Bukharin

Описание: It is said that on Koba's death in his desk in his dacha only 3 letters were found under an old newspaper in the bottom drawer. One was letter from Tito telling Koba to stop sending assassins to kill him, the second was Lenin’s last message to him telling him to apologise to Krupskaya for his verbal abuse, and the last was from Bukharin which read ‘Koba, why is my death necessary to you?’

In the summer of 1925, Anna Larina wrote a poem for Bukharin and planned to deliver it in person. But on the stairwell she ran into Koba who was also on his way to visit him. She thrust the envelope into his hand and ran out. Anna and Nickolai were eventually married in 1935 and moved into the Kremlin apartment in which Nadya had committed suicide in 1932. Koba was a constant shadow to their relationship and Anna paid a heavy price for marrying the man that Lenin had called ‘the Golden Boy’; 20 years in prison, gulag, exile and confiscation of her infant son.

Bukharin is described by general consensus of those who worked with him as warm hearted, generous and loveable. He alone offered Russia a way forward radically opposed to the one directed by Koba’s eventual solution. In 1922 Lenin said that ‘Bukharin is not only the most valuable theoretician of the Party but also may be considered the favourite of the whole Party.

In 1925 Stalin switched his support to Bukharin and advocated the economic policies of Tomsky, Rykov and Bukharin. This was a tactical move to the right to gain allegiance in the Politburo. By 1928, with the crisis in grain supplies, Stalin blamed Bukharin. Bukharin came to realise that Stalin was an unprincipled intriguer and only interested in the establishment of his own power. He thought Stalin would eventually destroy the communist revolution.

In November 1929 Bukharin was removed from the Politburo, his downfall was rapid, and realising the danger renounced his views.

In Feb 1937 he was arrested and spent a year in the Lubyanka Prison in Moscow, where is wrote some 200 poems and a novel ‘How it all began’, semi-autobiographical, known in Russia as the ‘Prison novel’. He never finished it, in fact it ends mid sentence. He wrote 34 letter to Stalin, not one was answered.

He was accused of many things including planning to assassinate Stalin, only confessing when lives of his wife and family were threatened. He retracted his confession but the end result was a foregone conclusion.

Bukharin was married 3 times, all 3 wives ended up in a gulag. He married Anna Larina in 1934 and he wrote her a letter from prison. But she herself had already been arrested and only received the letter some 54 years later in 1992. Anna server 20 years in a gulag being released in 1959.