Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin

Who he is and his times

Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin was born in Moscow on 27 September (9 October) 1888. By 1917 he was one of the best-educated Bolshevik theorists, and after the revolution he headed Pravda for many years, with interruptions. He became a candidate member of the Politburo on 25 March 1919 and a full member on 2 June 1924. After Zinoviev was removed in 1926, Bukharin took the leading position in the Comintern. In January 1929 he was elected a full member (academician) of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

The early Bukharin was a radical. In 1919, together with Preobrazhensky, he wrote The ABC of Communism (Azbuka kommunizma), and in 1920 The Economics of the Transformation Period (Ekonomika perekhodnogo perioda), a book written in the logic of War Communism with its faith in direct state distribution. In 1921 Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology (Teoriya istoricheskogo materializma) came out — a popular textbook of Marxist sociology in which he set out his “theory of equilibrium”. According to researchers, it was noticeably influenced by Alexander Bogdanov's ideas about the stability of complex systems.

Bukharin took the turn to NEP in 1921 seriously and in time became its chief interpreter. From November 1923 he actively opposed Trotsky's Left Opposition, and in 1924–1927, together with Stalin, he formed the majority in the leadership. It was in this period that he formulated a programme of slow but steady movement towards socialism through market exchange with the peasantry and cooperation.

Bukharin was not only a politician but also an organizer of the press and of science. According to the Great Russian Encyclopedia, he was one of the editors and authors of the first edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. His articles and reports of the 1920s set the language in which the party explained NEP: the bond (smychka) between town and country, cooperation, the growth of peasant farming as a condition for the growth of industry. That is why Bukharin's defeat in 1929 meant not only a change of faces in the leadership but also a change of the official economic vocabulary.

Main ideas

Bukharin's views rested on the theory of equilibrium. He described society as a system that is in a mobile, dynamic equilibrium with its environment and within itself: the forces of production, exchange and consumption collide, and equilibrium is disturbed and restored at a new level. For the economy, a simple conclusion followed: certain proportions must be maintained between sectors, otherwise a disturbance in one place causes a crisis in the whole system. The plan, as he understood it, is an instrument for maintaining such a mobile equilibrium, not a way of abolishing it.

Bukharin's attitude to the plan was neither market-based nor purely directive. According to A. V. Shubin, he regarded the plan as an instrument for achieving a moving economic equilibrium between sectors and warned against overestimating the planning principle: in an economy with millions of peasant households, considerable elements of spontaneity remain, which the plan must take into account rather than abolish by decree. Characteristically, the draft resolution he prepared in 1928 provided for high rates of industrialization, but with provisos about the development of agriculture and light industry. Bukharin argued not about whether industrialization was needed, but about how to balance it.

The economic programme of NEP grew out of the theory of equilibrium. Industry can grow only together with peasant demand: the countryside buys urban goods and sells grain, and growing exchange gives the state taxes and savings for capital investment. On 17 April 1925, in the report On the New Economic Policy and Our Tasks (O novoy ekonomicheskoy politike i nashikh zadachakh) at a meeting of the activists of the Moscow organization, Bukharin addressed the peasantry with the call “enrich yourselves”, to accumulate and develop their farms. The slogan provoked sharp criticism in the party, and Bukharin soon renounced it.

Bukharin saw the road to socialism in the countryside not in forced socialization but in cooperation, through which peasants of different strata are gradually drawn into ties with state industry. The state, in his view, retains control over the “commanding heights” — large-scale industry, banks, transport, foreign trade — and guides development through prices, credit and orders. In this scheme the market is not the enemy of the plan but the environment in which the plan operates.

These ideas were expressed most fully in Notes of an Economist (Zametki ekonomista), published in Pravda on 30 September 1928. In the guise of a polemic against Trotskyism, Bukharin argued that the notion that the maximum annual pumping of resources out of peasant farming into industry yields the maximum rate of industrialization is wrong. He demanded correct proportions between heavy industry, light industry and agriculture, and warned of the danger of planning construction projects out of materials that had not yet been produced. Importantly, he did not oppose industrialization as such: the dispute was about a rate that could be sustained for a long time.

What became of the ideas in practice

In 1925–1927 official policy on the whole coincided with Bukharin's: NEP was preserved, and the Left Opposition, with its demand for accelerated accumulation, was crushed. But as early as 1928 Stalin turned to forced industrialization, and Bukharin, together with Rykov and Tomsky, found himself cast as the “Right deviation”.

The occasion for Notes of an Economist was the control figures for the new economic year, published in September 1928. According to researchers, under the guise of criticizing Trotskyism Bukharin challenged the course of Stalin and of the chairman of the Supreme Council of the National Economy (VSNKh), Valerian Kuibyshev, defended light industry, which yields returns more quickly, and cited data on stagnation in agriculture. The response was a reshuffle of the Moscow party organization, where Bukharin had allies: on 27 November 1928 its first secretary, Nikolai Uglanov, was replaced by Vyacheslav Molotov.

The reaction came quickly. On 8 October 1928 the Politburo condemned the editorial board of Pravda for publishing the article without clearing it with the Central Committee, Bukharin's pupils were removed from the editorial board, and a campaign against the “Right deviation” and a purge of the Moscow party organization began. The November 1928 plenum of the Central Committee adopted a compromise resolution, but in 1929 the defeat of Bukharin's group became final: he lost the leadership of Pravda, and on 17 November 1929 he was removed from the Politburo.

The First Five-Year Plan and wholesale collectivization ran directly counter to his model. Instead of maintaining proportions, there was a bet on record rates in heavy industry; instead of market exchange with the countryside, compulsory procurements and the liquidation of individual peasant farming as a mass way of life. The abandonment of the balance approach was also proclaimed in theory: in December 1929 Stalin publicly rejected the balance of the national economy compiled by the Central Statistical Administration (TsSU) and Bazarov's and Groman's treatment of the balance problem. Bukharin's equilibrium never entered the practice of Soviet planning.

What worked and what did not

Bukharin's strength was his understanding of the systemic link between sectors. He saw that industry, agriculture, transport and consumption form a single system, and that the growth of one link runs up against the capacity of the others. His warning about construction projects built from non-existent materials describes a problem that Soviet planning faced for decades: the gap between announced projects and real resources. In this sense Bukharin intuitively formulated the requirement of balance that was later tested with inter-branch balances.

The abandonment of the balance approach in 1929 had consequences reaching far beyond the fate of Bukharin himself. Together with his theory of equilibrium, the attempts of TsSU statisticians to describe the economy as a system of interconnected flows also disappeared from official practice. The inter-branch balance (MOB), which expresses the idea of proportions quantitatively, returned to Soviet statistics and planning only with the balance for 1959. For three decades plans were drawn up without an instrument capable of testing Bukharin's main warning: whether the announced rates contradict the available resources.

The weakness is that the theory of equilibrium had no quantitative instrument. Bukharin spoke about proportions but could not show which proportions were correct and how dangerous a given rate was. His opponents pointed to the threat of war and the need to build heavy industry quickly, and he answered with qualitative arguments. The question of whether Bukharin's path would have been slower or faster than Stalin's remains counterfactual: it cannot be tested, and careful historians avoid confident answers here.

The political side of the programme did not work either. The slogan “enrich yourselves”, addressed to one group, proved vulnerable to accusations of supporting the well-off peasantry and was withdrawn by its author himself. In 1928 Bukharin was forced to conduct his criticism of the course in disguised form — as a polemic against Trotskyism. This shows the main point: the system had no institutional channel through which an alternative calculation could legitimately compete with the leadership's decision.

Another lesson concerns the difference between a rate and its sustainability. Bukharin's formula of the “highest sustained” rate sets a short-term record against a long-term trajectory. In modern terms, this is the difference between maximizing an indicator over a single period and growth that does not eat away the foundations of future production: soil fertility, fixed assets, the health and skills of workers. For planning, it follows that goals must be assessed over several horizons at once, not only by fulfilment of the annual assignment.

Debate and criticism

Bukharin conducted his first dispute against the left. In December 1924, in Pravda, he came out against Preobrazhensky's law of primitive socialist accumulation; in 1925 the article was published as a pamphlet, A New Revelation about the Soviet Economy, or How the Worker-Peasant Bloc Can Be Destroyed (Novoe otkrovenie o sovetskoy ekonomike, ili Kak mozhno pogubit' raboche-krest'yanskiy blok). Bukharin argued that non-equivalent exchange with the countryside would destroy the alliance of workers and peasants, and that the “primitive” stage of extraction threatened to become permanent. The left replied that the slow path would lead to the growth of private farming and ultimately to the restoration of capitalism.

The second dispute — with Stalin — was no longer theoretical. At the November 1928 plenum Stalin, according to A. V. Shubin, spoke in a conciliatory tone but used Notes of an Economist to accuse Bukharin of eclecticism. After that, arguments ceased to matter: the outcome was determined by the balance of forces in the Politburo and the apparatus. In 1929 Bukharin published Lenin's Political Testament (Politicheskoe zaveshchanie Lenina), trying to draw on Lenin's authority, but this no longer changed the situation.

In Western historiography Bukharin became a symbol of an alternative that never materialized. The American historian Stephen Cohen, in his biography Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (1973), argued that Soviet development after Lenin's death was not predetermined and could have followed a path different from Stalin's dictatorship. Alexander Erlich, in a 1960 book, described Bukharin's position as a strategy of “harmonious” or “balanced” growth. Critics of this reading point out that Bukharin himself justified the methods of War Communism in 1920, and in the 1920s took part in the struggle against the opposition using the same apparatus methods that were later turned against him.

The historian S. V. Tsakunov emphasizes the coherence of Bukharin's programme: growth of peasant accumulation, cooperation differentiated by strata of the peasantry, state control over the “commanding heights” and the gradual drawing of the countryside into ties with state industry. The weak point, from the standpoint of his opponents on the left, was the assumption that the well-off peasantry would cooperate with the state rather than turn into an independent economic force leading to the restoration of capitalism. This dispute was never tested in practice: NEP was wound up before its long-term results could become apparent.

Legacy today

At the February–March 1937 plenum of the Central Committee Bukharin was expelled from the party, and on 27 February 1937 he was arrested. From 2 to 13 March 1938 the third Moscow show trial took place — in the case of the so-called “Anti-Soviet Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites”. On 13 March Bukharin was sentenced to death by shooting, and on 15 March 1938 the sentence was carried out at the Kommunarka shooting ground. On 4 February 1988 he was rehabilitated, in June 1988 he was reinstated in the party, and on 10 May 1988 in the Academy of Sciences.

The rehabilitation came during perestroika, when interest in NEP as a model combining plan and market was especially high. Today Bukharin's framing of the question — a sustainable rate versus a record one, balanced growth versus the concentration of resources in one sector — remains part of the common language of development economics. At the same time, his theory of equilibrium is valuable more as an intuition than as a method: the quantitative apparatus for testing proportions appeared later, in the inter-branch balance and in models of optimal planning.

For Open Planning, Bukharin is closer than other authors of the 1920s: the plan sets the framework, while the market and cooperation allocate within it. But there is also a fundamental difference. For Bukharin, goals and rates were still set by the party, and the debate about alternatives was conducted within a narrow leadership, without public calculation and without independent verification. His fate shows that sound economic intuition does not survive without institutions that protect the right to disagree.

For the history of planning, it is important to distinguish between the rehabilitation of a person and the verification of a programme. Bukharin was rehabilitated through judicial, party and academic procedures in the course of 1988 and became one of the symbols of the revision of Soviet history in the perestroika years. But this did not make his economic programme confirmed: it remained a hypothesis cut short by a political decision, and today it has to be assessed by the logic of its arguments rather than by results that never came about.

Finally, Bukharin's fate is a reminder that more than once in Soviet history economic debate was cut short not by an argument but by an arrest. First Preobrazhensky dropped out of the debate, then Bukharin himself, and the statisticians' approach to the balance of the national economy was rejected as non-Marxist. For a modern planning system the conclusion is simple: the protection of alternative opinions and open access to data are not a political luxury but a condition for the plan's errors to be detected before they become irreversible.

Links between ideas

Whom the author argued with, whose ideas they developed, whom they answered and whose fate they shared. All links are on the shared graph. Graph of ideas

• Vladimir Bazarov and Vladimir Groman

  Shared fate ←

  In his speech of 27 December 1929 Stalin rejected both Bazarov and Groman’s treatment of the balance and the “theory of equilibrium”.

• Vladimir Bazarov and Vladimir Groman

  Parallel path ←

  The geneticists’ stable proportions and Bukharin’s equilibrium are one demand for balance between sectors, later testable with the inter-branch balance.

• Yevgeni Preobrazhensky

  Direct response ←

  In 1924 Bukharin answered the law of primitive accumulation: non-equivalent exchange would destroy the alliance of workers and peasants.

• Yevgeni Preobrazhensky

  Practice and institutions ←

  Co-authors of The ABC of Communism (1919), a mass commentary on the party programme.

• Yevgeni Preobrazhensky

  Shared fate ←

  The accumulation debate ended with both men eliminated: Preobrazhensky was shot in 1937, Bukharin in 1938.

Timeline

1. 1888

   Born in Moscow

2. 1919

   The ABC of Communism (Azbuka kommunizma), with Ye. A. Preobrazhensky; candidate member of the Politburo

3. 1921

   Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology (Teoriya istoricheskogo materializma), setting out the theory of equilibrium

4. 1924

   Member of the Politburo; article in Pravda against the law of primitive socialist accumulation

5. 1925

   Report of 17 April with the call to the peasantry “enrich yourselves”

6. 1928

   Notes of an Economist (Zametki ekonomista) in Pravda on 30 September; campaign against the “Right deviation”

7. 1929

   Elected a full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences; removed from the Politburo on 17 November

8. 1937

   Expelled from the party and arrested on 27 February

9. 1938

   Sentenced at the third Moscow trial, shot on 15 March

10. 1988

    Rehabilitated on 4 February, reinstated in the party and the Academy of Sciences

Key works

• 1919The ABC of Communism (Azbuka kommunizma), with Ye. A. Preobrazhensky
• 1920The Economics of the Transformation Period (Ekonomika perekhodnogo perioda)
• 1921Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology (Teoriya istoricheskogo materializma: populyarny uchebnik marksistskoy sotsiologii)
• 1925A New Revelation about the Soviet Economy, or How the Worker-Peasant Bloc Can Be Destroyed (Novoe otkrovenie o sovetskoy ekonomike, ili Kak mozhno pogubit' raboche-krest'yanskiy blok)
• 1925On the New Economic Policy and Our Tasks (O novoy ekonomicheskoy politike i nashikh zadachakh), report at a meeting of the activists of the Moscow organization, 17 April 1925
• 1928Notes of an Economist: At the Beginning of a New Economic Year (Zametki ekonomista: k nachalu novogo khozyaystvennogo goda)

Sources

1. Большая российская энциклопедия. Бухарин Николай Иванович
2. А. В. Шубин. Введение к документу: Бухарин, Николай, «Заметки экономиста», 1928. 2011
3. Н. И. Бухарин. Заметки экономиста (полный текст). 1928
4. Государственная публичная историческая библиотека России. Бухарин Н. И. Заметки экономиста: к началу нового хозяйственного года. М.; Л., 1928. 1928
5. Государственная публичная историческая библиотека России. Бухарин Н. И. О новой экономической политике и наших задачах: доклад на собрании актива Московской организации, 17 апреля 1925 года. 1925
6. Н. И. Бухарин. Новое откровение о советской экономике, или Как можно погубить рабоче-крестьянский блок. 1925
7. А. Ш. Руди. Теория равновесия как механизма устойчивости. 2012
8. Stephen F. Cohen. Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938 (рецензия в Slavic Review). 1973
9. Alexander Erlich. The Soviet Industrialization Debate, 1924–1928. 1960
10. И. В. Сталин. К вопросам аграрной политики в СССР. Речь на конференции аграрников-марксистов 27 декабря 1929 г.. 1929
11. Википедия. Бухарин, Николай Иванович
12. С. В. Цакунов. Лекция 3. Бухарин и Преображенский — представители двух течений официальной экономической мысли 20-х годов. 1994

Prepared from open sources. Dates, titles and quotations were checked against the source list at the bottom of the page; where sources disagree, the text says so.