[Mikolaj]

Above all he was a professional revolutionary. In another document he jokes about exterminating peasants, and as editor of Pravda, much of his career had been spent dispensing lies and propaganda for the cause. He describes the purge that was to swallow him up as "great and bold", eagerly agreeing that even "persons potentially under suspicion" should be its victims. Only intellectuals can talk like that.

source

Does anyone have a source for this assertion?

[Maxim Litvinov]

I can imagine the source MIGHT be ...

«U menia odna nadezhda na tebia» (“I Pin My Sole Hope on You”) [edited by KM
Anderson & GM Adibekov], Istoricheskiy arkhiv, 2001, vol. 3, pp. 47 – 85

I have only two things to say.

[1] Bukharin's documents and memoirs of him in general don't paint him as someone unsympathetic to suffering. I've read through the above letters (years ago now) and can't remember any jokes about dying peasants: I think this is probably a somewhat fanciful extrapolation by the author of your article.

I remember the 'great and bold' line though: Bukharin wrote to Stalin when he was already basically dead that there was something 'great and bold' about cleansing the Party. What part of this is his own views and what part is a desperate attempt to keep him and his family alive is another thing though. The series of letters I sourced above is full of Bukharin basically toadying up to Stalin and such a classification of the purges is in line with such toadying: 'Oh, benevolent Stalin! I am a great guy, honest I am! And I'm fully with you 100% in our need to be vigilant! I fully acknowledge we need a clean party. We need to rid ourselves of deviationists! Of course we must be ruthless... But I, well I am no oppositionist! I am your most loyal comrade! If only you could know just how sincerely I say these words!'... and that sort of guff. Amongst the same letters you can find a two-page-long ode Bukharin wrote for Stalin...

Yet the memoirs of his wife and others indicate that in truth he was suspicious of Stalin. He even considered towards the end that Kirov's death had been no accident (it probably was). He travelled through southern Russia during the famine and was touched deeply by it, according to his wife. Bukharin was the peasants' most ardent supporter in the Bolshevik elite - having advocated a 'smychka' (union) between proletariat and peasantry in his early 1920s writing...

[2] I've been fortunate enough to have picked Stephen Wheatcroft's brains about Bukharin and his view of him doesn't seem so rosy. He was saying something to me about *Bukharin* being the one to bring up 'extraordinary measures' in a 1926 [sic] Politburo meeting... That is, while the 'traditional' historical view had been that Bukharin was almost the Party's last hope to stop the Stalinists waging their 'war in the countryside', he talked of seeing a source or sources that implied/stated/testified to the fact that one of the earliest excesses against the peasantry - the confiscation of grain off them with no recompense in the late 1920s - was actually Bukharin's idea.

I don't have a source for that though. It must have been something that supposedly came out around 2000 though, I'd think....