Vladimir Lenin had called Nikolai Buhkarin the "golden boy of the Revolution". Post-Lenin, Josef Stalin thought otherwise. In 1937, the brilliant scholar and revolutionary ideologue was expelled from the party and arrested in 1937 on grounds of being a Trotskyite. Bukharin was dubbed a "hired murderer, saboteur, and wrecker in the service of fascism." He was even accused of having once plotted to assassinate Lenin and was summarily executed the following year. Between February 1937 and March 1938, Bukharin spent his days in Moscow's Lubyanka prison writing four books. Two were political theories, one a collection of poems and the last, this novel, remained unfinished. "Socialism and Its Culture" was a defence of the humanist element of socialism against the perils of fascism. "Philosophical Arabesques" was his parting shot on Marxism. The anthology of poems was a collection of 200 pieces on history and politics. The last, an autobiographical novel, he could not complete, executed as he was in his cell.

The four manuscripts remained obscured till an aide of Mikhail Gorbachev tipped off Stephen Cohen, known for his biography of Bukharin, that those did exist and were stashed away in secret archives. Cohen pursued Gorbachev and then Boris Yeltsin. He finally managed to procure photocopies of the manuscripts. o were not discovered -- they remained rumours. Bukharin's last works were published in Russia, and "How It All Began", the novel, saw the light of day as the English translation of the unfinished novel. It is similar to Leon Trotsky's autobiography in content, but it differs in form -- it is fiction.

"How It All Began" is a reflection of Bukharin's own days of youth. The story begins with the protagonist, Kolya Petrov's days of realisation in the 1890s and ends in 1905 when Bukharin was still a student in the gimnaziia just prior to the unsuccessful 1905 Revolution. The book works at three levels. Firstly, on the face of it, it is a lyrical story of a young man in pre-Soviet Russian Moscow and Bessarabia. Then, it is the autobiography of one of the most evocative and powerful writers of the Revolution. And lastly, it is a commentary on the socio-political developments of the turbulent years between 1905 and 1917.

Kolya (Bukharin) was born to Ivan Petrov, a schoolteacher in Moscow. Tired of inane and daily quarrels, Ivan took up a job as a tax assessor in Bessarabia. In Kishinev, he worked for the department of revenue. Life here was as bad. The officials drank a lot and took bribes and detested him for not being an anti-Semite. Ivan decided to return to Moscow. As he and his wife struggled to make both ends meet, the Petrov children stayed scattered with relatives all over Russia. The family reunited in Moscow once Ivan took up a job as a teacher once again. It was time for Kolya to enter the gimnaziia. It is in the backdrop of his father's predicament, that Kolya emerges as the central character of the story laced with anecdotes. Kolya was disenchanted with his parents because they had lied to him about sex. He gave up religion and was influenced by Russian Revolutionary writers.

Cohen and translator George Shriver believe Bukharin used "Aesopian language" to indict Stalin/Stalinism. It was for this reason that Cohen settled for "How It all Began" instead of "Times" which is the literal translation of Vremena, the title that Bukharin wanted as the title.


What Amazon.com says:

The story behind How It All Began is almost as compelling as that contained within its pages. Of all those in Lenin's inner circle, Nikolai Bukharin stood out as a kinder, gentler sort of revolutionary: a painter, writer, and student of the social and natural sciences who later defended Lenin's liberal New Economic Policy during the '20s. If he hadn't fallen prey to Stalin's maniacal purges, the history of Russian Communism might have turned out quite differently. Instead, Bukharin spent a year in prison writing feverishly and awaiting trial. He finished four books during that hellish year -- two books of political theory, a volume of poems, and then this unfinished novel--before being shot in his cell. The resulting manuscript could easily have vanished from the face of the earth. Improbably, it survived in Stalin's personal archives, from whence it was rescued, translated by George Shriver, and offered up as both historical document and genuinely interesting work of fiction--a sort of portrait of the revolutionary as a young man. How It All Began follows the coming of age of one Kolya Petrov, the son of vaguely liberal provincial Russians. Although Bukharin plants all the seeds of the political consciousness to come, this is done with a mercifully light touch, interspersed with character studies, lyrical descriptions of nature, and accounts of young Kolya's education. The book breaks off abruptly when Kolya is only 15, as the country was about to plunge into 1905's failed revolution -- and as Bukharin himself was about to be silenced forever.

In 1984, a twenty-year-old punkette with two-toned hair and a plastic raincoat boarded an American Airlines jet and left home, in search of a fantasy that she wanted to make into a life. That nice Catholic kid gone haywire was me, fleeing toward a future as a poet, a rock star, a groupie, anything but the accounted-for accounting major my dad said I should be. My fantasy was the floating world where artists and other weirdos made their own rules, turning their lives in the city's twilight into one long experiment.

San Francisco was the logical place to touch ground, and I held a naive hope that its history would rub off on me. As soon as I checked in to the Geary Street YWCA, I hiked up to the faded cafés of North Beach. Nothing happened as I sat there with my lonely notebook. I tried my luck on Haight Street, past the head shops and the spaced-out huddling Deadheads, but I never met anyone there who offered me a useful revelation. Those neighbourhoods' dreams were done, their shells transformed into theme parks. I soon tired of hucksters selling memories of Ginsberg or Garcia along with their bad manifestos and patchouli oil. I didn't want to be a Beat, or a hippie, or even a mohawked English-style punk like the ones who hung out in front of the Mabuhay Gardens. The costumes those characters wore seemed about as daring as Mickey Mouse.

I had to find the bohemia that was still forming, as I was. In the 1980s, that meant moving to the Mission District, a bilingual neighbourhood where kids with fresh tattoos lived across the hall from Latin American political refugees. The Mission had the resources wage slaves and students need to survive: cheap rents, easy subway access, and taquerías that served giant two-dollar burritos. I found a room in a creaky fifth-floor walk-up on South Van Ness, next to Paco's Tacos, the cheapest stand in the neighbourhood. It was only two blocks from the neighbourhood's oldest café, predictably called La Bohème. But I soon realized that I could make more interesting connections by staying in.

The flat I'd moved into was an ordinary San Francisco group house, occupied by a rotating cast selected by its leaseholder, a girl my age named Sally Frederick. At first, it didn't seem that different from the dorm rooms and off-campus shacks I'd passed through in my year and a half of college in Seattle. But unlike the postadolescent drifters I'd known, Sally had made a commitment to the spot where she'd happened to land. She expected her roommates and the small circle of friends who spent most evenings in her living room to go beyond the coincidence of our meeting and become one another's lifelines. Our efforts at the domestic arts didn't amount to much beyond hanging up a few movie posters and occasionally throwing together a curry from a mix. But emotionally, Sally pushed us further. She encouraged us to invest in each other, to open up, and to answer each other's trust with a willingness to provide support. Her intensity turned off some people, and they fled, but those willing to match it entered a network of steadfast companions that survived individual conflicts and disenchantments.

Sally had some kind of magic with people; I attributed it to a natural grace that made everyone in her presence feel a bit more beautiful. Now I recognize that her charisma was intensified by her self-imposed mission. She was trying to make us into a family. Hard times had struck the one she'd been born into: her parents were divorced, and a brother had drowned in a boating accident when she was a teenager. Her impulse to reach out beyond her bloodline was personal. Yet it suited all of us. As I moved from her little clan into others I helped form over the next decade, I realized that this is one of the first tasks any would-be bohemian faces: to create a sense of home that lasts while your life changes, to cultivate a family spirit beyond the boundaries of the white picket fence.

Making "family" where you find it is also one of the hardest ambitions to fulfill. No matter how strong the impulse may be to reinvigorate tired customs with the juice of inspiration and personal experience, applying your bright new ways to the life you actually lead can be difficult and even painful. You can declare the nuclear family as antiquated as the corset, but that doesn't make it easier to explain to your mother why you've decided to celebrate the holidays with your housemates instead of flying home. She will be hurt, and those beloved roomies may succumb to their own pressures and abandon you anyway. You could invite them all home with you, except that Uncle Gene might go off on one of his tirades about the gays getting all the good real estate, or your activist pal Amber might try to coax your grandmother to explain why she's pro-life.