How It All Began The Prison Novel [Hardcover]

Nikolai Bukharin (1888–1938) was a Bolshevik intellectual and revolutionary, as well as the author of more than a hundred articles and books. He was executed as a "counterrevolutionary" on March 15, 1938 and exonerated fifty years later by Mikhail Gorbachev.George Shriver has translated and edited Roy Medvedev's On Soviet Dissentand The October Revolution, as well as Let History Judge (all published by Columbia).Stephen F. Cohen is professor of politics and Russian studies at Princeton University. His books include Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938 and Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History Since 1917. George Shriver has translated and edited Roy Medvedev's On Soviet Dissentand The October Revolution, as well as Let History Judge (all published by Columbia).Here at last in English is Nikolai Bukharin's autobiographical novel and final work. Many dissident texts of the Stalin era were saved by chance, by bravery, or by cunning; others were systematically destroyed. Bukharin's work, however, was simultaneously preserved and suppressed within Stalin's personal archives.

At once novel, memoir, political apology, and historical document, How It All Began, known in Russia as "the prison novel," adds deeply to our understanding of this vital intellectual and maligned historical figure. The panoramic story, composed under the worst of circumstances, traces the transformation of a sensitive young man into a fiery agitator, and presents a revealing new perspective on the background and causes of the revolution that transformed the face of the twentieth century.

Among the millions of victims of the reign of terror in the Soviet Union of the 1930's, Bukharin standlG