The memoirs of Anna Larina, Bukharin's widow, This 1 Cannot Forget
Howe, Irving
THIS I CANNOT FORGET, by Anna Larina. Introduction by Stephen F. Cohen, translation by Gary Kern. W.W. Norton, 1993. 384 pp. $24.95. And on this side and that— The bones of Russians, How many...
...Perhaps Bukharin had not wanted to upset his young wife by telling her what he knew, or perhaps he was himself sick at heart upon watching what had happened to that new world" the Bolsheviks promised to create...
...Vanechka, do you know how many...
...One thing more...
...With a strength that reminds one of Turgenev's heroines, Larina learned to recite the letter by heart, murmuring it to herself in the camps, prisons, and exile where she would spend the next twenty years...
...For years thereafter they worked together in behalf of Bukharin's rehabilitation...
...Larina also remembers kindnesses...
...In late 1936 Larina gave birth to a boy, only a few months before Bukharin's arrest in February 1937 on the preposterous charge of heading "a gang of spies, terrorists and thieves...
...Like most former oppositionists, Bukharin was now a broken man politically and perhaps psychologically too— though his adoring young wife did not see this...
...He fancied himself rather a gentleman, speaking politely and offering her grapes, but at the end, in a burst of rage, he shouted: "You blab too much...
...he was allowed to hold government posts on condition he not criticize the policies of The Boss, as Stalin's fearful subordinates called him...
...She denied this, and her interrogator—one of the Neanderthal types—burst out: "Shoot her...
...This I Cannot Forget will take its place among the scores of memoirs composed by survivors of the Gulag...
...Bukharin had been a major Bolshevik figure during the 1920s, close to Lenin, greatly liked within the party, and respected, even by opponents, as a theoretician...
...It seems a pity that this unsubstantiated accusation should mar a touching book...
...He asked Larina to memorize this letter, because it was unsafe to keep a written copy...
...An old man striding with effort, supporting himself with a cane, and looking at us with mournful eyes...
...It is hard to believe this...
...In fact, ever since he had sided with Stalin against the Trotskyist "Left Opposition" in 1927, Bukharin's political—as later his personal—fate had been sealed...
...As a little girl delighted by Bukharin's playfulness and charm, she had looked forward to his visits to her father...
...Daughter of a prominent Bolshevik intellectual, Anna Larina was twenty years old when she married the forty-five-year-old Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin in 1935...
...There followed a spontaneous recognition scene of mother and son...
...Larina records a long interview with the third chief of the NKVD, Lavrentiy Beria...
...These charges were of a piece with those that had already been used to destroy major Bolshevik figures in two previous show trials...
...He removed his hat, despite the freezing temperature, and used it to wave farewell to us...
...Now 79 years old, she still does not...
...He tossed his cane aside [when the train began to move] and ran as hard as he could alongside us...
...Larina was arrested shortly before Bukharin's "trial" (at which, with subtle dialectical skill, he outwitted the infamous prosecutor Vyshinsky by admitting to the absurd general charges while refuting the particular ones...
...He was at the mercy of The Boss, and how much mercy The Boss would show we all know...
...Larina offers not the slightest evidence for her charge nor a speculation as to why the two Mensheviks, long principled opponents of Bolshevism and critics of Stalin's methods, should have wanted to help him by "tightening the noose...
...Larina was a strong person, with decent and humane impulses, utterly loyal to the memory of Bukharin (although that loyalty serves to limit her understanding of what happened to him and his fellow Bolsheviks in the years of Stalin's terror...
...Her baby, hardly a year old when she was arrested, was taken away from her and placed in an obscure orphan asylum...
...Convinced that he had only a short time left, Bukharin wrote a letter "To a Future Generation of Party Leaders," defending his innocence...
...The palmist said to Yagoda, "You know . . . you have the hand of a criminal...
...he loved the city...
...Bukharin had been part of the Bolshevik regime that suppressed the Mensheviks, the anarchists, and others in the early 1920s...
...he must have had a pretty good idea of what Stalin was really like...
...Her memory working freely in prison, Larina recalled an incident from the time she and Bukharin were still free...
...This is a very grave charge to make against two men, now dead, who were figures of unquestionable integrity, whatever one may think of their political views...
...Exiled in the town of Astrakhan, she and the wife of General Yakir (most of the top officers of the Soviet army had been arrested and would be killed) were mounting a train to be transported to a camp...
...But when one considers the suffering that has filled her life, one can understand this...
...The rat learned to beg for the bread—and that provided companionship of a sort...
...Bukharin's mission was to negotiate the purchase of the Marx-Engels archive from the German and Austrian social democrats...
...Let me cite a few: Interrogated by an NKVD (secret police) official named Skvirsky, she was fcrced to listen to fabrications he thrust before her: "We know for a fact that your marriage was a fiction to cover Bukharin's counterrevolutionary ties with young people...
...In Paris Bukharin enjoyed himself...
...In the summer of 1935 at the dacha of Maxim Gorky "an old hanger-on, a palm reader" SUMMER • 1993 • 385 took the hand of Grenrikh Yagoda, the first chief of the NKVD during the years of Stalin's terror (and soon himself to be one of its victims...
...If you want to live, then shut up about Bukharin...
...What would have been so terrible if he had...
...Shoot her...
...386 • DISSENT...
...Lazar Ortenberg, an elderly relative of Sacra Yakir, came with them to the Astrakhan station...
...By the 1930s Bukharin had completely lost political power to Stalin...
...In the late 1920s he led the "Right Communist" faction arguing against Stalin's forced collectivization of Russian agriculture and favoring a relatively moderate social course that retained much of the NEP (New Economic Policy) inaugurated under Lenin in 1921...
...Bukharin proved to be ineffectual as a factional leader and was easily routed by the Stalin apparat...
...Some twenty years later he was found by a courageous relative and then, at age twenty, he undertook a long journey to the Siberian town in which his mother was exiled...
...In 1935 Bukharin was sent by The Boss to Paris, and Larina accompanied him for part of the time...
...The "Letter" was used against him in his show trial...
...Nicolaevsky would later admit that he had himself written this "Letter," but insisted that it reflected the sentiments of an unnamed Old Bolshevik...
...The best part of her memoirs consists of reports on her experiences in the camps and prisons, told with much flair and even a few touches of humor...
...Politically, Larina's memoirs have little to offer, since she remains locked within the worldview of her husband's version of Bolshevism...
...At no point does it occur to her to ask whether the dictatorship Bukharin helped to create after the October Revolution might have laid the foundation, at least in part, for Stalinism...
...Every day, to the surprise of the prison guard, I would feed it some bread...
...A bit later, back in her cell, she could feel happy for a moment, "satisfied with my revolt in defense of human dignity...
...If you don't shut up, then here's what you'll get," whereupon Beria aimed his right forefinger at his temple...
...Once during her time as prisoner, as if to mimic an incident in Dostoevsky's life described in his House of the Dead, Larina was sentenced to be shot, taken out of her cell, and led to a ravine...
...he had acquiesced, however uneasily, in the persecution of the Trotskyists in the late 1920s...
...The negotiations, conducted mainly with two veteran Mensheviks, Fyodor Dan and Boris Nicolaevsky, came to nothing...
...Only during Gorbachev's time, when Bukharin was "rehabilitated" by the Communist party, did she make the letter public...
...The Kremlin was hardly a plausible locale for innocence...
...Now Larina bitterly denies that Bukharin did or could have spoken to Nicolaevsky as the latter claims...
...In that solitary cell Larina became friendly with a rat that kept visiting her...
...Ah, but history has some compensations, for it was Beria who would be the one to "get it...
...The Boss was resourceful at inflicting gratuitous suffering on his victims...
...While a prisoner in a camp, Larina heard of her husband's death at the hands of the secret police...
...Some time later Nicolaevsky published in the organ of the emigré Mensheviks a lengthy and sensational "Letter from an Old Bolshevik," which vividly recounted the horrors of Stalin's rule and was generally taken to be the work of Bukharin...
...Suddenly a voice cried out, "[T]urn them back, turn them back...
...Shoot her...
...She charges that "Dan and Nicolaevsky consciously helped Stalin tighten the noose already drawn" around Bukharin's neck...
...Yagoda turned red...
...Larina sees Bukharin as a pure-spirited man, an innocent unable to grasp what Stalin was up to in the late 1930s...
...And on this side and that— The bones of Russians, How many there are...
Vol. 40 • July 1993 • No. 3
