The fate of the leaders of the Bolsheviks – Bukharin and Rykov

85 years ago, on March 15, 1938, Nikolai Bukharin, a former member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, was shot. and former Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR Alexei Rykov.

Bukharin is one of the few highly educated and high-ranking rulers of the early years of Bolshevik Russia, who was friends with Stalin, called him Koba. And, it seems, in the heat of the turbulent decade after the October Revolution, he still did not understand what this person was like. Although he could not help but see how Stalin dismissed Trotsky himself, and then Zinoviev and Kamenev, seizing full power. So after all, he not only saw – he helped, on the side of Stalin he participated in the overthrow of yesterday’s “leaders”. Or did he consider what was happening to be a party polemic within the framework of democracy? And thought he was allowed to have his own opinion?

Bukharin, Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR Alexei Rykov and Chairman of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions Mikhail Tomsky, supporters of Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP), opposed Stalin’s plan for the collectivization of agriculture, the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class,” the requisition and sale of grain abroad – for accelerated industrialization. In January 1928, at a meeting of the Politburo, Rykov threw Stalin in the face: “Your policy does not smell like economics!” In September, Bukharin published the article “Notes of an Economist” in the main party newspaper Pravda, of which he was also an editor-in-chief:

“In general, when drawing up our plans, it is necessary to remember the directive of the 15th Congress: “It is wrong to proceed from the demand for the maximum transfer of funds from the sphere of peasant economy to the sphere of industry, because this demand means not only a political break with the peasantry, but also undermining the raw material base of industry itself. , undermining its domestic market, undermining exports and disrupting the balance of the entire national economic system.

Stalin called a meeting of the Politburo, at which Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky were accused of “right deviation”. Bukharin objected and—attention, did he see the light? called Stalin “a petty oriental despot.” Small! Stalin could not forgive such a thing.

In 1929, Bukharin was removed from the Politburo. Then he came to his senses, admitted mistakes, which, probably, allowed him to remain in more or less high positions, including the post of editor-in-chief of Izvestia. In 1934, on XVII Congress of the CPSU (b)urged: “The duty of each member of the party is to rally around Comrade Stalin as the personal embodiment of the mind and will of the party.”

And two years later, while on a business trip in Paris, he told the Social Democrats Fyodor Dan and Lydia Dan:

“He [Сталин] he is even unhappy because he cannot convince everyone, even himself, that he is greater than everyone else … For this very “misfortune” of his, he cannot but take revenge on people, all people, and especially those who are somehow higher, better than him … If someone speaks better than him, he is doomed, he will no longer leave him alive, for this person is an eternal reminder to him that he is not the first, not the best, if someone writes better, his business is bad, because he, it is he, must to be the first Russian writer… This is a small, vicious person… It so happened that he is sort of like a symbol of the party. The lower classes, the workers, the people believe him. Maybe it’s our fault, but it happened.” (“Socialist Russia”, 12/15/97)

By that time, Stalin was preparing the “Trial of the Anti-Soviet Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites”, where the main defendants were to be Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky (Tomsky shot himself in August 1936, having learned about the beginning of the investigation). Bukharin was arrested in February 1937. On the eve of his arrest, he left a message to the “Future Generation of Soviet Leaders”, which his widow preserved for history:

“I feel helpless in front of the infernal machine … At present, for the most part, the so-called NKVD bodies are a reborn organization of unprincipled, decayed, well-to-do officials who, using the former authority of the Cheka, for the sake of Stalin’s painful suspicion, I’m afraid to say more, in pursuit of they do their vile deeds with orders and glory, by the way, not realizing that they are destroying themselves at the same time – history does not tolerate witnesses of dirty deeds! .. Thunderclouds hung over the party. My innocent head alone will drag thousands more innocents… I have expressed my views openly together with Rykov and Tomsky… These days the newspaper with the holy name Pravda is publishing the vile lie that supposedly I, Nikolai Bukharin, wanted to destroy the gains of October, restore capitalism… I appeal to you, the future generation of party leaders, whose historical mission is to unravel the monstrous tangle of crimes, which in these terrible days is becoming grander, flaring up like a flame, and strangling the party… Know, comrades, that on that banner, which you will carry on your victorious march towards communism is also my drop of blood. (Rehabilitation: Political processes of 30 – 50 years. M., 1991)

And at the trial he repented, repeating the leading questions of prosecutor Vyshinsky:

“I plead guilty to the fact that I was one of the largest leaders of this “Bloc of Rights and Trotskyists” … This counter-revolutionary organization, to put it briefly … It set as its goal the restoration of capitalist relations in the USSR … The dismemberment of the USSR … In favor of Germany, in favor of Japan, partly England.

Vyshinsky. Were you a supporter of Lenin’s arrest?

Bukharin. Arrest? There were two such cases…

Vyshinsky. I ask you, did you have a plan to arrest Comrade Stalin in 1918?

Bukharin. There was a plan to arrest Lenin, Stalin and Sverdlov. (https://istmat.org/node/43299)

And so on and so forth. Brad and absurd.

Bukharin, Rykov and 16 other people who were with them on the same “case” were shot on March 15, 1938 at a special NKVD Kommunarka training ground near Moscow.

Sergei Baimukhametov.

On the picture: Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei Rykov.