19. The time has come to sever 

I bought Nikolai Bukharin’s Prison Poems in October 2023, along with 10 other books when Seagull Books, offered deep discount (40 percent to be precise). After all, you don’t get such offer every day. It’s almost two years the book rested in my bookshelf. 

Today while reading the book more than the poems it was the poet who attracted my attention. Being a Marxist, it was obvious.

Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938) was a Bolshevik leader and a founder of the Soviet state. Like many thinkers and writers, he was also a victim of Stalin, the dictator. Yes, I keep Stalin and Hitler in the same bracket. 

Stalin was the chief architect of Soviet totalitarianism and a ruthless man who destroyed the remnants of individual freedom and failed to promote individual prosperity. He was a cruel man. When his son Jacob was taken prisoner by the Germans during WW II, Stalin refused a German offer to exchange his son.

He remained secretary general of the party’s Central Committee, from 1922 until his death, that provided the power base for his dictatorship. A year before his death, Lenin wrote a political “testament,” calling for Stalin’s removal from the secretary generalship but even that call didn’t succeed.

Somehow Russians were lucky, unlike Indians, when Stalin was publicly invoked as “Our Father” by the Russian Orthodox Church. Here I can see some furrowed brows.

Nikolai Bukharin, a member of the party, was arrested in 1910 but escaped abroad. He stayed in Germany for a year and later visited Krakow, Poland where he met Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. Came back to Moscow after the revolution in 1917 and became editor of party newspaper Pravda. 

Lenin described him as the major theorist of the Communist Party. He was also the chief theorist of the New Economic Policy (NEP) and chief ally of Joseph Stalin. 

In 1928 Stalin abandoned Lenin’s quasi-capitalist NEP in favor of state-organized industrialization under a succession of five-year plans. When Stalin decided to proceed with agricultural collectivization Bukharin opposed it. The blows fell most heavily on the peasantry; some 25 million rustic households being compelled to amalgamate in collective or state farms within a few years. Bukharin was removed from Pravda, and the party leadership.

Collectivization caused a great famine in Ukraine. Where it is known as the Holodomor, from the Ukrainian words for hunger (holod) and extermination (mor). Some 10 million peasants perished through Stalin’s policies during those years.

Here we have to understand that Bolsheviks themselves were divided into a right wing and a left wing. After Lenin’s death in the subsequent power struggle between Leon Trotsky and Stalin, Bukharin allied himself with Stalin, who positioned himself as centrist of the Party and supported the NEP against the Left Opposition, which wanted more rapid industrialization, escalation of class struggle against the wealthier peasants. Trotsky, the prime force behind the Left Opposition, was removed with the support of Bukharin. 

However, again in 1934 Bukharin was reelected to the Central Committee and became editor of Izvestia. Later he became a principal architect of the 1936 Soviet Constitution.

In late 1934, Stalin launched a new campaign of political terror against the very Communist Party members who had brought him to power on a fabricated flimsy ground. 

Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary of the party, in a speech at the 20th Party Congress in 1956 confirmed that Stalin himself had arranged his leading colleague and potential rival Sergey Kirov’s murder as an excuse for the promotion of mass bloodshed.

The operation was called Great Purge, which was popularized by historian Robert Conquest in his 1968 book, The Great Terror. Also known as Moscow Trials, it was a series of show trials to remove suspected dissenters from the Party.

Between 1936 and 1938, three large Moscow trials of former senior Communist Party leaders were held in which they were accused of conspiring with fascist and capitalist powers to assassinate Stalin and other Soviet leaders. Amongst the big names, first it was Trotsky who was sentenced to death for treason. 

Nikolai Bukharin was arrested at the end of February 1937 and followed by a year of imprisonment and a show of trial, he was executed in March 1038. 

The French author and Nobel laureate Romain Rolland wrote to Stalin seeking clemency, arguing that “an intellect like that of Bukharin is a treasure for his country. For the sake of Gorky, I am asking you for mercy, even if he may be guilty of something.” Stalin did not respond.

In 1988, 50 years after Bukharin's execution, his name was cleared by the Soviet Supreme Court.

During that time, from February 1937 to March 1938, Bukharin wrote four book-length manuscripts by hand in his prison cell. The Prison Poems is the last of these four manuscripts to be published.

The four prison manuscripts remained hidden in Stalin's personal archive, and then, under 'post-Soviet' President Boris Yeltsin, in the Presidential Archive.

It was only in 1992, as a result of a campaign by the Bukharin family together with Bukharin's American biographer, Stephen F. Cohen, were copies of these manuscripts finally obtained from the secret archives. His childhood is vividly recounted in his mostly autobiographic novel How It All Began. 

Thus after 54 years, Bukharin's prison manuscripts were finally brought to light in 1992. Bukharin had divided his manuscript in nine parts according to the subject matter. The seventh part ‘Lyrical Intermezzo' contains 29 poems mainly poems of love and loss, and especially those for or about his young wife Anna Larina. 

The poem I’m going to share here is from this section – 

Parting

I am to go far, far away 

And it may be forever.

With thee, beloved, azure-eyed, 

The time has come to sever.

I know that you will weep and weep 

In quiet times, recalling me, 

And on the white sheets of our bed 

Your tears will fall unceasingly.

But you won't let the people see, 

Within your soul, the yearning, 

And hotly to your bosom press 

The child of our dear union.

My darling, till we meet again, 

Farewell, forgive me all!

Land of our birth, may you prosper, 

And don't despair, dear, don't despair!

(Parting; translated by George Shriver; Courtesy Seagull Books, with thanks.)

(Top Stalin and Bukharin, second from left; Photo Courtesy University of Notre Dame)