Excerpts from AH.com thread “What if Nikolai Bukharin took over the USSR?”
Kollontai the Third said:
Bukharin is often considered the big “what if” of the USSR along with Trotsky, being virtually Lenin’s favourite and usually considered the figure in the Soviet Union who most closely hewed to his vision for the Soviet Union with the fewest alterations. Of course, he ended up being associated somewhat with the right opposition out of his belief that the NEP should only be ended once the Soviet Union could springboard into the most painless possible transition towards collectivized industry. And he ended up backing Stalin over Trotsky and a number of other figures before eventually starting to quietly drift away from him out of a belief that Stalin was deviating from the proper course as much as Trotsky’s faction wanted to.
But after the American revolution he virtually exploded onto the scene as an avowed Americanophile; even appropriating what was something of a pejorative label for him and other Bolsheviks who believed wholeheartedly in the rightness of America assuming the leadership role over the Comintern. While he more formally labelled himself as an “Internationalist Bolshevik”, there was a clear degree of fondness for the American experiment that only grew with his increasingly routine visits to the country. He even started to make bids to take greater roles in the Soviet government along with his fellow internationalists, probably the most serious leadership struggle since Lenin died.
Yet Stalin’s already entrenched section of the party was able to resist the challenge, and being believers in Democratic Centralism; Bukharin’s followers ended up gradually ratcheting their bids down after failing. Then of course a lot of his faction was targeted for the later purge. Many such as Kollontai and Shlyapnikov would end up joining Trotsky in exile while others were eliminated outright.
Now, while Stalin managed a somewhat convincing lead, there still seems to be a lot of wiggle room for Bukharin to have reversed that. Assuming his fraction was able to cleanly wheel itself into power and displace the more conservative clique represented by Stalin, Kaganovich, and Molotov; how much would the Soviet Union have changed as a result? With Germany, Japan, Italy, and Brazil all being ticking timebombs and the world on a knife’s edge; how much would the world as a whole have changed?
I know that some like to meme about starting the “Militarized Internationalism” phase twenty years ahead of schedule but I really think that kind of paves over the differences between Bukharin’s fraction and the Frunze, Kuznetsov, and Zhukov triumvirate that came to power later more than a little.
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DeOppressoLiber said:
Bukharin the Americanophile is a bit of an over exaggeration. There was little real disagreement between Stalin and Bukharin about the level of enthusiasm for accepting economic integration with America. Arguably, the opposite was true, at least from 33 to 36. Red May brought Stalin back to something approaching an orthodox Leninist position, and it ultimately turned Bukharin into a mild supporter of the industrialization program and the proletarianization of the peasantry.
Which makes Bukharin’s final letter to Stalin all the more haunting: “Koba, why do you need me to die?”
Obviously, if Bukharin had been general secretary in 1933 (the most likely time for Stalin’s resignation would be in the aftermath of the scissors crisis, during the 16th Party Congress), we don’t see Stalin begging for his life. The growth of the security apparatus was largely Stalin’s doing. But we see at least a couple years delay before a major industrialization initiative. Would the later start be compensated by having a cleaner, more efficient program made possible by American largesse?
Hard to tell how it all balances out. American engineers did complain a lot about the bureaucracy getting in the way, and some squandered opportunities. But on the whole it’s probably likely that in terms of total output it puts the USSR behind OTL.
But on the other hand, I cannot stress this enough, the Yezhovshchina and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. Bukharin would have never allowed the Red Army’s internal reforms to be hijacked by Great Russia chauvinists and secret police goons to create a black hole that swallowed so much of the Army and left the survivors hobbled and paranoid.
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TheThirdMan said:
We probably wouldn’t have gotten Militarized Internationalism 20 years earlier. What we would probably start off with is a continuation of Leninist policies economically (possibly transitioning out of the NEP eventually) and with his avowed admiration for the American system, a focus on taking on elements from them.
The big question is how much Bukharin might’ve taken from the Americans. Full on multi-party democracy, or just some token elements merged with democratic centralism?
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Bear of Steel said:
Third Man, I think that question is born largely out of misunderstanding the differences between the function of parties within proletarian and bourgeois societies. In the latter, parties represent differing factions of interests; usually predominated by competing factions of the donor class. In the former, it has come to represent differing programs and visions for not merely geopolitical advantage or economic development, but the transition of society from Proletarian class rule to classlessness.
Even in America there was the general understanding that while debate could and should be vigorous; once a course of action was agreed upon; the parties should cooperate to make it actuality with allowance for changing or unforeseen conditions.
As for the question, it should be remembered that the whole of the Soviet Union was greatly enthused by the May Revolution and America was warmly embraced as an ally. The leadership in particular was craving for American aid in development and technology. What was more contentious perhaps was the question of who had seniority in the revolution.
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Excerpt from “Pariah no more - The Third Period of Soviet Politics” by Sergei Udaltsov
The system established by Iosif Stalin was something born of the isolation that the young union of freeborn republics experienced after defeating the White Army. In the world, only Weimar Germany and Kuomintang China maintained anything akin to consistently friendly relations with the Soviet Union. But the former was a disarmed nation that based its legitimacy on crushing the left flank of its revolution and the latter was only partially recognized in the face of the foreign preferred reactionary Beiyang government.
The Union was alone, and surrounded by many who would like to see it destroyed or forced to concede so much as to make the whole of the revolution pointless sooner or later. The survivors and victims of the Great Imperialist War would not stomach a return to the old regime, whatever the fairy tales the White exiles told their hosts. The imperialists had given up direct military intervention in 1922, content instead to starve out the revolution.
As with the French Revolution before it, duress turned the Soviet revolution towards desperate measures to empower itself in the face of an utterly irreconcilable enemy. The Cheka had waged a Red Terror against suspected enemies during the Revolution. In the years that followed, they battled counterrevolutionary plots both real and imagined.
As Victor Serge, a Left Opposition dissident put it, “The Party endeavoured to head [the Cheka] with incorruptible men like the former convict Dzerzhinsky, a sincere idealist, ruthless but chivalrous, with the emaciated profile of an Inquisitor: tall forehead, bony nose, untidy goatee, and an expression of weariness and austerity. But the Party had few men of this stamp and many Chekas” (Memoirs of Revolutionary , 1945). The unstable situation led to violent excesses. The violent excesses enabled corruption. Both in turn separated the Party from the people.
Russia was not a heavily industrialized nation before the revolution, with most of her factories concentrated in a handful of cities and virtually all of her coal derived from the Donbass. The economy of the Empire depended immensely on frantic French and British investment meant to bolster it as a bulwark against the German Empire’s continental ambitions, and precious little of the wealth flowed outside of the urban core and the nobles. It was at best an unevenly developed entity hemmed in by enemies better positioned to exert power in their spheres than itself, at worst an unsustainable engine fueled by external charity waiting for a push.
And much of what had been built already was in shambles thanks to the ravages of revolutionary war. Though the damage could have indeed been worse, Soviet Union was proclaimed over a country tired by years of virtually continual warfare and much rebuilding had to be done. And to perform this rebuilding capital needed to be raised and then sunk into the material means with which to further develop the land of the Soviets. Factories, modern technologies, skilled and educated personnel and the institutions to produce them, and advanced infrastructure were all necessary.
There was perhaps some measure of alarmism to the urgency. The NEP and commercial arrangements brokered by the political power of communist parties in Europe and North America had allowed the Party to make good on some of its promises to the workers and peasantry. Industrial production had returned to its pre-war high in most sectors in the 1926-7 statistical year.
Thirteen years of lost labor, when the enemies of the Soviet Union had not endured the same devastation. The massive Imperial Russian Army had been devastated by Germany once before. To the man in charge, thirteen years might have seemed like one-hundred. As Stalin put it in speech recorded in Pravda , “We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in years. Either we do it or they crush us” (18 February 1931).
And with the defeat of the revolutions in what had been the Central Powers; the Soviet Union would not be getting this capital from comrades in the Proletarian struggle. Weimar Germany would always keep the Soviet Union at some degree of arm’s length, while China would be ravaged by even worse crisis and warlordism that would virtually shatter the country and the also-rans that would emerge from the corpse of the Hapsburg Imperium would range from neutral to outright hostile.
Thus arose the New Economic Policy. A means to make the new union of republics attractive to foreign capital. It was not meant to be permanent, even by its most ardent of supporters, but it would allow the Capitalists to sell them the rope that Lenin hoped to one day hang them with. As had been planned by the majority of the party, eventually once the NEP had developed to the point that the former Russian Empire had acquired a proletarian base ready for the transition to a fully industrial power, it would be weaned off of.
Stalin saw this as the Union’s highest priority, above virtually all other considerations. Including the efficiency of this process. The mistakes and errors of the efforts could be resolved once the immediate threat of the Soviet Union’s laggard development behind its neighbours was resolved. Progress had to be made at any cost to secure the fortress of the worker’s revolution, and to ensure that no backslides were made into bourgeois restoration. This would create an atmosphere of always meeting targets and the necessity of sacrifices to meet them in exchange for greater prosperity in the future.
Security needed to be tightened, enemies needed to be watched closely as the Soviet Union took a less conciliatory tone regarding class conflict. Though Stalin remained as he ever was, deeply cautious in terms of foreign policy for fear of being entangled in conflicts he could not win; his faction sought to gradually push the Union towards the realization of the final conflict. Where once the imperialists shattered themselves with another conflict, the proletariat under Moscow’s guidance and example could sweep aside the broken remnants of the old world and beget an age where the controls and pressures were no longer needed.
Internally, the Union feared the rise of a potential Bonaparte, adventurists who might risk everything by pulling the worker’s state into confrontations prematurely, bourgeois restorationists, foreign agents, and opportunists who sought to subvert the incentives of the Soviets to what they perceived as self-advantages. Much like the French before them, the Soviets sought to steer this ship in hostile waters, and feared the possibility of mutiny or subversion.
This is by no means to excuse the actions of the Soviet Union, but it is an apt truism that repression and terror are the tools of those who are in a position of weakness rather than strength. One throws a punch in a struggle to survive with the iron fist, not the velvet glove used to comfort friends and family. But with seemingly no other choice but an unacceptable retreat into bourgeois norms once more or to consolidate all possible resources into an effort to prepare the Soviet Union for conflict with perhaps the whole of the world; the union formed for liberation had to turn towards the logic of exploitation to accumulate the resources necessary. And this was a process that could never be gentle in the face of such urgency.
…
The emergence of the Union of American Socialist Republics and its swiftly collected band of allies changed the whole of the Soviet calculus. Suddenly, the only power in the world who could perhaps fairly challenge the predominant might of the British Empire that sprawled across a quarter of the planet; to say nothing of its allies such as France and Portugal; was now on the side of the Soviets. The virtually peerless industrial might of America was now firmly partnered to the Union, and with America’s revolution came a dramatic shift in Latin America as well. Mexico, Nicaragua, and Chile had formed proletarian states while much of the rest of the region tilted towards the American side.
“The imperialist encirclement has been broken,” as Bukharin stated in his editorial heralding the liberation of the District of Columbia, “The workers of the Soviet Union and America are now united in brotherhood. The dreams of our limitless future are now in reach” (Pravda , 1 August 1933)
The Soviet Union was no longer alone. It had a network of allies now, powerful allies at that. Allies that were perhaps more powerful than the Soviet Union itself. And a system that was born to defend a revolution encircled by enemies in all directions was now faced with the problem that it was no longer fully encircled and perhaps more problematic; it was no longer the natural leader of the global revolution. Even the Germans would have been equals, surely the British as well as a revolution would likely cost them their empire. But America was perhaps the one state in the world who could unambiguously outmuscle the Soviet Union following a revolutionary conflict.
The pressures of cooperation also introduced a hole in the secrecy regime. One cannot form a black box to keep all outside eyes away when openly inviting the great mass of American industrial resources and expertise to assist the Union in modernizing and developing. Furthermore, the Americans could not be commanded to heel as easily as communist parties who were not in power in their own countries, to say nothing of other Bolsheviks within the party during the time of the Stalin faction’s predominance.
But the system once formed was somewhat reluctant to simply dismantle itself all at once. Stalin to a degree agreed with the lack of necessity for the present harshness of the security system in the face of relaxed pressures, but wanted this relaxation of security to happen gradually. At a controlled pace that would not allow enemies in hiding to cause chaos while taking advantage of the reprieve. And there was still the matter of the seemingly now inevitable clash with the capitalist powers. The American revolution had driven most bourgeois states into frenzied hysteria and was plainly inspiring many to turn towards the promises of fascism or hard-line Anti-communism.
The Soviet Union would no longer have to face it alone, but the great trial would still be coming all the same.
Transcript of VKP(b) Politburo discussions, 13th of April 1937
V.M. Molotov: Bronstein1 has been quiet of late.
I.V. Stalin: Why would he need to be chatty? Lev has Bukharin saying everything that he wants to be said. He’s too busy sampling the food at New York’s delicatessens and sleeping with his young mistresses to care about avenging a lost factional struggle.
N.I. Yezhov: The situation is delicate right now though, chief. The flood of foreigners has been increasingly difficult to manage. These American engineers don’t know how to keep their mouths shut. We’ve been breaking up White cells and putting them on the front page of Pravda , and still they keep yapping.
K.Y. Voroshilov: I’m not so concerned about spies. It’s the humiliation of the toiling people of the Soviet Union that can’t be allowed. Every morning I read more about the triumph of American engineering this, another industrial plant thanks to American scientific prowess that, yada yada. It’s dangerous. The last thing the state needs is for Germany or Poland to be emboldened by our weakness.
V.M. Molotov: With all due respect, comrades, I think you are being alarmist. This is precisely the boon we hoped for during the Civil War, when Vladimir Illyich [Lenin] was still with us. It came ten years later, and in America instead of Germany.
I.V. Stalin: It’s true, we’ve become used to going it alone. Vladimir Illyich warned us of the danger of revolutionary encirclement. We’ve broken that encirclement. But there are clear problems with the current cooperation. Do we not owe it to our American comrades to not, as they say, let their heads get too big? We’ll need to tighten the discipline at Pravda at the very least. We cannot let the triumphs of Soviet industry all go to our brothers across the sea.
L.M Kaganovich: I remain skeptical of the Americans’ entreaties towards their Left-SRs and those who feel as though we need to copy their system. We should be cautious about making heedless steps away from already proven methods. The remaining anti-revolutionary forces grow more reactionary every day; we can’t afford to leap without foresight.
A.I Mikoyan: We are all comrades in revolutionary struggle are we not? The Americans need our resources, our military skills and might, and our strategic position before Europe and Asia just as much as we need their machinery, engineers, and naval power. I am certain that they will be reasonable in compromising with us when we all face the same threats from Berlin and London.
K.Y. Voroshilov: What they’re doing is giving Tukhachevsky too many ideas. The situation on the continent is delicate, as Slava is all too fond of reminding us. If we play this wrong, we’ll not just be facing a Polish-German axis, but France and Italy as well. All the powers of old Europe will be against us.
V.M. Molotov: We’ve been working on that angle, actually. Trying to get the Americans to dial back the world revolution rhetoric on the one hand. Doing what we can to prevent a Franco-German rapprochement on the other. Hitler’s ambitions with regards to the Sudetenland may just be the flashpoint we need to scupper that threat.
I.V. Stalin: Another inter-imperialist war would be ideal. Preferably before Foster starts his war with Britain. The Americans have kept the results of our joint-operation a state secret—for now. The Red Army is not ready for war. They’ve had ample time; too many of them are incompetant or on the English payroll.
N.I. Yezhov: I don’t know what’s worse.
K.Y. Voroshilov: One leads to the other.
V.M. Molotov: That reminds me, Koba; you’re going to have to make good on your promise to make a state visit eventually. Our American comrades will only be indulged by visits by Kalinych2 for so long.
I.V. Stalin: You know how much I hate flying. It’s not like I do not want to go. There is much I would like to see in America. But there is also so much work to be done.
- Leon Trotsky’s birth name.
- Mikhail Kalinin, officially the Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Union and conventionally the head of state, in practice little more than a figurehead after Lenin’s death. “Kalinych” is an endearing form, the kind you’d have for your grandfather.
*[WPA]: Works Progress Administration *[NBI]: National Bureau of Investigation
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