From the Dustbin of History
Begun in prison, this autobiographical novel by Nikolai
Bukharin was never finished.
By SCOTT MCLEMEE
f all the early Soviet leaders,
Nikolai Bukharin had perhaps the
greatest range of interests and talents. He
was a lifelong student of the natural
sciences, a gifted painter and caricaturist
and an experienced journalist. He read
widely in literature (Russian, European,
American). His writings on economics
from the early 1920's are among the
most sophisticated theoretical works by
a Bolshevik; they display a close
familiarity with contemporary Western
sociology, which Bukharin did not (like
his peers) dismiss as mere bourgeois
mystification. And all this intellectual
vigor was joined to a warm and
unpretentious personality. In the
document usually called his ''Testament,''
Lenin noted that his young protege was
''rightly considered the favorite of the whole party.''
But brilliance and charm are no match for raw cunning -- in politics least
of all. During the intraparty struggles following Lenin's death, Bukharin
joined Stalin in an alliance against Trotsky's ''left opposition.'' Whereupon
Stalin did a volte-face to isolate another danger: the ''right opposition,''
namely Bukharin and his co-thinkers, who wanted a mixed economy
incorporating both state-run industry and a vigorous market in agricultural
products. Politically neutralized -- his policies consigned to the dustbin of
history by the forced collectivization of the peasantry -- Bukharin
nonetheless remained an important functionary for the Soviet Government
through the mid-30's. Then, at the Moscow trials, he was named a major
co-conspirator in numerous acts of sabotage, espionage and
assassination. His performance in the docket was strange, almost playful.
While confessing to most of the charges, Bukharin contested the details
of the case -- calmly tearing it to shreds.
The trial's outcome was never in question. Sixty years ago this March,
Bukharin was taken to an execution cell, shot, then effectively written out
of Soviet history. Abroad he was remembered, if at all, mainly as the
prototype for Rubashov in Arthur Koestler's ''Darkness at Noon.'' He
began to resume the dimensions of a figure significant beyond the
circumstances of his death only with Stephen F. Cohen's ''Bukharin and
the Bolshevik Revolution'' (1973). This detailed account of Bukharin's
political career and policies also elucidated his distinctive Marxism, with
its heterodox emphasis not on violent change but on the tendency of
societies toward equilibrium, even in post-revolutionary periods. A tiny
but persistent movement to rehabilitate him came to fruition in 1988
when, under Mikhail Gorbachev, he was finally exonerated.
A few years later, Cohen, a professor of politics and Russian studies at
Princeton University, was granted access to a portion of the archival
material on Bukharin, including four substantial works composed while he
was in prison: two works of Marxist theory, a collection of poems and an
unfinished novel. The novel, now published in George Shriver's solid
English translation as ''How It All Began,'' is a work of very lightly
fictionalized autobiography. It seems that Bukharin intended to take the
story of his alter ego, Kolya Petrov, up to the 1917 Revolution. But the
manuscript breaks off just before the revolution of 1905, with Kolya in
his teens -- barely conscious of politics, though that is about to change.
With its swarm of well-delineated minor characters (and their families),
''How It All Began'' is very much the work of a man with a feel for the
19th-century novel. Kolya Petrov, like his creator, is a product of the
intelligentsia. His parents meet as schoolteachers; his father, in particular,
is a ''type'' very familiar from Russian fiction: liberal-minded but
ineffectual and vague. After losing his teaching position, Ivan Antonovich
becomes a civil servant in a rural town, where his disinclination to torment
the Jews arouses suspicion. Bukharin depicts the mediocrity of the
provincial middle class, not in the tones of a commissar sentencing it to
oblivion, but with humor -- as when describing one of Ivan Antonovich's
all-night card games: ''Tottering, the honorable gentlemen would make
their way, like shellshocked soldiers, into the yard, where shivering from
the morning cold, they would stare at the sky that was growing pale and
in which the stars could be seen barely twinkling; they saw to their natural
needs, then returned once again to poisoning themselves, others and the
air with cognac, tobacco and the heat of the game.''
The family's steadily declining fortunes barely impinge upon Kolya's
awareness of the world. The novel is episodic, like childhood itself, and
most of the episodes are very happy -- a series of friendships, hobbies
and misadventures, somewhat reminiscent of Mark Twain (whom Kolya
reads, along with Moliere and Tolstoy and books on science). Quite a
few pages are given to lush and detailed descriptions of flora and fauna in
the Russian countryside. Eventually Kolya realizes that not everyone
leads such an idyllic life. Unlike some of the peasants he meets, he eats
meat every day, and the thought fills him with anger and shame. The
discovery of class differences is handled believably, as one element in the
gradual development of Kolya's psyche, rather than as some apocalyptic
episode in which the Bolshevik-to-be is formed.
If not quite a great novel, it is certainly a very good one: more evidence
of the man's exceptional talents. In the introduction, Cohen recounts how
the prison writings were unearthed and gives an expert account of their
place in Bukharin's intellectual biography. And he notes that the
manuscript of ''How It All Began'' contains very few corrections.
Bukharin wrote it at high speed, in barbarous conditions -- with all the
vividness of a life flashing in front of his eyes.
Scott McLemee is a contributing editor at Lingua Franca.
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
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