SPOKESMAN BOOKS
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Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation
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Catalogue
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Reviews
Bukharin’s
Prison Writings
Nikolai
Bukharin, translated by George Shriver, Socialism and Its Culture,
258
pages, Seagull Books, ISBN 978 1 90542 222 7, £16.99
Up-to-the-minute
capitalist globalism here presents itself at the service of ancient Communism.
The Prison Manuscripts of Nikolai Bukharin, written in unbelievable
‘medieval’ circumstances during his detention prior to the mock trial
which sentenced him to death, have been appearing in a series of volumes from
different publishers. I reviewed one of these a year ago, but here there
appears another, typeset in Calcutta and printed in Kings Lynn. This example
of international capitalist co-operation stands in marked contrast (which
would have astonished Bukharin) to the troubled evolution of the former Soviet
Union.
Where,
today, is the
‘respect
and comradeship in the relations between collective farmers of Turkmenistan
and those of Ukraine, those of Tajikistan and those of Georgia, those of the
Moscow region and those of Azerbaijan, those of Siberia, and those of
Birobijan (the Jewish autonomous region in the Soviet Far East) …’?
It
is unfortunately hazardous to believe one’s own propaganda too deeply, and
this kind of belief is a hallmark of Bukharin’s posthumous book. He argues
that the mutual respect and comradeship of the farmers
‘is
evident at the congresses held by collective farmers where the most important
decisions are made in common.’
It
is true that some collective farms have survived in a relatively healthy
condition, especially in Belarus. But the collegiality of decision making
withered long since, if it had ever truly existed.
Of
course, Bukharin was locked in prison, with no access to research materials,
and he had to write from memory. Equally significantly, he was actually
writing for a known audience of one, who alone held the power of life and
death over him. This was not a time to try to induct Stalin into a more
objective understanding of social conditions in the Soviet Union, and of the
relative powers of different social groups there. Whatever Bukharin said would
have to echo official propaganda in all substantial matters. The only relative
freedom of movement would be in matters of high ideology.
Even
here, flatulent slogans are by no means avoided.
‘The
USSR is showing the world a model of brotherhood and unity among
nationalities. This is not the abstract cosmopolitanism of a utopian
rationalist who fails to see the real particularities and distinctive features
among nationalities …’
There
would soon be time to explore these real particularities when whole
nationalities were being deported, very shortly after Bukharin’s own
extinction. This trauma had effects which lived on long after the Second World
War, and erupted in a series of bloody conflicts in the declining years of the
USSR, which persist and indeed get worse.
In
short, Bukharin’s parting thoughts have not weathered well. Since they were
marshalled under such adverse conditions, it is not really reasonable to
expect that they might. Quite aside from any appeal for clemency for himself,
which must have been a part of his thinking, even if unstated, these prison
writings were certainly aimed at securing a reprieve for his wife and young
son, Anna Larina and Yuri. Anna was half his age, and very beautiful. He doted
on her. But in fact, Anna had already been sent to the Gulag before these
writings were finished, and Yuri was already placed into foster care.
Steve
Cohen, Bukharin’s biographer, who describes his valiant efforts to recover
the Prison Manuscripts, tells us how Anna and Yuri were reunited, after she
had made a prolonged journey through Stalin’s prisons, labour camps and
Siberian exile, and after Yuri had spent two decades under a different family
name, in various foster homes and orphanages. Brought together again in 1956,
they met up with Bukharin’s biographer before the rehabilitation in 1988.
Bukharin
was a cultivated man and could be highly persuasive. But he was also capable
of lucid analysis and sober political judgement, which qualities are not very
evident in these Prison Manuscripts. If Stalin’s purge of the old Bolsheviks
was not simply an aberration, then it needed explanation. Evidently this
cannot be found in these pages. Attempts to explain would certainly bring down
on those who were presumptuous enough to embark upon them, condign punishment.
This
was the fate of Trotsky, who was already in exile, and who was, in 1940,
murdered by a KGB agent in Mexico (as is now known, with direct support from
Moscow).
It happens that Trotsky had published, in 1936, his remarkable book on The
Revolution Betrayed. Readers of Bukharin’s Prison Manuscripts will be
mainly motivated by the desire to understand the poignant tragedy of their
author. If they are looking for a real light on the subject of the
manuscripts, then they should certainly begin their reading with The
Revolution Betrayed, however far they may subsequently succeed in going
beyond it.
Since
1936 we in the West have also become familiar with another Russian voice,
which was not at that time very widely available. This was the voice of
André
Platonov, a certified ‘unstable element’ who left the Communist Party in
1921. It was only a year after Bukharin’s rehabilitation that saw the
publication in the Soviet Union of The Foundation Pit, which had been
written long before, from
1929-30.
A group of workers are digging an immense pit, to lay the foundations of a
colossal building, intended to house the local proletariat in its entirety.
This, of course, is destined never to be built.
Platonov
captures the extraordinary mixture of hope and despair ‘by which many
ordinary people must have lived during Stalin’s revolution from above’.
Perhaps those who seek to understand Bukharin’s tortured last manuscripts,
to do him justice need Platonov as their guide.
Ken
Coates
