Unearthing the Real Bukharin

At age seventeen, Bukharin joined the Bolsheviks during the 1905 Revolution and helped rally Moscow youth groups into a citywide organization. Along with fellow students Valerian Osinsky and Vladimir Smirnov, he spearheaded “theoretical raids” at Moscow University seminars, putting forward Marxist critiques against liberal professors. He was also involved in the workers’ movement and by age twenty was elected to the Bolshevik Moscow Committee.

Bukharin made his mark, however, as an economist and theoretician. The free enterprise system analyzed in Capital had undergone profound changes that he examined in Imperialism and World Economy. Influenced by Rudolf Hilferding’s Finance Capital, Bukharin described how free competition of early capitalism was supplanted by “monopoly alliances of entrepreneurs” in which “state capitalist trusts” of “several hundred billionaires and millionaires hold in their hands the fate of the whole world.” During the war, state power was “sucking in almost all branches of production” and “more and more became a direct exploiter, organizing and directing production as a collective capitalist.”

But the major issue that placed the rising young star at loggerheads with Lenin was over the Marxist theory of the state. Several European Marxists, including Anton Pannekoek and Zeth Höglund, had rehabilitated the anti-statism of Marx, while Bukharin became the first Bolshevik to do so in his Toward a Theory of the Imperialist State. Lenin refused to publish the essay and accused Bukharin of “semi-anarchism” for advocating the “exploding of the state.” Bukharin complained to Lenin of rumors that the leader had surrounded himself with an obsequious coterie (presumably Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev) and would not tolerate anyone “with brains.”

When Bukharin returned to Moscow in May 1917, Nadezhda Krupskaya’s first words to him were that Lenin “no longer has any disagreements with you on the question of the state.” Lenin had undertaken his own research on Marxism on the State before he returned to Russia that would guide much of his 1917 strategy. Lenin’s arguments for insurrection were seen by many of his lieutenants, including Kamenev and Zinoviev in Petrograd and Viktor Nogin in Moscow, as “almost a betrayal of accepted Marxist ideology” according to Bukharin. Cohen posits that Lenin relied on new leaders such as Leon Trotsky and Interdistricters in Petrograd and Bukharin and young Moscow Lefts to overcome the Bolshevik right wing and push his party toward the October Revolution later that year.

In early 1918, Bukharin headed “the largest and powerful Bolshevik opposition in the history of the Soviet Union.” Bukharin and his young Moscow comrades inspired the Left Communists to oppose the peace treaty with Germany, calling for a guerilla “holy war against militarism and imperialism” and produced their own journal, Kommunist. The future defender of “socialism in one country” was the most resolute internationalist, asserting that it was their duty to aid the fledgling European rebellion that was underway in Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest.

With the young Soviet state’s resources stretched and a population eager for peace, support for the Left Communists quickly melted, but the faction persisted in defending their differences with Lenin over the transition to socialism. With the economic catastrophe worsening, Lenin called for an end to nationalizations, giving commissars “dictatorial powers,” technical and financial collaboration with capitalists, and increased labor discipline to restore productivity (supplanting workers’ control in the process). Bukharin reviewed Lenin’s State and Revolution enthusiastically in Kommunist, with its repudiation of bureaucratic political and economic authority. For Bukharin and the Left, Lenin’s volte-face represented an abandonment of the ideals of the “commune state.”

Cohen describes Bukharin’s 1920 Economics of the Transition Period as his “ode to war communism.” During the Civil War, it provided “a theoretical justification of voluntarism and social leaps,” as well as coercion against the peasantry to feed the Red Army. Bukharin claimed there was “a struggle between the organizing tendencies of the proletariat and the commodity-anarchical tendencies of the peasantry.” With the Civil War over and the Soviet Union ravaged by economic catastrophe and famine, Bukharin revised his earlier positions. Within a year, he argued that this same working class itself “has been peasantized” and later would assert that war communism had been a “caricature of socialism.”

Lenin’s more lenient New Economic Policy (NEP), introduced in 1921, emphasized persuasion instead of coercion and encouraged peasants to cultivate their own land and to sell their produce on the market. Bukharin was Lenin’s closest collaborator after his second stroke at the end of 1922. By April 1923, Bukharin had become “the most convinced and consistent defender” of the smychka (“alliance”) between the working class and peasantry and advocate of the NEP. Citing Lenin’s last five articles before his January 1924 death, Cohen shows that Bukharin reiterated arguments initially made by the Bolshevik leader. Lenin warned against “exaggerated revolutionism” and the need for a “‘reformist,’ gradualist, cautiously roundabout method of activity of economic construction.”

To get the entire population participating in cooperatives, posited Lenin, would take a “whole historical epoch,” at best, “one or two decades.” Collaboration between the working class and the peasantry was crucial, as a split “would be fatal for the Soviet Republic.”

Central to Bukharin’s vision of the worker-peasant smychka was lowering industrial prices for peasants as consumers. Instead of focusing on production, as had the Preobrazhensky and the forces now on the party’s left, Bukharin envisioned expanding peasant demand as the driving force to stimulate all branches of industry. Bukharin’s call for peasants to “enrich themselves” was aimed at the middle peasants, “the most important stratum” that had to be won by Soviet power.

The task was to pull the lower strata up through increasing output, rather than have them dwell in “equality in poverty.” Above all, Bukharin maintained the transition to socialism should not be “parasitic” based on “socialist primitive accumulation” and the rapid transfer of surplus from the countryside to the cities, as suggested by Preobrazhensky, since this would endanger the smychka and the Bolshevik government’s very survival.

Bukharin himself had used the term “socialist primitive accumulation” in his 1920 Economics of the Transition Period, but Cohen did not include Lenin’s commentary that this was “extremely unfortunate. A childish game in its imitation of terms, used by adults.” Given the brutal historical role that “primitive capitalist accumulation” had played in the early development of capitalism, it was preposterous to suggest that either the workers or peasants should be exploited under a workers’ state. Similarly, Bukharin himself later criticized Preobrazhensky’s method of treating the peasantry as objects outside the early socialist system, to be manipulated in the state’s interests in collectivization and forced industrialization.

With rising urban unemployment and without foreign investment, the late NEP crisis renewed the economic conundrum of how an isolated Soviet Union was to pay for further industrial expansion beyond the recovery of the early NEP. When Great Britain broke off diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in 1927, an exaggerated war scare ensued and brought Bukharin much closer to the Left on the need for increased state planning and spending on heavy industry. But as Bukharin asked, “the major problem: how is a poverty-ridden country to scrap together the abundant capital for industrialization?”

As Mike Haynes has argued, no democratic solution was possible for overcoming economic backwardness. Bukharin advocated a policy of a modest “belt-tightening” that included increased labor productivity. The Left favored increased taxation of so-called kulaks (“wealthy peasants”) and NEPmen (businessmen). Cohen points out that both strategies were framed within the confines of the NEP and both were far less draconian than Stalin’s ultimate solution of war against the entire peasantry and working class to pay for industrialization. As Cohen asserted, Bukharin and the Left “fought over principles while an intriguer gradually acquired the power to destroy them all.”

Cohen pulls no punches in critiquing the division of labor between Bukharin’s defense of the NEP and Stalin’s increasingly ruthless control of the party apparatus, closing his eyes to what he knew were “the opposition’s legitimate grievances.” Bukharin went so far as to rationalize the substitution problem in which the party had replaced the rule of an “immature” working class for its own rule — a deferral of self-emancipation that would become one of the pillars of Stalinism in the twentieth century. Bukharin never connected his analysis of Stalinism with his conception of state capitalism, as his old comrade Osinsky and the Democratic Centralist opposition had when they wrote that “Socialism and socialist organization must be built by the proletariat itself, otherwise it will not be built at all . . .”

The July 1928 Central Committee plenum, claims Cohen, was the crucial event in the confrontation with Stalin’s loyalists. By then Bukharin saw Stalin as “an unprincipled intriguer who subordinates everything to the preservation of his power” and who “changes theories depending on whom he wants to get rid of the most.” Support for Bukharin’s policies was substantial, but Stalin controlled the party apparatus as all the uncommitted members sided with him. For the first time, Stalin talked openly about a new Soviet agrarian policy, that the peasantry would have to pay “something in the nature of a ‘tribute’” to fund industrialization.

Before the plenum dispersed, Bukharin met secretly with former Left leader Kamenev. Bukharin described Stalin as a “Ghengis Khan” whose policies would destroy the revolution and that his disagreements with Stalin were “many times more serious than were our disagreements with you.” Kamenev recounted that Bukharin talked as “a man who is doomed.”

Much more was at stake than Bukharin’s personal fate. Cohen demonstrates that by mid-1928 Bukharin had understood, much better than the Left, the implications of Stalin and the bureaucracy’s new turn. The peasants’ “tribute” to the state was in fact the “military-feudal exploitation of the peasantry” to pay for industrialization. Stalin’s anti-kulak campaign was a war against the entire peasantry, which had created a “united village against us.” And Bukharin predicted that such policies would mean driving the peasants into collectives “by force.” Stalin was determined to “cut our throats,” while his policies were “leading to civil war. He will have to drown the uprisings in blood.”

Bukharin’s prognosis proved accurate. We now know the scale of resistance to Stalinism’s war against the peasantry, even without organized direction. In 1930 alone, 2,468,000 peasants participated in 13,754 mass disturbances, 176 of which were described by the OGPU (secret police) as of an “insurrectionary nature.” We also know that Ivanovo textile workers rebelled against the regime’s policies, that discontent spread to metalworkers in Moscow, and that OGPU reports to Stalin record similar sentiments around the Soviet Union.

The OGPU was particularly alarmed by workers’ and soldiers’ sympathetic attitudes to the peasants — the possibility of a smychka against Stalinism was a very real possibility.

Bukharin’s tragedy, according to Cohen, was his “unwillingness to appeal” to such “popular sentiment,” limiting the discussion over the fate of revolution to “a small private arena.” The larger tragedy was that the Left Opposition of Trotsky and the Bukharinsts did not find common ground when Stalinism launched its bloody four-year war against the peasantry and working class. Trotsky himself had incorrectly depicted Stalinism as a centrist “Bonapartist” regime, wavering between the interests of the working class and phantom kulaks. “The problem of Thermidor and Bonapartism is at bottom the problem of the kulak” which meant “With Stalin against Bukharin – Yes. With Bukharin against Stalin – Never!”