He was first sentenced to death (by Molotov, Stalin, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, and Zhdanov) on November 1, 1937, along with 291 other high officials, but was left alive as a possible participant in the Bukharin trial. As in the case of the February–March plenum, he appeared as a witness, not a defendant. On April 19, 1938, several days after the end of that trial, he was included in another Category 1 list, but someone (Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, or Zhdanov) crossed his name out. Four months later, on August 20, 1938, Stalin and Molotov signed his death sentence (along with those of 311 other people, including Boris Ivanov’s neighbor, N. A. Bazovsky; the former director of the Berezniki Chemical works, M. A. Granovsky; the former head of the Party’s Jewish Section, S. M. Dimanshtein; the former leader of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Béla Kun; and a trade representative by the name of Iosif-Samuil Genrikhovich Winzer-Weinzer-Marzelli). Osinsky was executed ten days later, on September 1, 1938. One of his cellmates told his daughter, Svetlana, that he was so weak toward the end that he was allowed to bring a stool to the Lubyanka prison yard. “I picture them beating him—tall, slim, in his gold-rimmed pince-nez, always well groomed, clean shaven, fond of light suits…. Of course, it’s terrible when anyone is beaten, but this was my father.”18
■ ■ ■
Bukharin had done most of the inner work needed for a full confession in his letters to Stalin in late 1936, but he had not been able to “disarm” completely. “Interrogate me, turn my skin inside out,” he had written to dear Koba on September 24, “but dot the ‘i’ in such a way that no one will ever dare kick me.” The attached condition—“but dot the ‘i’”—had demonstrated clearly that he, as Stalin put it at the December plenum, “had no idea what was happening.” Bukharin’s job—like that of Osinsky, Gaister, Voronsky, and every other Bolshevik, arrested or not—was the same as Job’s. It was not to demonstrate guilt or innocence or confess to particular transgressions—it was to submit unconditionally to the eternal truth. It took about three months in prison for him to complete his confession. No bright lights or “assembly-line interrogations” seem to have been required. The “real reason,” he said in his last plea at the trial, was the final overcoming of the “split consciousness” in “his own soul.” (The transcript of his speech was censored before publication; the deleted words are underlined.)
The real reason is that in prison, where you have to spend a long time permanently suspended between life and death, certain questions appear in a different dimension, and are resolved in a different dimension, compared to the way things are in ordinary, practical life. For, when you ask yourself: if you must die, what are you dying for, particularly at the current stage of the development of the USSR, when it is marching in close formation into the international arena of proletarian struggle? And suddenly, if your consciousness is split, you see with startling vividness the totally black void that opens up before you. There is nothing to die for, if you want to die unrepentant. And, on the other hand, everything positive that shines in the Soviet Union acquires new dimensions in your mind. In the end, this disarms you completely, leads you and forces you to bend your knees before the Party and the country. And when you ask yourself: all right, if you don’t die, if, by some miracle, you are allowed to live, then, once again, for the sake of what? As an ostracized enemy of the people, in an inhuman situation, completely separated from everything that makes up the meaning of life? And the answer is the same. At such moments, Citizen Judges, everything personal, everything superfluous and mundane, all the remaining bitterness, pride, and a number of other things, fall away and disappear.19
In prison, Bukharin wrote two theoretical works: Philosophical Arabesques and Socialism and Its Culture. The former was about escaping the black void of individualism; the latter, about everything positive that shines. In the Arabesques, the narrator chases away Mephistopheles, “the devil of solipsism,” and tells him to hold his “dissolute tongue.” The story of Faust—the highest of the Pamirs and the model for socialist realism—is interpreted as the defeat of the “insane abstraction” of the lone individual and the rise of the reality of the “socialized man.” In late 1937, when Bukharin was in his cell writing the Arabesques, that reality consisted of the final unfolding of the last days. The apocalypse, he conceded, had been prophesied before: “Various ‘sects’ and movements (the Taborites, Moravian Brothers, Herrnhuters, Bogomils, Cathars, et al.) were, in effect, different political factions of the working people, and their leaders, including the executed Thomas Müntzer, John of Leiden, and others deserve the grateful memory of self-emancipating humanity.” The peasant warriors had been followed by “the great martyr Campanella,” Thomas More, and, in particular, Saint-Simon and Fourier, who had “identified socialism as the goal.” Now, in late 1937, that goal had been reached. “All the principal vital functions have been synthesized in the victorious completion of Stalin’s five-year plans, with theory and practice becoming one on the scale of the entire society and in every single cell of the social organism.” The time had been fulfilled. The real real day—“the birth of the new world for mankind”—had arrived.20
That new world, according to Socialism and Its Culture, was not an abstract socialism theorized by uninformed well-wishers, but the Soviet state as currently constituted. “For that reason, the world-historical task at the moment is not the preaching of universal love, but the preaching of ardent patriotism toward the USSR, which represents the most powerful force of the international socialist movement.” This was all the more urgent because of the rise of fascism and the attendant division of the world into two irreconcilable camps (a prerequisite for every apocalypse, including the one chronicled by Bukharin in the summer and early fall of 1917). Fascists deceived the nations by uttering proud words “about totality (i.e., wholeness),” but rather than healing “the rupture of human social existence and the coming apart of man,” they “reinforced and institutionalized” them. Fascist totalitarianism was a myth. “Socialism in the USSR, on the other hand, is true totalitarianism, i.e. wholeness and unity, whose dynamic is the self-generating growth of that same unity.” The USSR was a “monoideocracy” in the sense that it had created an “ideological unity of the masses” that had no use for the nonsocialized man. The task of socialism was “to overcome the split between will and intelligence” and lead Faust into a world in which “everyone will understand the basic principles of managing things and perform any number of functions.” “The directives of the central governing organs, staffed by people who will transfer there for reasons of aptitude and inclination, will be obeyed not as orders issued by superiors, but the way one follows doctors’ recommendations or orchestra conductors’ instructions. The sins and vices of the old individualistic and authoritarian-hierarchical world will gradually disappear: envy, perfidy, backstabbing will no longer be conceivable as innermost desires or motivations for human behavior; lust for power, vanity, pride, and the desire to subordinate people and rule over them will all disappear.”21
The “whole society” would be made up of “whole human beings.” Whole human beings were inconceivable without a whole society:
This thesis is in no way contradicted by the fact of the existence of the “harmonious individuals” of the Renaissance or ancient Greece or such phenomena as Goethe or our Pushkin, the universal geniuses of their time, because we are talking about the average type, not a small sample taken from the “elite.” Renaissance humanists were a negligibly small top layer of society; the “ideal human beings” in ancient Greece (idealized to an extraordinary degree in later times) relied on slave labor (as clearly demonstrated in Plato’s Republic); Goethe was an exception in the whole of Germany (and not only Germany).22
Socialist society would be the definitive answer to the call issued by the first Congress of Soviet Writers—a fraternal family of giants “who think and act at the same time,” an international constellation of redeemed Faust’s remaking the world:
One of the greatest geniuses of humanity, G
oethe, said that he was a “collective being” because in his work he expressed the experience of a huge number of his fellow humans [Mitmenschen]. In socialist society the lives of fellow humans will be immeasurably richer and more varied, and its geniuses will stand on shoulders immeasurably more powerful. Whereas Goethe, unlike the modern philistines of capitalism, had a sense of social connection, the geniuses of the socialist period of human history will find the idea of opposing themselves to their comrades and contemporaries totally inconceivable. Human relations will be entirely different because all traces of individualism will disappear.23
This future was near, but it had not yet arrived. Socialism was still being shaped, and Bukharin was still in prison, trying to outwit Mephistopheles. The last and decisive battle was still to be fought, and violent coercion—against both Bukharin and Mephistopheles—was still needed.
The more acute the struggle against the still powerful capitalist enemy, the more necessary this element of “authoritarianism,” strict discipline, promptness, cohesion, urgency, etc. From an ahistorical point of view, from the point of view of ideal absolutes and empty phraseology one can attack Soviet “authoritarianism” and “hierarchy” as much as one wishes. But such a point of view is itself empty, abstract, and meaningless. The only possible approach in this regard is the historic one, which bases the criteria of rationality on the specific historic circumstances and the common goal as defined by the “giant steps” of the historical process.24
After nine and a half months in prison, he had completed his confession and was ready to sacrifice himself to the giant steps of the historical process. On December 19, 1937, he wrote a letter to Stalin:
I’ve come to the last page of my drama and perhaps of my very life. I agonized over whether I should pick up pen and paper—as I write this, I am shuddering all over from disquiet and from a thousand emotions stirring within me, and I can hardly control myself. But precisely because I have so little time left, I want to take my leave of you in advance, before it’s too late, before my hand ceases to write, before my eyes close, while my brain somehow still functions.
In order to avoid any misunderstandings, I will say to you from the outset that, as far as the world at large (society) is concerned: (a) I have no intention of recanting anything I’ve written down [confessed]; (b) In this sense (or in connection with this), I have no intention of asking you or of pleading with you for anything that might derail my case from the direction in which it is heading. But I am writing to you for your personal information. I cannot leave this life without writing to you these last lines because I am in the grip of torments which you should know about.25
He still did not understand, still distinguished between his private and public selves, still believed that there was a Koba separate from Comrade Stalin. He was willing to play his role in the upcoming scapegoating ritual, but he was giving his “graveside word of honor” that he was innocent of the crimes he was confessing and that the reason he had admitted his guilt was to avoid the impression that he had not fully disarmed. He had, in fact, not fully disarmed: he continued to insist, like Job before the Lord spoke, that guilt and innocence with regard to specific actions must be relevant to the giant steps of the historical process.
There is something great and bold about the political idea of a general purge. It is (a) connected with the prewar situation and (b) connected with the transition to democracy. This purge encompasses (1) the guilty; (2) persons under suspicion; and (3) persons potentially under suspicion. This business could not have been managed without me. Some are neutralized one way, others in another way, and a third group in yet another way. What serves as a guarantee for all this is the fact that people inescapably talk about each other and in doing so arouse an everlasting distrust in each other. (I’m judging from my own experience. How I raged against Radek, who had smeared me, and then I myself followed in his wake….) In this way, the leadership is bringing about a full guarantee for itself.
For God’s sake, don’t think that I am engaging here in reproaches, even in my inner thoughts. I wasn’t born yesterday. I know all too well that great plans, great ideas, and great interests take precedence over everything, and I know that it would be petty for me to place the question of my own person on a par with the universal-historical tasks resting, first and foremost, on your shoulders. But it is here that I feel my deepest agony and find myself facing my chief, agonizing paradox.
What he needed was some sign of recognition that what he was offering was not utter self-abasement but an act of conscious self-sacrifice for the sake of great plans, great ideas, and great interests. What he needed was a nod from the historical process, a blessing from Koba on behalf of Comrade Stalin:
If I were absolutely sure that your thoughts ran precisely along this path, then I would feel so much more at peace with myself. Well, so what! If it must be so, then so be it! But believe me, my heart boils over when I think that you might believe that I am guilty of these crimes and that in your heart of hearts you yourself think that I am really guilty of all of these horrors. In that case, what would it mean? Would it turn out that I have been helping to deprive [the Party] of many people (beginning with myself!)—that is, that I am wittingly committing an evil?! In that case, such action could never be justified. My head is giddy with confusion, and I feel like yelling at the top of my voice. I feel like pounding my head against the wall: for, in that case, I have become a cause for the death of others. What am I to do? What am I to do?26
In the rest of the letter, he described how difficult it would be for him to go through with the trial; asked for poison, so he would be able to spend his last moments alone; begged to be allowed to see Anna and their son; and suggested various ways in which he might be useful if left alive. He ended his letter with a farewell to Koba.
But I am preparing myself mentally to depart from this vale of tears, and there is nothing in me toward all of you, toward the Party and the cause, but a great and boundless love. I am doing everything that is humanly possible and impossible. I have written to you about all this. I have crossed all the t’s and dotted all the i’s. I have done all this in advance, since I have no idea at all what condition I shall be in tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, etc. Being a neurasthenic, I shall perhaps feel such universal apathy that I won’t be able even so much as to move my finger.
But now, in spite of a headache and with tears in my eyes, I am writing. My conscience is clear before you now, Koba. I ask you one final time for your forgiveness (only in your heart, not otherwise). For that reason I embrace you in my mind. Farewell forever and remember kindly your wretched
N. Bukharin
10 December 193727
Koba never responded. Stalin’s response was the public Trial of the Anti-Soviet Rightist-Trotskyite Bloc, which took place on March 2–13, 1938. Bukharin confessed to “betraying the socialist Motherland, the gravest crime there is, organizing kulak uprisings, preparing terrorist acts, and belonging to an anti-Soviet underground organization,” but rejected most of the specific accusations, including the murder of Kirov and Gorky. He was bending his knees before the giant steps of the historical process, but the remaining bitterness and pride did not fall away completely. Or, as he would have it, the remaining bitterness and pride did not fall away completely, but he was bending his knees before the giant steps of the historical process. At the end of his last plea, he said:
I am kneeling before the country, before the Party, before the whole people. The monstrousness of my crimes is immeasurable especially in the new stage of the struggle of the USSR. May this trial be the last severe lesson, and may the great might of the USSR become clear to all. Let it be clear to all that the counterrevolutionary thesis of the national limitedness of the USSR has remained suspended in the air like a wretched rag. Everybody perceives the wise leadership of the country that is ensured by Stalin.
It is in the consciousness of this that I await the verdict. What matters is not the personal feeling
s of a repentant enemy, but the flourishing progress of the USSR and its international importance.28
He was sentenced to death the next day, along with seventeen other defendants, including Rykov, Yagoda, Zelensky, and Rozengolts. The sentence was carried out two days later, on March 15, 1938. “Their disgraceful, vile blood” wrote Yulia Piatnitskaia in her diary, “is too small a price for all the grief felt by the Party.” And as Koltsov wrote in his Pravda article (which may have influenced Piatnitskaia), “The pitiful attempt by the duplicitous, villainous murderer, Bukharin, to paint himself as an ‘ideologist,’ a creature lost in theoretical mistakes, is hopeless. He will not succeed in separating himself from his gang of accomplices. He will not be able to deflect full responsibility for a series of monstrous crimes. He won’t be able to wash his little academic hands. Those little hands are covered in blood. They are the hands of a murderer.”29
Aleksei Rykov and Nikolai Bukharin at the trial
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Over the course of several months following the Bukharin trial, Koltsov was elected to the Supreme Soviet and to the Academy of Sciences (as a corresponding member), awarded the Order of Red Banner, and praised (by Stalin and everyone else) for The Spanish Diary, which was published as a book. On December 12, he delivered a lecture “On the Short Course of the History of the Communist Party” at the Writers’ Club. The event was described by the Pravda correspondent, Aleksandr Avdeenko:
The oak hall was full of people. Instead of making a speech, Koltsov spoke informally about how our country would gradually move from socialism to communism. First, public transportation would become free, then bread. All other food items would begin to be distributed according to need, in exchange for conscientious labor, as opposed to money, which would lose its current role and turn to dust.
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