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

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. (Mar.)