Nikolai Bukharin - Great Purge

Great Purge

Stalin's collectivization policy proved to be as disastrous as Bukharin predicted, but Stalin had by then achieved unchallenged authority in the party leadership. However, there were signs that moderates among Stalin's supporters sought to end official terror and bring a general change in policy, now that mass collectivization was largely completed and the worst was over. Although Bukharin had not challenged Stalin since 1929, his former supporters, including Martemyan Ryutin, drafted and clandestinely circulated an anti-Stalin platform, which called Stalin the “evil genius of the Russian Revolution”. Stalin wanted to impose the death penalty on those involved, despite Lenin's injunction against bloodletting among Party members, but he was resisted by moderates.

More importantly, Sergey Kirov, a Leningrad party leader, was emerging as popular leader of the moderates. Although Kirov himself was a staunch Stalin loyalist, he was in favor of a general relaxation and reconciliation toward former oppositionists. In the 1934 Party congress, Kirov was elected to the Central Committee with only three negative votes, the fewest of any candidate, while Stalin received 292 negative votes.

In the brief period of thaw in 1934-1936, Bukharin was politically rehabilitated and was made editor of Izvestia in 1934. There, he consistently highlighted the dangers of fascist regimes in Europe and the need for "proletarian humanism". He was also the principal framer of the Soviet Constitution of 1936, which promised freedom of speech, the press, assembly, religion, and the privacy of the person, his home, and his correspondence.

However, Kirov was assassinated in Leningrad in December 1934, and his death was used by Stalin as a pretext to launch the Great Purge, in which about a million people were to perish as Stalin eliminated all past and potential opposition to his authority. Some historians now believe that Kirov's assassination in 1934 was arranged by Stalin himself or at least that there is sufficient evidence to plausibly posit such a conclusion. After Kirov's assassination, the NKVD charged an ever growing group of former oppositionists with Kirov's murder and other acts of treason, terrorism, sabotage, and espionage.