Thirty years ago, he wrote a fine if somewhat adulatory biography of Nikolai Bukharin, a polymath economist who has remained, for all his bloodthirstiness in the Revolution and his sycophancy towards ...

In an age of ideological conformity and technological brain-suck, the world needs more disobedient artists and thinkers.

He later stopped the execution of five bank officials by sending to Nikolai Bukharin a volume of poems that the Central Committee member had helped him publish, accompanied by the message that “every ...