Travel Reference
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Socialist Republic, which after 1991 became the
Republic of Uzbekistan. A rich architectural her-
itage that includes the ninth-century tomb of
Ismail Samanid and the
medressehs
of Ulugbek
(15th century) and Mir-Arab (16th century)
have made Bukhara a popular tourist destina-
tion in the region.
Bukharin, Nikolai Ivanovich
(1888-1938)
revolutionary and Soviet leader
A Russian Communist leader and skilled theo-
retician, Bukharin was a leading critic of Stalin-
ist policies after the late 1920s and an advocate
of a more gradualist approach to the transforma-
tion of the Soviet Union into a communist soci-
ety. Born in Moscow to a family of school
teachers, Bukharin's first taste of revolutionary
politics came as a student during the 1905 Rev-
olution. In 1906, while an economics student at
the University of Moscow, he joined the Bolshe-
vik faction of the Russian Social Democratic
Labor Party and rose quickly within the ranks of
the party. After several arrests he escaped to Ger-
many in 1911, where he settled until the out-
break of World War I. During the war he moved
to Switzerland, then Sweden, and eventually
came to New York City in 1916, where he briefly
worked with Leon
TROTSKY
in editing a radical
Russian-language newspaper. With the fall of
the monarchy in February 1917, Bukharin
returned to Moscow, where he continued to
occupy important posts in the Bolshevik Party
and was elected to the party's Central Commit-
tee. After the October Revolution he was named
editor of
Pravda,
the party newspaper, a position
he held until 1929. Always independent-
minded, he supported
LENIN
's overall civil war
policy, later known as War Communism, but
opposed him on the question of signing a sepa-
rate peace with Germany in March 1918.
Although in his well-known books
The ABC of
Communism
(coauthored with the economist
Evgenii Preobrazhensky) and
The Economics of the
Transition Period,
Bukharin had forcefully called
Nikolai Bukharin
(Hulton/Archive)
for an economy based on state control, milita-
rized labor, and compulsory requisition of food,
he became a strong advocate of the New Eco-
nomic Policy developed by the party after 1921.
As one of the preeminent leaders of the
COMMU
-
NIST PARTY
, Bukharin became involved in the bit-
ter power struggle that followed Lenin's death in
1924, initially supporting
STALIN
against Trotsky,
KAMENEV
, and
ZINOVIEV
. Closely identified with
the more gradualist New Economic Policy,
Bukharin became known as a leader of the
Rightist wing of the party and an opponent of
the Leftist policy of super industrialization at the
expense of the peasantry. By the time Stalin had
developed his policy of collectivization and rapid
industrialization based on coercion and terror,
Bukharin had been defeated within the party.
He was removed from the party's Politburo and
the editorship of
Pravda,
but allowed to remain a
member of the Central Committee. In 1934 he
was named editor of the newspaper
Izvestiia,
and
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