Politics, Murder, and Love in Stalin's Kremlin: The Story of Nikolai Bukharin and Anna Larina
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Paul R. Gregory
Paul Gregory is a Research Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and a pioneer in the study of Soviet and Russian economics. A student of the fabled Harvard Russian Research Center, he received his PhD from Harvard in 1969. His textbook on the Russian economy was used to teach more than two generations of students. In addition to his scholarly work, he has been an active blogger on Russian affairs for Forbes, The Hill, and other media platforms. He lives in Palo Alto, California.
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Politics, Murder, and Love in Stalin's Kremlin - Paul R. Gregory
twelve.
CHAPTER 1
April 15, 1937: A Plea from Prison
IT IS LATE NIGHT or early morning—the prisoner has little sense of time. He uses the night hours to work feverishly on his writing, following days filled with interrogations and negotiations. He repositions himself periodically to take advantage of the dim light from a single, naked bulb. His small cell is littered with books and papers that he has wheedled from his captors. Tonight he has put aside work on a semi-autobiographical novel to compose a letter to the person who controls his fate. He addresses the man warmly, assuring him that there are no bad feelings despite [your] removing me from my surroundings and sending me here.
The prisoner, nearing his fiftieth birthday, is small in stature; a prominent mustache and goatee divert attention from a hairline that began receding in youth. His hair is gray, but small wisps of the original red color remain visible. Periodically, he paces his cell, then returns to his task.
His letter, addressed Dear Koba,
rambles, runs on at tedious length, and intersperses hysteria, anger, bitterness, and remorse with ambitious plans for the future. He describes his life in prison, writing as if to allay any concerns Koba
might have that he is being mistreated. (He has ceased to go outside for exercise because he feels ashamed when other prisoners look at him.) The prison regime is strict: no feeding of the pigeons, no talking in the corridors, no noises in the cell, a light burning day and night. But it's also fair: the food is good, and even the young jailors treat him decently.
Parts of the letter appear bizarrely inappropriate: In my lifetime, I have known intimately only four women.
At the end, the prisoner makes his plea: Settle me in a hut somewhere outside of Moscow, give me a new name, let two NKVD officers live in my home, allow me to live with my family, let me work for the common good with books and translations under a pseudonym, let me till the soil.
The letter ends: My heart is breaking that this is a Soviet prison and my grief and burden are without limit. Be healthy and happy.
The signature read N. Bukharin,
and the date noted was April 15, 1937.²⁴
Bukharin's Dear Koba
was, of course, Joseph Stalin, the uncontested master of the Russian house. Following his usual pretense of giving his deputies a voice, Stalin wrote on the border of his transmittal letter: Circulate!
and listed seven Politburo members as recipients. Their predictable reactions came back in a torrent: The letter of a criminal
; A criminal farce
; and A typical Bukharin lie.
Stalin was thus again obliged to bend reluctantly to the will of the party.
Bukharin could not be freed; he would have to stand trial and receive his punishment. As Stalin had told him at the time of his arrest, Friendship is friendship, but duty is duty.
²⁵ Old pal Koba was simply doing that duty.
Nikolai Bukharin was the most prominent political prisoner ever held in the Internal Prison of the NKVD. Dubbed the Golden Boy
of the revolution by none other than Vladimir Il'ich Lenin, Bukharin had nonetheless fallen from the apex of the party hierarchy. By odd and ironic coincidence, Lenin's praise was uttered in the presence of five-year-old Anna Larina, who fifteen years later would become Bukharin's wife.²⁶
The praise and exalted stature were not surprising. Bukharin was widely regarded as a leading Marxist theorist, second only to Lenin. Among the best educated of the Bolshevik founding fathers, he organized student revolts at Moscow University at the age of sixteen and became a member of the Moscow Soviet in 1908, at the age of twenty. Arrested several times, he was sent to internal exile in Onega in 1910 for incendiary speeches and organizing worker protests. From there, he fled abroad, attended courses in German universities, and became an associate of Lenin—also an exile living in Krakow and then Switzerland.
Bukharin traveled a rocky road: he was arrested and expelled from both Austria and Switzerland. In 1916, he entered the United States illegally and found work there as a correspondent for the Russian-language daily, Novy Mir. In New York, he met Trotsky, whose impression of Bukharin was not positive (a medium through whom someone else's thoughts could be channeled
).²⁷
Nonetheless, Bukharin became a prominent figure. The author of numerous books and articles, fluent in French and German and widely traveled, he served as the editor of Pravda from the first days of the October Revolution. A man of great intellectual enthusiasm and curiosity, he attracted disciples to his Bukharin school,
later belittled by Stalin as Bukharin's little school
(shkolka). He read and composed poetry avidly, and his caricatures of Old Bolsheviks, doodled during Politburo meetings, remain classics.²⁸
But Bukharin also had telling weaknesses. He was impulsive, sensitive, prone to hysteria under stress, incapable of political calculation, and a self-admitted terrible organizer. He cried over the loss of several hundred of his Moscow Bolshevik comrades during the October Revolution; he wept profusely at Lenin's deathbed; he required sedation from Anna's mother after witnessing at first hand collectivization in Ukraine.²⁹ These traits led to a reputation of weakness among other Bolshevik leaders. (In the words of a fellow Politburo member: I fear Bukharin because he is a softhearted person.
)³⁰
In addition, Bukharin too often talked and wrote without thinking—unlike his nemesis Stalin, who (as his former secretary remarked) spoke little in a land that spoke too much.
³¹ Off-the-cuff remarks and chance meetings would come back to haunt him with terrible consequences. His sensitivity and volubility were later used to create the impression of a person not to be taken seriously. His colleagues used the term Little Bukharin
(Bukharchik) in private and public. Normally a term of endearment, Stalin used it to belittle him.
Bukharin was also known to change positions, the most prominent being his shift in the mid-twenties from radical Left Communism
to advocacy of the liberal
New Economic Policy. Lenin characterized him as soft wax
on which unprincipled persons can make an impression.
³²
During the civil war, Lenin kept the soft
Bukharin in Moscow to manage Pravda and Bolshevik propaganda. He thus retained a halo of innocence,
spinning brilliant words and ideas in Moscow
while other Bolshevik founders razed towns and villages, and ordered executions and torture at the front.³³ But he did not escape the violence of the civil war entirely: he was wounded in an anarchist bomb attack that claimed twelve lives in Moscow.³⁴
After Lenin's death, Bukharin was fully ensconced in the inner sanctum of power. Popular with the party rank-and-file, he, unlike other top Bolsheviks, moved freely around Moscow without guards and was greeted enthusiastically by Muscovites, who recognized him on sight. Bukharin often seemed, as described by a noted British historian, a gentle and lovable character of singular personal charm.
³⁵
Bukharin married three times. As one of his friends declared to Anna Larina shortly before their wedding in 1934, A holy place does not stay empty long.
³⁶ His first marriage was to his slightly older first cousin, Nadezhda Lukina, before the revolution. The union proved childless and fell apart in the early 1920s, as her health deteriorated. Nadezhda took the breakup badly. In Bukharin's words: She almost lost her mind. Lenin had to order her to go abroad.
³⁷ Nadezhda nonetheless remained devoted to her former husband.
Bukharin became acquainted with his second wife, Esfir' Gurvich, in 1921, during a game of gorodki on the lawn of Lenin's suburban estate. Esfir' was an economist who also had a degree in architecture. Throughout their marriage, she lived in a separate apartment, not in the Kremlin. Esfir' and Stalin's wife, Nadezhda Allilueva, were close friends, and their daughters—both named Svetlana—were constant companions at Stalin's dacha. According to rumors, Stalin drove Gurvich and Bukharin apart in 1928 because she knew too much about Stalin's private life.³⁸
Nikolai Bukharin remained committed to the ideal of a socialist state throughout his life. He continued to write voluminously on socialist theory, unwittingly providing Stalin with ammunition to accuse him of socialist heresy. His last instruction to his wife was to raise their infant son as a good Bolshevik without fail.
He had great faith in the eventual victory of socialism.
CHAPTER 2
March 15, 1938: A Husband Executed
WORD OF NIKOLAI BUKHARIN'S execution came to his twenty-four-year-old spouse, Anna Larina, in the Tomsk camp for wives of traitors of the fatherland.
The warden clambered to the upper bed boards, opposite Anna, and read aloud to the hundred or so prisoners the newspaper account of the closing session of the third of Stalin's Show Trials. As she read, she glanced at Larina so she could report her reactions.
The charges against Bukharin included plotting with German fascists, organizing uprisings, participating in a plan to assassinate Lenin, attempting to murder Stalin, and actually murdering prominent Soviet officials, including Leningrad Party boss Sergei Kirov and writer Maksim Gorky. One of the more unbelievable charges was the attempted poisoning of NKVD head Nikolai Ezhov. Bukharin and all twenty other defendants entered guilty pleas. His sentence—death by firing squad—was carried out two days later.
To avoid the stares of the warden and others, and to hide profuse bleeding from her nose, Larina pulled the bed sheets over her head. The warden broke off her reading and rudely ordered the newly created widow to wash the floor of the corridor. Another prisoner mercifully volunteered in her place.
As the prison official read on, Larina had doubts that the man in the dock was really her husband, Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin, and not some stand-in. If he had made such admissions to her in private, she would have considered him insane. But as far as Anna was concerned, Nikolai was at that point already a dead man—and had been one since the fateful day of his arrest in February 1937. Awareness that his suffering had ended brought a certain relief. She only hoped that he would leave life proudly, declaring his innocence.³⁹
Larina was one of the few women in the Tomsk camp whose husband had undergone a public trial. Most of them, knowing nothing of the fates of their husbands, continued to hope. The wife of a Ukrainian party worker came up to her and said, reproachfully: Why are you moping? History will vindicate your husband. No one will know about ours.
⁴⁰
The next morning, the warden confiscated Anna's only photograph of Iura, her eleven-month-old Bukharinist
baby, ordered her to pack, and sent her off to the next camp. She was shuttled among camps until 1945, and even after her release, she had to remain in exile for another decade.
Anna Larina was the stepdaughter of a high Bolshevik official, an intimate of Lenin, Iurii Larin. He married Anna's aunt, who raised her following her mother's death, a year after the girl was born. Iurii Larin took part in the October Revolution as a leader of the Petrograd Soviet. Hard-working and diligent, despite a birth defect that left him partially lame, he occupied leading state positions as Lenin assigned him to manage affairs of state. Many of Lenin's decrees were drafted by Larin.
Anna grew up in her father's apartment in the Metropole Hotel, a stone's throw from the Kremlin. Among Larin's frequent visitors were Lenin, Stalin, and other leading state and party figures, including a man twenty-six years Anna's senior, Nikolai Bukharin—short, red haired, blue eyed, with a mustache and beard. He had known Larochka
since her fourth year, was her favorite among the visitors, and now lived in the flat below hers.
Bukharin taught the young girl to swim and to climb the mountains at the age of nine, while she vacationed in Sochi. She was disappointed that he usually came to see her father, not her. An only child, she was delighted when in his company.
The Larins lived a simple life. Their Metropole apartment was cramped. Anna's stepmother/aunt had to watch the family budget carefully. Anna walked to school and rode public transportation. The family did have a dacha close to Moscow, and she spent summer vacations in the Crimea or Sochi with her family. Like her classmates, Anna joined the Communist Youth Organization. As a child of professional revolutionaries who was also close to Nikolai Bukharin, she developed an early interest in