A legendary revolutionary

Alan Brien

Bukhcirin and the Bolshevik Revolution Stephen Cohen (Wildwood House £4.50) Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky — then whom? The common reader can probably name, at most, only two other founding fathers of the Revolution — Zinoviev, mainly because of the famous forged "Zinoviev Letter." And Bukharin, the, Last Bolshevik, the original of Koestler's Rubashov in Darkness at Noon, tried and shot by Stalin in the final show trial of 1938, confessing to unimaginable crimes and conspiracies because of his devotion to the Party. Such, at least, is the legend.

Professor Cohen's book sets out to put the legend right. Partly because °fit, young leftist activists in the United States,,have begun to adopt Bukharin as the unknown revolutionary, the forgotten philosopher. And Professor Cohen makes a persuasive case for Bukharin rather than Trotsky as the alternative to Stalinism, the true heir of Lenin. In Eastern Europe, he suggests, it is Bukharinist-style ideas and policies which are being revived.

In Yugoslavia, Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia, Communist reformists have become advocates of market socialism, balanced economic planning and growth, evolutionary development, civil peace, a mixed agricultural sector and tolerance of social and cultural pluralism within the framework of the one-party state.

This 'socialist humanism' was Bukharin's distinctive contribution to the debate on ways and means, ends and means, in the early days of the Soviet Union.

Professor Cohen also combats the "widespread misconception that Bukharin willingly confessed to hideous, preposterous crimes in order to repudiate what he himself represented, to repent sincerely his opposition to Stalinism, and thereby perform a 'last service' to its myth of infallibility."

Bukharin was the youngest among the Bolshevik leadership. Born in 1883, he became a schoolboy revolutionary during the first stirrings of revolt in 1905. He was tiny, just around five feet, always chirpy and boyish, attractive to women, sympathetic to dhildren, gay and witty — the most 'intellectual' of them all, in both the pejorative and the flattering sense of the term. The idea that Communist politicians wore their ideology like a strait-jacket of dogma, every one in the same uniform, cannot survive any serious study of the period. Lenin,

was always taking two steps forward and one step back — the title indeed of one of his works.

And this was before the Party came to power. Afterwards, their theorists discovered they had even less of an agreed programme on how to operate the power machine they had captured. But Bukharin was exceptional even in this company.

In the earliest days, he was on the far left, protesting that Lenin was continually making "concessions to bourgeois principle and practice." He backed instead the policy of War Communism — egalitarianism with a gun, the military organisation of labour, the extraction of surpluses from the peasant by coercion rather than by reward — while still retaining his Utopian optimism and his trust in "revolution from below."

But when Lenin adopted his 'new economic policy' legalising exactly those methods Bukharin had condemned, he became its warmest, and most convincing, theoretician, the ideologue of the Far Right. From 1923 onwards, he was the spokesman of the prosperous peasant. He was the protagonist of 'Socialism in One Country' — the slogan which was to bring Stalin to supreme power.

His fellows, though not above pillaging his ideas, could not help regarding him as an unreliable ally. Lenin described him, in his death-bed testament, in the much-quoted phrase "the favourite of the Party." But earlier, in 1920, he was affectionate but dismissive— We know tiow soft Bukharin is: it is one of the qualities we love him for and cannot help loving him for. We know that more than once he has been called in jest 'soft wax.' It appears tlfat any 'unprincipled' person, any 'demagogue,' can make an impression on that 'soft wax.'

Trotsky's epitome in his autobiography is colder and brisker: "This man's nature is such

, that he must always lean on somebody, be dependent on somebody. He becomes in these conditions nothing more than a medium through which somebody else speaks and acts." 'And. for . the Vaditional,.yiew of Bukharin, Professoa.,HrCarirsupplies.the final report: "a combination of rigidity in ideas with malleability of temperament,made him a ready tool in the hands of men less single-minded and more politically astute. Once convinced by the process of reasoning of the rightness of a policy, he stuck to it with great tenacity and without regard for its consequences to others or him

self." One can see that it produced the maximum of self-satisfaction with the mini" mum of self-defence.

Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago accepts that portrait of Bukharin. Like manY ex-prisoners from concentration camps, he judges with a mixture of vanity and arrogance those who never suffered. There is a gloat in his voice as he recalls the trials of the former leaders who "marched forth like doleful obedient goats and bleated out everything they had been ordered to, vomited all over themselves. cringingly abased themselves and their convictions ... came before the judges' drenched in their own urine."

For him, there is no riddle. The mistake was to think them supermen — they were weaklings (his italics) and Stalin knew it. The real heroes were those who refused to talk and died, either by their own hand or the executioners, behind the scenes. Bukharin, "the highest and brightest intelligence of all," Was the most despicable. Solzhenitsyn describes in vivid detail how he crawled to Stalin to the last, writing begging letters, pleading his old friendship. How he told his intimates as each former colleague was tried and shot — "That's the kind of people they were, maybe there's something to it." How he lacked the courage to kill himself, the endurance to keep up his hunger strike. How he at last collaborated at his own trial, speaking the words prepared for him bY the Great Producer, on the promise of being allowed to go on living.

It is a pity that Professor Cohen's book came just too early to confirm or refute The Gulag Archipelago version. According to Professor Cohen, Bukharin

in a dazzling exhibition of double-talk, evasion, code words, veiled allusions, exercises in logic, and stubborn denials, regularly seized the initiative from an increasingly flustered Vishinsky and left the case of the real prosecutor, Stalin, a shambles.

The extracts he gives from the transcript seem to 'bear out this interpretation, as do contemporary reports in the Western press. The New York Times correspondent wrote— Mr Bukharin alone, who all too obviously fullY expected to die, was manly, proud, almost defiant. He is the first of the 54 men who have faced the court il the last three public treason trials who has not abuse“ himself ... He was making his last appearance and last utterance on the world stage and he seemed simply and intensely an earnest man completelY unafraid but merely trying to get his story straight before the world.

If he did not denounce the whole proceedings as an obscene farce, it was to save, not his own life, but those of his young wife and new-born child — both of whom anyway spent twentY years in the Gulag Archipelago until released, along with Solzhenitsyn, under Krushchev.

Bukharin had opportunities to escape, but, . like Solzhenitsyn, he refused to be a voluntarY emigre. Until the end, so long as he was allovved to write, he attacked the dictatorship of Stalin in-the Soviet press — admittedly in that Ae" sopian language where the message is written in invisible ink between the lines. But no one who wanted to read it could miss it, as Professor Cohen demonstrates at length. He was a lonely friend of independent science, a champion of the free voice in the arts, a supporter of the oppressed at home and abroad to the end. Only a few others saw the menace of Hitler in 1933, and they tended to turn a blind eye to Stalin. More understood the menace of Stalin, but they tended to underestimate Hitler. Bukharin almost alone appreciated they were mirror images of each other and let it be known that in condemning one he was condemning both. Simply for that he deserves rehabilitation as an internationai figure of the first rank which this book awards him.

Alan Brien was formerly theatre critic of The Spectator. He now writes for the SundaY Times.