Translated by George ShriverNikolai Bukharin, an original Bolshevik leader and a founder of the Soviet state, spent the last year of his life imprisoned by Stalin, awaiting a show trial and likely execution. During that time, from March 1937 to March 1938, Bukharin wrote four book-length manuscripts in his prison cell. Seventy years later, The Prison Poems is the last of the four prison manuscripts to be published.Bukharin organized his poems (approximately 180 of them, written from June to November 1937) into several 'series': one dealing with 'Forerunners' to the 1917 Russian Revolution and another dealing with the Russian Civil War contain commentary not found in the other prison manuscripts. The same is true of the 'Lyrical Intermezzo' poems for and about Anna Larina, his wife. Readers will also find of interest the series of nature poems, the one on humanity's cultural-historical heritage, the anti-Nazi and anti-capitalist poems, and others dealing with what Bukharin saw as the aims and achievements of socialism in the USSR.