"To Be Preserved Forever"
Hands-on Scholar

Bulgakov was wrong: manuscripts do burn, and many did in Stalin's Soviet Union. Indeed, we will never know how many manuscripts, correspondence, government documents, photographs, films, and even paintings perished in the Soviet Union during the bloody years from 1929 to 1953, when Stalin's regime tried to repress anything that deviated from its falsification of almost everything.
Some were lost in the crude haste of millions of arrests, searches, and confiscations, while others were frantically discarded in fear of such visits; but many more were systematically destroyed. From Lubyanka Prison in the thirties, it has been reported, "a sootstained chimney . . . sprinkled Moscow with the ash of incinerated manuscripts." How many incinerators were at work in the Lubyankas throughout provincial Russia and the other Soviet republics?
And yet, a great many forbidden manuscripts and documents did survive Stalin's reign of terror. Some were saved by secret acts of private courage, but most were "preserved forever"-as they were often stamped-by the terror machine itself in the archives (vaults seems a more fitting word) of the NKVD (the Soviet secret police) and of Terrorist No. 1, Stalin. Two of the most extraordinary manuscripts to have survived those years are now being published in Moscow.
Nikolai Bukharin, a Soviet founding father and once-acclaimed "golden boy of the Revolution," was only one of Stalin's victims, but his fate was special. As the leading and most prescient Bolshevik opponent of Stalin's Draconian policies at their inception-he warned in 1928 that they meant the "militaryfeudal exploitation of the peasantry" and a "police state"-Bukharin was doomed to be the chief defendant in Stalin's most grossly falsified show trial of the thirties. (It was this trial that Arthur Koestler memorialized in his powerful, if somewhat misleading, novel Darkness at Noon.) Bukharin was condemned and executed in March 1938 as an "enemy of the people" whose alleged misdeeds "exceed the most perfidious and monstrous crimes known to the history of mankind." His entire biography was officially anathematized for the next 50 years, until he was exonerated and restored to full honor under Gorbachev in 1988.
Indeed, even today, as those archives of the Terror still grudgingly divulge their secrets, it is only slowly becoming possible to learn exactly what happened to Bukharin during his last year of life. Arrested in February 1937, he spent 12 months in Lubyanka, Stalin's factory of false confessions, being "prepared" for the trial. Recently uncovered documents testify to the 49yearold Bukharin's desperate, lonely struggle to save his principles, dignity, and sanity, but above all his young wife and infant son, Anna Larina and Yuri, as well as his 13-yearold daughter, Svetlana Gurvich, by his previous wife.
But the most remarkable recent discovery is that, during Bukharin's relentless agony of "dangling between life and death" in Lubyanka, as he wrote to Stalin from his cell, this middleaged intellectual, who is so often characterized as having been "soft" and "weak," found the moral and physical strength to write-without a typewriter, the sources he needed, or even a reliable supply of paper-four book-length manuscripts in barely one year.
Two of them-a study of the "crisis" of contemporary civilization as expressed in the rise of European fascism, and a treatise titled Philosophical Arabesques-were culminations of long-standing Bukharinist themes that had distinguished him as the most intellectual and modern of Soviet founding fathers and, in Lenin's testament, the Communist Party's "biggest theorist." Both were ambitious, passionate works that sought to answer Marx's critics but also to bring Marxism fully into the 20th century; to demonstrate that fascism was a mortal threat to the best cultural achievements of capitalism and socialism; and thus to persuade Stalin to put the Soviet Union in the forefront of an international antifascist coalition in the name of "humanism." The muted but clear subtext of both manuscripts was Bukharin's despair that Stalinism was becoming a homegrown variant of the "dehumanization" typified by Nazism, and that Stalin's secret overtures to Hitler might lead to a fateful al-liance between them, as happened 17 months after Bukharin's execution.
The other two prison writings were departures for Bukharin. After midnight for five months, when Lubyanka "interrogations" routinely began and ended, Bukharin wrote poems on many subjects, from history, culture, and philosophy to nature and his love for Anna. With them were instructions for their thematic arrangement in a separate volume. The almost 200 poems, each carefully dated with the time of composition, can also be read as a chronicle of his emotional state during these months of nocturnal torment by Stalin's men and a sleepless quest for spiritual escape.
Bukharin's last manuscript was, most remarkably, an autobiographical novel. Its enigmatic title (Vremena) might be freely translated In Those Times; its purpose is also not hard to guess. As at least two generations of Russian revolutionaries were being destroyed in Stalin's terror, their biographies and ideals falsified in the name of a oncesacred cause, Bukharin wanted to leave behind a personal testimony of why he and others had become Marxist radicals as schoolboys in czarist Russia. The novel was cut short by his trial and execution, but the 22 completed chapters are a compelling panorama of Moscow and the Russian provinces on the eve of a great upheaval that swept so many young idealists into power and eventually consumed them.
All four prison manuscripts were immediately buried in the deepest ("top secret") archaeological recesses of the Terror. Bukharin's jailers, acting on standing orders or their own fearful instincts, sent them directly to Stalin, where they disappeared into his personal archive, now part of the still largely inaccessible Presidential Archive controlled by Boris Yeltsin. They were excavated, at my initiative, only in 1992. The novel was published in Moscow in 1994, and Columbia University Press is now preparing an English-language edition. The manuscripts on philosophy and a world endangered by fascism, along with selections of Bukharin's poems and other prison writings, are now being published in full for the first time.
My role in this saga was an outgrowth of both my book Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 18881938, published in the United States in 1973, and my close personal relationship with Bukharin's widow and son since we first met surreptitiously in preglasnost Moscow in 1975. While researching that book, I encountered vague reports that Bukharin had written some kind of manuscript while in prison, but not until 1988 did an aide to Gorbachev privately confirm the existence of the four manuscripts.
On behalf of Anna Larina, Yuri, and myself, I began asking for the manuscripts. Gorbachev, although sympathetic to my request, was already locked in a bitter conflict with his Communist Party opponents over control of such "party documents." In 1991 I was still optimistic that he would soon authorize release of the manuscripts. Suddenly, however, with the end of the Soviet Union and his own office, the Kremlin's Presidential Archive was no longer under Gorbachev's control.
In 1992 Anna Larina, by then almost 80 and ill, and I took a different approach. Convinced that the Bukharin family was the legal and moral heir to his written works and had a juridical right to examine all files related to his case, she formally named me her proxy and requested that I be given full access to all materials related to Bukharin. To our surprise, the former NKVD/KGB archive responded promptly and more or less positively, and my work in that repository of historical horror soon began. It was clear, however, that not even the highest archive authorities of the postCommunist Russian state could themselves authorize access to materials in the Presidential Archive, where the prison manuscripts and many other essential documents were held. Only a very influential member of the Yeltsin government could do that.
Advised by a Russian friend, I identified a person who might have the power and inclination to help. In July 1992, ironically during the opening session of the new government's trial of the Communist Party, I cornered one of Yeltsin's highest and closest associates. Though not known as a politician with any sympathy for the Soviet founding fathers, he was evidently moved by Anna Larina's desire to learn everything about her martyred husband. I would like to thank that person publicly but I still do not feel free to name him, even though he has left Yeltsin's side. Within a few minutes, I was in his government office while he spoke on the telephone to archive administrators, and within a few weeks, photocopies of the four handwritten manuscripts were ours. Thus were Bukharin's widow, son, and daughter able to encounter him anew across an enormous chasm of time and suffering.
For me there was the great satisfaction and excitement of discovery and, as a biographer who had thought his work finished 20 years ago, considerably more. The manuscripts have enabled me to follow Bukharin's thinking beyond his last published articles in 1936, when he was still a Central Committee member and editor of the government newspaper Izvestia, into the prison shadows of death.
No less important, his prison writings confirm that-as I argued in my book and as Stalin's biographer Robert C. Tucker (IBM Professor of International Studies, Emeritus) had done earlier-Bukharin was not "broken" during his year in Lubyanka, and he did not actually "confess" at the trial. Instead, he ultimately agreed to participate in the grotesque spectacle in order to save his family and to speak publicly for the last time, in every Aesopian way available to him, about crucial, even anti-Stalinist, matters. Most people failed to understand and therefore honor Bukharin's defiant conduct at the trial, though a few perceptive Western observers in the courtroom did so. As the Soviet judge who reviewed Bukharin's case 50 years later remarked, "He was a fighter to the end, despite the conditions in which he found himself."
His last fight against Stalin, who was represented in the prison and courtroom by brutal policemen and corrupt prosecutors, was enormously complex and, of course, terribly uneven. The Kremlin Inquisitioner had the power of life and death over his family, but also, as Bukharin noted anxiously in his prison letters, over his last manuscripts; the Lubyanka prisoner's only "power" was Stalin's perverse need for his participation in the show trial. Even permission to write in his cell, which was unusual and could have come only from Stalin, who was in turn Bukharin's essential and probably only reader, was part of the cruelly inequitable struggle.
Unfortunately, we still lack important documents for putting Bukharin's last days in their full historical context. For example, Bukharin's courtroom statements, as published under strict Stalinist censorship in 1938, allude to central themes of his prison manuscripts, but the Presidential Archive still refuses to make available its typescript copy of the original trial transcript, which includes handwritten "corrections" by Stalin and his hanging judge Vasily Ulrikh. Moreover, while I have been allowed to read the protocols of Bukharin's false prison testimony, to which he agreed only after three months in Lubyanka, the previous interrogations in which he protested his innocence remain inaccessible in another closed archive.
Other important materials are mysteriously missing-misplaced or "burned." They include the first volume of Bukharin's study of modern civilization, completed before his arrest and seized during the search of his Kremlin apartment, and an invaluable filmed record of the trial shot by NKVD cameramen. (Indeed, it is astonishing that not one frame of film or even a single photograph showing the faces of the defendants in this most infamous political trial of the century has ever been found.) Similarly, while a deeply moving and revealing letter from Bukharin to his wife, dated January 1938, was delivered 54 years later, it was not the first he wrote to her from Lubyanka, but it is the only one recovered. For us the search continues, even as the trail and hope fade.
Readers will no doubt react to Bukharin's prison manuscripts in different ways. Some will evaluate their substance in the intellectual and political context in which they were written. Others may judge them less for their content than for the extraordinary courage needed to write them, understanding that Bukharin had to formulate every thought on a razor's edge between what he desperately wanted to say, to the despot and to posterity, and the desperate plight of his family. (Bukharin was told that his wife and child were safely together in a Moscow apartment, but as Anna Larina recounts in her memoirs-This I Cannot Forget, published by W. W. Norton in 1993-she had already begun her 20year journey through the gulag of prison camps and exile, and the oneyearold Yuri his own odyssey through foster homes and orphanages. They saw each other again only in 1956.)
In the "new" Russia and among specialists in this country, some people will peremptorily dismiss Bukharin's prison writings as part of an unworthy, discarded, and nowirrelevant Soviet past. Thus, a fashionable Moscow newspaper denounced a scholarly journal's decision to publish several chapters of the philosophical manuscript in 1993 as "simply a scandal and a disgrace." Such attitudes are a continuation of the Soviet conformist approach to history, exchanging yesterday's uncritical pluses for today's minuses.
If these manuscripts had been published in Soviet Russia only a few years ago, during the great Bukharin revival of the late eighties and early nineties, they would have been among the most read and honored publications of the time. Today, however, few Russians-ex-Communists or Communists, liberals or nationalists, powerholders or oppositionists-seem to be interested in understanding their country's modern history. Most of them only want historical symbols for their raging political conflicts. Thus, while the Russian publishers of Bukharin's prison manuscripts, including his novel, could barely find sufficient funds for printing 1,000 copies, books worshipful of Stalin proliferate in large editions.
But this will pass, as it has before, along with the current notion that a nation can disregard or leap out of its history. Eventually, more and more Russians will want to understand what happened in their country in this tragic century and whether there were any alternatives. As that process of historical rethinking deepens, it will hardly be able to bypass Nikolai Bukharin, whose political life intersected so centrally with three of the nation's most abiding tragedies. It was Bukharin who opposed Stalin's wanton destruction of the country's small producers and markets, which have still not truly revived; whose antifascist warnings, even from his prison cell, offered an alternative to Stalin's pact of appeasement with Hitler, which left the people unprepared for a war that cost perhaps 30 million Soviet lives; and whose show trial symbolized a terror that engulfed the nation.
When more Russians come to reflect on the meaning of Bukharin's manuscripts, let it be at last in the spirit of Spinoza-not to laugh or cry, not to condemn or praise, but to understand.

Stephen F. Cohen, a professor of politics, is profiled on pages 16-20. A slightly different version of this article appeared in The Nation of November 27, 1995. It is adapted from the author's foreward to The Prison Manuscripts of N. I. Bukharin, edited by Gennady Bordyugov, to be published this month in Moscow.