I have to say that Scott McLemee doesn't seem to know what he is talking about. I guess he must have gone to Princeton and studied under Steve Cohen, eh? How else do we explain this bizarre claim that Bukharin was almost unknown except as a character in novels until "rehabilitated" by Cohen? This is ridiculous. In economics, Bukharin's work was never forgotten and has been much studied continously in many leftist circles. McLemee is either ignorant or disingenuous, probably the former. Barkley Rosser On Sun, 14 Jun 1998 09:55:44 -0400 James Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com> wrote:
> 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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