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

Nicolai Bukharin was the leading reformer of the early Soviet leadership. Despite being a committed communist he argued for a mixed economy and encouraged people to "get rich" from their own enterprise under socialism. This "Gorbachev of the 20s" was expected by many to be Lenin's natural heir and, according to Lenin, the "favourite of the revolution". Nonetheless he lost out to Stalin and was shot as an "terrorist". Anna Larina, Bukharin's young wife, survived imprisonment to write this book which tells the story of his fall from power, her husband's arrest and her own imprisonment. Read alongside Getty's excellent, The Road to Terror, which includes translations of the transcripts from the closed central committee "plenums" to which Anna refers throughout the book, the book provides unique insight into the boardroom power struggle inside history's biggest ever corporation, the Soviet Union.

This is one of the most haunting books I have ever read. Larina provides a window into one of the most disturbing periods of modern history. The reader will find himself (or herself) drawn into the madness that was Stalin's system of terror of the 1930's. The author's survival of the purges, and her determined faith in her doomed husband, are a testimony to the spirit of the Russian people.

In reading this remarkable book, one should not forget that it is a widow's memoir, not an historical work. Anna Larina was but a child when she fell in love with the charismatic Nikolai Bukharin, one of the inner circle of Bolshevik intellectuals who seized control of Russia during the October Revolution in 1917. When they married, she was a beautiful Russian girl barely out of her teens and Bukharin was a celebrated national figure of 43. They had a very short married life together before Bukharin was swept into Stalin's counter-revolutionary net with trumped-up charges that he was plotting an anti-Bolshevik takeover including a plan to assassinate Stalin himself. This culminated in the celebrated "Moscow Show Trials" of the 1930's where Bukharin "confessed" his guilt and was executed.All this is written about from the horrified wife's perspective and it makes an absorbing narrative, indeed. It was not enough for the Stalinist Communists of that era to imprison the accused. They imprisoned the family of the accused as well. Being the wife of a counter-revolutionist was a crime in Communist Russia. And so -- off to imprisonment or exile. That Anna's and Bukharin's son was only a year old at the time, made no difference to the proletarian authority. The child was taken from the mother's arms and finally was raised in foster homes. It took 20 years before mother and son were reunited. The scene describing the reunion of the mother with her lost son is one of the many high points of her book. Anna's vivid descriptions of her life in squalid, filthy prisons she was sent to over the years is reminiscent of Solzhenitsyn's work. Yet, somehow she did not fully convey the intense moral outrage of such an unjust treatment. Perhaps, that is because she had to learn to suppress those feelings to keep alive, to hang on to sanity.In her view, it was not Bolshevism but Stalin who was the villain. He is everyone's villain in post-communist Russia. Anna Larina makes no effort to soften her feelings for the dictator who once had been a friend of Bukharin's but who finally did him in. She argues Bukharin's innocence not as a lawyer would but with all the emotion of a wife whose husband, son and youth were stolen unjustly from her by one of the Century's most vicious despots.I highly recommend this book to be read after obtaining a more historical perspective in Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution : A Political Biography, 1888-1938 by Stephen F. Cohen who, incidentally, penned the introduction to Anna Larina's most interesting and memorable book.