At the end of February 1937, during his participation in the Plenary Session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of The Republic of The Republic of Bulgaria ,D. Bukharin was arrested and imprisoned, and by 15 March 1938, when he was shot, while confronting interrogations and writing confessions, he wrote three books: Socialism and Its Culture, An Introduction to Dialectics, and the autobiographical novel Epoch, as well as lyric poems. It was not until 1992 that copies of the four prison manuscripts, sealed in secret archives, were returned to Bukharin's relatives.
In our memory, the name "Bukharin" comes from the Soviet film Lenin in 1918, the female agent who assassinated Lenin was directed by Bukharin, and there is a line in the film that is widely circulated in China: "Vasily, go and save Lenin!" Bukharin is a traitor! Matviev, who had infiltrated the enemy, informed Vasily of the enemy's intention to assassinate Lenin, but Because of Bukharin's deliberate misdirection, Lenin was still shot and wounded by the female agent. The film's plot comes directly from the court verdict on March 13, 1938: "Kaplan's murder of Lenin on August 30, 1918, by a member of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, was the direct result of a conspiracy by left-wing communists led by Bukharin. ”
But the fact is that on the day before Lenin's assassination, Bukharin rushed to Lenin's house after receiving the news of Ulitsky's assassination and urged him to change his plan to go to the factory in the afternoon to give a speech, but Lenin still insisted on acting according to the original plan. Although Bukharin had historically opposed some of Lenin's ideas, he remained a faithful follower of Lenin's ideas. In December 1922 Lenin said in his "Political Testament" that "Bukharin is not only the most precious and greatest theoretician of the Party, he is also rightly regarded as a favorite figure of the Whole Party". The 1939 film (directed by Mikhail Röhm) comes against the backdrop of the fact that the "Right-Trotsky clique" headed by Bukharin had just been purged and the cult of personality of Stalin was rapidly blazing. It should also be mentioned that the Concise Course on the History of the Communist Party of the Communist Party (Brazzaville), which Stalin personally presided over and personally instructed to organize the study and was full of words of personal praise and admiration for him, was published in 1938 and had been printed three hundred and one times by 1953, forty-two million copies. In 1939, the Comintern shipped 10,000 copies of the Chinese edition of the book to Yan'an, which became an important theoretical weapon of the Yan'an rectification movement.
In the early 1980s, it should be closely related to the ideological atmosphere of the ideological emancipation movement, and the Chinese ideological and intellectual circles showed enthusiasm for reading and thinking about Ni i Bukharin, the older generation of Soviet revolutionary theorists who died unjustly in the Great Purge of the 1930s, and it was several years before the CPSU formally rehabilitated Bukharin in 1988 and restored his party membership. At this time, the relevant books translated and published mainly included "Research Materials on the History of the International Communist Movement (Bukharin Album)" compiled by the Research Office of the International Communist Movement History of the Compilation Bureau of the Compilation Bureau of the Works of Marx, Engels, Stalin, lenin, and Lenin of the CPC Central Committee (People's Publishing House, 1981), "Research Materials on the History of the International Communist Movement (Bukharin Album)" (People's Publishing House, 1981), "Ken Coats", "Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution- Political Biography " (1888-1938) ( translated by Xu Kui et al., People's Publishing House, 1982), Su Shaozhi et al. edited Studies on Bukharin Thought (Translation Collection, People's Publishing House, 1983). The first issue of the magazine "World History" published Zheng Yifan's "Some Questions About Bukharin" in 1981, when we had just finished studying the course of modern world history, and this article was very enlightening to us. Later, Zheng Yifan's "Bukharin Treatise" (Central Compilation And Publishing House, 1997) and other treatises and research articles came out one after another, and today's young readers may hardly imagine how much enthusiasm and ideological shock people had when they read Bukharin.
Bukharin at the rally
Bukharin's "Socialism and Its Culture" (translated by Zheng Yifan, Chongqing Publishing House, November 2015) mainly discusses the characteristics of socialist culture, the role of the Party and the dictatorship of the proletariat in the cultural revolution, national culture and the creation of socialist culture, the relationship between the individual and society, equality and hierarchy, and so on. Bukharin's daughter, Si Nikovich-Bukharinna, wrote a preface to the book, "To the Chinese Reader", in which the question of "socialism and its culture" was revived at a time when the possibility of building socialism in Russia was debated after the October Revolution: Lenin believed that the cultural level necessary for the building of socialism could be achieved through the cultural revolution, while Bukharin affirmed that the proletariat in the transitional period would grow culturally and become an organizer. The purpose of Bukharin's prison manuscript was to give a comprehensive reply to the critics of socialism, "he concluded that socialism created a new culture and a new civilization, and that it liberated mankind from the evil crisis and war of capitalism from fascism" (p. 4).
From today's perspective, she argues that Bukharin's writings "help to understand the utopias of the 20th century that people encounter in their lives and minds." Importantly, "Nih I exhorted us to oppose fascism uncompromisingly and to uphold the ideals of humane socialism and the practical goal of democratization of the country" (p. 5). More importantly, she saw that Bukharin was trying to defend the image of Soviet socialism in his book when he was "dreaming of a new society for the future", in which humanity, humanism and freedom were "the test of the nature of socialism". She believed that Bukharin was not seeing these as empty declarations. In 1924, Bukharin wrote in a letter to Dzerzhinsky, chairman of the General Directorate of State Political Defence: "I think that we should turn as soon as possible to a more 'liberal' form of Soviet power: less repression, more legality, more discussion, autonomy (under the leadership of the Party ...). and so on. ...... Raising the question of the democratization of social life to the regime and the party is the unquestionable merit of Nih I. (p. 8) As a relative who knows Bukharin best, she concludes the article by mentioning that "it is important to know that birth and self-education make this dreamer without the bad qualities of the people he lists, and it is he who is ready for the future society" (p. 9). These are all issues that cannot be ignored when studying Bukharin's cultural ideals.
It now seems that many of the questions raised by Bukharin in Socialism and Its Culture are both an expectation of future development and a reflection on real life. With regard to the relationship between the state and society, he argues that although the means of production are in the hands of the state, "our state itself is not a thing of its own, it is not above society like the bourgeois state." In our case, the state is being transformed into a social one, and countless social organizations are at the same time peripheral organizations of the state" (p. 17). He emphasized that "in the USSR the state is not a wart above society, detached from society, calling the shots to society, sucking its anointing, isolating itself against social organization" (p. 149); with regard to the planned economy, "planning is realistically valid for us precisely because it is not the result of bureaucratic calculations formulated only from above and imposed from above, but based on the actual calculation of the whole people, Every grass-roots unit of production and culture-building has made its own opinion to the common cause" (p. 30); in chapter IX, "The Question of Freedom," he argues that "the transition to socialism offers: 1. freedom from exploitation; 2. freedom from political slavery; 3. freedom from cultural repression" (p. 108), and that these freedoms are not formal, but materially guaranteed, "just as the workers' speech, the press, assembly, association have public places, printing presses, paper, etc." (p. 114). He did not even shy away from the rebuke: "The Soviet Union cannot speak of any freedom, any democracy, because we have only one party here. ...... The new constitution now gives no foothold to other parties, that is, to conclude that the SOVIET Union is less democratic politically than it was in 1918. His answer was that "all these arguments are full of lies", his argument was that the victory of the revolution could be achieved by concerted action, that the existence of other parties was necessarily exploited by the spies of the enemy, that the Soviet people were not interested in the freedom to allow the existence of other parties ... and concluded that "no bourgeois democracy in the world is far from being comparable to that of the democracy of the developing Soviet states" (p. 144). At the same time, he constantly criticizes fascism as the opposite of socialism: the "new type of man" created by fascism is mercenary, the "new" type of thinking proposed is "soldier thinking", the "new" cultural value is brutal animality, and the "new" society is the medieval hierarchy... All this is "the great degeneration of culture, the barbarization of culture" (p. 153); the fascist state "has unlimited power, rules over everything, fixes the fission of man and develops it to appalling proportions" (p. 235); "Fascism theoretically elevates anti-individualist tendencies to the heavens, it places the almighty 'total state' above all organizations,...... Here, the loss of individuality of the masses is directly proportional to the glorification of the 'leader'. ...... There are only three fundamental criteria for morality: loyalty to the 'nation' or 'state', 'loyalty to the leader', and the spirit of the soldier" (p. 241).
How, then, can we understand that after witnessing and personally witnessing Stalin's Great Purge, bukharin still has to appear in his legacy to the world as a theoretical fighter for the defense of Socialism in the Soviet Union, in the face of the bloody and bloody reality of the Soviet Union and the fullfall of unjust cases? In addition to bukharin's "Dreaming of a New Society for the Future" mentioned above in the preface, the question posed by The First Appearance of Bukharin's Posthumous Manuscripts from Prison (Vladislav Hedler, Rut Storialova), which is appendice to the book, raises a deeper question: "The red thread that runs through this book is that socialism must create and allow for the development of the direction it speaks of, and only then can it prevail over the capitalist social formation." Among Soviet social scientists in the mid-30s, this method of observing problems was no longer popular. Bukharin, in his discourse, did not abandon the 'metaebene' of socialist theory... This enabled him to link the general line and tendencies, ideals and realities, freedom and restrictions on freedom, and to raise difficult questions for discussion, albeit with great caution in doing so. He argues that these "manuscripts do not conceal the social antagonisms and political contradictions in the socialist plan." This proves that it is not a work of apology for error. We should also repeatedly consider the conditions under which the manuscript was produced" (p. 265).
As early as April 1929, at the Plenary Session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Stalin, in his report entitled "On the Right Leaning in the Communist Party (Brazzaville)", summarized Bukharin's "anti-Party" conspiracy as "opposing the Party line by the method of issuing an anti-Party manifesto, by the method of resignation, by slandering the Party, by the method of secretly sabotaging the Party, and by the method of behind-the-scenes negotiations with yesterday's Trotskyists for the organization of an anti-Party alliance.". Thus this prison work is bukharin's self-defense against accusations against his anti-Party, "and he must prove that the theory he expounds is neither a heresy of bourgeois democracy nor aimed at the restoration of capitalism". (p. 268) At the same time his true theoretical last words, he never doubted the future of the socialist revolution, never questioned the leadership of the Party, but only raised his guard against the tendency to go against socialist democracy earlier, against arbitrary executive orders and bureaucracy, "his aim is to reform from within" (p. 267). Thus, "the writings in prison reflect how far loyal intellectuals can go within the Party without abandoning their principles." Bukharin's failure proves that this conflict can only be resolved at the expense of the disappearance of these loyal intellectuals from the world". (p. 270) This is also the strongest feeling I felt after reading this book. The autobiographical novel "The Age", which was also completed in prison, contains a dialogue about the repression of intellectuals by the Tsarist authorities, which can be seen as an important addition to the reflection on this conflict: "I often feel that even the countercultural nature of the Romanov monarchy in society is underestimated... Aren't all the good minds, the essence of the nation, all hanged? As long as a little talent is revealed, a little talent is revealed, and the head is beheaded..." Yes, the "anti-cultural nature" causes the best heads to fall to the ground.
On December 10, 1937, Bukharin wrote a letter to Stalin (file number 05903) in prison, four months before he was shot, and he apparently had both a strong premonition of this final outcome and the hope of trying to change it. What is unbearable to read in this letter is the spiritual humiliation and torture suffered by this theoretical genius, a rare theoretical genius among Russian revolutionary intellectuals. On the one hand, he "made a sincere assurance to the other side before his death that I had not committed a crime that I had confessed during the interrogation", and on the other hand, he said that "what I am saying here is absolutely true: in recent years I have been sincerely and faithfully carrying out the Party line, and have learned to evaluate you rationally and love you". However, "I have no choice but to confess my guilt, to admit the confessions of others and to play them on, otherwise I would have 'surrendered without surrendering my weapons'". But he immediately turned to envisioning the necessity of a great purge for the other side, even saying, "I understand that big plans, big ideas, and big interests are above all else." So, "Okay! Need is need. But please believe that when I think that you will believe that I am guilty, you will think from the bottom of my heart that I am indeed guilty, and my heart will be full of blood." It seems that what he wants to see is that the other party knows that he is innocent and sacrifices him only for the sake of great goals! So, "God, how nice it would be if there was an instrument that would allow you to see my broken, miserable heart!" If you can see how attached my heart is to you, and in a way that is completely different from the likes of Stepsky and Tully, that's fine."
Looking back at the interactions, enmity and feuds between the two sides and all the scenes that Bukharin has been branded as a "right-leaning anti-party clique" since 1928, it is really difficult to guess what Bukharin really felt when he said this. He had already said in "Testament: Letter to the Leaders of the Future Generation" that the organs of the NKVD "are nothing more than a degenerate organization of a group of mindless, corrupt, incompetent, well-paid bureaucrats." They used the Cheka's former power to pander to Stalin's morbid paranoia (I'll put it this way) in the struggle for status and fame, to create their vile cases without realizing that they were also destroying themselves,—— history would not tolerate witnesses to evil deeds." But in this letter he was not affected by this painful emotion. Then came the specific purpose of writing the letter: first, to plead that he die before the final trial; second, to plead that he be given poison in prison in lieu of a shooting; third, to plead for permission to say goodbye to his wife and son; and finally, to be more unexpected: fourth, if he could be saved, he asked to do two jobs and send him to America to wage "a mortal struggle" with Trotsky; or to send him to a concentration camp for twenty-five years, "I will build a university there, a museum of local history, Technical stations, etc., institutes, galleries, ethnological museums, animal and plant museums, concentration camp magazines and newspapers", "In short, I will engage in pioneering cultural work ... Until the last breath of life". The projects he wanted to do were all vehicles for the realization of his cultural ideals, showing how much Bukharin wanted a new destiny and life, including his mention of galleries and museums, reminding people of his former painter, Lenin first met him as a young painter, and even in the 1930s a Soviet painter advised him to abandon politics and become a professional painter. The letter ends: "Koba, now my conscience is pure before you. I ask you for one last forgiveness (psychic, and nothing else). For this I hug you in my heart. Farewell, if there is anything sorry for me, an unfortunate person in the past, please forgive me. After Bukharin was shot, a saying circulated in Moscow that he stood with his chest held high and cursed Stalin when he was about to be executed (see Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, p. 588).
Tony Judt argues that the horrific purges of the Soviet Union in the 1930s "aimed at purging 'traitors' within the party and purging those who might pose a challenge to policy and the general secretary"; these terrorist activities "protected and explained Stalin's boundless power and authority". He goes on to point out in particular that the 1938 trial of Bukharin became a unique and dramatic innovation, "at the cost of a shocking sacrifice that the revolution sacrificed not only its sons and daughters, but its designers." The trials and purges of the following decades were just some brazen reprints..." (History of Postwar Europe, vol. 1, p. 243, translated by Lin Junhua et al., CITIC Publishing House, 2014) This is an accurate description of this history by historians.