Nikolai Bukharin

Origin and religion

Born in Moscow to a Russian family of teachers. Often remembered as the mild face of Bolshevism. He was milder than Stalin in 1929. He was not mild in 1918.

Russian family, Orthodox cultural background. Atheist.

Responsibilities

• Editor of Pravda
• Leading party theorist
• Head of the Comintern after Zinoviev
• Leader of the “Right Opposition” defending the NEP

He edited Pravda, wrote the ABC of Communism with Yevgeni Preobrazhensky, and was the favorite intellectual of the NEP years. Lenin’s testament called him the party’s biggest theorist and also said he had never fully understood dialectics. He opposed forced collectivization at the pace Stalin demanded.

The record

He was arrested in 1937, made to perform in the March 1938 show trial, and shot on 15 March 1938. From prison he smuggled a letter “to a future generation of party leaders,” memorized by his wife Anna Larina and published decades later. It is a primary document of a man trying to say the trial was a lie without giving his captors a pretext to kill his family at once. He had, earlier, accepted terror against class enemies. The state did not treat that as a mitigating fact.