STEPHEN F. COHEN

In Praise of War Communism: Bukharin’s
The Economics of the Transition Period

When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them. It is as if ivied maidens and garlanded youths were to herald the four horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Eric Hoffer, The True Believer

The Economics of the Transition Period, Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin’s eulogistic and controversial analysis of war communism, appeared in May, 1920, just as those extremist civil war policies of the Bolshevik government were reaching their apogee. It was destined to be the least circulated, but among the most famous of all his major theoretical works. That, unlike Bukharin’s other important writings, The Economics had no further Russian editions¹ was due to the rush of events: its domestic programmatic implications were made largely obsolete by the collapse of war communism and the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in March, 1921. That the book nevertheless continued to be influential and admired-the doyen of Soviet historians, M. N. Pokrovskii, cited it in 1928 as one of the three great Bolshevik achievements in “social science” since the revolution² -was due to its theoretical content, which is the subject of this essay.

I

Like most revolutionary documents, The Economics is not fully comprehensible apart from the events that prompted its writing. The time, it will be remembered, was not ideal for leisurely theorizing. The civil war raged; and Bukharin, in addition to his duties as a Central Committee member, editor of Pravda, and a chief executive of the Communist International, was a candidate Politburo member and thus one of the eight party leaders who constituted the real government of Soviet Russia. Two circumstances seem to have prompted his lengthy excursion into abstract Marxist theory during these turbulent days: the improvised nature of the regime’s domestic policies, and his own special role in the Bolshevik leadership.

The first circumstance involved the origin and development of the policies which in retrospect became known collectively as war communism: wholesale nationalization of almost all manufacturing enterprises; regimentation of labor; rationing, state-controlled distribution of goods, and the disappearance of institutionalized market relations; forcible requisitioning of grain from the peasantry; and, as a result and most characteristic, the extensive “statization” (ogosudarstvlenie) of the country’s economic life. These spectacular policies originated not in the party’s 1917 ideology or program (as is frequently assumed), but in response to the perilous military situation that suddenly confronted the Bolsheviks with the outbreak of civil war in the summer of 1918. Encircled by white armies and foreign troops, blockaded and cut off from major sources of supplies, the fragile government abandoned the relatively moderate economic policies then in force and sought through a series of frantic, makeshift measures to lay its hands on all available human and material resources. In short, war communism was born and took shape in the crucible of military expediency and the Bolsheviks’ desperate efforts to survive as the government of Soviet Russia.³

During the next two years, however, as the tide of war turned in their favor, these policies acquired a higher rationality in the minds of many Bolsheviks. They came to be regarded not only as necessary, but as principled—as comprising a valid, if painful, road to socialism. But the sanctification of measures that had begun as siege expedients, and which were in important respects contrary to previous Bolshevik expectations, and which were attracting the criticism of foreign socialists and Bolshevik doubters, created an increasingly awkward situation. By 1919-20, given the Bolsheviks’ commitment to ideological tidiness, a serious attempt to make theoretical sense of the party’s radical policies and their social consequences was long overdue.

It was this task that Bukharin undertook in The Economics. That it fell to him is explained by his gradual emergence as the man responsible for the theoretical integrity of Bolshevism. A significant body of work completed before 1917 had established him as the party’s leading theoretical economist. After 1917, his arterial love of theory, his plethora of pedagogical and literary activities, and the instant canonical status of popular works such as The ABC of Communism,⁴ written with Evgenii Preobrazhenskii and published in 1919, had already begun to cast him, at the age of thirty-one, in his familiar role of the 1920s as the official theorist of “orthodox Bolshevism.”⁵ A seeker of ideas ill-suited to serve as their embalmer, it was a mantle Bukharin neither sought nor wore with ease. But war communism demanded theoretical treatment. And, as Lenin had said in 1919 of another problem, “if anyone could do this, it is most of all Comrade Bukharin. . . .”⁶

If The Economics represented Bukharin’s attempt to rationalize policies of dubious origin, it also memorialized a change in his own thinking. Before the summer of 1918 he had neither advocated nor envisaged economic policies similar to those of war communism. While to the left of Lenin on economic issues during the early months of Bolshevik rule, his own recommendations had for the most part been moderate.⁷ What is important here is not that he came to embrace war communism as a viable road to socialism but that he was not alone in this. The notion (promoted by the Bolsheviks themselves after 1921) that only a few dreamers and fanatics accepted war communism as enduring policy is incorrect. It was, in fact, the sentiment of the party majority; few resisted the general euphoria.⁸ What set Bukharin apart from the others, what made him seem to be the most convinced, was his literary monument to the collective folly, The Economics of the Transition Period, a tract which partook in the worst error of the period—the belief that “Civil war lays bare the true physiognomy of society. . . .” ⁹

II

Bukharin intended The Economics to be the theoretical half of a two-volume study of “the process of the transformation of capitalist society into communist society.” The second volume, projected as “a concrete, descriptive work on contemporary Russian economics,” never appeared. Originally, he planned to co-author the study with another young Bolshevik and close friend Iurii Piatakov, but “practical tasks” (Piatakov was at the front during most of the civil war) made this impossible and the latter contributed directly to only one chapter.¹⁰ Written rapidly and in extremely abstract language—as Bukharin noted apologetically, “almost in algebraic formulas”¹¹—key ideas and concepts were frequently not fully explained and occasionally inconsistent. But as a first and audaciously brilliant attempt to go beyond the existing body of Marxist thought, the book was an immediate and lasting succès d’estime.

It is possible to be generous or overly critical in judging The Economics. Western historians have tended to dismiss it as a theoretical apology for war communism, which it was, though Bukharin’s notion that it was a Marxist duty to analyze contemporary reality is surely a mitigating factor. Something more, however, accounted for its enduring esteem and for the fact that several of the book’s arguments outlived war communism. Very generally, Bukharin dealt with three broad subjects or themes: the structure of modern capitalism on the eve of proletarian revolution; society in the midst of revolutionary breakdown, or the revolutionary “disequilibrated” society; and the process of establishing a new societal equilibrium out of the chaos as a phase in the transition to socialism. He mentioned Russia very rarely, but it was clear from his treatment of the second and third subjects that the Bolshevik experience since 1917 was foremost in his mind. Just as Marx had posited his findings on English capitalism as general laws, so did Bukharin believe that he was formulating universal laws of proletarian revolution.

Bukharin’s treatment of neo-capitalism in The Economics was largely a restatement of his earlier writings on the subject. For our purposes, it is necessary to observe only that he found contemporary capitalism to be profoundly unlike the laissez-faire economy Marx had analyzed in three important respects. First was the widespread monopolization and trustification of economic life. Second, and closely related, the bourgeois state had become directly and actively involved in the economy as an owner and organizer. And third, as a result of these two processes, a “merging” or “fusing” of political and economic functions in capitalist society had occurred, a development which transformed the advanced capitalist economy “from an irrational system into a rational organization.” Since the major characteristic of this new system was the interventionist role of the modern state, he called it state capitalism.¹²

As he had done in his pre-1917 writings, Bukharin portrayed the state capitalist economy as an imposing assembly of productive, technological, and organizational achievements. This, however, raised a serious question about the desirability of revolution, which, in the case of Russia, had reduced economic production to a virtual fraction of the 1913 level.¹³ In addition to the direct casualties of the civil war, thousands of people were dying from the most primitive of causes, hunger and cold. Consequently, the Bolsheviks were being assailed by European Social Democrats, particularly Karl Kautsky, as destroyers not builders. Marxists regarded themselves as harbingers of a socially just abundance, and this accusation hurt. A number of Bolshevik polemics had been produced in response,¹⁴ but the charge required a more substantial and reasoned answer. The Economics sought to provide that answer by formulating “the costs of revolution” as a law of revolution.

Bukharin had observed earlier that the charge was reminiscent of the one leveled by the Girondins against the Jacobins, and which had driven Charlotte Corday to murder Marat.¹⁵ His point was that great revolutions were always accompanied by destructive civil wars. His favorite illustration was that when barricades are constructed out of railway cars or telegraph poles the outcome is economic destruction.¹⁶ But he was more intent on proving that a proletarian revolution inevitably resulted in an even greater temporary fall in production than did its bourgeois counterpart. Lenin’s State and Revolution (and Bukharin’s own writings before 1917) had established the doctrine that the bourgeois state apparatus had to be destroyed during the revolutionary process. Bukharin now argued that the merger of political and economic functions under capitalism, and the fact that the proletariat aimed at a fundamental restructuring of “production relations,” meant that the onslaught against the state had to become an onslaught against the economic apparatus of capitalism. “The hierarchical relations of capitalist society” are undone; “the disorganization of the ‘entire apparatus’” results. ¹⁷

Bukharin enumerated four “real costs of revolution”: the physical destruction or deterioration of material and living elements of production, the atomization of these elements and of sectors of the economy, and the need for unproductive consumption (civil war materials, etc.). These costs were interrelated and followed sequentially. Collectively they resulted in “the curtailment of the process of reproduction” (and “negative expanded reproduction”) and Bukharin’s main conclusion: “the production ‘anarchy’ . . . , ‘the revolutionary disintegration of industry,’ is an historically inevitable stage which no amount of lamentation will prevent.”¹⁸

This may appear to have been an obvious point, but it apparently came as something of a revelation to many Bolsheviks. It was directly opposed to the prevailing Social Democratic assumption that the transition to socialism would be relatively painless. Kautsky and the Austrian Marxist Rudolf Hilferding had fostered this belief, particularly the latter with his argument that if the proletariat seized the six largest banks it would automatically control the economy.¹⁹ Even some “older”—a euphemism for less radical— Bolsheviks accepted Bukharin’s law only in connection with Russia, arguing that in England, for example, no serious fall in production would occur.²⁰ Bukharin disagreed, insisting on its universal applicability. After the introduction of NEP in 1921, he claimed that this was the basic point of The Economics: “The central thought of the whole book is that during the transition period the labor apparatus of society inevitably disintegrates, that reorganization presupposes disorganization, and that therefore the temporary collapse of productive forces is a law inherent to revolution.” He had proved, he said in summary, “the necessity of breaking an egg to obtain an omelette.”²¹ Profound or not, Bolsheviks generally came to accept the “law” and to regard it as a significant discovery by Bukharin.²²

Bukharin’s law solved another problem as well. Marxists were accustomed to believing that the “objective prerequisites” of socialism “ripen” within the envelope of capitalist society, and that revolution occurs only after considerable “ripening.” Maturation was measured in terms of “the level of concentration and centralization of capital” of “the aggregate ‘apparatus’” of capitalist economy; the new society, it seemed, arrived as a “deux ex machina.” By arguing that this apparatus was invariably destroyed in the process of revolution, and that therefore “in toto it cannot serve as the basis of the new society,” Bukharin subtly dismissed the nagging question of peasant Russia’s relative backwardness (unripeness). He emphasized the “human” rather than the “material” apparatus as the essential criterion of maturity: the decisive prerequisite was a certain level of “the socialization of labor” (the existence of a proletariat) and the revolutionary class’s capacity to carry out “social-organizational” tasks. ²³

This argument led Bukharin to the heart of the dilemma of Bolshevik rule in an underdeveloped society, and to the previously unarticulated proposition that was to be at the center of the intra-party controversies of the 1920s— “building socialism.” He rejected the traditional Marxist assumption that socialism attains almost full maturity in the womb of the old order, and thus adapted Marxism to backward Russia. He contrasted the growth of socialism to the growth of capitalism:

They [the bourgeoisie] did not build capitalism, it built itself [stroilsia]. The proletariat will build socialism as an organized system, as an organized collective subject. While the process of the creation of capitalism was spontaneous [stikhiinym], the process of building communism is to a significant degree a conscious, i.e., organized process. . . . The epoch of communist construction will therefore inevitably be an epoch of planned and organized work; the proletariat will solve its task as a social-economic task of building a new society. . . .²⁴

III

Up to this point, Bukharin was describing a disequilibrated society, presenting a sophisticated and frequently ingenious account of the multiple rupturing of societal connections and interrelationships. Now he had to treat the emergence of a new equilibrium. The concept of equilibrium runs through most of Bukharin’s theoretical work, from The Economics to Historical Materialism (1921), where he explained Marxist dialectics and social change in terms of the establishment and disturbance of equilibrium, to his famous 1928 attack on the first Five Year Plan in “Notes of An Economist.” It is important to note here only that he meant a “dynamic” or “moving” equilibrium, not a static system, and that the practice of viewing society (or at least economic systems) as being in a state of equilibrium had a geneology, albeit a somewhat subterranean one, in Marxist thought. It was implicit in volume two of Capital, where Marx had employed static and dynamic models to explain capitalist accumulation and reproduction, and explicit in one chapter of Hilferding’s Finance Capital, where he had used the concept and the term to expound the second volume of Capital.²⁵

Bukharin’s reliance on this precedent, and his understanding of equilibrium as a state of “evolution and growth,” was spelled out in The Economics:

In theoretically mastering the capitalist system of production relations, Marx proceeded from the fact of its existence. Once this system exists it means . . . that social demands are being satisfied, at least to the degree that people are not only not dying off, but are living, acting, and propagating themselves. In a society with a social division of labor . . . this means that there must be a certain equilibrium of the whole system. The necessary quantities of coal, iron, machines, cotton, linen, bread, sugar, boots, etc., etc., are produced. Living human labor is expended in accordance with all of this in the necessary quantities in relation to production, utilizing the necessary means of production. There may be all sorts of deviations and fluctuations, the whole system may be enlarged, complicated, and developed; it is in constant motion and fluctuation, but, in general and in its entirety, it is in a state of equilibrium.

To find the law of this equilibrium is the basic problem of theoretical economics.²⁶

Analyzing an existing equilibrium (or disequilibrium), however, was not the same as explaining how a new one was to be forged out of the wreckage of the old.

Bukharin’s answer was to endorse the coercive measures of war communism and give them theoretical expression. The new equilibrium was established by replacing the destroyed links between elements of production with new ones, by restructuring “in a new combination the dismantled social layers . . . .” This operation was performed by the proletarian state, which statizes, militarizes, and mobilizes the productive forces of society. “The process of socialization in all of its forms” was “the function of the proletarian state.”²⁷ Bukharin carefully pointed out that while there was a “formal” similarity between the proletarian system and state capitalism (since capitalist property was being transformed into “collective proletarian ‘property’”), they were “diametrically opposite in essence.”²⁸ Since it was no longer “surplus profit” but “surplus product” that was being created, “any sort of exploitation” was “unthinkable” (nemyslimyi) under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Labor conscription, for example, which under state capitalism was “the enslavement of the working masses,” was now “nothing other than the . . . self-organization of the masses.” ²⁹

Beneath this elaborate construction was the crux of Bukharin’s argument: force and coercion (nasilie and prinuzhdenie) were the means by which equilibrium was to be forged out of disequilibrium. He did not avoid the harsh conclusion; an entire chapter on “‘Extra-Economic’ Coercion in the Transition Period” defended the proposition:

In the transition period, when one productive structure gives way to another, the midwife is revolutionary force. This revolutionary force must destroy the fetters on the development of society, i.e., on one side, the old forms of “concentrated force,” which have become a counterrevolutionary factor-the old state and the old type of production relations. This revolutionary force, on the other side, must actively help in the formation of production relations, being a new form of “concentrated force,” the state of the new class, which acts as the lever of economic revolution, altering the economic structure of society. Thus on one side force plays the role of a destructive factor; on the other, it is a force (sila) of cohesion, organization, and construction. The greater this “extraeconomic” power is . . . the less will be “the costs” of the transition period (all other things being equal, of course), the shorter will be this transition period, the faster will a social equilibrium be established on a new foundation and the quicker will the . . . production curve begin to rise.

Here, too, revolutionary coercion was unlike previous “‘pure force’ of the Duhring type,” because it led toward “general economic development.”³⁰

The ugly potentialities of Bukharin’s reasoning are easy to emphasize. All kinds of abuses could be and were rationalized with the argument that exploitation of the working class was not possible under a dictatorship of the proletariat. To argue that a workers’ state could not by definition exploit a worker was to condone one set of evils because they were “progressive.” Less obvious, perhaps, is the cogency and historical validity, at least within limits, of Bukharin’s statement on the role of coercion in laying the foundations of a new social order. History has provided few (if any) examples of a society in revolutionary upheaval being stilled or restored to harmony without the use of considerable force. Unfortunately his argument was beclouded and therefore weakened by one supplementary theoretical digression and by one omission.

The digression dealt with his belief that political economy and its traditional categories were not applicable to post-capitalist society, an assumption which gave his treatment of the economics of the transition period an ultraradical gloss. Marxism, in other words, employed “a dialectical-historical” methodology: categories and economic laws discussed by Marx related only to capitalist commodity production. Bukharin explained:

as soon as we take an organized social economy, all the basic “problems” of political economy disappear: problems of value, price, profit and the like. Here “relations between things” and social economy are regulated not by the blind forces of the market and competition, but consciously by a . . . plan. Therefore here there can be a certain descriptive system on the one hand, a system of norms on the other. But there can be no place for a science studying “the blind laws of the market” since there will be no market. Thus the end of capitalist commodity society will be the end of political economy.³¹

This understanding of political economy was shared by many Marxists and, by the mid-twenties, by a majority of Bolshevik economists. It remained something of a “dogma,” but also a topic of lively debate, until the 1930s when it was officially repudiated in the search for “a political economy of socialism.”³² But despite its currency, Bukharin’s attempt to apply the proposition in 1920 caused considerable headshaking. In the chapter written with Piatakov, he observed that in analyzing the transition period “the old understandings of theoretical economics instantly refuse to serve”; they even “begin to misfire.” Examining each category (commodity, value, price, wages), and finding each theoretically obsolete, he proposed new concepts (instead of wages, “a social-labor ration”; instead of commodity, “product”; and so forth).³³

As a result, The Economics sounded more radical than it was. For while Bukharin carefully stressed that the subject of political economy—commodity production—still existed in the transition period, and that therefore the old categories were still of practical value, his theoretical glimpse into the future seriously disturbed some readers. Two problems were involved: by discarding political economy, Bukharin seemed to be saying that man was no longer constrained by objective economic laws. Although he did not argue this point, his failure to specify new objective regulators left him open to the charge of “voluntarism.” Second and related was his disconcerting habit of discussing the future in the present tense.³⁴ In both respects, his presentation reflected the “leap-into-socialism” ideas associated with war communism.

But the most serious flaw in regard to the programmatic implications of The Economics was Bukharin’s failure or inability to distinguish clearly between the period of disequilibrium and the period following the reestablishment of equilibrium. He spoke of the transition period as the transition to socialism, and also as the transition to a new social equilibrium, from which society would move on to socialism. Left unclear was whether the extreme measures employed to forge a new equilibrium would continue to be the norm after equilibrium was established. Occasionally he implied that this would be the case.³⁵ But his periodization of the transitional process distinguished between an initial period of mobilizing the fragments of the collapsed order, which he called “the economic revolution” or “primitive socialist accumulation” (a term borrowed from Vladimir Smirnov and made famous in the 1920s in a different context by Preobrazhenskii), and a subsequent period of “technical revolution,” which would witness an evolutionary, harmonious flowering of production.³⁶

Put another way, Bukharin’s understanding of equilibrium seemed to be in conflict with his analysis of the transition period. If a state of equilibrium, capitalist or otherwise,³⁷ implied proportionality between the elements and spheres of production, then the measures of war communism would have to become obsolete at some stage in the transition period. Bukharin’s explanation, in which he tried to have it both ways, illustrated the confusion:

The postulate of equilibrium is invalid . . . . There is neither proportionality between production and consumption, nor between different branches of production . . . nor between human elements of the system. Therefore it is radically wrong to transfer to the transition period categories, concepts, and laws adequate to a state of equilibrium. One may object that insofar as society has not perished, there is equilibrium. Such reasoning, however, would be correct if the period of time we are examining was conceived of as being of great length. A society cannot live long outside equilibrium, it dies. But this social system for a certain time can be in an “abnormal” state, i.e., outside a state of equilibrium.

This was open to two interpretations: either the transition to socialism would be relatively brief; or Bukharin meant only the transition to an equilibrated state from which socialism would evolve. It is reasonable to assume that in 1920 he believed the former. After 1921, however, he offered the second interpretation.³⁸

The dilemma implicit in Bukharin’s reasoning was particularly evident in his remarks on agriculture. Like most Bolsheviks, he previously had said little that was meaningful on the peasant’s role in the new society. The enormity of the agrarian problem was now clear to him. The need to re-establish equilibrium between town and country, he explained, was “decisive for the fate of mankind . . . the most important and complex question.”³⁹ His solution hardly suited his description of the problem. Here, too, he formulated the key role of coercion, especially in the forcible requisitioning of grain. It was most crucial, however, at an early stage of the revolution, while the transition period as a whole was to be characterized by “a secret or more or less open struggle between the organizing tendencies of the proletariat and the commodity-anarchical tendencies of the peasantry.” He did not specify the form of this struggle or its arena. Significantly, however, he did exclude collective forms of agricultural production as the primary means of bringing the peasantry into the “organizing process,” arguing instead that “for the main mass of small producers, their drawing into the organized apparatus is possible mainly through the sphere of exchange. . . .”⁴⁰

The remark was a tantalizing adumbration of Bukharin’s later theory of “growing into socialism” through the market, the lynchpin of his cautious, evolutionary agrarian policies of the 1920 s —but without its essential mechanism. For while he excluded meaningful collectivization, he also excluded market (“free trade”) and “monetary-credit” links between town and country. In 1920, he still accepted the state “organs of distribution and procurement” as the basic intermediary between the industrial city and the small-peasant countryside.⁴¹ The problem should have been clear: without a commodity market, what was to encourage the peasant to produce and deliver a surplus? Bukharin spoke of the middle peasant’s “two souls”-one inclined toward capitalism, one toward socialism—and presumably hoped that the good soul would volunteer surplus grain. The alternative to this dubious likelihood was a system of permanent requisitioning. One of the book’s rare pessimistic notes suggested that Bukharin saw the quandary: “The Revolution [in Russia] triumphed easily because the proletariat, striving toward communism, was supported by the peasantry, who moved against the landlord. But this same peasantry turns out to be the greatest brake in the period of constructing communist production relations.”⁴² That, of course, was the Bolshevik dilemma, and the blind side of war communism.

IV

Final judgment on a book like The Economics-so much a child of its time-should take into account its reception as well as its contents. That its esteem outlived war communism was due to Bukharin’s innovative treatment of themes which were compatible with the post-1921 view of war communism as a regrettable but necessary episode: the structure of neocapitalism, the “costs of revolution,” the concept of “building socialism,” and the historical limitations of political economy. Although some Bolsheviks regarded parts of the book as “debatable from a Marxist point of view,” none questioned its considerable influence.⁴³ Indeed, in one quarter of the party, it was greeted with undisguised hostility, because it did promise to be influential.

A scathing attack by M. S. Ol’minskii, one of the older, less radical party leaders edged aside in 1917 by the young Bolshevik Left (of which Bukharin was the most prominent representative), appeared shortly after the introduction of NEP. It burned with resentment. Ol’minskii accused Bukharin of having abandoned Marxist political economy for “the Bukharinist method of penal servitude and shooting,” and of “revising Marxism from the Left.” In the campaign to give the book the status of The ABC of Communism, he saw the further machinations of “that part of the party” who were delirious with “the enthusiasm of power,” and for whom “nothing was impossible.”⁴⁴ Bukharin, to his credit, responded in a light vein, reprimanding Ol’minskii for his charges of “revisionism.”⁴⁵

With war communism then in the process of being dismantled and discredited, Ol’minskii scored some easy points; but he was mistaken or disingenuous in identifying the book’s stance on war communism with Bukharin’s generation, as was vividly illustrated by Lenin’s private notes on The Economics and his “recensio academica,” written on May 31, 1920, for the Communist Academy, which had published the book. Lenin’s evaluation was subsequently distorted by the circumstances surrounding the publication of his notes, which rested in an archive until Stalin’s victory over Bukharin in 1929, when they were hastily disinterred as part of the campaign to destroy Bukharin’s theoretical credentials.⁴⁶ Stalinist commentators naturally dwelt on the negative comments, of which there were many, but this spoke more of the dissimilarities of Bukharin and Lenin as intellectuals than of the book itself.

The great majority of Lenin’s objections centered on Bukharin’s terminology. He particularly disliked what he called the use of “Bogdanovist gibberish”— a reference to the lapsed Bolshevik philosopher Aleksandr Bogdanov—instead of “human language,” and, closely related in Lenin’s mind, Bukharin’s penchant for the words “sociological” and “sociology.” Over and over he greeted them with “ugh!,” “ha, ha,” “karaul,” “eclecticism,” and at one point, “it is good that the ‘sociologist’ Bukharin finally puts the word ‘sociologist’ in ironical quotation marks! Bravo!”⁴⁷ Lenin’s terminological reprimands reflected the very different intellectual orientation of the two men: Bukharin was deeply interested in and influenced by contemporary sociological thought (as Historical Materialism would show), and regarded Bogdanov’s recent work on “organizational science” as “interesting”; Lenin instinctively distrusted modern schools of social theory and had an abiding dislike for anything associated with Bogdanov.⁴⁸ When Bukharin said something was “theoretically interesting,” Lenin retorted with scorn. Lenin’s other objections were more substantial: some related to previous areas of disagreement such as the structure of modern capitalism; and some rightly focused on those parts of Bukharin’s argument which were too abstract and in need of clarification or empirical evidence. They were pertinent comments from a friendly and sympathetic critic.

But all Lenin’s reservations paled against his ecstatic praise for the most “war communist” sections of The Economics. Almost every passage on the role of the new state, statization in general, militarization and mobilization met with “very good,” often in three languages, as did Bukharin’s formulation of disequilibrium and “building socialism.” Most striking, Lenin’s greatest enthusiasm was reserved for the chapter on the role of coercion. He filled these margins with superlatives and at the end wrote, “Now this chapter is superb!,” a judgment more representative of his overall evaluation.⁴⁹ He concluded his summary review with the hope that “small” shortcomings “will disappear from following editions, which are so necessary for our reading public and which will serve to the even greater honor of the Academy; we congratulate the Academy on the splendid work of its member.”⁵⁰ Ol’minskii feared the book’s influence; Lenin looked forward to future editions. There were to be no other editions, and Lenin’s review was not published.

V

Bukharin once said of Pokrovskii’s historical work, “he who makes no mistakes, does nothing.”⁵¹ It was a fitting epigram for The Economics. Its critical shortcoming reflected the defect in war communism. Bukharin’s analysis was mute on what were to be the long-term economic problems of Soviet Russia and his own chief concerns after 1921: the problems of investment and accumulation, of the relationship between industry and agriculture, and of expanding the entire economy, quantitatively and qualitatively. The “prose of economic development,” as Ol’minskii put it, was absent. Hosannas to the advent of a “conscious regulator” did not constitute an economic program. The Economics was really about disequilibrium and the costs of revolution; and Bukharin’s error, as he was soon to realize, was to generalize on this experience for the entire transition period. His charge against the Social Democrats applied to him as well; for while he added a destructive stage in the transformation process, he, too, left the impression that socialism would come as a deus ex machina. It was indeed “as if ivied maidens and garlanded youths were to herald the four horsemen of the apocalypse.” ⁵²

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Copyright © 1971 by Stephen Frand Cohen. This article is drawn from a larger study on Bukharin and Russian Bolshevism, 1888-1938, undertaken with the support of the Research Institute on Communist Affairs, Columbia University, and to be published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1972.