The Prison Manuscripts: Socialism and its Culture

by Nikolai Bukharin, George Shriver (Translator)

Bukharin's Prison Manuscripts were written in Moscow's Lubyanka prison during 1937-1938 while awaiting his inevitable liquidation.  Like Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks , Bukharin's Manuscripts too have their central emphasis on issues such as culture, ideology and philosophy in the context of building up an alternative vision of socialism, as against capitalism, fascism and the kind of socialism practiced in the Soviet Union under Stalin.

 

Written between February and April 1937, this thought-provoking volume deals with themes such the realization of the concept of total man , the problem of freedom, the problem of equality and hierarchy, the style of socialist culture, the problem of progress, diversities in capitalism and socialism, the role of the Party and the dictatorship of the proletariat in the cultural revolution.  It is an important work for anyone interested in cultural studies, history of socialism, philosophy and ethics.

258 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin, Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet politician, advocated gradual agricultural collectivization; after the last "show trial" of Moscow of the 1930s for treason, people executed him.

Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin, a Russian prolific author, wrote on theory.

As a young man, he spent six years in exile, worked closely with Vladimir Ilich Lenin and Leon Trotsky. After February 1917, he returned, his credentials earned him a high rank in the party, and after the October, he served as editor of Pravda, the newspaper.

Within the bitterly divide, his move to the right as a defender of the new economy, positioned him favorably as chief ally of Joseph Stalin, and from the party leadership, they together ousted Trotsky, Grigori Evseyevich Zinoviev, and Lev Borisovich Kamenev. From 1926, Bukharin enjoyed great power as general secretary of committee of Comintern to 1929. Nevertheless, decision of Stalin to proceed drove the two men apart, and the Politburo expelled Bukharin.

When the purges began in 1936, Joseph Stalin for pretext liquidated his former allies and rivals for power, and some letters, conversations, and tapped phone calls of Bukharin indicated disloyalty. People arrested him in February 1937, and charged conspiracy to overthrow the state. Proceedings alienated many western Communist sympathizers.