XXXIII
Kolya stood at the edge of the
waterfront like a frozen sentinel. He
was lost in his thoughts today. So much
had happened and so much was about to happen.
Far off in the distance he could see the monstrous capitalistic skyline of
New York. The very sight of it filled
him with wonder and distaste.
When he had first arrived in the States,
he had been surprised and filled with marvel at the immensities of New
York. But over time that had
changed. He had seen the rampant poverty
of other immigrants like himself. New
York was a city of contradictions. A
city of the rich and the poor, but then again, so was nearly every city
Bukharin had lived in. Everywhere people
were mistreated for the simple reason of having no money. But the world was changing, and Kolya
remembered with bitterness that he had once been in the thick of it.
His thoughts were interrupted by the
sound of the fog horn of a large passenger ship leaving the harbor. Kolya looked up and gave a short wave of his
hand towards the ship. High up on the
deck, a small figure in black returned his wave. It was Trotsky, his friend he had made in the
USA. Both of them had been émigrés and
had taken over a small Russian newspaper called the Noviy Mir in New York. But they longed for home, and they both
longed for a chance to give a larger contribution to the cause of the
Bolsheviks.
Kolya, for his part, had played it well,
but too well it seemed. Lenin had
overreacted to some of his criticisms, and had shut down his newspaper Kommunist in Stockholm after only one
edition. He had refused to publish some
of his articles because they supposedly took Marx and Engel’s quotations out of
context. And Lenin also had the audacity
to accuse him of being an anarchist with his anti-statist stance, an
accusation, which Bukharin couldn’t understand.
Lenin believed that because Bukharin’s articles defended the Marxist
ideal of anti-statism rather vehemently, that he did not believe in the ideas
of a transitional period between revolution and the time when Communism would
be born in full in Russia. This
transitional state included capitalism, which led to socialism or the so called
dictatorship of the proletariat, which would eventually lead to communism with
no state. But while Bukharin focused more
on the anti-statist approach to eventual utopian communism, he never spoke
against a transitive phase. The problem,
it seemed, was not that he spoke wrongly, but that he spoke, unwittingly,
correctly, and that made him a threat.
But he was a threat no more. The news had arrived in New York like a
bombshell. The Tsar had abdicated. A new government was forming, and it was
forming without the Bolsheviks. Finally,
after months of mistreatment by authorities and alienation within his own party
he had been called back to Russia.
It was time to go home.
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