Nikolai Bukharin, despite the extent of his published work (much of which has now become available in English), and despite a full-scale biographyfootnote1 (something which does not exist for most leading Bolsheviks), remains a curiously elusive and paradoxical figure. A prominent Left Bolshevik until 1921, by 1923 he had nevertheless become the principal exponent of a gradualist interpretation and extension of the New Economic Policy, and was to lead the Right in the Party for the rest of the decade. Having laid the ideological basis for Stalin’s rise to power in the mid-twenties, above all through his concept of building ‘socialism in one country’, he has nevertheless become the symbol for influential currents within Eurocommunism of a classical Marxist tradition that can be seen as implicitly anti-Stalinist. After spearpointing the onslaught on the Joint Opposition of Zinoviev, Kamenev and Trotsky in 1926–7, in a campaign of unprecedented distortion and vilification, under conditions in which prior organizational measures had made ‘discussion’ a farce, Bukharin has nevertheless come to represent for many later Communists a dignified and loyal opposition ‘from within’.footnote2 The most substantial theorist apart from Lenin and Trotsky among the Bolsheviks, he nevertheless presided over the muzzling of theoretical work within the Communist International. His conduct at his trial has been variously seen as the epitome of capitulation, and as a masterpiece of subtle resistance against all odds. Personally close to Lenin, who described him as ‘the favourite of the Party’, Bukharin was nevertheless to be executed on trumped-up charges which included that of planning to assassinate Lenin—an absurd and shameful slander which millions of Communists were nevertheless to accept for decades thereafter.

The account given below by Roy Medvedev of Bukharin’s last years, provides the fullest historical record to date of this tragic episode. Medvedev, like Bukharin’s widow and son, is active in the campaign for his full rehabilitation, both juridically and within the Party. This campaign deserves the whole-hearted support of socialists in the West: the rehabilitation of all the Bolshevik Old Guard—Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and the many others executed or assassinated at Stalin’s behest and since written out of the history of the revolution which they helped to forge—will be of prime importance in settling accounts with what remains of the Stalinist legacy to this day.