Nikolai Bukharin - Fall From Power

Fall From Power

Bukharin's support of continuation of NEP was not popular with higher Party cadres, and his slogan to peasants, “Enrich yourselves!” and proposal to achieve socialism “at snail's pace” left him vulnerable to attacks first by Zinoviev and later by Stalin. Stalin attacked Bukharin's views, portraying them as capitalist deviation and declaring that the revolution would be at risk without a strong policy that encouraged rapid industrialization.

Having helped Stalin achieve unchecked power against the Left Opposition, Bukharin found himself easily outmaneuvered by Stalin. Nevertheless, Stalin's victory would not have been inevitable if Bukharin had been more politically astute. He seems to have enjoyed a majority in the Politburo initially (he said that Kalinin and Voroshilov betrayed the Right at the last minute) and unlike the Left Opposition, broad mass support among the peasantry, which made up 80% of the Russian population. Yet Bukharin played to Stalin's strength by maintaining the appearance of unity within the Party leadership. Meanwhile, Stalin used his control of the Party machine to replace Bukharin's supporters in the Rightist power base in Moscow, trade unions, and Comintern.

Bukharin attempted to gain support from earlier foes including Kamenev and Zinoviev who had fallen from power and held mid-level positions within the Communist party. The details of his meeting with Kamenev, to whom he confided that Stalin was “Genghis Khan” and changed policies to get rid of rivals, were leaked by Trotskyist press and subjected him to accusation of factionalism. Eventually, Bukharin lost his position in the Comintern in April 1929 and editorship of Pravda, and he was expelled from the Politburo on 17 November of that year.

Bukharin was forced to renounce his views under pressure. He wrote letters to Stalin pleading for forgiveness and rehabilitation, but through wiretaps of Bukharin's private conversations with Stalin's enemies, Stalin knew Bukharin's repentance was insincere.

International supporters of Bukharin, Jay Lovestone of the Communist Party USA among them, were also expelled from the Comintern. They formed an international alliance to promote their views, calling it the International Communist Opposition, though it became better known as the Right Opposition, after a term used by the Trotskyist Left Opposition in the Soviet Union to refer to Bukharin and his supporters there.