The Parallel Lives of M. Tullius Cicero
and Nikolai I. Bukharin

Joseph J. Hughes (Missouri State University)

This paper will compare the public lives of two similarly remarkable men of letters: M. Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC) and Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (1888-1938). Both men were widely learned, skilled speakers and voluminous writers with an eclectic range of interests. But both felt called to serve what they perceived to be the good of their countries, a decision which cost both men their lives. Both were studied and admired after their deaths, and held up as exemplars of an enlightened approach to public life. Specific points of comparison abound, but I will restrict myself to two: their application of humanistic study to their public lives, and their Nachleben.

Like Cicero's de Oratore, Bukharin's autobiographical novel How It All Began (written in prison while he awaited his show trial and ultimate death) represents an attempt to withdraw into an earlier, better world where the mistakes of the past have not yet been made and the humanist/statesman's possibilities are endless. Bukharin's protagonist Kolya Petrov, as it turns out, receives precisely the education Cicero calls for in de oratore, including a thorough grounding in Latin and in Greek.  Each studied poetry, was a poet himself, and served as patron to younger poets. In adulthood, each was followed by a cadre of acolytes; Cicero had his tirones and Bukharin had his Institute of Red Professors. Both held high office: Cicero, of course, had his annus mirabilis; Bukharin was one of Lenin's top advisors after the October Revolution and later spent 1925 to 1929 as Joseph Stalin's right hand man. Both paid for their political stands: Cicero through his exile and Bukharin, ultimately, with his life.

Cicero's ambitions and education led him to embrace conservative values. Unsurprisingly, his solution for Rome's ills involved a coalition of the upper classes he termed concordia ordinum. Bukharin's inquiries took him along a radically different path from Cicero's. Where It All Began chronicles Kolya Petrov's increasing sympathy with Russia's oppressed masses.  Although the novel drops off before Kolya enters adolescence, he is clearly a future Bolshevik by the end. Both were men of words in times dominated by men of action like Caesar and Stalin. Both closed their political careers (and their lives) in a blaze of rhetorical glory: Cicero with his Philippics and Bukharin with his brilliant acting performance during the great show trial of 1938.

Were Plutarch himself to choose a modern parallel for his Life of Cicero, he couldn't ask for a better subject than Nikolai Bukharin. The synkrisis is complex and fascinating. Although Cicero comes across as the more politically astute of the two, it can be argued that his colleagues largely shared his humanistic values. Even Antony was an orator of considerable polish (not to mention an amateur poetry critic). Bukharin, on the other hand, was but the foremost of a wave of Bolshevik intellectuals destroyed by Stalin and his semi-literate henchmen. Cicero's son held the consulship under Augustus, while Bukharin's wife was sent to the GULag and his son was raised under an assumed name. Cicero's literary accomplishments were always honored in Rome, but his political views enjoyed no such acceptance. Only a millenium later did he become the beloved "Tully," republican theorist and martyr. Bukharin, too, was seen as a martyr both by Trotskyists and by those who saw him as representing a more humane strain of Soviet communism. Yet in the end, each man proved to have been a greater humanist than he was a statesman. As Cicero himself pointed out of Cato the Younger at ad Atticum 2.1: dicit enim tamquam in Platonis politeiai, non tamquam in Romuli faece sententiam.