Bukharin, Nikolai Ivanovich (1888–1938)

Soviet politician and theorist. A moderate, he was the chief Bolshevik thinker after Lenin. Executed on Stalin's orders for treason in 1938, he was posthumously rehabilitated in 1988.

He wrote the main defence of war communism in his Economics of the Transition Period (1920). He drafted the Soviet constitution of 1936, but in 1938 was imprisoned and tried for treason in one of Stalin's show trials. He pleaded guilty to treason, but defended his moderate policies and denied criminal charges. Nevertheless, he was executed, as were all other former members of Lenin's Politburo except Trotsky, who was murdered, and Stalin himself.