Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  BUKHARIN, NIKOLAI IVANOVICH

  sky); Economics of the Transition Period (1920), which celebrated the statization of the economy under War Communism but also began to explore how to build a socialist society after the revolution; and Historical Materialism (1921), a major analysis of Marxism in the twentieth century.

  After Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy in 1921, debate swirled around the question of the relative importance that should be accorded industry and agriculture to achieve economic development within the framework of a socialist economy. Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition favored rapid industrialization at the expense of agriculture, in what Preobrazhensky termed “primitive socialist accumulation.” Bukharin, disavowing the illusions of War Communism, emphasized the need to find an evolutionary path to socialism based on a strong alliance with Russia’s peasant majority and invoked Lenin’s last writings to legitimize this position. He argued that forcibly appropriating agricultural surpluses would ultimately lead to the disintegration of agriculture because peasants would no longer have an incentive to produce. While agreeing that industrialization was absolutely critical for the construction of socialism, he favored a gradual approach. Bukharin’s path to socialism relied upon a growing consumer market, possible only if there were private merchants to contribute to the growth of domestic trade. He argued for policies that would produce balanced growth at a moderate tempo, speaking of growing into socialism through exchange.

  In the mid-1920s Bukharin aligned himself with the Stalinist majority against the Left, becoming a full member of the Politburo in 1924, and played a major role in the government. He was the architect of the pro-peasant policies introduced in 1925 and urged peasants to “enrich yourselves,” a phrase that would later be used against him. As editor of Pravda and other party publications, and a member of the Institute of Red Professors, Bukharin moved easily in the world of NEP intellectuals and artists and authored government policies favoring artistic freedom. He became head of the Comintern in 1926 after the ouster of Grigory Zinoviev and saw the collapse of his policy of cooperation with the Chinese Nationalists. In the same period, Bukharin strongly attacked the Left Opposition and helped achieve its total ouster from power in the fall of 1927.

  Bukharin supported the 1927 decision of the Fifteenth Party Congress to adopt a five-year plan for Soviet industrialization, but he and the gradualist

  Communist leader Nikolai Bukharin in London, June 1931. © HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS policies he advocated fell victim to the radical and violent way Josef Stalin carried out the plan. Bukharin opposed Stalin’s harsh measures against the peasants after the amount of grain marketed fell off sharply. In September he published “Notes of an Economist,” criticizing efforts to inflate the industrial goals of the plan and defending the idea of balanced growth; it is impossible, he said, “to build today’s factories with tomorrow’s bricks.” Stalin and his allies counterattacked, labeling Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, and Mikhail Tomsky the “Right Opposition.” His power already undercut by the end of 1928, Bukharin was removed formally from the Politburo, the Comintern, and editorship of Pravda during 1929 and systematically vilified. In limbo for the next four years after halfhearted recantations, horrified by the destruction visited on the peasantry by collectivization, he served as research director for the Supreme Economic Council and its successor and wrote extensively on culture and science. In the era of partial moderation from 1934 to 1936, Bukharin became editor of the government newspaper, Izvestiya, participated in the commission to prepare a new Soviet constitution, and wrote about the danger of fascism in Europe.

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  BUKOVINA

  The Great Purges ended the domestic truce. Bukharin was arrested in February 1937. In March 1938, along with the Right Opposition, he was tried for treason and counterrevolution in the last great show trial, the Trial of the Twenty-One, where he was the star defendant. Bukharin confessed to the charges against him, probably to save his young wife Anna Larina and their son Yuri (born 1934), and he was executed immediately. In the Khrushchev years, Bukharin came to symbolize an alternative, non-Stalinist path of development for the Soviet Union. He was rehabilitated in 1988, and Larina made public his last written work, a letter to future party leaders, that she had preserved by memory during years of imprisonment. See also: LEFT OPPOSITION; LEFT SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES; NEW ECONOMIC POLICY; PURGES, THE GREAT; WAR COMMUNISM

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Bergmann, Theodor; Schaefer, Gert; and Selden, Mark, eds. (1994). Bukharin in Retrospect. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Bukharin, Nikolai. (1998). How It All Began. New York: Columbia University Press. Cohen, Stephen F. (1973). Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938. New York: Oxford University Press. Haynes, Michael. (1985). Nikolai Bukharin and the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism. London: Croom Helm. Heitman, Sidney. (1969). Nikolai I. Bukharin: A Bibliography, with Annotations. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution. Kemp-Welch, A., ed. (1992). The Ideas of Nikolai Bukharin. New York: Oxford University Press. Larina, Anna (1993). This I Cannot Forget: The Memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin’s Widow. New York: Norton. Lewin, Moshe. (1974). Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates from Bukharin to the Modern Reformers. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Medvedev, Roy A. (1980). Nikolai Bukharin: The Last Years. New York: Norton.

  CAROL GAYLE WILLIAM MOSKOFF

  BUKOVINA

  Bukovina is a region that straddles north-central Romania and southwestern Ukraine. First records of the region date back to the fourteenth century, when the whole territory was a constituent part of the Moldovan Principality.

  From 1504, the region was drawn under indirect Ottoman rule. However, following the Russo-Turkish war of 1768-1774, the Hapsburg Empire annexed the region, in accordance with the 1775 Convention of Constantinople.

  During the initial stages of Austrian rule, Bukovina’s population expanded rapidly. The region’s reputation for religious toleration and relaxed feudal obligations saw a wave of German, Polish, Hungarian, Ukrainian, and Romanian immigrants flood into the area.

  The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the aftermath of World War I gave rise to a brief period of dispute concerning rights to the region, with both Romania and briefly independent Ukraine claiming sovereignty. The Treaty of Saint Germain awarded the territory to a newly enlarged Romania.

  Control over the region shifted following the enactment of the clandestine Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, as the Soviet Union seized northern Bukov-ina (to the Sereth River) on June 29, 1940. This move precipitated an exodus of the region’s German settlers.

  Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 saw the whole territory temporarily revert to Romania. Bukovina’s sizable Jewish population suffered during this period. However, the region was retaken by advancing Soviet troops, and in September 1944 northern Bukovina was officially incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

  After a period of territorial stability under Communist rule, focus on the area returned during the 1990s. With an estimated 135,000 ethnic Romanians living in Ukrainian Bukovina, tentative calls were made by the Romanian government for a reversion to territorial arrangements that had existed prior to the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. The Ukrainian government’s unwillingness to engage Romanian demands meant the issue initially reached a stasis. However, Romania’s application to join NATO forced a resolution of the dispute and, as such, a 1997 treaty mutually recognized the territorial integrity of the two states. See also: MOLDOVA AND MOLDOVANS; UKRAINE AND UKRAINIANS

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  BULGAKOV, SERGEI NIKOLAYEVICH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Fischer-Galati, Stephen. (1991). Twentieth Century Rumania. New York: Columbia University Press. Roper, Steven D. (2000). Romania: The Unfinished Revolution. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers.

  JOHN GLEDHILL

  swirls with fierce wit, narrative inventiveness, and a myriad of historical, literary, and religious references.

  Bulga
kov’s last play, Batum (1939), written in honor of Stalin’s sixtieth jubilee, was banned. Bulgakov died of kidney disease in 1940. See also: GOGOL, NIKOLAI VASILIEVICH; MOSCOW ART THEATER; THEATER

  BULGAKOV, MIKHAIL AFANASIEVICH

  (1891-1940), twentieth-century novelist, journalist, short story writer, and playwright; author of internationally acclaimed novel Master and Margarita.

  Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov was born in Kiev. He graduated from the Kiev University Medical School in 1916 and married Tatiana Lappa, his first of three wives. He practiced medicine in provincial villages, then in Kiev, where he witnessed the outbreak of the Russian Civil War and struggled with morphine addiction. In 1920 he abandoned medicine for a writing career and moved to Vladikavkaz, Caucasus, where he wrote feuilletons and studied theater.

  Bulgakov moved to Moscow in 1921. There his troubles with censorship began. His satirical (patently science fiction) novel Heart of a Dog (Sobache serdtse) was deemed unpublishable. His play Days of the Turbins (Dni Turbinykh), based on his autobiographical novel White Guardu (Belaya Gvardiya), premiered in 1926 and was banned after its 289th performance (although it supposedly numbered among Josef Stalin’s favorite plays). Subsequent plays were banned much earlier in the production process. His short story “Morphine” (1927) was his last publication in his lifetime. In 1930 he wrote a long letter (his second) to the Soviet government requesting permission to emigrate. He received in response a telephone call from Stalin, who offered him an assignment as assistant producer at the Moscow Art Theater. Although not subjected to forced labor or confinement, Bulgakov hardly enjoyed privilege. His work remained unpublished and unperformed. His attempts to appease the censors by tackling relatively safe subjects (historical fiction and adaptations) proved futile.

  Bulgakov’s novel Master and Margarita was written between 1928 and 1940. Resonant with the influence of Nikolai Gogol, it concerns the Devil, who, disguised as a professor, travels to Moscow to wreak havoc. This exuberantly irreverent work

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Bulgakov, Mikhail. (1987). Heart of a Dog, reprint ed., tr. Mirra Ginsburg. New York: Grove. Bulgakov, Mikhail. (1996). The Master and Margarita, reprint ed., tr. Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor. New York: Vintage. Milne, Lesley. (1990). Bulgakov: A Critical Biography. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Proffer, Ellendea. (1984). Bulgakov: Life and Work. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis.

  DIANA SENECHAL

  BULGAKOV, SERGEI NIKOLAYEVICH

  (1871-1944), political economist, philosopher, and theologian, whose life and intellectual evolution were punctuated by sharp breaks and shifts in worldview.

  Sergei Bulgakov was born into the clerical estate. His father was a rural clergyman in Livny (Or?l province); his mother, of gentry background. Like Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Nikolai Dobrolyubov a generation earlier, Bulgakov lost his faith at age fourteen and transferred from the seminary to the secular gymnasium at Elets, and then to Moscow University, where he studied political economy. His book On Markets in Capitalist Conditions of Production (1897) established him, together with Nikolai Berdyayev, Peter Struve, and Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky, as one of Russia’s foremost Legal Marxists. While researching his doctoral thesis (“Capitalism in Agriculture”) in Europe, Bulgakov experienced a spiritual crisis, breaking down in pious tears before Raphael’s canvas of the Sistine Madonna in Dresden. Upon his return to Russia, he spearheaded the movement from Marxism to idealism (including among others Berdyayev, Semen Frank, and Struve). Over the next twenty years he became a key participant in the seminal collections

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  BULGANIN, NIKOLAI ALEXANDROVICH

  of articles-Problems of Idealism (1902), Landmarks (1909), From the Depths (1918)-that charted the collective spiritual evolution of an important segment of the Russian intelligentsia. Bulgakov’s idealism translated into political involvement in the Union of Liberation (founded in Switzerland in 1903) and included the drafting of the Cadet (Constitutional Democrat) party’s agrarian program. During the Revolution of 1905, Bulgakov founded a small but intellectually sophisticated Christian Socialist party and was elected to the Second Duma.

  Like his fellow liberals and radicals, Bulgakov experienced severe disappointment following Peter Stolypin’s June 3 coup, formulated in his article in Vekhi, criticizing the intelligentsia. But by 1912 he had regained his sense of direction, finally completing his doctoral dissertation in a completely new tone. Philosophy of Economy: The World as Household (translated into English for the first time in 2000) is a work of social theory, and fully part of the “revolt against positivism” (H. Stuart Hughes) characteristic of European social thought in the period from 1890 to 1920. The book established Bulgakov’s prominence as a thinker of the Russian Silver Age. In Philosophy of Economy and his next major work, The Unfading Light (1917), Bulgakov became a religious philosopher, bringing the insights of Orthodox Christianity, and particularly the concept of Sophia, the Divine Wisdom, to bear on problems of human dignity and economic activity.

  Following the February Revolution, Bulgakov became a delegate to the All-Russian Council of the Orthodox Church; in 1918 he was ordained as a priest. Bulgakov was among the two hundred or so intellectuals Vladimir Lenin ordered shipped out of the new Soviet Union, across the Black Sea to Istanbul, in 1922. In his “second life,” first in Prague and then in Paris, Bulgakov became arguably the twentieth century’s greatest Orthodox theologian, crafting two theological trilogies modeled on the pattern of the liturgy: the “major” (e.g., Agnets Bozhy) and the “minor.” Bulgakov was founder and dean of the St. Sergius Theological Academy in Paris and active in the ecumenical movement, including the Brotherhood of St. Alban’s and St. Sergius and the Russian Christian Student Movement. Sophia, the Divine Wisdom, became a unifying principle in his writing, even leading to the development of a doctrine known as Sophiology. A tragic controversy over Sophia erupted in 1935; Bulgakov’s views were condemned by both the Soviet Orthodox Church and the Synod of the Orthodox Church in Exile in Czechoslovakia. Bulgakov’s final work was a commentary on the Apocalypse of St. John the Divine. In 1944 he died of throat cancer in Paris.

  Banned for seventy years in the Soviet Union, the writings of Bulgakov and his fellow Silver Age philosophers experienced a resurgence of popularity beginning in 1989. See also: BERDYAYEV, NIKOLAI ALEXANDROVICH; CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY; SILVER AGE

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Evtuhov, Catherine. (1997). The Cross and the Sickle: Sergei Bulgakov and the Fate of Russian Religious Philosophy, 1890-1920. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Valliere, Paul. (2000). Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov: Orthodox Theology in a New Key. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

  CATHERINE EVTUHOV

  BULGANIN, NIKOLAI ALEXANDROVICH

  (1895-1975), political and military leader.

  Nikolai Bulganin was a marshal of the Red Army who rose to the position of Soviet Prime Minister (1955-1958) under Nikita Khrushchev. Bul-ganin made his career mainly as a security and military official, but he was also an urban administrator. As mayor of Moscow (1931-1937) at a time when the capital was undergoing rapid expansion, he collaborated closely with Khrushchev in the construction of such enduring symbols of Stalinist urbanization as the Moscow metro. Bulganin’s career benefited from the purges (1937-1938). Despite his lack of military training, Josef Stalin actively promoted him as a party commissar to oversee the military. He eventually joined Stalin’s war cabinet in 1944. In 1947 he succeeded Stalin as minister for the armed forces and was promoted to marshal. A year later he joined the Politburo. Shortly after Stalin’s death (1953), he was appointed minister of defense. In the ensuing political confrontation with secret police chief Lavrenti Beria, Bulganin sided with his friend Khrushchev, ensuring the military’s loyalty. Bul-ganin’s subsequent support for Khrushchev against Georgy Malenkov, who was advocating reduced spending on heavy industry, led to Bulganin’s appointment as prime minister. In this post he actively supported Khrushchev’s
attempts to defuse

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  BULGARIA, RELATIONS WITH

  tensions with the West, over both Germany, and Yugoslavia. But he always played second fiddle to party boss Khrushchev. A year after Bulganin sided with the Stalinist Anti-Party Group against Khrushchev (1957), he was dismissed as both prime minister and marshal. Relegated to a minor economic post, he subsequently retired in 1960. See also: KHRUSHCHEV, NIKITA SERGEYEVICH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Khrushchev, Nikita. (1974). Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament, tr. and ed. Strobe Talbott. London: Andre Deutsch. Taubman, William; Khrushchev, Sergei; and Gleason, Abbott, eds. (2000). Nikita Khrushchev. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

  ROGER D. MARKWICK

  BULGARIANS

  The Bulgarians, or Bulgars, belonged to the Turco-Altaic language group and originated from western Siberia, along the valley of the Irtish River. During the first and second centuries C.E. they migrated in the direction of eastern Europe and settled in the region north of the Caucasus. There, the proto-Bulgarians mingled with local native tribes of Iranian origin, whose cultural achievements and social hierarchy had a substantial impact on their further development. The proto-Bulgarians were called Bul-gars for the first time by a Roman chronographer in 354. During the seventh century, they merged with the Slavic tribes inhabiting the territory bordering the Black Sea, between Romania and Turkey, in southeastern Europe, which is present-day Bulgaria.