The Great Terror

Deutscher describes Bukharin as combining “angularity of intellect” with “artistic sensitivity and impulsiveness, a delicacy of character, and a gay, at times almost schoolboyish, sense of humour.”³⁸ He was also possessed from time to time by a soggy, tearful romanticism—even about the Secret Police. Trotsky speaks of “his behaving in his customary manner, half hysterically, half childishly.”³⁹

His main associate was Alexei Rykov, Lenin’s successor as Premier, who had worked in the underground top leadership since it first stabilized, but who had consistently tended to compromise with the Mensheviks. With Bukharin and Rykov stood the striking figure of Tomsky, leader of the trade unions, the only worker in the Politburo. He had led one of the earliest of all Soviets, that in Reval, in the 1905 revolution, and had been one of the three representatives of underground organizations at the conference of Bolshevik leaders in Paris in 1909.

Bukharin’s Right won men like Uglanov, successor to Kamenev as leader of the Moscow Party; and around Bukharin in particular there grew up a group of younger men, mainly intellectuals, who were perhaps the best minds in the Party in the early 1930s. During the attack on the Left, Stalin strongly censured the idea of “fantastic plans for industry without reckoning up our reserves” and rebuked “people who look on the mass of laboring peasants as … an object to be exploited for the benefit of industry.”⁴⁰

But he now began to take a different line, adopting the left-wing policy in its most rigorous form.

On 11 July 1928 Bukharin had a secret meeting with Kamenev, organized by Sokolnikov. Kamenev made a résumé of the conversation which finally leaked and was published abroad. Bukharin had finally seen, as he said, that the political divergences between his own right-wing faction and the left-wing faction of Zinoviev and Kamenev were as nothing compared with the total divergence of principle which separated them all from Stalin. It was not a question of ideas, since Stalin did not have any: “He changes his theories according to the need he has of getting rid of somebody at such-and-such a moment.” Stalin had concluded that the advance to socialism would meet more and more popular resistance. Bukharin commented, “That will mean a police State, but nothing will stop Stalin.” On the peasant issue Bukharin added in true Party style, “The kulaks can be hunted down at will, but we must conciliate the middle peasants.”

Bukharin’s appeal to the disgraced Kamenev was the poorest possible tactics. Not only was Kamenev no use, and the news of the approach to him highly damaging to Bukharin, but the real forces of the Left were beginning to be reconciled to the Party line, now that it had evidently swung their way; Pyatakov capitulated as early as February 1928. By mid-1929, Krestinsky, Radek, and most of the other “Trotskyites” had petitioned for readmission to the Party. Of the leaders, Rakovsky alone held out (until 1934). An observer remarks that Communists who had become involved in the opposition and needed to redeem their past faults were “particularly ruthless.”⁴¹

Towards the end of 1928, Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky put in their resignations, in anger at Stalin’s steady undermining of their positions. It was too soon for Stalin, and he immediately made his usual verbal concessions, passed a Politburo resolution compromising with the Right, and thus obtained “unanimity.” Thereafter, the attack on the Rightist deviation went on as before but without any naming of the leaders.

In January 1929, Bukharin submitted a declaration to the Politburo protesting against plans to squeeze the peasantry and strongly criticizing the absence of intra-Party democracy. It included the remarks “We are against one-man decisions of questions of Party leadership. We are against control by a collective being replaced by control by a person, even though an authoritative one.” This, it was charged, was “direct slander of the Party, direct slander of Comrade Stalin, against whom they try to advance accusations of attempting the single-handed direction of our Party.”⁴²

Stalin’s success in organizational detail now bore fruit. The Rightists were supported in the Central Committee by a mere handful of members.⁴³ That body, meeting in April 1929, condemned the right wing’s views, removed Bukharin from his editorship of Pravda and chairmanship of the Comintern, and dismissed Tomsky from the trade union leadership. As Kaganovich was to say of the trade unions: “The greater part of the leadership … has been replaced. It could be said that this was a violation of proletarian democracy, but, comrades, it has long been known that for us Bolsheviks democracy is no fetish….”⁴⁴