Philosophical Arabesques

E X C E R P T

by Nikolai Bukharin

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January 2004

ISBN:
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$49.95 cloth
448 pp.

Philosophy/Political Theory

Introduction: A Voice from the Dead
by Helena Sheehan

This is a voice from the dead. It is a voice speaking to a time that never heard it, a time that never had a chance to hear it. It is only speaking now to a time not very well disposed to hearing it.

This text was written in 1937 in the dark of the night in the depths of the Lubyanka prison in Moscow. It was completed in November on the 20th anniversary of the revolution to which its author had given his life, the revolution that was in the process of devouring its own true believers, the revolution that was not only condemning him to death but demanding that he slander his whole life. This text lay buried in a Kremlin vault for more than half a century after its author had been executed and his name expunged from the pages of the books telling of the history he had participated in making. After decades, his name was restored and his memory honoured in a brief interval where the story of the revolution was retold, retold in a society to which it crucially mattered, just before that society collapsed to be replaced by one in which the story was retold in another and hostile way, a society in which his legacy no longer mattered to many. Only then, due to the determination of his biographer and family, did the thousand plus pages of his prison writings emerge from the vault to be published into a world he could never have imagined.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this text is that it was written at all. Condemned not by an enemy but by his own, seeing what had been so magnificently created being so catastrophically destroyed, undergoing shattering interrogations, how was he not totally debilitated by despair? Where did he get the strength, the composure, the faith in the future that was necessary to write this treatise of philosophy, this passionate defence of the intellectual tradition of marxism and the political project of socialist construction?

Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin was a tragic true believer. He was the youngest, most intellectual, most sensitive, most sparkling of the original bolshevik leaders. He was extremely popular, both at home and abroad. Lenin held him in particular affection and esteem, despite polemicising against him in key controversies along the way. Such was possible then. The early years of the revolution were full of problems and possibilities, dreams and debates. The bolsheviks were stunned to find that they had seized state power and they scurried about trying to figure out what to do with it. They were trying to do something that had never been done before. Everything was open to question. Everything needed to be re-thought and re-created. They were in new territory with no maps to guide them. Bukharin was energetically engaged in exploring and mapping the new terrain. He was involved in virtually all of the important debates of the era: from agricultural and industrial policy to scientific and artistic questions. He was always on the move, striding around Moscow in his peaked cap, russian blouse, leather jacket and high boots, generating an atmosphere of intellectual excitement and fun, embodying “an aura of bohemia come to power”¹

Bukharin is the personification of the path not taken. His life and death will always be particularly poignant because of that. He was 29 at the time of the revolution and 49 when he died. He was a member of the politbureau and central committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, editor of Pravda, head of the Communist International. After the death of Lenin, he was at the pinnacle of power and was a possible successor. He advocated the continuation of the new economic policy, a conciliatory approach to the peasantry aimed at achieving agricultural productivity and steady industrialisation. Stalin sided with Bukharin against the “left deviation”, associated with Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev, which emphasised world revolution, rapid industrialisation, coercive collectivisation. When this strategy was defeated in 1927 and its exponents expelled from the politbureau and even the party, Stalin reversed himself and turned on the “right deviation”, associated with Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky, and in 1929 defeated them in turn. They were removed from the politbureau and higher echelons of power, but remained on the central committee and worked productively in industry, trade unions and academic institutions. Bukharin was editor of Izvestiya and member of the Academy of Sciences (and head of its commission on the history of knowledge) and still active in many sectors of soviet life, from the arts to economic planning.

Bukharin stood for “socialist humanism”, socialism with a human face, socialism with an open mind, socialism with an honest voice, socialism with an outstretched hand. He advocated a more evolutionary path to socialism, an opening of a process where a society would grow into socialism, where those who questioned might be persuaded and not necessarily coerced or executed, where theoretical questions were settled by theoretical debates and not by accusations of treason, purges of editorial boards and disappearances in the night. Bukharin was inclined to be bold and passionate in open polemics and to be somewhat guileless and sometimes even naïve in the face of covert political manoeuvring. It has been the downfall of many a politician intellectual. It is a sad fact of life that unscrupulousness confers a decided advantage in struggles for power.

After this most consequential struggle for power came the frenzy of the first 5 year plan, a titanic and turbulent struggle to collectivise agriculture, to build heavy industry, to achieve in 10 years what took 100 years in other countries. It was declared to be the time of “the new turn on all fronts of socialist construction”, the time of “shattering transformations”, not only in politics, industry and agriculture, but in philosophy, art, education, science, in absolutely every aspect of the social order. There was intensified pressure to “bolshevise” every institution, every academic discipline, every artistic form. The intelligentsia was told that the time for ideological neutrality was over. They had to declare themselves for marxism and for the dialectical materialist reconstruction of their disciplines or evacuate the territory. All the debates that had raged in the 1920s, whether between marxism and other intellectual trends or between different trends within marxism, were sharply closed down through the 1930s. There was to be one correct line on every question. Any deviation was considered to be not only mistaken but treacherous. There was resistance in many areas. Geneticists fought back against attempts by brash bolshevisers to override the process of scientific discovery. Bukharin sided with those such as Vavilov who were standing up to Lysenko.

In philosophy there had been a debate throughout the 1920s between those who were grounded in the empirical sciences and emphasised the materialist aspect of dialectical materialism and those who were more grounded in the history of philosophy, particularly Hegel, and emphasised the dialectical dimension of dialectical materialism. It has been an ongoing tension in the history of marxism and it was healthy and natural for it to it to play itself out in the atmosphere of intellectual ferment and institutional transformation in the early days of soviet power. Philosophy was considered to be integral to the social order. Political leaders, particularly Lenin and Bukharin, participated in philosophical debates as if these issues were matters of life and death, of light and darkness. Even while preoccupied with urgent affairs of state, they polemicised passionately on questions of epistemology, ontology, ethics and aesthetics.²

Bukharin developed in and through these debates. At first he sided with the mechanists. At one point, he even confessed to “a certain heretical inclination to the empirio-critics."³ He believed that marxists should study the most advanced work in the natural and social sciences and cleanse itself of the lingering idealism inherent in quasi-mystical hegelian formulations. In Historical Materialism, published in 1921 and used as a basic text in higher party schools, he interpreted dialectics in terms of equilibrium: of conflict of forces, disturbance of equilibrium, new combination of forces, restoration of equilibrium.⁴ Although Bukharin was not uneducated in classical german philosophy, others who were more steeped in this tradition underlined the origins of marxism in this intellectual culture and criticised Bukharin accordingly. Lenin was one who did so and stated that Bukharin, although he was the party’s outstanding theorist, had not quite understood dialectics.

Prominent comintern intellectuals, such as Korsh and Lukacs, associated with a neo-kantian-neo-hegelian interpretation of marxism, which went even further in this direction than the soviet neo-hegelian school of Deborin, both criticised Bukharin. Korsh did so quite bitterly, even shouting during a speech of Bukharin at the 5th world congress of the comintern. Lukacs accused Bukharin of bias toward the natural sciences, but saw this as being in conflict with his frequently acute dialectical instincts. At the 5th comintern congress, Zinoviev railed against Korsch and Lukacs in a display of shameless anti-intellectual demagoguery. Bukharin made his criticisms of them in more intellectual terms as relapses into outmoded hegelianism. He refused to go along with the bullying workerist anti-intellectualism and saw fit to remark that a worker was not always right, no matter how black were his hands. Interestingly, Deborin also criticised Korsch and Lukacs for going too far in the direction of Hegel and being hostile to the natural sciences.⁵

Although there was growing pressure to short circuit such debates with demagogic rhetoric, Bukharin considered contending arguments seriously. In the midst of these debates, Engels’s Dialectics of Nature and Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks were published and both sides were emphasising different passages and claiming the texts as authority for their views. Bukharin seriously studied them and was particularly influenced by Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks, which dealt with problems in philosophy and the natural sciences, but paid great attention to the history of philosophy in general and Hegel in particular. He had also reflected on Lenin’s earlier criticism of him on the question of dialectics. In his writings in the 1930s, he came to a new understanding of dialectics and to the relationship of marxism to its philosophical progenitors.

In 1931 Bukharin led the soviet delegation to the international history of science congress in London. His paper, published in the ensuing book Science at the Crossroads and translated into many languages, indicated this philosophical transition. He set out to convey the intellectual vitality of marxism to a sceptical audience. He placed marxism within the context of all contemporary currents in philosophy and emphasised how dialectical materialism had overcome the narrowness of mechanistic materialism by superceding its ahistoricism, its quietism, its individualism.⁶ Reading it in his prison cell in Italy, Gramsci still thought that this did not represent a significant change in Bukharin’s tendency to emphasise materialism to the neglect of the dialectic and wrote an extended critique of Bukharin, whom he regarded as the embodiment of a positivistic tendency within marxism.⁷

In 1933 Bukharin edited Marxism and Modern Thought, a collection of essays published by the Academy of Sciences to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the death of Marx. Here he took greater note of the hegelian roots of marxism. He underlined Marx’s excellent knowledge of the history of philosophy and argued that marxism took up all that was rational and progressive in the thousands of years of philosophical development. He considered dialectics to be the “algebra of revolution”, demonstrating the transitory character of every form, the interrelatedness of all things, the indivisibility of analysis and synthesis, the logic of contradictory processes and universal connections. Nevertheless, he still put a heavy emphasis on natural science and repudiated “hegelian panology." He engaged in a polemic contrasting marxism with all other philosophical trends of the times, even while acknowledging the grains of truth in all of them: logical positivism, pragmatism, gestalt, neo-kantianism, neo-hegelianism.⁸ These were the themes he took up again at much greater length in his prison cell in 1937 in this manuscript.

Bukharin was a cosmopolitan intellectual, exposed to an array of intellectual influences and accustomed to mixing with intellectuals of many points of view and arguing the case for marxism in such milieux. So were others who found themselves between the covers of Science at the Crossroads and Marxism and Modern Thought: Hessen, Zavadovsky, Vavilov, Kolman, Uranovsky, Deborin. They were coming under increasing pressure from a younger generation who had come up under the revolution, never been abroad, knew no foreign languages, had no detailed knowledge of either the empirical sciences or the history of philosophy, had never read books enunciating other points of view. They were brash and often ruthless. They were more inclined to cite the authority of the classic texts and current decrees than to engage in philosophical argument. They were taking over as professors, directors of institutes and members of editorial boards, increasingly occupying positions of authority over learned scholars of international reputation.

These developments in soviet intellectual life were inextricably tied to the rhythms of soviet political and economic life. The way forward with the first 5 year plan was far from smooth and uncomplicated. There was violent resistance to collectivisation of agriculture and peasants were burning crops and slaughtering livestock rather than surrender. There was one disaster after another in the push to industrialisation. There was a fundamental contradiction between the advanced goals that were to be achieved and the level of expertise in science, engineering, agronomy, economics, indeed a general cultural level, needed to achieve them. There was panic and confusion and desperation. There was reckless scapegoating. Breakdowns, fires, famine, unfulfilled targets were put down to sabotage and espionage. There was a blurring of the lines between bungling and wrecking, between association with defeated positions and treason, between contact with foreign colleagues and conspiracy with foreign powers.

The country was pictured as full of spies and wreckers and agents of imperialist powers who wanted to disrupt every aspect of soviet life in every possible way, from agriculture and industry to philosophy and physics. Fascism was on the rise in Europe, but there was little evidence of a nazi 5th column within the Soviet Union. There was in fact little evidence of sabotage or espionage or even organised opposition on any significant scale by this time. Nevertheless the population was urged to revolutionary vigilance, to root out traitors in every form of soviet activity in every corner of soviet society.

The assassination of Kirov in 1934, of which Stalin was both prime mover and chief mourner, simultaneously eliminated a rival and provided the pretext for a new wave of repression. These purges swept though the entire population. There were no strata where the NKVD did not reach to uncover spies, wreckers and traitors, but the accusations bore down most heavily on party members. Every day brought new reports of arrests of commissars, army officers, trade union officials, central committee members, komsomol leaders, old bolsheviks, foreign communists, writers, doctors, philosophers, scientists, economists, agronomists, engineers, construction workers, teachers and even children, and finally the agents of the purge themselves. Interrogators found themselves in prison and on trial with those they had only recently interrogated. The accusations and arrests brought a frenetic turmoil to the institutions from which the accused and arrested had come. Those remaining were called together to denounce the accused and to criticise themselves and/or others for not unmasking the traitor sooner. This often led to further accusations and a terrifying atmosphere of accuse or be accused. It escalated beyond all rationality and morality. Under threat and even torture, false confessions were extracted and esteemed colleagues and close comrades were implicated in the most fantastic conspiracies.

Through these years, Bukharin could feel the social order unravelling. His own room for manouveur was constantly shifting. He was often denounced, but occasionally honoured, in the official discourse. In response to periodic demands that he not only accept defeat but renounce his views, he sometimes refused, sometimes capitulated, often compromised. He was always negotiating the terms in which he could speak or act. He continued to embody a critical alternative, although in increasingly aesopian forms of expression. He sincerely acknowledged the successes of the 5 year plan, accepted the drive to intensified industrialisation and threw his energies into state planning. He did continue to advocate freedom in intellectual and artistic life and agonised over the climate of fear overtaking every area of life. “Cats are clawing at my soul” he told the young Anna Larina.⁹

His relationship with Stalin was a merry-go-round of mixed signals. Stalin played with him, expressing admiration and affection, all the while scheming against him, jealous of his intellectual acuity and all round popularity and vengeful against any alternative to his absolute authority, as his meglomania swept all into a hurricane of destruction. Bukharin had reason to know of Stalin’s personality and plotting and he did know, yet he was sometimes seduced into believing in a better side to him and hoping that appealing to it would bring results. They lived and worked in close proximity to each other, first in exile and later in the Metropol and Kremlin. After Stalin’s wife Nadya committed suicide, Stalin asked Bukharin to change apartments with him, as the memory was too painful. In the same bedroom, where she was driven to her death, Bukharin went through his last agony before his arrest, feeling all the possibilities of life closing down on him. Nevertheless, all through the terror, right to the very end, he wrote “Dear Koba” letters, refuting the charges against him, protesting his innocence, believing, not believing, that, if only Stalin could see what the NKVD was doing, where things were going wrong, that he would put it right.

There were 3 spectacular show trials in which whole original nucleus of the party, with the exception of Lenin and Stalin, were represented as involved in a fantastic conspiracy to assassinate party leaders, to sabotage industry, to foment peasant uprisings, to spy for foreign powers, to overthrow socialism and to restore capitalism. Zinoviev, Kamenev and others were sentenced to death in August 1936. Radek, Pyatakov, Sokolnikov and others were sentenced to death or long terms of imprisonment in January 1937. There was much testimony at these trials implicating Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky, preparing the scenario for the third trial.

To Anna Larina, who became his wife, we owe an intimate account of his last months as he awaited arrest, humiliation and death. For the most part he confined himself to the bedroom of his Kremlin apartment “like a caged beast." His mood changed constantly. He received mounting depositions of testimony against him, much of it from trusted comrades, describing a vast conspiracy to subvert soviet power, to restore capitalism, to cede soviet territory to foreign powers, to assassinate Lenin, Kirov, Stalin. At times he was totally mystified by what seemed to be “some inexplicable witchcraft." At times he became numbed to the horror of deceit and betrayal and wild irrationality and he became detached and listless. Then it would seem sharp and vivid again and he would flare suddenly into a fierce rage. He plunged into the depths of despair. He felt “banished from life like a leper." He heard of the suicide of Tomsky. He considered suicide himself, as did Rykov. At other times, he had surges of hope that the truth would triumph and he would be vindicated. He imagined scenarios in which he might live in the countryside with his young wife and see his new son grow and pursue his interests in art and science. There were times when he found the composure and commitment to write a book on the culture of fascism. He went on hunger strike to try to bring the central committee to its senses. He was immersed in an excruciating internal struggle:

“Nikolai Ivanovich both understood and refused to understand.”¹⁰

He attended the central committee and was confronted with monstrous allegations, face to face with his accusers impeaching themselves as well as him. He returned home to say “I have returned from hell, a temporary hell, but there can be doubt that I will fall into it for good.”¹¹

He resigned himself to this hell, this disgrace, this death and decided to reach across the hopelessness of his time to hope in posterity. On the eve of his arrest, he composed a letter to a future generation of party leaders and asked Anna to memorise and then destroy it.

“I am leaving life…I am helpless before an infernal machine that seems to use medieval methods, yet possesses gigantic power, fabricates organised slander, acts boldly and confidently…Storm clouds hang over the party…I knew nothing about secret organisations. Together with Rykov and Tomsky, I expounded my views openly. Since the age of 18, I have been a member of the party, and always the goal of my life has been the struggle for the interests of the working class, for the victory of socialism. These days the newspaper with the hallowed name Pravda prints the most contemptible lie that I, Nikolai Bukharin, wanted to destroy the achievement of October, to restore capitalism…If I was more than once mistaken regarding methods of building socialism, may my descendants judge me no more severely than did Vladimir Ilyich. We were the first to pursue the same goal by an as yet untrodden path. The times, the mores, were different. I turn to you, the future generation of party leaders, on whom will fall the historic mission of clearing the monstrous cloud of crimes that in these terrible days is growing more and more grandiose, spreading like wildfire and smothering the party…In what may be the last days of my life, I am certain that sooner or later the filter of history will inevitably wash the filth from my head. I was never a traitor. I would have unhesitatingly traded my own life for Lenin’s. I loved Kirov and never undertook anything against Stalin….Know, comrades, that the banner you bear in a triumphant march towards communism contains a drop of my blood too!”¹²

It was many years before that letter could be received by those to whom it was sent.

On 27 February 1937 Bukharin said goodbye to his family. He assured Anna that truth would win out and he exhorted her to raise their son as a bolshevik. He proceeded to the plenum of the central committee where he, along with Rykov, was expelled from the party and arrested for treason. Bukharin and Rykov had declared all accusations against them to be slanderous. Bukharin insisted: “I am not Zinoviev or Kamenev and I will not tell lies against myself."

For 13 months he was imprisoned and interrogated in the Lubyanka. For 3 months, he resolutely refused to confess. Then came a period of extended negotiation, threats and promises. It is likely that he made concessions to save the lives of his family and to have his prison writings published. He had little reason to believe that any promises made to him would be honoured, but he held on to whatever thread of belief he could grasp.

During this period of 13 months between his arrest and execution, he wrote 4 book length manuscripts.¹³ He also wrote letters to Stalin about his prison writings, begging him to let them be published:

“I wrote [the prison manuscripts] mostly at night, literally wrenching them from my heart. I fervently beg you not to let this work disappear … Don’t let this work perish… This is completely apart from my personal fate.”¹⁴

The first was Socialism and Its Culture, a sequel to his book The Degradation of Culture and Fascism that he was writing before his arrest. Together these were to constitute a 2 part work to be called The Crisis of Capitalist Culture and Socialism. Bukharin considered the quick publication of this work “at a crossroads of history” to be an urgent matter, devoted as it was to positioning the Soviet Union at the forefront of the anti-fascist struggle. He begged Stalin to have it published under a pseudonym if necessary and to write a preface himself. There was no chance of this, as Stalin was already engaged in the secret diplomacy heading in the direction of the nazi-soviet pact of 1939 that had such tragic consequences for the anti-fascist movement.

The next was a collection of poems entitled The Transformation of the World. Most of them were poetic reflections on the same themes as preoccupied him in his prose writings. These were of epic scope, sweeping though the history of the world and seeing socialism as the culmination of humanistic struggle of the centuries. Some were also a chronicle of his emotional state, his love for Anna, his longing to be free.

The third was Philosophical Arabesques. This loomed large in his struggle to speak in a substantial voice to his own times as well as to later times. He seemed to have believed it would be published. He would have had to do so to invest such a massive effort in it. He wrote to Anna that she would be given the manuscripts in his cell at that time, putting particular emphasis on Philosophical Arabesques:

“The most important thing is that the philosophical work not be lost. I worked on it for a long time and put a great deal into it; it is a very mature work in comparison to my earlier writings, and, in contrast to them, dialectical from beginning to end.”¹⁵

Philosophical Arabesques was an ambitious systematic work of philosophy. The title might arouse an expectation of a collection of fragmentary or even whimsical epigrams, but it was not that. It marshalled the motif of arabic art to refer to a series on discourses on various themes interwoven with each other to form an intricate pattern. This approach to philosophy set marxism within the whole history of philosophy, within the whole battle of ideas of world culture of his times. It was a highly polemical text, engaging seriously with virtually every major intellectual trend of its times. It displayed an astute knowledge of the intellectual life of the epoch and the world historical context from which it emerged. He saw the grain of truth in every previous philosophy and saw marxism in continuity with the centuries long struggle to conceptualise the universe. He acknowledged the partial perspectives in each of the contemporary trends contending with marxim and argued that marxism superseded every one-sided view of the world to bring philosophy to a higher synthesis than had ever been achieved. It was an integrative and grounded way of thinking that offered a fresh way into the complex new problems of the era.

This was in contrast to another approach to marxism, which was prevailing in the Soviet Union at that time, isolating it from all outside forces, shutting down all internal debate. Marxism was reduced to a simplistic scheme where canonical formulations were recited repetitively, where all philosophical arguments were set in the past, where all philosophical questions were presented as basically settled. The philosophers busied themselves with writing textbooks, dictionaries, encyclopedia. In doing so, they stuck closely to the classics of marxism and to current party decrees.

Bukharin began his treatise in a sweeping world historical style, characterising the epoch with exuberant energy as a time of titantic struggle between a old order dying and a new order being born, a time of revaluation of all values. As an integral part of this struggle, marxism was proving to be the ultimate philosophy, holding its head high, winning the battle of ideas, interacting and arguing with all other philosophies, uniquely aware of the socio-historical context of all texts, supremely involved in shaping the world that other philosophies only conceptualised at a distance, indeed going on to the street as a fighting force. He portrayed opposing philosophies as turning away from an integration of reason and emotion and action into one cul de sac or another, each seeking one at the expense of the others, whether fixating on exact sciences or categorical imperatives or solemn hymns to blood and iron. From this launching pad, he addressed his readers (presumably the world audience there for his previous books):

“Here the author wishes to proceed along an avenue of thought, an avenue lined with enigmatic sphinxes that have torn many brains apart, but have also been able to play on the sublime harp of creativity. Let us go then to look once again at these old familiar figures and to gaze into their mysterious eyes.”

There were shifts of style in the manuscript, some of them due to the circumstances in which it was written, which allowed for little proofreading or revision, but also because he was consciously making concessions to the style in which philosophical polemics of the day were written in order to convince adherents of alternative positions on their own terrain that their arguments were full of holes. Some of such passages taking up battle on the “field of pure reason”, on the terms of adversaries, might have been a bit tedious, but certainly no more so than the texts being addressed. He was at his best, however, when putting their arguments into wider and earthier context and highlighting the contrasts in the light of day.

In his polemic against solipsism, for example, he called attention to the irony of a world where people ate and drank, killed and died, made stone axes and electric generators and learned to determine the chemical composition of stars, while philosophers argued that it was all an illusion, that the whole symphony of the world played only in the solitary consciousness. Arguing constantly that ideas were social products and not immaculate conceptions in the minds of philosophers, he linked solipsism to the trajectory of class societies and how thinkers had become more and more remote from material practice. Going through a whole panoply of forms of subjective idealism, encompassing a cast of characters from Pyrrho to Kant to Eddington, he played out the polemic in several acts: from a purely logical exercise, where they at first seemed invincible, but could be reduced to a series of non sequiturs; to a demonstration of the contradiction of word and deed, where the world inevitably asserted its iron priority against the arrogance of spirit attempting to swallow all; to an argument based in sociology of knowledge, showing how class societies divided all of humanity’s vital activities and fixed them in different sections of the population and could not achieve an integral overview.

So he argued on multiple levels, traversing the whole history of philosophy and taking on the whole array of modern currents, showing their roots in previous ideas as well as in contemporary experience. He engaged in polemics against positivism and mechanistic materialism, but the weight of his emphasis was on many forms of idealism from hegelian rationalism to primitivist mysticism. Always he stressed the resurgence of the world and the flesh against the arrogance of spirit and the tendency of the “I” to consume the world. He traced this through the evolution of the division of labour in which the theoretician became possible, but became one-sided, impoverished, atomised as mental and manual labour became increasing disconnected. With the degeneration of capitalism, its radius of cognition tended to diminish.

There was a strong emphasis on the sociology of knowledge. Every concept was a condensation of collective labour, a product of centuries of social history. Every mode of production generated a characteristic mode of thought. He portrayed capitalist intellectual culture as flying off in all directions, chasing one myopic version of reality after another and argued that only socialism could generate unified vision.

The picture of socialism articulated here was by this stage highly romanticised, but it was an attempt to reconnect with the vision of the society that they had sought to create and had believed was really coming into being. Indeed something had been created, however imperfectly, and he was clinging to that in a kind of desperate hope that it could reassert itself against the forces that were destroying it. His prison writing was a struggle to play a role in that still.

The gap between the picture of soviet society in the text and the society imprisoning and defaming its true believers was a product of prison conditions and complex bargaining and compromising in order to achieve publication. Certainly the genuflections to Stalin as great thinker as well as great leader must be read primarily in this way. Nevertheless I believe that there was a more complicated, more conflicted psychology involved. There had to be some kind of complex dialectic of hope and despair, a striving that was surging and falling, powerful and powerless, not only in relation to his own fate, but for the whole world historical experiment in socialism, playing itself out within him for him to persist in this work. He still believed, despite everything, that the foundations for true human liberation were being laid in a new mode of production and a new mode of representation.

There was much attention to classical german philosophy. He wanted to prove himself, even posthumously, to Lenin, on questions of philosophy and to vindicate himself against the charge that he had not adequately grasped the meaning of the dialectic and that he had not given due weight to the origins of marxism in hegelian philosophy. His knowledge of the history of philosophy was impressively erudite and his references were remarkably accurate, particularly considering the scant resources available to him in prison. He did have access to a number of philosophical texts from the prison library and through the indulgence of his somewhat intellectual interrogator Kogan. He did become more consciously dialectical, but he did not go in the direction of a neo-hegelian interpretation of marxism. Quoting Lenin, he was wary of the “mysticism of the idea” and remained resolutely materialist in emphasis.