Bukharin’s Philosophical Arabesques was written while he was imprisoned in the Lubyanka Prison in Moscow, facing trial on charges of treason, and later awaiting execution after he was found guilty. After the death of Lenin, Bukharin cooperated with Stalin for a time. Once Stalin's supremacy was assured he began eliminating all potential rivals. For Bukharin, the process was to end with his confession before the Soviet court, facing the threat that his young family would be killed along with him if (...) he did not. While awaiting his death, Bukharin wrote prolifically. He considered Philosophical Arabesques as the most important of his prison writings. In its pages, he covers the full range of issues in Marxist philosophy—the sources of knowledge, the nature of truth, freedom and necessity, the relationship of Hegelian and Marxist dialectic. The project constitutes a defense of the genuine legacy of Lenin's Marxism against the use of his memory to legitimate totalitarian power. Consigned to the Kremlin archives for a half-century after Bukharin’s execution, this work is now being published for the first time in English. It will be an essential reference work for scholars of Marxism and the Russian revolution and a landmark in the history of prison writing. (shrink)

This is an introduction to "Philosophical Arabesques", a manuscript written by Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin, leading politician and intellectual of the October revolution, in the Lubyanka prison in the Soviet Union in 1937 in the months between his arrest and execution. This text lay buried in a Kremlin vault for more than half a century and only came to light in the glasnost era of the 1980s. It is a full length philosophical apologia for marxism vis a vis other world views. (...) This introduction contextualises the manuscript in term of the intellectual, political and socio-historical movements of the times. (shrink)