39 Facts About Nikolai Bukharin

1.

Nikolai Bukharin joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1906.

2.

From 1926 to 1929, Nikolai Bukharin enjoyed great power as General Secretary of the Comintern's executive committee.

3.

However, Stalin's decision to proceed with collectivisation drove the two men apart, and Nikolai Bukharin was expelled from the Politburo in 1929.

4.

Nikolai Bukharin was born on 27 September, 1888, in Moscow.

5.

Nikolai Bukharin was the second son of two schoolteachers, Ivan Gavrilovich Bukharin and Liubov Ivanovna Bukharina.

6.

Nikolai Bukharin's childhood is vividly recounted in his mostly autobiographic novel How It All Began.

7.

Nikolai Bukharin joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1906, becoming a member of the Bolshevik faction.

8.

Nikolai Bukharin met his future first wife, Nadezhda Mikhailovna Lukina, his cousin and the sister of Nikolai Lukin, who was a member of the party.

9.

In 1911, after a brief imprisonment, Nikolai Bukharin was exiled to Onega in Arkhangelsk, but he soon escaped to Hanover.

10.

Nikolai Bukharin stayed in Germany for a year before visiting Krakow in 1912 to meet Vladimir Lenin for the first time.

11.

Nikolai Bukharin developed an interest in the works of Austrian Marxists and heterodox Marxist economic theorists, such as Aleksandr Bogdanov, who deviated from Leninist positions.

12.

When Trotsky arrived in New York in January 1917, Nikolai Bukharin was the first of the emigres to greet him.

13.

Nikolai Bukharin left New York in early April and returned to Russia by way of Japan, arriving in Moscow in early May 1917.

14.

On 10 October 1917, Nikolai Bukharin was elected to the Central Committee, along with two other Moscow Bolsheviks: Andrei Bubnov and Grigori Sokolnikov.

15.

Nikolai Bukharin then represented the Moscow Soviet in their report to the revolutionary government in Petrograd.

16.

Nikolai Bukharin emerged as the leader of the Left Communists in bitter opposition to Lenin's decision to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

17.

Nikolai Bukharin revealed this in a Pravda article in 1924 and stated that it had been "a period when the party stood a hair from a split, and the whole country a hair from ruin".

18.

Nikolai Bukharin became the foremost supporter of the New Economic Policy, to which he was to tie his political fortunes.

19.

Nikolai Bukharin emerged as the leader of the Party's right wing, which included two other Politburo members and he became General Secretary of the Comintern's executive committee in 1926.

20.

Nikolai Bukharin was worried by the prospect of Stalin's plan, which he feared would lead to "military-feudal exploitation" of the peasantry.

21.

Nikolai Bukharin did want the Soviet Union to achieve industrialization but he preferred the more moderate approach of offering the peasants the opportunity to become prosperous, which would lead to greater grain production for sale abroad.

22.

Nikolai Bukharin pressed his views throughout 1928 in meetings of the Politburo and at the Communist Party Congress, insisting that enforced grain requisition would be counterproductive, as War Communism had been a decade earlier.

23.

Stalin attacked Nikolai Bukharin's views, portraying them as capitalist deviations and declaring that the revolution would be at risk without a strong policy that encouraged rapid industrialization.

24.

Yet Nikolai Bukharin played to Stalin's strength by maintaining the appearance of unity within the Party leadership.

25.

Nikolai Bukharin attempted to gain support from earlier foes including Kamenev and Zinoviev who had fallen from power and held mid-level positions within the Communist party.

26.

Jules Humbert-Droz, a former ally and friend of Nikolai Bukharin, wrote that in spring 1929, Nikolai Bukharin told him that he had formed an alliance with Zinoviev and Kamenev, and that they were planning to use individual terror to get rid of Stalin.

27.

Nikolai Bukharin wrote letters to Stalin pleading for forgiveness and rehabilitation, but through wiretaps of Bukharin's private conversations with Stalin's enemies, Stalin knew Bukharin's repentance was insincere.

28.

Nikolai Bukharin envisaged several parties and even nationalist parties, and stood for the maximum of decentralisation.

29.

When Nikolai Bukharin was arrested two years later, Boris Pasternak displayed extraordinary courage by having a letter delivered to Nikolai Bukharin's wife saying that he was convinced of his innocence.

30.

Stalin's collectivization policy proved to be as disastrous as Nikolai Bukharin predicted, but Stalin had by then achieved unchallenged authority in the party leadership.

31.

In February 1936, shortly before the purge started in earnest, Nikolai Bukharin was sent to Paris by Stalin to negotiate the purchase of the Marx and Engels archives, held by the German Social Democratic Party before its dissolution by Hitler.

32.

Nikolai Bukharin was joined by his young wife Anna Larina, which therefore opened the possibility of exile, but he decided against it, saying that he could not live outside the Soviet Union.

33.

Nikolai Bukharin, who had been forced to follow the Party line since 1929, confided to his old friends and former opponents his real view of Stalin and his policy.

34.

For some prominent Communists such as Bertram Wolfe, Jay Lovestone, Arthur Koestler, and Heinrich Brandler, the Nikolai Bukharin trial marked their final break with Communism and even turned the first three into passionate anti-Communists eventually.

35.

Nikolai Bukharin held out for three months, but threats to his young wife and infant son, combined with "methods of physical influence" wore him down.

36.

Nikolai Bukharin's confessions were somewhat different from others in that while he pleaded guilty to the "sum total of crimes", he denied knowledge when it came to specific crimes.

37.

Nikolai Bukharin was immensely popular within the party throughout the twenties and thirties, even after his fall from power.

38.

British author Martin Amis argues that Nikolai Bukharin was perhaps the only major Bolshevik to acknowledge "moral hesitation" by questioning, even in passing, the violence and sweeping reforms of the early Soviet Union.

39.

Nikolai Bukharin was a cartoonist who left many cartoons of contemporary Soviet politicians.