SCOTT MCLEMEE ON BUKHARIN (NY TIMES BOOK REVIEW)

James Farmelant farmelantj at juno.com
Sun Jun 14 06:55:44 PDT 1998


June 14, 1998

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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