ABSTRACT
During a year of confinement in the Lubyanka prison in 1937–1938, and while his infamous show trial was being prepared by Stalin and the NKVD, the prominent Soviet theoretician Nikolai Bukharin was granted permission and materials to write. Under the impression that his writings would be passed on to his family, Bukharin wrote by night at great speed four manuscripts – Socialism and National Culture, Philosophical Arabesques, Poems and an autobiographical novel How It All Began. After his condemnation and execution, the writings were passed to Stalin and confined to his personal archive until the 1990s. This chapter examines how Bukharin’s writing may be understood as a resistant strategy directed against the pressure to confess to counter-revolutionary conspiracy. It also shows how the counter-confessional strategy was divided between epic historical materialism and more lyrical, even Spinozist understandings of nature and humanity’s place in it.
