Bukharinists

The Bukharinists were a faction within the Soviet ruling coalition whose place in the book’s account is defined by a sudden reversal in policy. In 1927 they were aligned with the Stalinists in appeasing private farmers; a year later, Stalin imposed rapid industrialization and forced collectivization, taking up demands previously advanced by the Left Opposition and carrying them out with greater brutality. Their significance lies in this reversal: a program’s political direction did not guarantee who would enact it, or how.

Position in the 1927 Coalition

In 1927, the Stalinists and Bukharinists formed the ruling coalition and pursued appeasement of private farmers. The coalition attacked the Left United Opposition, comprising Trotskyists and Zinovievists, whose program called for accelerated industrialization and a struggle against rich peasants through measures including higher taxes and collectivization. The Bukharinists are thus situated on the governing side of a contest over the pace and means of social transformation, rather than presented as an organization with a separately described structure or membership.

The 1928 Reversal

The political alignment changed abruptly in 1928, when Stalin enforced a turn toward rapid industrialization and the brutal collectivization of land. This shift did more than defeat the Left Opposition: it appropriated its central economic demands and implemented them more harshly than its proponents had proposed. The reversal made the opposition’s prior characterization of Stalin as a right-wing Thermidorian increasingly untenable. The account notes that some Trotskyists recanted and joined the Stalinists, even as the Trotskyist faction was being exterminated; it does not, however, detail the Bukharinists’ individual responses to the new policy.

Revolution Turned Inward

The policy reversal belongs to a broader interpretation of the Soviet Revolution. Sheila Fitzpatrick argues that collectivization and rapid industrialization were part of the October Revolution’s internal dynamic, and that the revolutionary sequence proper ended only in 1937. The account distinguishes the upheaval of 1917–21 and the subsequent New Economic Policy, which consolidated Soviet state power while leaving much of society’s texture intact, from the thrust beginning in 1928. That thrust aimed directly at remaking the social body: liquidating peasants as a class of individual owners and replacing the old intelligentsia with a new one.

Historical Significance

The book frames the forced transformation not simply as an accidental departure from the revolution, nor as proof that the Communist project was inherently totalitarian. It argues instead for holding together the October Revolution’s emancipatory potential and the historical necessity of its Stalinist outcome. In this reading, the Bukharinists’ role in the 1927 coalition marks one stage in a larger crisis: revolutionary energies that could not expand beyond the Soviet Union were redirected inward, with collectivization and industrialization serving as substitutes for the spread of revolution abroad. The sharp shift from farmer appeasement to coercive transformation makes the faction’s historical position legible through a political reversal, while the account leaves its separate institutional history unspecified.