BUKHARIN, NIKOLAJ IVANOVIČ. - Russian revolutionary, b. in 1888, d. in 1938. He was one of the major representatives of the Bolshevik current and in the early years following the Revolution of 1917 he played an important part 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 forced suppression of private agricultural holdings, convinced that the peasants, once industry had been socialized, would gradually and peacefully conform to the general movement of socialization. Because of this theory of his, known as that of "samotěk," or of spontaneity, which denied the principle of class struggle in the countryside, B. was, together with Rykov, regarded as the principal representative of the so-called "right deviation" of the party. As the philosophical foundation of this position of his, the mechanistic conception that he had of the Hegelian dialectic is pointed to, and which translates into the so-called "theory of equilibrium," according to which every motion of the universe is the result of a disturbance and of a restoration of equilibrium between different opposing factors, and not of the internal contradictions latent in every phenomenon, and in every thing, as Lenin taught. Equilibrium, the disturbance of it and its restoration are according to B. the true essence of the Hegelian dialectic (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.
Bibliography4 works
Gustavo A. Wetter