Nikolai Bukharin
How It All Began
Trans. from the Russian by George Shriver
Introd. by Stephen F. Cohen
New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Pp. xxxii + 345. $28.95 cloth
Reviewed by Victor Terras

There are books that matter only because they have some value as historical documents. Nikolai Bukharin’s autobiographic novel about the experiences of Kolia Petrov and his family, which takes him to the eve of the Revolution of 1905, that is, until Kolia is about fifteen, might well have been published in the Soviet Union under Stalin (it is reminiscent of Fedin’s Early Joys, 1946). Who would have thought that, in 1998, an English translation would be published by Columbia University Press, and with an introduction by a distinguished scholar of Russian studies, of the author Nikolai Bukharin, a leader of the Revolution of 1917 and one of the most prominent victims of Stalin’s purges. His book is valuable as an exhibit of the mentality of the “progressive” Russian intelligentsia which was responsible for the Revolution. It is depressing reading, considering that Bukharin was among the morally and intellectually outstanding representatives of his class; one thinks of his role as guardian angel of the great poet Osip Mandelstam. What makes it depressing is the preposterous political correctness of young Kolia and his father, Ivan Antonych Petrov, a schoolteacher and later a tax assessor. All the wrong ideas and movements are duly put down or exposed. Marxism, as interpreted by Lenin, is the only right idea. Ivan Antonych’s fellow teachers are ignoramuses and lickspittles, his fellow officials are incompetent, greedy, and corrupt. Russian literature is presented entirely from a radical Marxist point of view. Pushkin is a revolutionary, Zhukovsky, “a courtier and sycophant of the tsars.” About Turgenev, we learn mainly that he “had to serve a prison term” (172). As for Tolstoy: “...always the same old Christian rubbish” (259). Even Dostoevsky is dealt with in a politically correct way, as the ideas of Versilov, a negative character of his novel A Raw Youth, are presented as profoundly true: “Human beings, thus orphaned [by loss of faith in God], would immediately begin to press against one another more closely and lovingly” (323).

In his introductory essay Stephen F. Cohen points out a few passages which may be read as Bukharin’s attempts to project an accusation directed at Stalin’s Russia through an exposure of the tyranny of czarist Russia. But this cannot prevent us from seeing Bukharin’s novel mainly as political propaganda. There is some evidence that this propaganda has had an effect even on American minds. In the excellent glossary added to the novel, we find this definition of gimnaziya: “In nineteenth-century Russia a government-sponsored elite secondary school (inspired and supposedly modeled on the gymnasia of ancient Athens). After 1866, under Minister of Education Dmitry Tolstoy, increased emphasis was placed on classical education with the result that more than 40 percent of class time went to instruction in Greek and Latin, one purpose being to discipline students and distract their attention from current affairs. In the late 1800s graduation from a gimnaziya was virtually the only means of admission to a university” (341).

This is exactly what Bukharin would like us to believe. The fact is that the gimnaziya was a public school, accessible to all who could pass the entrance examination. Its curriculum was equivalent to that of a German Gymnasium, a French lycée, or a British public school. Admission to a university in all European countries depend on a diploma from a secondary school. In Russian, to be sure, there was a quota on Jewish students in all public institutions of higher learning.