BUCHARIN, NIKOLAJ IVANOVIČ. — Russian revolutionary, died in 1888, died in 1938. He was one of the foremost representatives of the Bolshevik current and, in the first years following the Revolution of 1917, played an important role as a politician and organizer, 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, having come into sharp conflict with Stalin because of the radical and violent manner in which the collectivization of agriculture was being carried out, he was executed in 1938 together with other leaders of the Revolution.
B. was opposed to the forcible suppression of private agricultural enterprises, convinced that the peasants, once industry had been socialized, would gradually and peacefully conform to the general movement toward socialization. Because of this theory of his, known as “samotěk,” or spontaneity, which denied the principle of the class struggle in the countryside, B., together with Rykov, came to be regarded as the principal representative of the party’s so-called “right deviation.” The mechanistic conception he held of Hegelian dialectics is pointed to as the philosophical foundation of this position; it found expression in the so-called “theory of equilibrium,” according to which every movement in the universe is the result of a disturbance and restoration of equilibrium among various opposing factors, and not of the internal contradictions latent in every phenomenon and every thing, as Lenin taught. According to B., equilibrium, its disturbance, and its restoration 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), ibid. 1921; Azbuka kommunizma (The ABC of Communism), ibid. 1920.
Gustavo A. Wetter