Could Bukharinism become an Internationalist political ideology like Trotskyism?

As it says on the tin, if Bukharin was forced, or fled into exile as per Trotsky could Right Oppositionism become a force in Left Wing politics like Trotskyism? Or is Bukharinism tied too much to Socialism in One Country and the USSR to successfully mobilise as an internationalist theory?
 
From an old soc.history.what-if post of mine:

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I. Introduction

During the 1930s the international Communist movement was divided into three groups. The first and infinitely the most powerful was of course the Stalin-dominated "official" Communist International. The second was the Trotskyites. The third was the Right Opposition--essentially those Communists who were expelled from the Comintern in 1929 for supporting Bukharin and objecting to the ultraleft "Third Period" line of the Stalinists at this time.This third group has had almost nothing written about it apart from Robert J. Alexander's *The Right Opposition: The Lovestoneites and the International Communist Opposition of the 1930s* (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press 1981). As Alexander notes, the Right Opposition, organized in the International Communist Opposition (ICO) actually had more adherents world wide than the Trotskyites in the 1930s. Admittedly that's not saying much in itself--but according to Alexander, Right Opposition parties (mostly affiliated with the ICO) existed in fifteen countries during the 1930s, and some of them were not without influence. In the US, though a tiny group, they had considerable power in at least two major labor unions--the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) (where Charles Zimmerman, a leading Lovestoneite, headed the powerful Local 22 and was a member of the union's executive board) and the United Auto Workers (UAW) whose President Homer Martin relied heavily on Lovestoneite advisers. In Sweden most Communists went over to the Opposition; in the Riksdag elections of 1932 the Oppositionists got 5.7 percent of the vote compared to 3.9 for the Comintern party (and 41.7 for the Social Democrats). In Germany the Brandler-Thalheimer group (the KPO) won twenty-one seats in the municipal elections in Thuringia in late 1932 (compared to thirty-eight for the official Communists). In India, M. N. Roy, who was the founder of the Communist Party of India, led the Oppositionists for a while.

Most important was Spain where the Bloque Obrero y Campesino (BOC) was for most of its existence "larger and more important in national politics than the official Spanish Communist Party, and BOC leader Joaquin Maurin was the country's outstanding Marxist thinker." (Alexander, p. 185) The BOC's successor, the POUM, is often mistakenly referred to as a "Trotskyite" party, partly because Stalinist propaganda constantly referred to it as such, and partly because Andres Nin had been a Trotskyist (though by 1934 he and Trotsky had completely parted company and in 1937 Trotsky said that for six years Nin had made "nothing but mistakes"). But in the merger of the BOC with Nin's Izquierda Comunista to form the POUM in 1935 it was Maurin who was elected secretary general, and the BOC clearly brought far more members into the POUM than did Nin's group.

(Maurin was arrested by the Francoists in the early days of the Civil War and spent a decade in jails. On Maurin's disappearance--for some time, the other POUM leaders thought he was dead--Nin became political secretary of the party. An interesting what-if is whether the presence of Maurin at the head of the POUM during the first year of the war would have made any difference in the party's policies or ultimate fate. Maurin later argued that the POUM made major mistakes in not entering Largo Caballero's government and in opposing transformation of the militia into a regular army. Maurin also eventually was to regret that the POUM did not merge with the PSOE, which would have strengthened Largo Caballero's position against the Communists and the "Prieto-Negrin sector" of the PSOE. But given the Republic's dependence on Soviet aid, one may wonder whether this would have made a difference.)

The ICO and its affiliates considered themselves, not a new international, but a "faction" of the Communist movement involuntary excluded from the Comintern, and anxious to return to it if only the Comintern would change its policies and allow ICO members freedom to advocate their positions within the Comintern. For a long time, the Trotskyites had a similar concept. Yet the Trotskyites did go on to form a Fourth International and did survive Trotsky's death, however fragmented they became. (They even played fairly significant roles in politics and trade unionism in a few countries, especially Sri Lanka.) By contrast the International Right Opposition did not survive. A few of its members reconciled with Stalinism (especially after the Comintern reversed its ultraleft line of the early 1930s in favor of the United Front and later the Popular Front); many more moved to Social Democracy and then often further to the right. With all the emphasis on ex-Trotskyites in the conservative and anti-Communist movements one should not forget that ex-Bukharinites have also been of considerable importance here. (This is especially true in the United States where Bertram Wolfe was a notable author of scholarly works critical of Communism, Ben Gitlow helped originate the genre of the "ex-Communist confessional", Will Herberg became a sociologist of religion and helped edit *National Review* in the 1950s, Jay Lovestone assisted George Meany and the AFL-CIO in combating Communism in world labor, etc.)

So my question is, what would have enabled the Right Opposition to survive--even in the fragmented from in which the Trotskyists did? I think that the key to the different fates of the two movements has to do with the different fates of Trotsky and Bukharin. The Trotskyists had the advantage that Trotsky, having been expelled from the USSR, was free to develop a coherent body of anti-Stalinist ideology which his supporters could at least take as a starting point, even if many of them, during his life and especially later, quarreled with his viewpoint on many issues.

By contrast, Bukharin was not free to develop a "Bukharinist" ideology. During the mid-1920s both Stalin and Bukharin supported NEP. When serious differences developed between the two in 1928, Bukharin felt that he could not openly quarrel with Stalin, but could only challenge him within the Politburo, where Stalin soon gained a majority. Most of the party and the public could only guess at the growing split through "hints"; Bukharin had to pretend for example that his "Notes of an Economist" was directed against "Trotskyite super-industrializers", not against the Stalinist majority of the Politburo. Meanwhile Stalin started to warn of a right deviation, but at first pretended that it had no support within the Politburo. Eventually, of course, Stalin ousted Bukharin, and by late 1929 Bukharin had yielded and indicated his acceptance of the party's "general line." By 1934 Bukharin fully confessed his "sins" and as a reward was made editor of Izvestia. His writings of the 1930's are pretty much standard Stalinist stuff (though better written than typical Stalinist hack-work)--obviously they had to be Stalinist in order to get published--despite the attempts of sympathetic historians like Stephen Cohen to find anti-Stalinist "Aesopian" messages in them.

The result is that the ICO had nobody to provide ideological leadership--they admired Bukharin but had no idea what his real positions on current issues might be. Was this inevitable? Probably--so long as Bukharin remained in the USSR. However, surprising as this may seem, Stalin allowed Bukharin to leave the USSR twice during the 1930s--once to attend a symposium on the history of science in London in 1931 and once to negotiate with the exiled German Social Democrats in Paris in 1936 for the sale of some of Marx's and Engels' manuscripts to the Soviet Union. Suppose Bukharin on either occasion had decided not to return to the USSR?

II. Bukharin in Paris--1936

In 1936, the exiled German Social Democratic party in Paris showed an interest in selling its archives--including manuscripts by Marx and Engels--to the Soviet Communist Party. The SPD's motives are easy to understand--it badly needed money. Moreover, its leaders were worried that in the event of a new world war, Hitler would seize Paris and the archives with it. For its part, the CPSU leadership was interested in getting the archives for its Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute. So a delegation was sent to Paris to negotiate the sale. Stalin decided that the delegation would be headed by none other than his enemy of a few years back, Nikolai Bukharin. Two Russian Menshevik exiles--Fyodor Dan and Boris Nicolaevsky--would be the intermediaries between the CPSU delegation and the SPD.

Superficially, 1934-36 had witnessed something of a political comeback by Bukharin. (They were good years in his personal life, too; he had married the beautiful young Anna Larina--it was his third marriage--who by early 1936 was pregnant with his son.) At the 17th Party Congress in 1934, he had performed "self-criticism," denouncing the line he and other "rightists" had taken in 1928-9 as totally wrong and praising Stalin, rapid industrialization, mass collectivization, etc. to the skies. In return, he was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee (admittedly, this was a demotion from the full membership he had previously held, but less of a demotion than one might have expected a year or two earlier) and became editor of the government newspaper *Izvestiya.* He was chosen to address the first Congress of Soviet Writers on the subject of Soviet poetry.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1934/poetry/

The ovation received by Bukharin at the Writers' Congress indicates that the man Lenin had called the "favorite of the whole party"
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/ni/vol02/no01/lenin.htm retained his popularity: "The shorthand report of the congress contains this comment immediately following Bukharin's address: 'Tumultuous applause throughout the auditorium, turning into a standing ovation. Cries of 'Hurrah!' Everyone stands.' There was only one other speech, that of Maxim Gorky, which ended in such a tumultuous tribute by the audience." Roy A. Medvedev, *Nikolai A. Bukharin: The Last Years,* p. 83. There is one report that Bukharin was terrified by the ovation he received, knowing that it would come to the always-jealous Stalin's attention; supposedly Bukharin told a friend "Do you know what you've just done? Signed my death warrant." Medvedev is IMO justly skeptical of this kind of projecting-backwards. 1934--until Kirov was killed in December--was a year of "liberalization" and of reconciliation of the party with its old dissidents (the last of the great Trotskyist die-hards in the USSR, Rakovsky, returned to the Party after the usual "self-criticism"; and even Kamenev and Zinoviev were re-admitted). Death sentences for party members still seemed comparatively far away.

Why did Bukharin make his submission to Stalin in 1934-36? (In 1931-33 he had submitted to the party line, but without toadying to Stalin or denouncing his own 1928-9 position.) For one thing, his past criticisms must have seemed irrelevant to the new situation. Mass collectivization had exacted a fearful price, and heavy industry may have been built up with too much haste, but they were now faits accompli. You couldn't tear down the new factories, and dissolving the collective farms might only add to the chaos that creating them had caused. Furthermore, it may have seemed to Bukharin that Stalin was moving in the right direction. The final settlement of what Adam Ulam has called "the war against the nation" did after all involve some concessions to the peasants, especially the private plot. Stalin even condemned discrimination against the children of kulaks: "A son does not answer for his father." http://books.google.com/books?id=QS6IlPQf6owC&pg=PA130 (Actually, of course, such discrimination continued; it has indeed even been plausibly suggested that the purpose of Stalin's statement was to lull the children of "exploiters" into a false sense of security so that they would stop lying about their class origins, an understandably common practice.) The 1936 Constitution, in the drafting of which Bukharin had a major role, ended the privileged position of the proletariat versus other classes. Elections would now be one-person-one-vote (and by secret ballot). Even priests would now be allowed to vote! (Nicolaevsky later remarked that Bukharin probably did not realize how Stalin would pervert the ending of special privileges for proletarians vis-a-vis other classes, for party members vis-a-vis non-party members, etc. into the equal subordination of everyone to Stalin's absolute rule.) In international affairs, the ultra-leftist "Third Period" line, where social democrats were denounced as "social fascists" had given way to the "united front against fascism" which was obviously much more to Bukharin's liking.

Indeed, it is very likely that international affairs--above all, the threat of Hitler and Japan to the USSR--was what led to Bukharin's submission. In his address to the 17th Party Congress, Bukharin quoted Hitler's notorious passage from *Mein Kampf*: "And so we National Socialists consciously draw a line beneath the foreign policy tendency of our pre-War period. We take up where we broke off six hundred years ago. We stop the endless German movement to the south and west, and turn our gaze toward the land in the east. At long last we break off the colonial and commercial policy of the pre-War period and shift to the soil policy of the future. If we speak of soil in Europe today, we can primarily have in mind only Russia and her vassal border states..." From the same platform, Bukharin also read the declarations of some Japanese generals about their plans for the "emancipation" of Siberia. Bukharin remarked that with Hitler threatening "to squeeze us out into Siberia" and the Japanese militarists threatening "to squeeze us out of Siberia" it looked as if "we shall have to find somewhere in one of the blast-furnaces in Magnitka to house all 160 million inhabitants of our Union." Medvedev, p. 68. Faced with this mortal danger, Bukharin seemed to be suggesting, all past differences must be forgotten and there must be total unity behind Stalin.

The murder of Kirov, which may or may not have been Stalin's work http://groups.google.com/group/soc.history.what-if/msg/a203a6075c592e83 shattered--at least temporarily--the relatively "liberal" mood of 1934. The first trial and jailing of Zinoviev and Kamenev, who at this time were accused only of "moral complicity" in the assassination (Nikolaev, the assassin, was from Leningrad, and in a sense had once been a "Zinovievite"--but only in the sense that everyone who held even a minor Party position in Leningrad had to be a Zinovievite before Zinoviev was replaced by Kirov as leader there) was a potential threat to Bukharin even though Bukharin had been a bitter enemy of Zinoviev and Kamenev (and ally of Stalin's) in the mid-1920's. There are two reasons for this. First, Stalin liked to group together all his opponents, even when they in fact had been enemies of each other. Second, there was a tiny bit of a basis for Stalin's allegation of a "Leftist-Rightist conspiracy" against the party's leadership--namely, Bukharin's famous meeting with Kamenev in 1928. The purpose of this meeting was to talk Kamenev out of forming a bloc with Stalin against the "Rightists." The meeting was supposed to be secret, but Kamenev made a detailed record of it, which he showed to Zinoviev, and which fell into the hands of the Trotskyists, and Trotsky--who was hostile to Bukharin and indignant at Kamenev's and Zinoviev's "capitulation" to Stalin--made it public. Also, there were apparently some quiet attempts of former "Left" and "Right" Oppositionists to get together in the 1930's, though AFAIK there is no evidence that Bukharin encouraged them or was even aware of them.

Nevertheless, the danger to Bukharin still seemed merely a possibility. After a few months, the extreme tension immediately following the Kirov murder seemed to ease. At a banquet for graduates of military academies, Stalin even came up to Bukharin and proposed a toast: "I want to propose a toast to Comrade Bukharin. We all know and love our Bukharin, our Bukharchik. And 'whoever brings up the past--loses an eye.'" [an old Russian proverb--DT]
http://books.google.com/books?id=v3BrNF80AzUC&pg=PA272 Anna Larina would later write that this was a deliberate attempt on Stalin's part to test
Bukharin's popularity (and therefore, from Stalin's perspective, potential dangerousness). If so, the tremendous applause that greeted Stalin's toast was not a good omen for Bukharin.

In early 1936 came a warning signal: For the first time in years, *Pravda* attacked Bukharin's *current* views. Bukharin had written in *Izvestiya* on January 21, 1936 (the anniversary of Lenin's death (see Medvedev, pp. 104-5):

"Bolsheviks were just what were needed...to turn the amorphous, uncomprehending masses in our country, where Oblomovitis was the prevailing characteristic, where a nation of Oblomovs was in power, into the shock troops of the world's proletariat." (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblomov on the meaning of "Oblomovitis" or *Oblomovshchina.*)

*Pravda* replied furiously (in an editorial entitled "On a Putrid Concept") that it was slander to accuse pre-1917 Russians of being good-for-nothing lazybones--a "nation of Oblomovs"--and reminded Bukharin of the great Russian revolutionary tradition of the Decemberists, the Populists, Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, etc.--it even went back to Stenka Razin and Emilian Pugachev. It ignored that Chernyshevsky himself had called Russia a "nation of slaves" and that Lenin often wrote of Russia's "Oblomovitis." Bukharin apologized, said that he had never meant to question that Russians had a revolutionary tradition before 1917, etc. but there was at least the first hint that he was again under a cloud. He had after all committed a serious mistake in ignoring Stalin's increasing emphasis on Russian national pride.

Shortly thereafter Stalin chose Bukharin to head the delegation that would go to Paris. More remarkably, after Bukharin had been in Paris a few weeks, Stalin even let Bukharin's pregnant wife join him. This would seem to be giving Bukharin a remarkably good opportunity to defect--other Soviet citizens who were allowed to spend some time abroad were often deterred from defecting by the thought of what would happen to their spouses and children back in the Soviet Union. (Though this is complicated by the fact that Bukharin before defecting would still have to think of his ex-wife and their young daughter, both of whom were still living in the USSR.)

Whether Bukharin seriously considered defecting and what might have happened had he in fact defected will be discussed in Part Two.

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Unfortunately, I never got around to writing Part Two, but I think my conclusion is that by 1936 the International Communist Opposition had fallen apart enough that even an exiled Bukharin could not put it back together again. And indeed it is hard to see a "Bukharinist" ideology by 1936 independent of Stalinism. Really, all Bukharin was saying by then was "Koba, don't you realize you have won? There is no need for all this suspicion and repression." He really had no basic objections any more to Stalin's economic or foreign policy--unlike the Trotskyists, he certainly would not have objected to Stalin's support for the Popular Front; a broad alliance of anti-fascist elements was precisely what he wanted. And of course his defection would be seen as proof that the ex-Rightists were traitors, and would doom Rykov and Tomsky. Actually, they--like Bukharin himself--were doomed to physical extinction anyway, but it is unclear whether Bukharin recognized this yet as of spring 1936. The warning signs were there, certainly, but maybe this storm like previous ones would pass...

One should also note that not everyone in the ICO was a "Bukharinite" anyway. Jay Lovestone said that on domestic Soviet questions he was pro-Stalin in 1929; it was only on international questions (above all Stalin's tendency to demand a radical line form all Comintern parties regardless of distinctive national conditions) that he was closer to Bukharin.

(BTW, it is possible that the very purpose of sending Bukharin to Paris was to get him to incriminate himself; his meetings with social democrats in Paris, though obviously necessary for purchase of the manuscripts, could easily be portrayed as espionage, though in fact Bukharin's trial did not mention them too much. But letting his wife join him almost looks like taunting him to defect--which Stalin probably knew Bukharin would never do. In any event, Nicolaevasky certainly didn't help Bukharin's prospects for survival by publishing the "Letter of an Old Bolshevik" http://fau.digital.flvc.org/islandora/object/fau:5353/datastream/OBJ/view which everyone assumed was based on his conversations with Bukharin in Paris. Indeed, Anna Larina denounced the "letter" as a fabrication deliberately written to bring about the arrest and death of her husband--the Menshevik Nicolaevsky's revenge on the Bolsheviks...)
 
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Thorough as usual David, but to help develop an idea I'm tinkering with do you have any idea what a surviving and coherent Bukharin movement would look like, either in competition with Trotskyism or supplanting it as the main tendancy of the Anti-Stalinst left?
 
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