Nikolay Bukharin (1888-1938), Russian Communist leader and theorist, who was a leading critic of Stalinism beginning in the late 1920s. He was also an original proponent of incorporating free-market forces into the socialist economy.

Nikolay Ivanovich Bukharin was born in Moscow to schoolteacher parents and became involved in student politics during the 1905 revolution against the imperial government (see Russian Revolution of 1905). He joined the Bolsheviks (later Communists) the next year and rose quickly in the party while studying economics at Moscow State University. Arrested several times, Bukharin was exiled in 1911. He escaped Russia during his exile and met Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin in Poland in 1912, collaborating with him on what was to become the official Communist Party newspaper, Pravda (Truth). He became acquainted with Joseph Stalin in Vienna in 1913. In New York City in 1916, he began editing Novy Mir (New World), a radical newspaper.

Bukharin returned to Moscow in 1917, during the Russian Revolution and, after being elected to the Bolshevik Central Committee, supported Lenin’s seizure of power in October of that year. Bukharin became editor of Pravda and held that post from 1917 to 1929. He wrote several influential political and economic essays, including The ABC of Communism (1919) and The New Course of Economic Policy (1921), in which he promoted Lenin’s partially market-based New Economic Policy. Elected to full membership of the Politburo, the Communist Party’s highest decision-making body, after Lenin’s death in 1924, Bukharin allied himself with Stalin against Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinovyev, and Lev Kamenev in an economic debate that turned out to be a struggle for control of the party. Trotsky, Zinovyev, and Kamenev lost. In 1926 Bukharin replaced Zinovyev as head of the Third (Communist) International, often called the Comintern.

An economic theorist more than a politician, Bukharin had clashed with Trotsky in an argument over profits for peasants, which Bukharin promoted. When Stalin forced private farms to collectivize under the state in 1928, Bukharin criticized him. Bukharin was backed by other prominent Communists, including Alexey Rykov. But Stalin, who was general secretary of the Communist Party, lined up Politburo members against Bukharin and stripped him of all his party positions in 1929. 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 as a traitor during one of the Stalin purge trials and executed the following year. In 1988, 50 years after Bukharin's execution, the verdict was reversed and his name cleared by the Soviet Supreme Court.