policies he advocated fell victim to the radical and violent way Josef Stalin carried out the plan. Bukharin opposed Stalin’s harsh measures against the peasants after the amount of grain marketed fell off sharply. In September he published “Notes of an Economist,” criticizing efforts to inflate the industrial goals of the plan and defending the idea of balanced growth; it is impossible, he said, “to build today’s factories with tomorrow’s bricks.” Stalin and his allies counterattacked, labeling Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, and Mikhail Tomsky the “Right Opposition.” His power already undercut by the end of 1928, Bukharin was removed formally from the Politburo, the Comintern, and editorship of Pravda during 1929 and systematically vilified. In limbo for the next four years after halfhearted recantations, horrified by the destruction visited on the peasantry by collectivization, he served as research director for the Supreme Economic Council and its successor and wrote extensively on culture and science. In the era of partial moderation from 1934 to 1936, Bukharin became editor of the government newspaper, Izvestiya, participated in the commission to prepare a new Soviet constitution, and wrote about the danger of fascism in Europe.
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The Great Purges ended the domestic truce. Bukharin was arrested in February 1937. In March 1938, along with the Right Opposition, he was tried for treason and counterrevolution in the last great show trial, the Trial of the Twenty-One, where he was the star defendant. Bukharin confessed to the charges against him, probably to save his young wife Anna Larina and their son Yuri (born 1934), and he was executed immediately. In the Khrushchev years, Bukharin came to symbolize an alternative, non-Stalinist path of development for the Soviet Union. He was rehabilitated in 1988, and Larina made public his last written work, a letter to future party leaders, that she had preserved by memory during years of imprisonment. See also: LEFT OPPOSITION; LEFT SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES; NEW ECONOMIC POLICY; PURGES, THE GREAT; WAR COMMUNISM
Bergmann, Theodor; Schaefer, Gert; and Selden, Mark, eds. (1994). Bukharin in Retrospect. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Bukharin, Nikolai. (1998). How It All Began. New York: Columbia University Press. Cohen, Stephen F. (1973). Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938. New York: Oxford University Press. Haynes, Michael. (1985). Nikolai Bukharin and the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism. London: Croom Helm. Heitman, Sidney. (1969). Nikolai I. Bukharin: A Bibliography, with Annotations. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution. Kemp-Welch, A., ed. (1992). The Ideas of Nikolai Bukharin. New York: Oxford University Press. Larina, Anna (1993). This I Cannot Forget: The Memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin’s Widow. New York: Norton. Lewin, Moshe. (1974). Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates from Bukharin to the Modern Reformers. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Medvedev, Roy A. (1980). Nikolai Bukharin: The Last Years. New York: Norton.
CAROL GAYLE WILLIAM MOSKOFF
Bukovina is a region that straddles north-central Romania and southwestern Ukraine. First records of the region date back to the fourteenth century, when the whole territory was a constituent part of the Moldovan Principality.
From 1504, the region was drawn under indirect Ottoman rule. However, following the Russo-Turkish war of 1768-1774, the Hapsburg Empire annexed the region, in accordance with the 1775 Convention of Constantinople.
During the initial stages of Austrian rule, Bukovina’s population expanded rapidly. The region’s reputation for religious toleration and relaxed feudal obligations saw a wave of German, Polish, Hungarian, Ukrainian, and Romanian immigrants flood into the area.
The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the aftermath of World War I gave rise to a brief period of dispute concerning rights to the region, with both Romania and briefly independent Ukraine claiming sovereignty. The Treaty of Saint Germain awarded the territory to a newly enlarged Romania.
Control over the region shifted following the enactment of the clandestine Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, as the Soviet Union seized northern Bukov-ina (to the Sereth River) on June 29, 1940. This move precipitated an exodus of the region’s German settlers.
Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 saw the whole territory temporarily revert to Romania. Bukovina’s sizable Jewish population suffered during this period. However, the region was retaken by advancing Soviet troops, and in September 1944 northern Bukovina was officially incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
After a period of territorial stability under Communist rule, focus on the area returned during the 1990s. With an estimated 135,000 ethnic Romanians living in Ukrainian Bukovina, tentative calls were made by the Romanian government for a reversion to territorial arrangements that had existed prior to the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. The Ukrainian government’s unwillingness to engage Romanian demands meant the issue initially reached a stasis. However, Romania’s application to join NATO forced a resolution of the dispute and, as such, a 1997 treaty mutually recognized the territorial integrity of the two states. See also: MOLDOVA AND MOLDOVANS; UKRAINE AND UKRAINIANS
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Fischer-Galati, Stephen. (1991). Twentieth Century Rumania. New York: Columbia University Press. Roper, Steven D. (2000). Romania: The Unfinished Revolution. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers.
swirls with fierce wit, narrative inventiveness, and a myriad of historical, literary, and religious references.
Bulgakov’s last play, Batum (1939), written in honor of Stalin’s sixtieth jubilee, was banned. Bulgakov died of kidney disease in 1940. See also: GOGOL, NIKOLAI VASILIEVICH; MOSCOW ART THEATER; THEATER
(1891-1940), twentieth-century novelist, journalist, short story writer, and playwright; author of internationally acclaimed novel Master and Margarita.
Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov was born in Kiev. He graduated from the Kiev University Medical School in 1916 and married Tatiana Lappa, his first of three wives. He practiced medicine in provincial villages, then in Kiev, where he witnessed the outbreak of the Russian Civil War and struggled with morphine addiction. In 1920 he abandoned medicine for a writing career and moved to Vladikavkaz, Caucasus, where he wrote feuilletons and studied theater.
Bulgakov moved to Moscow in 1921. There his troubles with censorship began. His satirical (patently science fiction) novel Heart of a Dog (Sobache serdtse) was deemed unpublishable. His play Days of the Turbins (Dni Turbinykh), based on his autobiographical novel White Guardu (Belaya Gvardiya), premiered in 1926 and was banned after its 289th performance (although it supposedly numbered among Josef Stalin’s favorite plays). Subsequent plays were banned much earlier in the production process. His short story “Morphine” (1927) was his last publication in his lifetime. In 1930 he wrote a long letter (his second) to the Soviet government requesting permission to emigrate. He received in response a telephone call from Stalin, who offered him an assignment as assistant producer at the Moscow Art Theater. Although not subjected to forced labor or confinement, Bulgakov hardly enjoyed privilege. His work remained unpublished and unperformed. His attempts to appease the censors by tackling relatively safe subjects (historical fiction and adaptations) proved futile.
Bulgakov’s novel Master and Margarita was written between 1928 and 1940. Resonant with the influence of Nikolai Gogol, it concerns the Devil, who, disguised as a professor, travels to Moscow to wreak havoc. This exuberantly irreverent work
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bulgakov, Mikhail. (1987). Heart of a Dog, reprint ed., tr. Mirra Ginsburg. New York: Grove. Bulgakov, Mikhail. (1996). The Master and Margarita, reprint ed., tr. Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor. New York: Vintage. Milne, Lesley. (1990). Bulgakov: A Critical Biography. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Proffer, Ellendea.
