EFLV - "Bukharin"

NIKOLAY BUKHARIN 

1) EMOTION ("romantic") 

2) PHYSICS ("toiler") 

3) LOGIC ("skeptic") 

4) WILL ("serf") 

Bukharin was Lenin's closest associate, leader and ideologist of the Bolshevik Party, "the golden child of the revolution," "the Veniamin of Bolshevik leadership," and "the favorite of the party. Executed by Stalin in 1938. 

Bukharin's trouble was a common trouble of the "serfs" - controllability. He wanted to be an artist, he was good at it, but at the beginning of the twentieth century Russia was delirious about revolution and revolutionaries were in vogue. Young people are known to be particularly susceptible to fashion, so it is not surprising that Bukharin, with his socialdemocratically oriented 2nd Physique, found himself among the radicals already in his gymnasium years. What is surprising is that he did not mix painting with political struggle, as many did, but devoted himself wholly to politics, being a creature apolitical by nature. Bukharin himself explained the categorical nature of his choice by saying that "one life cannot be divided between such demanding gods as art and revolution," but I think it was not the incompatibility of idols. A decisive role in the fate of Nikolai Bukharin was played by his closest grammar school friend, Ilya Ehrenburg, a zealous Bolshevik at the time. His superior Will easily recruited Bukharin into the ranks of politicians. Later Ehrenburg, fearing the pressure of Lenin's most powerful Will, crawled away from the ranks of professional revolutionaries and took up art history, journalism, and writing, while Bukharin, having found in Lenin a real master, remained. 

The relationship between Lenin and Bukharin is a special section of their biographies. Lenin appreciated the malleability of Bukharin's 4th Will, but was also afraid that this malleability might turn into political prostitution. He wrote: "We know Comrade Bukharin's softness, one of the qualities for which he is so loved and cannot be disliked. We know that more than once he was jokingly called 'soft wax. It turns out that on this 'soft wax' any 'unprincipled' person, any 'demagogue' can write anything." Lenin, of course, was vainly jealous; Bukharin belonged to him indiscriminately, but it does not follow that Bukharin considered it obligatory for himself, copying Lenin exactly, to transfer political squabbles to individuals. On the contrary, Bukharin was personally quite impartial (the 4th Will) and maintained the friendliest relations even with his most avowed political enemies, frightening the Bolshevik superiors with this omnivorousness. 

Another source of friction between Lenin and Bukharin: a certain servile freedom of the "serf" standing above the Will (decide for me, but I think for myself). Bukharin's Logic, though 3rd, was first-rate, especially in comparison with other Bolshevik nonscientists. His decent education gave him a significant head start and allowed him to open his mouth without fear among like-minded people. It turned out that the Party had two ideologues: Lenin and Bukharin - which Bukharin easily put up with, but Lenin did not. He quarreled assiduously with Bukharin, playing offended Marxist innocence, berating him with the last words in their political vocabulary, clearly leading to a rupture. Colleagues in the political struggle suggested to Bukharin the source of the squabble: "...your Lenin cannot tolerate any man with a head around him," - and they were wrong. Lenin was not only ready to tolerate intelligent people near him, but even sympathized with them. A different thing is that he kept the ideological monopoly, as well as the political monopoly, for himself and did not tolerate rivals in this field. This circumstance did not prevent Lenin from drawing a handful of handfuls from Bukharin's scolded articles retrospectively, from publishing explicit plagiarism under his own name. 

It seemed more attractive to Lenin to exploit the softness of Bukharin's 4th Will by making him the "settler" of interdepartmental and inter-factional conflicts. And it must be admitted that the choice of such a role for Bukharin was as fortunate as possible. His lack of personal interest, non-partisanship, and sincere benevolence toward the opposing sides ensured his trust in the litigants and the feasible success of his mission. 

Lenin's opponents dreamed of using Bukharin in a different way. Finding a certain system in his chronic falling into opposition to Lenin, they suspected in this figure a hardened, consistent and talented frontrunner, ready and able to replace the prickly, uncomfortable Lenin. And, of course, they miscalculated. When a representative of the Left SR promised Bukharin a Leninist chair, he answered with genuine consternation: "Do I have the necessary data to become the leader of the party and fight Lenin and the Bolshevik Party? No, don't deceive yourself!" 

Bukharin's golden age came between the end of Lenin's autocracy and the beginning of Stalin's autocracy. As one of the key figures in the Party leadership at that time, he withdrew from the struggle for leadership (4th Will) from the outset, bargaining for his neutrality the position of official ideologist of the Party (honey for the 3rd Logic). Bukharin's position as a weight that could tip the scales of the struggle for power in one direction or another not only gave him the position of the first ideologist, but also shaped the face of the country for this period: it humbled the cannibalistic instincts of the main pretenders to the throne (Stalin, Trotsky, Zinoviev), liberalizing the cultural and economic policies of the authorities as much as possible. Private initiative especially blossomed, soaking up like a sponge the slogan thrown out by Bukharin, dear to his 2nd Physique: "Enrich yourselves!" 

The story of the sunset of Bukharin's career and life is banal and sad, like any sunset story of the lives of nice, glorious, but weak people. After receiving sole power from his hands, Stalin thanked his friend only by shooting him as one of the last. Shooting "Bukharinists" and "right-wing deviationists" began even before Bukharin's arrest. By the way, my grandfather, a professor at a Leningrad institute, was also among them, shot in 1937, i.e. a year before the execution of his idol. Bukharin's death is made all the more sad by the fact that, under no illusions about Stalin's character and talents, before his arrest he had made his wife learn by heart a letter to succeeding generations, the contents of which were limited to an oath of allegiance to the tyrant. Sad but true, like any "serf," Bukharin, even in the face of eternity, remained more loyal than a citizen. 

About the appearance and character of "Bukharin" as a mental type, it is probably possible to say the same words that were used in describing Bukharin himself by his acquaintances and biographers: "He had the appearance of a saint rather than a rebel and a thinker. His open face with its enormous forehead and clear shining eyes was in its perfect sincerity almost ageless. "Charming with women, at ease with children, accessible to both the worker and the intellectual, he was a 'sympathetic personality' even in the eyes of his opponents. His youthful enthusiasm, sociability, intimate humor... was already making an impression on his acquaintances. They spoke of his kindness, nobility, expansiveness, and love of life. 

* * * 

Of the literary characters, the type of "Bukharin" is most accurately conveyed by Tolstoy in the image of Platon Karataev. Karataev's vivid, imaginative speech, industriousness, kindness, caring, sincerity and inescapable fatalism are the best way to reproduce the psychotypical traits of the "Bukharin. 

To what others have said about the "Bukharin," I would like to add one notable trait of his character: he is not jealous. I once had the chance to meet a woman of this type. With her usual "Bukharin's" candor she told me that it was her fate to marry a pathological bureaucrat. Remarkably, she was upset by her husband's behavior, but not by his red tape. "I'm not jealous," she said simply. Not even the fact that her husband was eventually imprisoned for attempted rape changed anything. She uncomplainingly went to his camp for the rest of her sentence - to nourish her stomach and sexually. I don't know how their story continues, but there is no doubt that there will be no end to her husband's infidelity or to her wife's patience. 

"Bukharin is a living subversion of Freud, a living anti-Oedipus. His 2nd Physique is too strong and flexible to be jealous with physiological jealousy. And the 4th Will has too little self-respect to disagree in advance with cheating. 

And vice versa. Berdyaev had the 2nd Will with the 4th Physique, and he wrote: "I am quite incapable of experiencing a feeling of jealousy. One gets the impression that anyone whose Will and Physics occupy the non-injurious Second and Fourth rungs on the hierarchy of functions, i.e. people belonging to the types "Bukharin", "Berthier", "Gazzali", "Einstein", can be included among the Freudian subversives, people who are not jealous by nature.