Nikolay Bukharin

Nikolay Bukharin (1888-1938), Russian Communist leader, born in Moscow, and educated at Moscow State University. As a youth he participated in revolutionary activities against the czarist government and was soon identified as a Bolshevik. He was frequently imprisoned, and in 1911 he was exiled. By 1916 he was in New York, where he edited Novy Mir (New World), a radical newspaper. After the Russian Revolution began in March 1917, he returned to Moscow; he was elected to an influential Bolshevik committee, was editor (1917-1929) of the official Communist party newspaper Pravda (Truth), and was a member (1924-1929) of the Politburo. During the struggle for control of the party, he allied himself with Joseph Stalin against Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinovyev, and Lev Kamenev in 1926 he replaced Zinovyev as head of the Third International. Three years later, having fallen out of favour with Stalin, he was stripped of all his positions. He briefly regained some of his prestige when he became editor of Izvestia (News), the official government newspaper, in 1934. Arrested on charges of Trotskyist activities in 1937, he was convicted during one of the Stalin purge trials. In February 1988, fifty years after Bukharin's execution as a traitor, the verdict was reversed and his name cleared by the Soviet supreme court.