The beginning of 1936 did not yet seem to presage any tragedy, either for Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin or for our country as a whole. It is true that Kirov’s assassination, and a number of closed political trials, at one of which Zinoviev and Kamenev were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment, had created a state of continuous tension. Nevertheless, it still remained possible for many former members of the Zinovievite and Trotskyist oppositions to avoid repression by once again publicly repenting their past ‘sins’. And in the case of former ‘Right’ oppositionists, including Bukharin himself, more often than not even such expressions of repentance were not demanded.
At this time, Bukharin was absorbed in his work as editor-in-chief of Izvestia. Obviously, Izvestia’s significance and influence, either then or now, cannot be compared with that of Pravda, whose editor Bukharin had been prior to the defeat of the so-called Right Opposition. At the same time, however, it was possible to publish things in the less official Izvestia which could never have appeared in
Bukharin continued to live in the Kremlin and remained on the Central Committee of the cpsu, although no longer as a full but as a candidate member. In his editorial work and in relationships with friends alike, he maintained the utmost loyalty. He never spoke badly behind Stalin’s back either of Stalin himself or his policies, not allowing any hint of what could be termed ‘opposition’. Of course, there were many things he did not know. To many other things he simply closed his eyes. Nevertheless, he could not have been ignorant of the major difficulties being experienced by the country, and in particular by the peasantry. After all, a huge quantity of readers’ letters flowed into the editorial offices of Izvestia from all parts of the country, and Bukharin had to read many of them—but even this did not change his position. In those months, he did not even meet with his recent collaborators in opposition, Tomsky and Rykov.
In the spring of 1936, the question arose of purchasing sections of the Marx-Engels archive, principally from the German Social-Democrats. At that time Germany was under the rule of fascism, while the Social-Democratic Party, like the Communist Party, had been banned. Its local organizations had been dissolved, and many activists had been arrested and were languishing in concentration camps. The majority of the leadership, however, had emigrated, and the bulk of the archives of that party, with which Marx and Engels had been so closely linked in the second half of the nineteenth century, was removed to other Western countries—especially those where socialists were in power. The German Social-Democrats were extremely hard up for resources, and were prepared to sell part of their archive to the Soviet Union (on the understanding that they would keep a copy). The Politburo of the Central Committee appointed Bukharin to head the group that was sent to negotiate purchase of the archive. It is doubtful whether there was anyone better suited in the Central Committee for these negotiations. The group also included Adoratsky, a prominent employee of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, and Arosev, a member of the Party since 1907 and at that time a well-known writer and political figure. There were others in the group who were less well-known but, perhaps, no less influential.
The Politburo decision also specified those people with whom Bukharin was to meet and negotiate. These included, in particular, Otto Bauer, the
Bukharin willingly accepted the Politburo’s proposal concerning the trip. He prepared for it carefully, and with excitement. Of course, contacts had already been established in the past between Bolsheviks and Social-Democrats, for the purpose of either purchasing or collecting copies of works by Marx and Engels which were referred to and used by Western social-democrats, but which had not yet been published. In particular, a lot of work was done in this respect by the founder of the Marx-Engels Institute (later the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute), David Ryazanov. However, there was a substantial difference in atmosphere between the mid-twenties and the mid-thirties. So far as I am aware, nothing was printed in the Soviet press about the creation of this group around Bukharin, about its tasks or its subsequent contacts, though in the Western press there were many articles about it.
The group headed by Bukharin travelled to Norway, Denmark and other countries, and then based itself for a longer time in Paris, where Bukharin, Arosev and Adoratsky took adjoining rooms in the well-known Hotel Lucrétia. Apparently Bukharin’s wife, Anna Mikhailovna Larina, came to visit him in Paris for the month of April. She was a very young wife all of twenty. Bukharin had already been married twice before. But in those years getting married, like getting a divorce, was a comparatively easy matter. From his second wife, Bukharin had a daughter, Svetlana, who at the time of his new marriage was ten or eleven years old. Anna Mikhailovna Larina came from a well-known revolutionary family of long standing. From childhood she had been familiar with most of the leading Bolsheviks and knew Bukharin well, since he often used to visit colleagues and comrades, both in the Kremlin and in the governmental ‘house on the embankment’, and liked to play games with the children. At nineteen, Anna Mikhailovna was strikingly beautiful. In 1935 she married Bukharin, who was then forty-eight, and moved to his Kremlin flat. This flat had been lived in by Stalin until 1932, but after the suicide of Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Stalin had asked Bukharin to exchange flats, on the grounds that he found it difficult to stay there. Stalin also knew Anna Larina, and on hearing about her marriage, he telephoned to congratulate her. Soon afterwards, having met Bukharin with his wife in the Kremlin, Stalin said: ‘Even here you managed to outflank me.’