Word: bukharin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Soviet citizens. The old constitution also ensured a wide range of freedoms -press, assembly, religion and speech. As it happened, the 1936 constitution was adopted just as Stalin began his Great Purges, which cost 1 million lives, including that of the document's author, Bolshevik Leader Nikolai Bukharin. The new model not only reiterates most of the old guarantees but also promises Soviet citizens the right to have a house, income and savings, livestock and an assortment of "articles of everyday use and personal consumption and convenience." It enlarges freedoms to include the inviolability of correspondence, telephone conversations...
Only Lenin offers a thread of continuity and legitimacy of rule for Russia's present, apparently divided leadership. Virtually all of Lenin's closest Bolshevik comrades-Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev-were dishonored and murdered by Stalin. For 40 years, from Lenin's death in 1924 through Khrushchev's ouster in 1964, every Russian leader was irreversibly disgraced by his successors. Such an interruption in legitimate succession demands a fresh reinforcement of the link between the present leaders and the founding father...
...Bukharin, unshaken in his commitment to the Russian revolution, but confronted with the failure of the opposition to Stalin, achieving a political stance was more difficult. Condemned as a traitor, he determined both to admit, indeed, to help the Prosecutor establish, that in his untimely opposition to Stalin, he was no better than a traitor. At the same time, he tried to deny with all the irony and passion still left to him that he was in fact in the service of a foreign country. That this denial was in Merleau-Ponty's account, so difficult to make...
...particular view of history. And if your view is partial, or if what you counted on betrays you, you are still responsible for the outcome. It is this drama of historical responsibility that Merleau-Ponty lays bare for us in Koestler's novel, in the trial of Bukharin, and in the exile and assassination of Trotsky. Such responsibility, and the anxiety and willfulness which it inspires, makes of politics, as Napoleon said, the modern tragedy. One ought not to be surprised then, that most of the personal drama of politics lies in the ways men have found of living with...
...Merleau-Ponty's account of Bukharin's behavior is correct, could not Stalin have granted Bukharin his intentions, and condemned his actions? Why make a farce of Bukharin's tragic acceptance of his guilt? Merleau-Ponty did not attempt to answer these questions directly, perhaps because for him Stalinism was not yet over: he continued to work with the French Communist Party until the existence of the labor camps in Russia was revealed a few years later. But he provides the terms for an answer, and suggests the consequences of remaining silent. For Stalin to acknowledge that Bukharin was guilty...