 1970s. It
was influential in keeping the profile of Bukharin alive and clear of
corrupting
calumnies. Bukharin’s son Yuri Larin discovered it and began a
prolonged
underground project of translating it into russian. Among those who
read
it eventually was Mikhail Gorbachev. The other key figure in mediating
between Bukharin and future generations was, of course, his young wife
Anna Larina, although it was decades before she could break into the
public
arena to say what she had to say. She knew him from the time she was a
child, as a daughter of a prominent bolshevik and friend of Bukharin.
She
never saw him again after his arrest in 1937 and suffered prison,
exile,
separation from her baby son. When
widow, son and biographer teamed up in the 1970s and began to gather
others,
his path to posterity opened into the process that would eventually
bring
his prison manuscripts out of dark vaults into the light of day.
With
the ascendancy of Gorbachev came glasnost and perestroika and recovery
of history. These were ideas associated with the legacy of Bukharin as
well as ideas creating an atmosphere favourable to his rehabilitation.
This time it happened. Bukharin was judicially exonerated of all
criminal
charges and restored to party membership in 1988. What followed was a
bukharinist
boom. The memoirs of Anna Larina were a publishing sensation. After
years
of captivity, then obscurity, she became a celebrity. There were many
books,
articles, broadcasts, films, plays and exhibitions featuring
Bukharin. His
last testament was finally given to the mass of party members. It was
read
at party meetings to tearful and powerful responses. For many soviet
citizens,
it was 'an emotional excursion into their long forbidden past.' 26
It was highly charged and much of the charge from this spread to other
socialist countries in
Then
came the next act of the tragedy. The world turned upside down again.In
1992 Anna Larina finally received a letter written to her in 1938.
Bukharin
on the eve of his fateful trial, exhorted her to:
“Remember
that the great cause of the
She
read it in a world in which the
Whatever
may come in the future that may draw something deeper than dominant
ideology
cliché from this past, the
This
manuscript is a document in that story. Its author had the astonishing
composure and commitment to want to move the story onward not only in
his
life but after his death. He believed
that the brightness of the original vision was strong enough to
overcome
the darkness. It did break through somehow throughout all of those
years
even if the darkness prevailed. Those who accused those who dreamed of
socialism of conspiring to restore capitalism, those who kept the truth
of it in forbidden vaults, were the ones who sowed the seeds of
reaction
and restoration.
He
could not have envisioned when labouring in his bleak cell to write the
310 tightly handwritten pages of this text that it would be buried in a
vault for 54 years, that it would be published in a Russia that had
renounced
the legacy of the USSR, that it would come to me via 41 e-mail
attachments
from New York to Dublin in 2001 as I faced the task of bridging his
world
and ours. We all write into a vast unknown. We imagine an audience, but
our published words move into the world along paths previously
unimagined.
So
how relevant is this text written so long ago and now published in our
world of gloating globalised capitalism? Is it only a
documentation of
doomed dreams or is it a voice from the dead saying something
substantial
to our post-modern post-philosophical times? I
believe that it is a voice reminding us of the capacity of marxism to
take
on the battle of ideas in our own times, to signpost the blind alleys
of
our own era, to rise up in the world again as an illuminating and
transforming
force. It is a voice inciting us to deal with the darkness of our own
days
and to reach for the future.
Helena
Sheehan
Dublin
2002
Notes:
1.
Stephen Cohen Bukharin and the
Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography
2.
3.
Nikolai Bukharin “Avtobiografiia” p55, cited in Cohen, op cit, p14
4.
Bukharin Historical Materialism
5.
Sheehan, op cit, chapter 5 on the philosophy and politics of the
comintern.
6.
Bukharin Science at the Crossroads
7.
Antonio Gramsci Selections from the Prison Notebooks
8.
Bukharin Marxism and Modern Thought
9.
Anna Larina This I Cannot Forget
10.
Larina, ibid, p314
11.
Larina, ibid
12.
Bukharin “To a future generation of party leaders” appendix to Larina,
ibid, p343-5
13.
For all information about these manuscripts I am indebted to the work
of
Stephen Cohen, primarily in the form published in his introduction to How
It All Began. I am also grateful to him for a number of letters,
telephone
conversations and a meeting in
14.
Bukharin to Stalin, 1937, cited by Cohen, “Bukharin’s Fate”
introduction
to How It All Began
15.
Bukharin to Larina,
16.
Will OldhamI See a Darkness CD
Palace 1999.
17.
Larina, op cit, p152
18.
Cohen, op cit, p xxvii
19.
The Case of the Anti-Soviet Block of Rights and Trotskyites
20.
ibid
21.
ibid
22.
Larina, op cit, p305
23.
I have written in much greater detail the trajectory of Soviet
intellectual
life from 1917 to 1945 in chapter 4 of Marxism and the Philosophy
of
Science: A Critical History. Sections of this lengthy chapter can
be
found on the web indexed at www.comms.dcu.ie/sheehanh/mxphsc.htm
24.
Cohen Rethinking the Soviet Experience
25.
Bertram Wolfe Khrushchev and Stalin’s
26.
Cohen “The Afterlife of Nikolai Bukharin” introduction to Larina, op
cit,
p29
27.
Bukharin to Larina, op cit
28.
This is the stance taken by Martin Amis in Koba the Dread