Politburo Clears 20 Executed in Stalin Purges

The Communist Party leadership on Friday performed what was termed a “very noble deed”--clearing the name of Nikolai I. Bukharin and 19 other prominent Bolsheviks executed in Josef Stalin’s notorious purges half a century ago.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennady I. Gerasimov told a news briefing that a special commission of the ruling Politburo rehabilitated the 20 officials who were tried in 1938 on trumped-up charges of spying.

The mass rehabilitation was another signal that under Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost , or openness, Soviets are freer to examine their country’s history.

“Of course, we can’t return their lives, but this is a very noble deed,” said Gerasimov, adding that authorities did not clear the name of Genrikh G. Yagoda, who headed the Soviet secret police and masterminded Stalin’s early purges.

Although acknowledging that Bukharin was not a criminal, the commission’s decision did not signify that he had been readmitted posthumously to the Communist Party. Gerasimov said another party commission is examining whether the names of Bukharin and the others, including prominent official Alexei I. Rykov, should be restored to party rolls.

A party member since 1905, Rykov played an integral role in the revolution of 1917, organizing the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 in what is now Leningrad.

Rykov’s policies were similar to those of Bukharin. He opposed Stalin’s relentless pace of collectivization and industrialization that cost the lives of millions of peasants and workers.

Gerasimov said the Politburo commission, whose membership he declined to reveal, acted Friday after hearing a report on Thursday from the chairman of the Soviet Supreme Court.

Bukharin, a major Bolshevik theorist and economist, was one of the leaders of the 1917 revolution that brought the Communists to power in Moscow. Soviet founder V. I. Lenin once called him the “favorite of the whole party.”

Bukharin favored a continuation of the New Economic Policy, Lenin’s last economic program that permitted some private enterprise and left farms in the hands of the peasants.

Since the early 1920s, Lenin’s New Economic Policy and Bukharin’s proposals have served as a model for a moderate alternative to Stalin’s radical policies. And political observers see considerable similarities between Lenin’s policy and Gorbachev’s reform policies.

Twenty years later, after breaking with Stalin over his program of rapid industrialization and forced collectivization, Bukharin was arrested as a spy, humiliated in a show trial and shot as an “enemy of the people.”

Gerasimov said the investigation of Bukharin and his co-defendants was marred by gross violations of Soviet law. False information was produced and “admissions of guilt wrung from the accused through unlawful means,” he said, apparently referring to torture.

Commenting on the commission’s refusal to rehabilitate Yagoda, Gerasimov said, “The fact that a man in those days fell victim to repression did not automatically mean that he was innocent.”

Yagoda headed the NKVD, the precursor of the KGB. He was responsible for purges in which thousands of Soviets died. Rumors at the time had it that Yagoda was charged after Stalin discovered he had worked for the Czarist police before the revolution.