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“I Am the Last”—Memories of Bukharin in Paris
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
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1. Anna Mikhailovna Larina Bukharina's memoirs were serialized in Znamia (October-December 1988) as “Nezabyvaemoe” and later published by Novosti Press. There is a translation, German, Nun bin ich schon weit iiber zwanzig (Gottingen: Steidl Verlag, 1989 Google Scholar as well as a translation, French, Boukharine ma passion (Paris: Gallimard, 1990 Google Scholar.
2. Originally titled “How the Moscow Trial Was Prepared” and subtitled “Letter of an Old Bolshevik,” the text was reprinted in English translation in Boris I. Nicolaevsky, Power and the Soviet Elite, ed. Janet D. Zagoria (New York: Frederick A. Praeger for the Hoover Institution, 1965).
3. “Bukharin o Staline” appeared in Novyi Zhurnal 75 (1964) and then in French translation as “Boukharine, Dan et Staline,” Le Contrat social 8 (1964). It should be stressed that questions concerning the validity of Nicolaevsky's and Dan's accounts are formally independent of each other.
4. Sotsialisticheskii vestnik 736 (December 1959) revealed that the “Letter” was “written by B.I. Nikolaevskii on the basis on the basis of long conversations with N.I. Bukharin. “
5. Notably, Slusser, Robert M. in Russian Foreign Policy, ed. Lederer, Ivo J. (Yale University Press, 1962), 221–22Google Scholar and in Slavic Review 25 (1966): 529-31.
6. See Nicolaevsky's interview in Power and the Soviet Elite, 9.
7. Medvedev's, Let History Judge (New York: Knopf, 1971 Google Scholar served as Madame Bukharina's conduit for publication of her husband's testament. Medvedev's, , Nikolai Bukharin: The Last Years (New York: Norton, 1980 Google Scholar coincides closely with Madame Bukharina's memoirs even in the latter's mistakes. Medvedev, however, gives credence to one of Nicolaevsky's conversations with Bukharin (concerning Lenin's last months), thus breaking ranks with Madame Bukharina's unflinching position that no “intimate” conversations of any sort occurred. Getty's, Origins of the Great Purges (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985 CrossRefGoogle Scholar confuses two issues: the authenticity of the “Letter” and Nicolaevsky's later belief, not found in the “Letter,” that Stalin had murdered Kirov. Getty supports his case by referring to Medvedev (and therefore unwittingly to Bukharina). He weakens his argument by invoking a contradiction between the “Letter” and an article in Sotsialisticheskii vestnik for April 1934 which “must therefore have been written and sent to press while Bukharin was in Paris” (267 note 19). Bukharin was in Paris in April 1936.
8. George Kennan in his introduction to Power and the Soviet Elite calls the “Letter” the most authoritative and important single bit of source material we have on the background of the purges. Stephen F. Cohen, in Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1973), confirms the reliability of the “Letter” and concludes that “[W]hatever the case, there is no doubt that, in one form or another, Bukharin was the source of the Letter” (471-72 note 143).
9. Louis Fischer in New York Times Book Review, 21 November 1965. Similar tributes from, among others, George Kennan, Leonard Schapiro and Robert Tucker are quoted in Revolution and Politics in Russia: Essays in Memory of B.I. Nicolaevsky, eds. Alexander and Janet Rabinowitch with Ladis D. Kristof (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973). Walter Laqueur echoes such sentiments in a recent issue of Encounter (July-August 1990) where he singles out Sotsialisticheskii vestnik as one of his primers on Soviet Russia.
10. Nicolaevsky interview in Power and the Soviet Elite, 4-5.
11. F. Dan to F. Adler, 1 March 1936, in Fedor H'ich Dan: Pis'ma, ed. Boris Sapir (Amsterdam: IISG, 1985), 484.
12. Tucker, Robert C. and Cohen, Stephen F., eds., The Great Purge Trial (New York: Grosset & Dunlop, 1965), 384 Google Scholar.
13. Records cited by Paul Mayer, “Geschichte des sozialdemokratischen Parteiarchivs und das Schicksal des Marx-Engels-Nachlasses,” Archivfur Sozialgeschichte 8 (1966/ 1967): 101-31. Medvedev follows Madame Bukharina's mistake concerning Bukharin's itinerary in the west.
14. Mayer, 122-23.
15. Reswick, William, Dreamt Revolution (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1952), 325.Google Scholar This memoir appeared several years before Nicolaevsky had claimed Bukharin as his source.
16. Nikolaevsky interview in Power and the Soviet Elite, 5.
17. Medvedev, Bukharin, 116, heightens the dramatic impact by quoting Lidia Dan as saying that Bukharin arrived “late one night.” In fact, her account states that Bukharin came, quite banally, at lunchtime …
18. “Bukharine, Dan et Staline,” 199.
19. Malraux, Andre, Les Chenes qu'on abat (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 216 Google Scholar.
20. Nicolaevsky interview, Power and the Soviet Elite, 9.
21. At the time that some menshevik exiles, including Nicolaevsky, were expressing guarded support (as the best of a bad lot) for the bolshevik right opposition led by Bukharin (see “Instruktsiia dlia redaktsii ‘Sotsialisticheskogo vestnika',” [1928/29] Boris I. Nicolaevsky Collection 18, Hoover Institution Archives), Trotsky was declaring: “With Stalin against Bukharin?-Yes. With Bukharin against Stalin?-Never!” Cohen (Bukharin, 442 note 90) cites this as a quotation from Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), 315; but it is not clear from Deutscher's text that this is, in fact, a verbatim statement.
22. I. Rubin to [menshevik] foreign delegation, 25 November 1921, Nicolaevsky Collection 25, Hoover. See also Ladis D. Kristof, “B.I. Nicolaevsky: The Formative Years,” in Revolution and Politics in Russia, 31.
23. Mme. Bukharina (292) dismisses this statement as “stupid.” In fact it recalls her own account of her husband's remark to Nicolaevsky: “Come to the Soviet Union, Boris Ivanovich, you will see with your own eyes what Russia has become. I'll help you organize this trip by way of Stalin” (271).
24. Cohen, 365.
25. “Letter of an Old Bolshevik,” Power and the Soviet Elite, 59-60.
26. “Interview with Boris Nicolaevsky,” Power and the Soviet Elite, 11.
27. “Pis'mo 18 bol'shevikov,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik 278/9 (26 September 1932).
28. Tucker and Cohen, 384.
29. Nicolaevsky does accuse Stalin of the crime in two later articles but not in the “Letter.” See his “The Murder of Kirov,” translated from Sotsialisticheskii vestnik 693, 698, 700 (May, October, December 1956) and “More on Stalin and Kirov,” translated from Novoe russkoe slovo (6 December 1959), both in Power and the Soviet Elite, 56 and 78.
30. Only Trotsky's Biulleten1oppozitsii 42 (February 1935) accused Stalin of having taken the initiative in the terrorist act and it too added that the murder was not “according to Stalin's plan. “
31. Cohen, Bukharin, 471 footnote 33 refers to three Izvestiia articles where Bukharin suggests that the assassination was intended to “wreck the internal course” of conciliation.
32. Pierre Broue, “Party Opposition to Stalin (1930-1932) and the First Moscow Trial,” paper presented at the III World Slavists’ Conference, Washington, DC, November 1985. Broue is the editor of the correspondence to be published by Hoover Press. This explanation also accords with Bukharin's trial testimony cited earlier.
33. Medvedev, Bukharin, 130-32.
34. I am not considering the even more speculative hypothesis that Nicolaevsky's notes on his conversations with Bukharin were among the materials stolen from him in November 1936 (Nicolaevsky does not admit this) and used in Moscow since the materials would have been publicly invoked against Bukharin at some point in his later tribulations. If this hypothesis were confirmed, however, it would prove the authenticity of the “Letter” and make Nicolaevsky, at most, an involuntary accomplice to Bukharin's doom.
35. In his memoirs as a Soviet economist in the 1920s, Novaia ekonomicheskaia politika i krizis partii posle smerti Lenina (published posthumously by Hoover Press, 1971), N. Valentinov (Vol'skii) acknowledges the excellent quality of the information published by Sotsialisticheskii vestnik and calls on the surviving editors to reveal their sources “for history.” They never did so. Even more recently, the last member of the menshevik foreign delegation replied to my query, “[i]n my opinion, it is not appropriate to enlarge upon this subject [clandestine channels of communication with Russia in the 1920s] even now,” private correspondence from Boris Sapir, 31 January 1987.
36. Robrieux, P., Histoire interieure du parti communiste (Paris: Fayard, 1984) 4: 467–68.Google Scholar
37. Rafael Abramovich to Friedrich Adler, 5 February 1927, SAI Archives 2623, IISG, Amsterdam.
38. Nicolaevsky to T.I. Vulich, 7 August 1934, Nicolaevsky Collection 134, Hoover. Nicolaevsky was working at the time on the history of that classical forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
39. See Mayer, 125-33.
40. This is explained in the preface to the piece in Le Contrat social.
41. Editorial note to Iz Arkhiva L.O. Dana, ed. Boris Sapir (Amsterdam: IISG, 1987) 109.
42. Ibid., 160. It might be added that they have not been found elsewhere either.
43. Sotsialisticheskii vestnik 196 and 199 (22 March and 4 May 1929). Curiously, all historians state that the conversation was published by trotskyists but their only published reference are these Vestnik articles.
44. Sotsialisticheskii vestnik 101/102 (25 April 1925).
45. Iz Arkhiva L.O. Dana, 54-58.