Events ultimately proved Bukharin right about Malinovskii. A post-1917 Bolshevik tribunal would convict Malinovskii of being a police spy and sentence him to death by firing squad. For now, though, Bukharin stayed in Cracow several weeks, contributed to Lenin’s newest magazine, and became a regular member of the circle.
After Cracow, Bukharin moved to Vienna, Austria, where he married a fellow Moscow refugee named Nadezhda Mikhailovna Lukina. They set up housekeeping not far from the Trotskys, though the two couples never became close. At Lenin’s request, Bukharin also helped another young Lenin protégé, a Georgian who recently had started calling himself Koba Stalin. Lenin had sent Stalin to Vienna to research a paper on Marxism and the National Question. Since Stalin spoke no German, Bukharin acted as both his translator and his academic guide.
With the world war, Bukharin left Vienna and moved to Switzerland. He tried to start an independent Bolshevik journal there, but Lenin objected. In 1915 he moved to Sweden, a key link in the underground smuggling route for messages between Russia and the outside world. Here he wrote his second major book, Imperialism and World Economy; his Economic Theory of the Leisure Class had been completed in Vienna. But relations between him and Lenin continued to deteriorate.
Each time Bukharin tried to assert independence, Lenin resisted. When Bukharin asked that he and his Swedish group be appointed a “special commission” to keep contact with allies in Russia, Lenin sniffed disloyalty and forbade them from any direct contact with Russia at all. When Bukharin and his friends complained, Lenin accused them of having an “anti-party attitude” and called Bukharin himself “unstable in politics” with “semi-anarchistic ideas.”62 Bukharin also clashed with Lenin on ideological issues, such as the role of nationalism and popular self-determination.
Even Lenin’s ally Alexander Shliapnikov, watching from Russia, lamented that “both sides began to display pettiness.”63
Swedish police arrested Bukharin in April 1916 for antiwar activities and then deported him to Christiana, Norway (renamed Oslo in 1924). A German agent had tried to involve Bukharin in an espionage plot, which had infuriated Swedish authorities. The last straw between Bukharin and Lenin came in September 1916 when Lenin rejected an essay Bukharin had prepared for him as “decidedly incorrect.”64 As the argument escalated, Lenin complained to Zinoviev, “I am now so ill-disposed toward Bukharin I cannot write.”65
By then, Bukharin had had enough. He too complained to Zinoviev: “You simply do not want me as a collaborator. Don’t worry. I won’t be troublesome.” To Lenin himself he wrote that his vendetta had caused rumors that “I am being kicked out because ‘you Lenin cannot tolerate any other person with brains.’”66 Bukharin decided he needed distance and booked passage to America. His biographer Stephen Cohen concluded: “The deterioration in his relations with Lenin was probably a major factor.”67
Despite these arguments, Bukharin and Lenin never broke ties. They managed somehow to keep the door open between them. Before leaving Europe, Bukharin bared his feelings to Lenin in an emotional letter: “At any rate, I ask one thing: If you will polemicize, etc., preserve such a tone as not to force a split. It would be very painful to me, painful beyond my strength, if joint work, even in the future, should become impossible. I have the greatest respect for you and look upon you as my revolutionary teacher and love you.”68 Lenin responded in kind, telling his young protégé, “We all value you highly.”69 The two continued to write back and forth, Lenin asking Bukharin to use his new perch in New York to help the cause by raising money and finding English publishers for Lenin’s articles.70
On reaching New York, Bukharin and his wife slept on a friend’s sofa the first few nights. Then he started his new post on the editorial staff of Novy Mir.
Now, seeing Trotsky standing in front of him in New York City, Bukharin seemed happy to forget politics. He and Trotsky apparently said not a word about their common headaches with Vladimir Lenin that first day. Instead, Bukharin had found something in New York City that he felt Trotsky, as Europe’s foremost socialist writer, would surely appreciate. It wasn’t the theater or the skyscrapers; not the subway, the cinema, or the fancy stores. Instead, “[We] had hardly got off the boat when he told us enthusiastically about a public library which stayed open late at night and which he proposed to show us at once,” Natalya recalled. “At about nine o’clock in the evening we had to make the long journey to admire his great discovery.”71
THE FRONT LOBBY of the Astor House led directly out onto Times Square. New Yorkers had named this spacious, five-block-long intersection for the building at its south end, constructed by the New York Times Company, yet another behemoth skyscraper at four hundred feet tall and with twenty-five stories. Already this square had become the heart of New York theater. Giant advertising posters covered the walls, though Trotsky could barely comprehend their garish colors and oversize English words. Al Jolson? Zeigfeld Girls? Cohan? Bukharin, just five feet tall and half a head shorter than either Trotsky or Natalya, led them down the sidewalk past crowds of people laughing, singing, or talking, off to a show, a concert, or a restaurant. The voices competed with noise from taxis and horses on the street. At Forty-Second Street they turned east into a canyon between tall buildings, which whipped the wind in their faces and made them shiver. At the next block, they passed under a singularly ugly structure, the Sixth Avenue elevated train line with its metal trestles blocking the sidewalk, frustrating traffic, and hiding the streetlights. Their teeth rattled as trains passed overhead, though at least the belching smoke of coal-burning steam engines had recently been eliminated with new electric cars.
Across the street they passed the giant Hippodrome Theatre on one side, featuring that week an enormous ice ballet with more than a thousand performing skaters. On the other side they passed Bryant Park, cluttered with shanties and huts. At Fifth Avenue, Bukharin led them around the corner until they stood in front of a great white marble building, an architectural marvel opened just a few years earlier, in 1911. Two white marble lions guarded the front entrance from either side. Overhead, etched in stone, was the name New York Public Library.
Bukharin knew Trotsky would adore this site. He and Trotsky shared a passion as deep as politics, what today would label them “wonks” or “nerds” or “geeks.” In every European capital either of them visited, one of their first stops had been the library, be it in Vienna, Paris, Madrid, or Copenhagen. Trotsky had loved libraries since his teens. In his first prison in Nikolaev, he had sought out the prison library for solace. As writers, they craved the long days spent doing research in the stacks, especially in an age before TV, radio, talking movies, or the Internet became distractions.
Bukharin took them inside and led them up marble stairways to the building’s top floor, then through a small foyer to the library’s main reading room. This too was magnificent, a vast open space almost three hundred feet long and seventy-seven feet wide, larger than the entire ship Montserrat on which they had just crossed the ocean, with ceiling paintings and sculptures and flooded with light. And books! The library’s seventy-five miles of shelves held more than a million of them, plus newspapers and magazines from around the world! For anyone! For free! To just come and read! Till almost midnight! Even on a Sunday night!
Neither Trotsky nor Bukharin had any idea that this library was actually a monument to capitalism, largely financed by three great American fortunes: those of real estate mogul John Jacob Astor; corporate lawyer Samuel Tilden; and in particular that widely reviled enemy of the working class, Andrew Carnegie. No matter. For the Russians, it would become a second home.
They didn’t stay long. The walk back to the Astor House was just five blocks, but it could seem endless on a freezing cold night like this. “On the way back we got to know the exhausted faces of the New Yorkers,” Natalya recalled.72 Walking in Times Square,