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

Anna Larina (Author), Gary Kern (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1993

The memoirs of the widow of Nikolai Bukharin, a central figure of twentieth-century Soviet history, presents both a moving family saga and a sweeping portrait of the early days of the creation of the Soviet state, before Stalin's bloody purges.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This remarkable memoir by the widow of Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin, a critic of Stalin's dictatorial regime, is at once a love story, a family tale and a harrowing record of 20 years in the Gulag. Larina, adopted daughter of an economic adviser to Lenin, lived in the Kremlin and sent girlish love notes to Bukharin through Stalin. In 1937 Bukharin, her husband of three years, was arrested. Vilified in a Moscow show trial, he was executed in 1938. Larina, now near 80, spent two decades in prisons, labor camps and under house arrest in Siberia. Her son Yury, taken from her when only a year old in 1937, grew up in orphanages. In this disjointed yet moving memoir, published in Moscow in 1988, she recalls her wrenching reunion with Yury and describes her campaign to rehabilitate her husband's reputation. She passionately defends Bukharin, a founder of the Leninist one-party dictatorship, portraying him as politically naive and blind to Stalin's nature. Despite her bias, her book is a prime source on the original Soviet ruling elite. Princeton Sovietologist Cohen, in a valuable introduction, defends the potential relevance of Bukharin's "socialist humanism" for postcommunist Russia. Photos.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

A founding father of the Soviet Union, Bukharin (1888-1938) was the Communist Party's leading theoretician and principal advocate of economic gradualism. Twenty-five years his junior, his wife, Larina, watched helplessly as he paid the ultimate price for "crimes against the state." She herself endured two decades in the gulag. Fortunately, Larina has lived long enough to witness Bukharin's official exoneration and the actual publication of these fascinating memoirs (skillfully introduced by Sovietologist Stephen Cohen). Her account describes many moving moments, including the separation from her infant son and the final farewell to her husband. As a tantalizing bonus, Larina offers numerous first-hand recollections of Stalin and his henchmen. Her memoir is absolutely unforgettable. It stands with Eugenia Ginsburg's Journey into the Whirlwind (1967) and Nadezhda Mandelstam's Hope Against Hope ( LJ 11/1/70) as prime examples of a tragic Soviet genre.
- Mark R. Yerburgh, Fern Ridge Community Lib., Veneta, Ore.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc; 1st US edition (March 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393030253
• ISBN-13: 978-0393030259
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #391,808 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A remarkable memoir from a widow's perspective., October 23, 1999

By 

Paul J. Rask - See all my reviews

This review is from: This I Cannot Forget: The Memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin's Widow (Paperback)

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.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Recommended for anyone interested in Stalin's rise to power, March 21, 2001

By 

phdc "phdc" - See all my reviews

This review is from: This I Cannot Forget: The Memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin's Widow (Paperback)

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.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The smartest guys in the room: The amazing rize and scandalous fall of the Soviet Union, May 18, 2006

By 

Graeme Harker (London, England) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: This I Cannot Forget: The Memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin's Widow (Paperback)

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.