(This is my special entry on Bukharin, as ridiculed by Lenin and as a despicable punk in life, and, as such, diametrically opposed to the ideal of some historians, who somewhat idiotically suggest that he could have been, and should have been, the positive alternative to Stalin!
The reader should not be surprised that my choice of Soviet political figures inserted between the Lenin and the Stalin subsections is limited to Trotsky and Bukharin, as both of them are featured in Lenin’s Testament, plus both of them have been discussed by historians (erroneously) as prospective successors to Lenin. There will be further discussions of early Soviet politicians, such as Kirov, Kalinin, etc., after the Stalin subsection which will begin with my next entry after this one.)
Post-Stalin historical revisionism and Western historiography love to portray Nikolai Bukharin as one of the topnotch contenders for early Soviet leadership, and as an across-the-board hands-down positive alternative to Stalin. But nothing can be more in conflict with the truth. To begin with, Bukharin was a follower and not a leader. At the same time, both in his political career, and in personal life, he was a despicable unprincipled flip-flopper, and a shameless user. Yes, he did die a violent death, but his genuine victim status ought not to make him automatically eligible for the laurels of a hero or for political sainthood, and in my book Comrade Bukharin is getting no sympathy!
I would not have wasted a separate entry on him, but, being appalled by the hypocrisy of his neo-revisionist fans who have virtually sanctified him, I feel the need to respond to their unwarranted accolades of him, and not somewhere in passim, but within the respectable format of an individual entry.
He prided himself on being the party’s leading theoretician and later in life he even became an Academician to the disgrace of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. But as a thinker he was a joke. The best academic work he had ever written was his ABC of Communism, a very crude popularization, or digest, of an already idiotic subject matter, which reveals him as a political hack inspired by his own promising career, but by no means as a serious scholar which he pretended to be.
Lenin was perfectly fair to “our Bukharchik,” when he poured a bucket of sarcasm on him in his Testament:
“Bukharin is not only the most valuable and most important theoretician in our party (big joke!) but he can also be rightfully considered as the favorite of the entire party; but his theoretical views can only with the greatest reserve be regarded as Marxist… He has never studied dialectics, and, I think, he has never fully understood them.”
Nobody in his own mind can read this with a straight face, pretending that this is some kind of endorsement, or an approving comment on Bukharin, and not an act of his political assassination by ridicule, on Lenin’s part. Even his use of the oddly un-Bolshevik characterization as a “favorite of the entire party” (“lyubimets vsei partii” in Russian) triggers a certain unflattering association which we will be pointing out right away.
In his political opinions Bukharin was what the Russians call a “KVD, kudá véter dúyet, wherever the wind blows.” He changed his positions one hundred eighty degrees overnight, from left to right and from right to left, depending on the official attitudes in Moscow. He cultivated friendships of important people, such as Zinoviev and Kamenev seemed to him at one time, but next, he would be gloating over their demise. Having finally figured out that it was Stalin who was running the show in Russia, he tried to become Stalin’s stooge, but demonstrably unsuccessfully, as Stalin loathed insincere stooges and preferred to get rid of them all. In 1938 he got rid of Bukharin as well. All this has been documented with chronological precision, leaving no room for guesswork, and yet Bukharin’s apologists like to look the other way, promoting their disingenuous agenda, depicting Bukharin as the alleged “positive alternative!” But how can a man virtually referred to as ‘a prostitute’ by Lenin himself (this is, in fact, exactly what Lenin had in mind, in my judgment, when he so oddly called Bukharin “lyubimets vsei partii,” such interpretation being completely consistent with both his exhibited behavior and his basic character).
Unlike most of his ethnic-Russian colleagues, who had retained their membership in the Russian Orthodox Club and reveled in its conspiratorial practices, Bukharin was an atheist. He never attended church, and saw no sanctity in marriage. He was an unabashed womanizer, using his VIP status to get himself attractive girls. He became much more circumspect, however, only when he realized that his career, and, possibly, even his life could be in danger during the later years. Aside from his numerous random congresses, there were three “steady” women in his life. The first one was Nadezhda Mikhailovna Lukina, his maternal cousin and sister of the notable Bolshevik scholar Nikolai Mikhailovich Lukin, Bukharin’s cousin. Their marriage took place in 1910, shortly before Bukharin went into a long exile, and was perhaps a career move on his part, to make himself more important in the Bolshevik circles. After the Bolshevik Revolution, however, the marriage did not last, mainly because of Bukharin’s in-your-face promiscuity, which was too much for his wife. The fact that by the time Bukharin dropped his first wife, Nikolai Lukin had somewhat faded, in comparison with the rising star of Nikolai Bukharin, ought not to be lightly dismissed, either. Next, he started openly living since 1921, outside of marriage, with a certain Esther Isaievna Gurvich, with whom he had a daughter (born in 1923) and whom he dumped in 1929. In 1934, although at that point he already was in serious disfavor, and must have realized that anybody associated with him would be running a mortal risk too, he got married to a certain Anna Larina, a young idealistic fan of his, twenty-six years his junior. She was an orphan of ethnic Russian origin, adopted by the family of the prominent Jewish Soviet economist Yuri Larin (born Mikhoel Zalmanovich Luria). Her young life having been doomed from the very beginning of this relationship, the long-suffering Anna Larina was to remain faithful to her executed husband all her life, a precious gift which Bukharin hardly deserved.
Another curious detail. Although Bukharin closely associated himself with Jews all his life (Trotsky was his closest acquaintance before Bukharin would turn against him, when anti-Trotskyism came into vogue), and he ought to have been more circumspect about such touchy things, yet he was known to exhibit an unusual recklessness and insensitivity in these matters, with some anti-Semitic undertones, passing himself, an ethnic Russian, as a shtetl Jew Moisha Aba Dolgolevsky. This was his assumed identity, which he used in jest in Russia among his acquaintances, and even semi-seriously when he traveled abroad, and the sheer incongruity of such false identification further testifies to the crookedness of his twisted mind. (He liked to explain this perversion to others, including his Jewish father-in-law Yuri Larin, as a hilarious ruse of his: at a time when most Jewish Bolsheviks had been known to have adopted convenient Russian-sounding assumed names for themselves (like “Larin”/Luria, for instance), he, Bukharin, delighted in doing the exact opposite thing!! If this was not an offensive display of explicit anti-Semitism on Bukharin’s part, then he must have been a very sick man, to do it without an apparent reason!
...Thus ending my small selection from the gallery of Lenin’s transitional epigones, it is time for us to turn the page now into a new era of the institutional Soviet power, and to meet the one and only candidate to fill the shoes--- not of Lenin, of course, an explicitly transitional figure, but of someone genuinely institutional and substantial, someone like… Peter the Great. So, welcome to Comrade Stalin!
The reader should not be surprised that my choice of Soviet political figures inserted between the Lenin and the Stalin subsections is limited to Trotsky and Bukharin, as both of them are featured in Lenin’s Testament, plus both of them have been discussed by historians (erroneously) as prospective successors to Lenin. There will be further discussions of early Soviet politicians, such as Kirov, Kalinin, etc., after the Stalin subsection which will begin with my next entry after this one.)
Post-Stalin historical revisionism and Western historiography love to portray Nikolai Bukharin as one of the topnotch contenders for early Soviet leadership, and as an across-the-board hands-down positive alternative to Stalin. But nothing can be more in conflict with the truth. To begin with, Bukharin was a follower and not a leader. At the same time, both in his political career, and in personal life, he was a despicable unprincipled flip-flopper, and a shameless user. Yes, he did die a violent death, but his genuine victim status ought not to make him automatically eligible for the laurels of a hero or for political sainthood, and in my book Comrade Bukharin is getting no sympathy!
I would not have wasted a separate entry on him, but, being appalled by the hypocrisy of his neo-revisionist fans who have virtually sanctified him, I feel the need to respond to their unwarranted accolades of him, and not somewhere in passim, but within the respectable format of an individual entry.
He prided himself on being the party’s leading theoretician and later in life he even became an Academician to the disgrace of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. But as a thinker he was a joke. The best academic work he had ever written was his ABC of Communism, a very crude popularization, or digest, of an already idiotic subject matter, which reveals him as a political hack inspired by his own promising career, but by no means as a serious scholar which he pretended to be.
Lenin was perfectly fair to “our Bukharchik,” when he poured a bucket of sarcasm on him in his Testament:
“Bukharin is not only the most valuable and most important theoretician in our party (big joke!) but he can also be rightfully considered as the favorite of the entire party; but his theoretical views can only with the greatest reserve be regarded as Marxist… He has never studied dialectics, and, I think, he has never fully understood them.”
Nobody in his own mind can read this with a straight face, pretending that this is some kind of endorsement, or an approving comment on Bukharin, and not an act of his political assassination by ridicule, on Lenin’s part. Even his use of the oddly un-Bolshevik characterization as a “favorite of the entire party” (“lyubimets vsei partii” in Russian) triggers a certain unflattering association which we will be pointing out right away.
In his political opinions Bukharin was what the Russians call a “KVD, kudá véter dúyet, wherever the wind blows.” He changed his positions one hundred eighty degrees overnight, from left to right and from right to left, depending on the official attitudes in Moscow. He cultivated friendships of important people, such as Zinoviev and Kamenev seemed to him at one time, but next, he would be gloating over their demise. Having finally figured out that it was Stalin who was running the show in Russia, he tried to become Stalin’s stooge, but demonstrably unsuccessfully, as Stalin loathed insincere stooges and preferred to get rid of them all. In 1938 he got rid of Bukharin as well. All this has been documented with chronological precision, leaving no room for guesswork, and yet Bukharin’s apologists like to look the other way, promoting their disingenuous agenda, depicting Bukharin as the alleged “positive alternative!” But how can a man virtually referred to as ‘a prostitute’ by Lenin himself (this is, in fact, exactly what Lenin had in mind, in my judgment, when he so oddly called Bukharin “lyubimets vsei partii,” such interpretation being completely consistent with both his exhibited behavior and his basic character).
Unlike most of his ethnic-Russian colleagues, who had retained their membership in the Russian Orthodox Club and reveled in its conspiratorial practices, Bukharin was an atheist. He never attended church, and saw no sanctity in marriage. He was an unabashed womanizer, using his VIP status to get himself attractive girls. He became much more circumspect, however, only when he realized that his career, and, possibly, even his life could be in danger during the later years. Aside from his numerous random congresses, there were three “steady” women in his life. The first one was Nadezhda Mikhailovna Lukina, his maternal cousin and sister of the notable Bolshevik scholar Nikolai Mikhailovich Lukin, Bukharin’s cousin. Their marriage took place in 1910, shortly before Bukharin went into a long exile, and was perhaps a career move on his part, to make himself more important in the Bolshevik circles. After the Bolshevik Revolution, however, the marriage did not last, mainly because of Bukharin’s in-your-face promiscuity, which was too much for his wife. The fact that by the time Bukharin dropped his first wife, Nikolai Lukin had somewhat faded, in comparison with the rising star of Nikolai Bukharin, ought not to be lightly dismissed, either. Next, he started openly living since 1921, outside of marriage, with a certain Esther Isaievna Gurvich, with whom he had a daughter (born in 1923) and whom he dumped in 1929. In 1934, although at that point he already was in serious disfavor, and must have realized that anybody associated with him would be running a mortal risk too, he got married to a certain Anna Larina, a young idealistic fan of his, twenty-six years his junior. She was an orphan of ethnic Russian origin, adopted by the family of the prominent Jewish Soviet economist Yuri Larin (born Mikhoel Zalmanovich Luria). Her young life having been doomed from the very beginning of this relationship, the long-suffering Anna Larina was to remain faithful to her executed husband all her life, a precious gift which Bukharin hardly deserved.
Another curious detail. Although Bukharin closely associated himself with Jews all his life (Trotsky was his closest acquaintance before Bukharin would turn against him, when anti-Trotskyism came into vogue), and he ought to have been more circumspect about such touchy things, yet he was known to exhibit an unusual recklessness and insensitivity in these matters, with some anti-Semitic undertones, passing himself, an ethnic Russian, as a shtetl Jew Moisha Aba Dolgolevsky. This was his assumed identity, which he used in jest in Russia among his acquaintances, and even semi-seriously when he traveled abroad, and the sheer incongruity of such false identification further testifies to the crookedness of his twisted mind. (He liked to explain this perversion to others, including his Jewish father-in-law Yuri Larin, as a hilarious ruse of his: at a time when most Jewish Bolsheviks had been known to have adopted convenient Russian-sounding assumed names for themselves (like “Larin”/Luria, for instance), he, Bukharin, delighted in doing the exact opposite thing!! If this was not an offensive display of explicit anti-Semitism on Bukharin’s part, then he must have been a very sick man, to do it without an apparent reason!
...Thus ending my small selection from the gallery of Lenin’s transitional epigones, it is time for us to turn the page now into a new era of the institutional Soviet power, and to meet the one and only candidate to fill the shoes--- not of Lenin, of course, an explicitly transitional figure, but of someone genuinely institutional and substantial, someone like… Peter the Great. So, welcome to Comrade Stalin!
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