This is an introduction to "Philosophical Arabesques", a manuscript written by Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin, leading politician and intellectual of the October revolution, in the Lubyanka prison in the Soviet Union in 1937 in the months between his arrest and execution. This text lay buried in a Kremlin vault for more than half a century and only came to light in the glasnost era of the 1980s. It is a full length philosophical apologia for marxism vis a vis other world views. This introduction contextualises the manuscript in term of the intellectual, political and socio-historical movements of the times.