Author: Nikolai Bukharin
Publisher: Seagull Books
Year: 1998
Language: English
Pages: 345
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8170461723
Description
Here at last in English is Nikolai Bukharin's autobiographical novel and final work.
Many dissident texts of the Stalin era were saved by chance, by bravery, or by cunning; others were systematically destroyed. Bukharin's work, however, was simultaneously preserved and suppressed within Stalin's personal archives.
At once novel, memoir, political apology, and historical document, this work known in Russia as the prison novel, adds greatly to our understanding of this vital intellectual and maligned historical figure. The panoramic story, composed under the worst of circumstances, traces the transformation of a sensitive young man into a fiery agitator and presents a revealing new perspective on the background and causes of the revolution that transformed the twentieth century.
Not yet thirty when the Bolsheviks took power, he was one of the youngest, most popular and most intellectual members of the Communist Party. In the 1920s and '30s, he defended Lenin's liberal New Economic Policy, claiming that Stalin's policies of forced industrialization constituted a 'military-feudal exploitation' of the masses. He was arrested and spent a year in prison. In one of the most infamous show trails of the time, Bukharin confessed to being a counter-revolutionary while denying any crime. He was executed in his prison cell on March 15, 1938.
THE TRANSLATOR:
George Shriver has translated and edited Roy Medvedev's on Soviet Dissent and The October Revolution, as well as his Let History Judge.