A Bolshevik Love Story

...In the Russian manner, Bukharin's father and ailing first wife, Nadezhda M. Lukina, came to live with them in the Kremlin apartment that two years earlier had been Stalin's...

...Bukharin thought he was joking...

...and even the daughter of Georgi V. Plekhanov, father of Russian Marxism, appears in Paris in 1936 to ask Bukharin to deliver a package to her mother, Rosalia Markovna, in Leningrad...

...Lavrenti P. Beria, the secret police chief, portrayedless villainously than in other accounts...

...younger than my Nadya...

...For example, he refused—as does Larina—to believe that while in Paris Bukharin also called on two other prominent Mensheviks, Fyodor Dan and his wife Lydia (sister of Yuli Martov), which became known in 1964...

...By his own account, in a secret letter to future Soviet leaders that Larina committed to memory, he fully accepted Stalin's general line from 1932 on...

...their stomachs swollen from hunger...

...He naively welcomed the replacement as police chief of Genrikh Yagoda, who would eventually stand trial with him, by Nikolai Yezhov, who would indict him before the Central Committee...

...Both these episodes may have been costly to Bukharin, although only the Kamenev meetings, not Nicolaevsky's "Letter," came up at the 1937 plenum...

...In a drunken rage at a Kremlin banquet in November 1932, he threw "cigarette butts and orange peels" into the face of Alliluyeva, who would perish that night (at Stalin's hand, Bukharin believed...

...Nevertheless, his next instinct was to call Stalin, who would not take the call...

...He could not bring himself to suicide, she makes clear, because he wanted to save her, their baby son Yuri and others dear to him...

...Larin and Bukharin were friends before Anna was born...

...Another American scholar, Andre Liebich, has challenged her views in even greater detail in the Slavic Review (Winter 1992...

...But Bukharin himself at his trial in 1938 had no serious complaints against Nicolaevsky...

...In August 1936, after an investigation into the activity of Bukharin, Rykov and their ally Mikhail P. Tomsky was announced, Tomsky committed suicide...

...The first episode was that of the so-called "Kamenev notes" of 1928, reporting an effort by Bukharin to dissuade former "Left" oppositionists from joining Stalin in attacking his "Rightist" group...

...Larina attributes to an "instinct for self-preservation" Bukharin's persistent hopes that Stalin, despite his "morbid suspiciousness," would yet save him from the secret police, which he considered "degenerate" as compared with its "chaste" traditions in Lenin's time...

...24.95...

...Larina does not much discuss Bukharin's career before 1928 or his political legacy...

...rather, it is that so little came of those conversations...

...A precocious, beautiful, brave young heroine, Anna, 30 years younger than Bukharin—who read Maurice Maeterlinck's Blue Bird to her as a child, wooed her at age 16 with love passages from Knut Hamsun's Victoria, and finally (after detours for each) made her his third wife when she was 20...

...That conviction would also disarm Bukharin...

...At the time of the collectivization in 1930, when he was traveling through the Ukraine, he saw packs of children begging for alms...

...From 1918 to 1927, both families lived in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow and saw one another constantly...

...But all who knew Nicolaevsky would agree that this was an honest error...

...Catching his wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva walking alone with Bukharin, Stalin threatened, "I'll kill you...

...Anna's adoptive father, the disabled Yuri N. Larin (born Mikhail A. Lurye), one of the godfathers of instant ("war") communism in 1918-20...

...For example, she says at one point that Bukharin "neither smoked nor drank," but two photos in the book show him with a cigarette in his mouth in 1925 and 1929...

...Sergo Ordzhonikidze and others sympathetic to Bukharin did succeed in having the investigation formally suspended in September...

...but from the start it was widely rumored to have been partly based on Nicolaevsky's talks with Bukharin in Paris, Amsterdam and Copenhagen between February and April 1936, when they were negotiating a proposed sale of Marx archives...

...Before the grim cold morning in February 1937 when Larina delivered Bukharin, weakened by a hunger strike, to the savage plenum that sealed his fate (its proceedings were not published until 1992), he spent most of his time in one room, unable to face his grieving father...

...To be sure, Nicolaevsky was hardly infallible...

...This meeting wasn't mentioned at the trial, if indeed Stalin was ever aware of it...

...Viewed in purely dramatic terms, Larina's unconditional loyalty to her husband is one of the book's strengths, as are Bukharin's final professions of faith in the Communist cause (both at his public trial, and in the secret letter...

...The second episode revolved around the "Letter of an Old Bolshevik" published anonymously in the same Socialist Courier in December 1936 and January 1937...

...But Bukharin lost hope once Karl Radek, under interrogation, turned against him and a Central Committee plenum returned to his case in December...

...2-3,1991...

...I do not believe I truly considered him a fully grown adult...

...Ambassador...

...Back home in Moscow, he sobbed to his father: "If more than 10 years after the Revolution one can see such things as this, what was the point of doing it...

...In addition to being a world-class journalist and Marxist theoretician, fluent in several European languages, he was a painter, hunter, naturalist, and butterfly collector (his mother wanted him to be a biologist...

...A good wife, a beautiful wife...

...Her account of their years together—and particularly the final months (August 1936-February 1937), awaiting his arrest—is so charged with suspense that it recalls classic dramas of romantic love amid political upheaval by Stendhal, Dickens, Manzoni, Verdiand D.W...

...And consider the principals: ?A Byronesque hero in Bukharin, with his proletarian cap, leather jacket and boots...

...Larina justly recalls that years earlier, during the civil war, he had sanctioned "the word of Comrade Mauser...

...Among other characters, Lenin and Trotsky make cameo appearances...

...In 1965, the Menshevik historian (and frequent New Leader contributor) Boris I. Nicolaevsky admitted publicly that he had composed the "Letter...

...As a "family member of a traitor to the motherland," Larina spent 18 years in Soviet prisons, labor camps and forced exile...

...Reviewed by Anatole Shub Author, "An Empire Loses Hope" In these poignant memoirs Anna Larina has recaptured and re-created the spirit of her youthful love for, and all too brief (1934-7) marriage to, the doomed Nikolai I. Bukharin, the most appealing of the Old Bolsheviks...

...An authentic son of the Moscow intelligentsia, but also "a sportsman with the musculature of a prizefighter," he could walk on his hands and did so once, to distract Anna, in the middle of Paris...

...The pity is not that Bukharin had such conversations with non-Communists more kindly disposed to him than Stalin's party was...

...These human concerns helped motivate Bukha-rin's ambiguous "confession" at his trial too (although Larina heard rumors of a "special [torture] cell...

...In the midst of political crises in 1928, '29 and '30, Bukharin each time fell ill...

...Dismissed by Lenin as a "fantasizer," he compelled 10-year-old Anna to change her legal birthday, January 27, after it coincided with Lenin's funeral...

...Griffith...

...When Bukharin heard the news, blood spurted from his eyes...

...He often phoned Bukharin in the middle of the night, once to congratulate him: "You've outspit me this time, too [an unexplained reference...

...Indeed, for a future filmmaker or opera librettist, this story has everything: extreme emotions, dramatic settings, even prescient palm readers (including commissar Anatoly Lunacharsky, who thus forecast Anna's fate...

...Alliluyeva shuddered...

...The conversation was variously reported by a German Leftist paper, Trotskyite leaflets in Moscow and the Menshevik Socialist Courier (sometimes translated from the Russian Vestnik as Herald) in Paris...

...In 1928, Bukharin's boyishness provoked a stuttering outburst from his comrade, Aleksei I. Rykov, who reproached him for an indiscretion as "M-malchik bukharchikl" [Little boy Bukharchik.] Sensitive, emotionally taut, Bukharin wept easily: upon hearing that hundreds had died in the October 1917 uprising in Moscow...

...As a child, Anna was "captivated" by Bukharin's "irrepressible joie de vivre, his mischievousness and his passionate love of nature...

...And, in fact, Bukharin's second wife, Esther Gurvich, and their daughter Svetlana survived as well—but the unfortunate Lukina perished in the terror...

...One day Larina found him with a revolver pointed at his head...

...Bukharin broke politically with Stalin in 1927, was full of personal foreboding by 1928, yet could not long resist him...

...After decades of pain and isolation, one can understand how Larina in 1988 found it hard to accept that Bukharin, aware from 1928 on that Stalin meant to destroy him, exchanged confidences with "anti-Party" outsiders and spared his young wife the details...

...But two years afterward he complained that he missed her to Bukharin—whom Larina is convinced Stalin also loved as well as hated...

...He seems to have saved Anna's life after she wrote a letter from prison asking to be shot and was actually taken out to a killing field...

...A putative ally, Mikhail I. Kalinin, told Bukharin privately: "You, Nikolai Ivan-ovich, are 200 per cent right, but we have let the power slip through our hands, and there is nothing more worthwhile than Party unity...

...Larina might have been on more solid ground had she asserted that the Men-sheviks inadvertently contributed to his demise...

...Koba" Stalin, who delivered Anna's first mash note to Bukharin...

...he "literally wilted under severe nervous strain...

...A Russian-born American scholar, Yuri Felshtinsky, has meticulously examined, and largely refuted, her claims in the Moscow Voprosi Historii (No...

...Later, he phoned furiously when Pravda (edited by Bukharin) disclosed that his mother referred to him by the diminutive "Soso...

...However, as Stephen F. Cohen observes in his Introduction, she carries such loyalty too far in evaluating two dramatic episodes involving outsiders...

...At least some of these references should have been carefully annotated for American readers...

...Instead, she argues that the Men-sheviks deliberately compromised him...

...In Larina's pages, too, love and art transfigure death and villainy...

...We have since learned that, after his return from Paris in April 1936, Bukharin also met secretly at a Moscow railway station with William C. Bullitt, the U.S...

...Hers is, rather, an intimate portrait of her husband toward the end of his life: a vivid, tender portrait rich in detail...

...Among other disclosures that probably irked Stalin, who read the Courier regularly, the "Letter" articulated widespread suspicion of the circumstances surrounding the murder of a potential rival, Sergei M. Kirov...

...Neither is Larina infallible...

...She was not reunited with their son Yuri until 1956 and could only tell her story publicly in Russia in 1988, when these recollections were first serialized in the monthly journal Znamya...

...more than anyone else at Lenin's funeral...

...Lenin's widow and sister are seen pleading with Stalin for the lives of their old comrades Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev...