This I Cannot Forget: The Memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin's Widow

408 Pages·1994·11.553 MB·English

by  Anna Larina

"A RARE LOOK INTO
THE INNERMOST
CIRCLE OF THE
BOLSHEVIK
REVOLUTION'S
DOOMED FOUNDING
FATHERS."
FRONT PAGE REVIEW.
NEW YORK TIMES
BOOK REVIEW
Memoirs
of Nikolai
Bukharin's
Widow
This
I Cannot Forget
THE MEMOIRS OF
NIKOLAI BUKHARIN'S WIDOW
Anna Larina
Introduction by
STEPHEN F. COHEN
Translated from the Russian by
GARY KERN
W·W·NORTON & COMPANY
New York • London
Russian edition copyright © 1988, 1989 by Anna Larina
First American edition copyright © 1993 by Anna Larina
First published as a Norton paperback 1994
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
The text of this book is composed in Plantin Light 118,
with the display set in Plantin Light 118.
Composition and manufacturing by the Haddon Craftsmen, Inc.
Book design by Jacques Chazaud.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Larina, Anna.
[Nezabyvaemoe. English]
This I cannot forget : the memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin's widow/ by Anna Larina;
introduction by Stephen F. Cohen; translated from the Russian by Gary Kern.
p. cm.
Translation of Nezabyvaemoe.
Includes index.
1. Larina, Anna. 2. Bukharin, Nikolai Ivanovich, 1888-1938.
3. Revolutionaries-Soviet Union-Biography. 4. Soviet Union-Politics and
government-1917-1936. 5. Wives-Soviet Union-Biography. I. Title.
DK268.B76N4913 1991
947 .084' 092------dc20 91-12739
ISBN 0-393-31234-8
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 10 Coptic Street, London WClA lPU
234567890
1bis book
is dedicated
to the two men
closest and dearest to me:
my father and my husband

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: The Afterlife of Nikolai Bukharin
by Stephen F. Cohen 11
AUTHOR'S PREFACE 37
THIS I CANNOT FORGET 39
The Tomsk Camp, December 1937-March 1938 42
Transit Prisons 51
Mothers and Babies in Prison 54
Wives of Political Prisoners 55
Mothers of Disgraced Sons 5 7
How Stalin Toyed with Bukharin-The Bukharin
Trial 63
A Nightmare 74
The Fate of Her Child and Memories of a Happier
Siberian Journey 75
8 CONTENTS
The Underground Cell 85
Vision of Golgotha 1 O1
The Rightist and Trotskyist Oppositions 105
With Bukharin in the Crimea, 193 0 10 7
Bukharin's Conversation with Kamenev and Its
Fateful Consequences, 192 8-192 9 112
Bukharin's Character and Ideals 125
A Letter to Yezhov and a Poem for Yura 128
Our Romance, Stalin's Wife, and Premonitions 133
Deeper into the Gulag 14 7
Return to Lif~And to Moscow 162
Last Months in Moscow after Bukharin's Arrest 167
Exile in Astrakhan, 19g 7 1 72
The Astrakhan Prison, 193 7-Moscow's Lubyanka
Prison, 1938 180
Confrontation with Beria 18 7
Portrait of Father 204
Childhood Friendship with Bukharin 220
Lenin's Death, Father's Death, and New Cellmates 224
Memories of Trotsky, and a Disturbing Interrogation
~~~~* ~
Bukharin's Last Months ofF reedom: The Paris Trip 246
The "Letter of an Old Bolshevik" and Other Supposed
"Recollections" of Bukharin in Paris 258
The Storm Descends: Stalin and Bukharin 2 79
Bukharin's Confrontation with Sokolnikov 292
Radek's Arrest and Testimony 296
"I Have Returned from Hell. "-Bukharin, January
1937 309
Reunion with Yura in 1956 318
Contents 9
The Last Plenum and Bukhan·n's Hunger Strike 323
The Last Good-bye and the First Search 334
Bukharin's Arrest 339
Bukharin's Testament 343
EPILOGUE: I ALWAYS BELIEVED THAT THE TRUTH
WOULD TRIUMPH 347
BUKHARIN'S PRISON LETTER TO ANNA LARINA
DELIVERED 54 YEARS LATER 353
LETTERS FROM SOVIET READERS 357
INDEX 377
Photographs appear following page 192.

INTRODUCTION
The Afterlife of
Nikolai Bukharin
by
S T E P H E N F. C O H E N
"If you want to live, then shut up
about Bukharin!"
-Lavrenty Beria to Anna Larina, 1939
Readers are opening a book unlike any other in the long and agonized
history of Soviet literature. Circumstantially, it belongs to the large vol
ume of personal testimony by survivors of Stalin's twenty-five-year ter
ror and Gulag Archipelago, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once and forever
named that far-flung system of interrogation cells, transit prisons,
forced-labor camps, and remote exile populated by millions of lost souls
and brutally obedient guards. Here, again, we journey into the lower
depths of a debased world "covered in the shame of unbridled terror,
awash in the blood of the innocent" and particularly "the tears of
women ... tom from their children and husbands." Gulag literature,
much of it written secretly decades ago and only recently freed from
censorship, continues to appear. It may be, with its counterpart from the
other defining holocaust of modem times, the most characteristic writ
ing of the twentieth century.
But Anna Mikhailovna Larina's book is different, indeed unique. It
is not primarily the story of her twenty years of suffering and survival in
the Gulag-that, too, would make an astonishing volume-but of her
previous life as a daughter and wife among the founding fathers of the
Soviet Union. Except for Leon Trotsky's autobiography and fragmen
tary reminiscences of a later period by Stalin's daughter, Larina's book