BUCHARIN, NIKOLAJ IVANOVIČ. — Russian revolutionary, b. 1888, d. 1938. He was one of the leading representatives of the Bolshevik current and in the early years following the Revolution of 1917 played an important part as a politician and organizer, serving as a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and of the Politburo. He was one of the principal organizers of the Comintern. Later, coming into sharp conflict with Stalin over the radical and violent manner in which the collectivization of agriculture was being carried out, he was executed in 1938 along with other leaders of the Revolution.
B. opposed the forcible suppression of private farms, convinced that once industry had been socialized, the peasants would gradually and peacefully conform to the general movement toward socialization. Because of this theory, known as the “samoletk” or theory of spontaneity, which denied the principle of class struggle in the countryside, B., together with Rykov, was regarded as the principal representative of the so-called “right deviation” within the Party. As the philosophical foundation of this position, his mechanistic conception of Hegelian dialectics is cited, which he expressed in the so-called “theory of equilibrium,” according to which every motion in the universe is the result of a disturbance and restoration of equilibrium among opposing factors, rather than of the internal contradictions latent in every phenomenon and in every thing, as Lenin taught. Equilibrium, its disturbance, and its restoration, according to B., are the true essence of Hegelian dialectics (v. MATERIALISMO STORICO).
Principal works: Mirovoe chozjajstvo i imperializm (World Economy and Imperialism), Moscow 1918; Teorija istoričeskogo materializma (Theory of Historical Materialism), 1911; Alchibah Kommunizma (The ABC of Communism), 1912.