Nikolai Bukharin Quotes

We see now that infringement of freedom is necessary with regard to the opponents of the revolution. At a time of revolution we cannot allow freedom for the enemies of the people and of the revolution. That is a surely clear, irrefutable conclusion.

It is true that these courts will gradually change in character. As the state dies out, they will tend to become simply organs for the expression of public opinion. They will assume the character of courts of arbitration. Their decisions will no longer be enforced by physical means and will have a purely moral significance.

The foundations of a Communist society are laid by the organization of industry, and first of all by purposeful unification of industry under state control.

In the sanguinary struggle with capitalism, the working class cannot refrain from inflicting the last extremity of punishment upon its declared enemies. While the civil war continues, the abolition of the death penalty is impossible.

In our system of universal military training, barrack life must be reduced to a minimum, so that ultimately the Red barracks may completely disappear.

The Russian bourgeoisie raised the hunt against the Jews, not only in the hope of diverting the anger of the exploited workers, but also in the hope of freeing themselves from competitors in commerce and industry.

The political commissars are the representatives of the class will of the proletariat in the army; they are mandated by the party and the military centres.

Our ultimate aim is to bring about the existence of a state of society in which all persons who for one reason or another have lost the capacity for work, all those who are unable to work, shall have assured support. We must ensure that old people shall enjoy a peaceful old age in which they will be provided with all the comforts of life; that children shall have everything suitable to their requirements; that invalids and cripples shall be able to live in the circumstances most appropriate to their condition; that those who are wearied and overworked shall be placed in curative surroundings, where they will receive all the care that used to be given to the wealthy bourgeois who were ailing; that no one shall any longer be perpetually harassed with anticipation of hard times.

In the mater of education as in all other matters the Communist Party is not merely faced by constructive tasks. In the educational system bequeathed to it by capitalist society, it must hasten to destroy everything which has made of the school an instrument of capitalist rule.

In the Russian Soviet Republic, in which all workers can express their will through the soviets, the workers and peasants have for the last two years been electing communists to the various executive organs.

The Red Army has been created by the workers for the struggle with the White Army of capital. The Red Army issued out the civil war; it will disappear when a complete victory has been gained in the war, when class has been abolished when the dictatorship of the proletariat has lapsed.

The proletarian army must be exclusively composed of persons belonging to the working class, of persons who do not expoloit labour and who are directly interested in the victory of the workers' revolution.

During this era when the old society is being destroyed and the new society is being upbuilded, the popular courts have a gigantic task to perform. The process of change has been so rapid that soviet legislation has not been able to keep pace with it. The laws of the bourgeois landlord system have been annulled; but the laws of the proletarian State have as yet merely been outlined, and will never be committed to paper in their entirety.

Fascist ‘order’ is the ‘order’ of military, political and economic barracks; it is the military capitalist system of a state of ‘emergency’. This expresses itself in a number of most important facts: in the tendency towards state capitalism; in the ‘common national’, ‘corporate’, etc, dictatorship, with the suppression of a number of internal contradictions; in the establishment of various ‘mono’ systems – ‘mono-nation’, ‘mono-party’, ‘mono-state’ (’totalitarian state’), etc; in the organisation of mass human reserves – petty-bourgeois and, in part, working class; in a whole ‘incorporated’ ideology, attuned to the basic interests of finance capital; and, finally, in the creation of a material and ideological war base.The so-called Fascist ‘national revolutions’, with their anti-capitalist slogans, are really in essence but a speedy reorganisation of the bourgeois ranks, eliminating parliamentary changes and the system of competing parties, introducing uniform military discipline all along the line, and organising mass reserves.

In all grades of army life, the proletariat is in control through the instrumentality of the communist commissars, who both at the front and at the rear are mainly drawn from among the workers.