Bukharin, Nikolai Ivanovich 1888-1938
Russian Marxist revolutionary and political theorist

Born in Moscow, he was active in the Bolshevik underground (1905-17), and after the February Revolution returned to Russia. He played a leading role in the organization of the October Revolution in Moscow and was dubbed by Lenin 'the darling of the party'. He was a considerable theorist, became editor of Pravda (1917-29), and was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Russia and a member of the politburo (1924-29), in which position he came round to supporting Lenin's New Economic Policy, but had an ambivalent attitude to Stalin's collectivization campaign. In 1937he was arrested in Stalin's Great Purge, expelled from the party, tried on trumped-up charges, and shot. He was posthumously readmitted to the party in 1988.