Providing Precedents for Change : History Rewritten to Justify Future

When Josef Stalin engineered the execution of Nikolai I. Bukharin 50 years ago for treason and espionage after a patented Communist show trial, he brought down one of his chief rivals for power, the author of a competing, even entrepreneurial form of socialism.

Now a new Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, has staged an equally formal and political exercise to rehabilitate Bukharin, to turn him from a criminal to a heroic ancestor of his own social and economic reforms.

As Bukharin’s resurrection demonstrates, history is a deadly serious business in the Soviet Union. Gorbachev feels he must rewrite the past in order to change the future.

In the United States, where students typically forget most of their history almost as soon as they take their last exam, the passionate maneuverings in Moscow over the history of the early years of the Communist revolution may appear strange. But there is good reason for the Soviets’ preoccupation with the past. Unlike the U.S. government, which derives its authority from the Constitution, revolutionary regimes such as Moscow’s must look elsewhere for their legitimacy.

Reliance on Marxism-Leninism

The answer in the Soviet Union is the almost religious doctrine of Marxism-Leninism, which confers a sort of divine right to rule on its true adherents. To change the present system of social and economic order, Gorbachev must demonstrate that past leaders, no matter how revered in their own time, followed false prophets.

And Gorbachev has to produce true prophets in their place. Thus a restored Bukharin--one of the original Bolsheviks, once described by Lenin himself as “the golden child of the revolution”--confers legitimacy on Gorbachev’s current campaign of perestroika, his social and economic restructuring.

Historical authority plays an important role on the American political scene as well. President Reagan, for example, frequently justifies his conservative policies with references to two of his Democratic predecessors, Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.

For Gorbachev, by contrast, historical precedent is all important. He would have no chance of selling the radical reforms of perestroika if he could not trace its lineage to the founding fathers of the Russian Revolution.

“It is hard to imagine perestroika succeeding without an ideological basis,” said Jack F. Matlock Jr., the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. “And it’s hard to see an ideological basis without rehabilitating Bukharin. History is one of the purely political issues in the U.S.S.R. today.”

Bukharin and Alexei I. Rykov, who was also shot in 1938 and who was rehabilitated by Gorbachev in February, had been among Lenin’s closest aides. Bukharin was the chief editor of Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, and one of its most prominent theoreticians. Rykov was Lenin’s deputy, and, after Lenin’s death in 1924, he held the most important office in the government--chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars.

During the 1920s, Bukharin and Rykov “developed both theoretically and practically the New Economic Policy (NEP) proposed by Lenin,” dissident Soviet historian Roy Medvedev has written. “They naturally opposed the premature rolling back of that policy” by Stalin in the late 1920s. And they criticized Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture--millions died in the resulting displacement and famine--and his “super-industrialization” plan.

Khrushchev Speech

Nikita S. Khrushchev, the Soviet leader after Stalin’s death, intended to rehabilitate Bukharin and Rykov but stopped short in a 1956 speech assailing Stalin’s crimes. That speech was never published in the Soviet Union, and Leonid I. Brezhnev, who ousted Khrushchev, seemed more willing to rehabilitate Stalin than his victims.

Now, according to Medvedev, a range of Gorbachev programs--more private enterprise, cultivation of private plots of land, “family brigades” to operate farms, joint ventures between Soviet and Western companies--”represents partial restoration, in new conditions, of many methods and principles of the NEP.”

And the rewriting of official history has not stopped. Gorbachev is reported by his supporters to be preparing a whole speech on “history”--the crimes of the Stalinist period--that he may deliver during a Communist Party conference in late June at which he will seek to extend his mandate for economic and political reform.

As a historian, Gorbachev is not without his critics. Within the Politburo itself, Yegor K. Ligachev, the chief opponent of Gorbachev’s reforms, has accused Gorbachev of threatening to tell the Soviet public that everything it has learned about Soviet history is false.

Such criticism last November, at a time when Gorbachev was facing stiff challenges to his authority as general secretary of the Communist Party, led him to temper an earlier speech on the Stalin era. Although he criticized the mass terror of Stalin’s time, he also praised Stalin’s contribution to victory in World War II and approved his policy of forced collectivization.

Since then, Gorbachev’s supporters say, he has learned a lot about the Stalin era from a special commission reviewing Soviet historic archives. The commission is said to have uncovered evidence of Stalin’s personal role in preparing false cases against Bukharin and others during the purges of the 1930s.