[Militant No. 884, 19 February 1988, p. 6]
One of the most famous ‘non-persons’ of the Russian revolution has been officially readmitted to the pages of soviet history.
By Lynn Walsh
Nikolai Bukharin, prominent Bolshevik leader and friend of Lenin, was not a traitor, spy, or fascist agent. Like twenty other defendants, he was the innocent victim of the third Moscow show-trial, staged by Stalin in 1938 to justify the mass annihilation of all remaining opponents and potential rivals. (Yagoda, the twenty-first, was himself a former witch-hunter.)
Fifty years after these political murders, the Politburo, by ratifying the supreme court’s annulment af the sentences, has finally admitted the truth.
The 1938 trial, they said on television and in Pravda was accompanied by “gross violations of soviet justice”, “falsification”, and “admissions obtained by illegal means’’ (i.e., torture),
Posthumous acquittals do not undo executions. Nevertheless, the exoneration of dedicated revolutionaries like Bukharin, Rykov, and Rakovsky are to be welcomed, Bukharin’s widow, Anna Larin[a], who herself survived twenty years in the Gulag, has waged a courageous and tenacious fight for this vindication.
But how fearful are the bureaucrats of exhuming the truth! As long ago as 1957 Khrushchev proposed rehabilitation, but was held back by cohorts who feared the effects.
Gorbachev now favours “filling in the blank spots”. But unravelling the “monstrous tangle of crimes” (Bukharin’s words) is double-edged for Gorbachev too.
Absolving Stalin’s victims helps distance the present leaders from the regime’s brutal past. It reinforces the drive to shake up the overweight bureaucracy and renovate the apparatus. But for how long can the violent ‘excesses’ be divorced from the process of political counter-revolution by which the bureaucracy usurped the power from tie working class?
The politburo has concentrated on the third trial. The second, in 1937, based on the frame-up of former members of the Left Opposition, would raise much thornier problems.
Erratic course.
The special focus on Bukharin is also significant, There has long been a Bukharin cult among the bureaucracy’s reformist wing. Like most cults, it is based on an idealisation of the prophet.
Bukharin is held up as one af Stalin’s outstanding opponents, which is far from the truth, Although Lenin said he was “the favourite of the whole party’, his course was erratic.
In the early years of the revolution, Bukharin adopted an ultra-left stance. After the 1923 defeat in Germany and the enforced retreat of ‘the ‘New Economic Policy, he did an about-turn. Disenchanted with the proletariat, he looked towards the peasantry. Far from opposing Stalin, Bukharin was his stooge. Reflecting an emerging elite, Stalin discovered “socialism in one country”, Bukharin provided the theory: the development of socialism at a snail’s pace. At the same time he acted as a hatchet-man, and was the most vituperative opponent of the Left Opposition around Trotsky.
When, in 1928, Stalin turned against the kulaks (richer peasants) and towards forced collectivisation combined with autocratic industrialisation, Bukharin balked.
But he capitulated. Cruelly humiliated, he still served Stalin as a propagandist, never openly opposing him. This abject subservience did not save him.
However, it is Bukharin’s economic thinking of 1923-28 which interests the advocates of perestroika. He favoured more reliance on the market, with more scope for richer peasants and small businesses. It is also claimed that he favoured democratisation, though this is hardly justified.
In the current struggle within the bureaucracy, rehabilitation of Bukharin is thought to provide ‘Bolshevik’ legitimacy for perestroika and glasnost. He symbolises an alternative policy line for the leadership, without challenging the roots of the bureaucracy. It is the illusion of a middle way —between Stalin and Trotsky.
Even though it is being considered by a politburo committee, the leadership is very hesitant about the political, as opposed to a merely legal, rehabilitation of Bukharin. The problem is: where will it end? If Bukharin, why not Trotsky?
There are calls from the top for recognition of Trotsky’s role in leading the Petrograd soviet and commanding the Red Army. But in his 70th anniversary speech Gorbachev denounced the “anti-socialist essence’ of Trotsky. In spite of Stalin’s crimes, “the party’s leading nucleus headed by Joseph Stalin safeguarded Leninism in an ideological struggle.“
Unwavering.
In contrast to Bukharin, from 1923 to his assassination in 1940 Trotsky led an unwavering struggle against Stalinism. He exposed the real character of the privileged caste which seized power.
Above all, Trotsky advanced a programme for the overthrow of the bureaucracy and the restoration of workers’ democracy. It remains as valid today as it was under Stalin.
Gorbachev may have to allow partial recognition of Trotsky’s. role. But the rehabilitation of his revolutionary personality and ideas is a task for the working class.
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