Politics, Murder, and Love in Stalin's Kremlin: The Story of Nikolai Bukharin and Anna Larina

by Paul R. Gregory

Overview

Paul Gregory sheds light on how the world's first socialist state went terribly wrong and why it was likely to veer off course through the tale of two of Stalin's most prominent victims. The story of Nikolai Bukharin and Anna Larina begins with the optimism of the Bolshevik Revolution but turns into a dark saga as the game changes from political struggle to physical survival. Told for the most part in the words of the participants, it is a story of courage and cowardice, strength and weakness, missed opportunities, bungling, and, above all, love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780817910358
Publisher:	Hoover Institution Press
Publication date:	05/10/2010
Series:	HOOVER INST PRESS PUBLICATION
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	196
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Paul R. Gregory, a Hoover Institution research fellow, holds an endowed professorship in the Department of Economics at the University of Houston, Texas, and is a research professor at the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin. The holder of a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University, he is the author or coauthor of twelve books and many articles on economic history, the Soviet economy, transition economies, comparative economics, and economic demography including Lenin’s Brain and Other Tales from the Secret Soviet Archives (Hoover Institution Press, 2008), The Political Economy of Stalinism (2004), Before Command: The Russian Economy from Emancipation to Stalin (1994), Restructuring the Soviet Economic Bureaucracy (1990, reissued 2006), and Russian National Income, 1885–1913 (1982, reissued 2005). He has edited Behind the Façade of Stalin's Command Economy (2001) and The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag (2003), both published by Hoover Institution Press and summarizing his research group's work on the Soviet state and party archives. His publications based on work in the Hoover Institution Archives have been awarded the Hewett Book Prize and the J.M. Montias Prize for the best article in the Journal of Comparative Economics. The research of his Hoover Soviet Archives Research Project team is summarized in part in "Allocation under Dictatorship: Research in Stalin's Archive" (coauthored with Hoover fellow Mark Harrison), published in the Journal of Economic Literature.

Read an Excerpt

Politics, Murder, and Love in Stalin's Kremlin

The Story of Nikolai Bukharin and Anna Larina

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By Paul R. Gregory

Hoover Institution Press

Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8179-1035-8

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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.

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." 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.

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").

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.

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. 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.")

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." 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."

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. 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.

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." 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." 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." 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.

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.

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."

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 politics.

Little did her father suspect that she was clandestinely reading top- secret party documents taken from his desk. As a fourteen-year- old, she read the secret transcripts describing Bukharin's political defeat at the hands of Stalin. On her next visit to his apartment, she burst out in tears before the despondent older man.

As Anna's beauty blossomed, Nikolai Bukharin's intentions changed from family friend to hesitant suitor. After his defeat, Bukharin retreated to the Crimea to recover from a lung infection. There the depressed Bukharin began his courtship by asking the sixteen-year-old Anna "if she would be able to love a leper."

After an intermittent off-and-on courtship, Anna and Nikolai became husband and wife on Anna's twentieth birthday. In a twist of fate, the Kremlin apartment they occupied had belonged to Stalin, who exchanged it with Bukharin after the suicide of Stalin's wife, Nadezhda. (A congratulatory call from a drunken Stalin interrupted their wedding night.) The couple's son, Iura, was born in 1936.

Although Bukharin's political fortunes appeared to be improving at the time of their marriage — he was named editor of Izvestiia in 1934 — both recognized the dark clouds on the horizon. Anna's father had warned her, soon before his death, that her time with Bukharin would be short but worth a whole lifetime. His prediction was correct about duration but understated the trials and tribulations that lay ahead for his daughter.

CHAPTER 3

September 8, 1927: Digging His Own Grave

When the STALIN-KAMENEV-Zinovyev troika fell apart in early 1926, the ever-agile Stalin formed a new majority with Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomskii. In response, his former allies, Kamenev and Zinovyev, joined forces with the aloof Trotsky to form the United Opposition. Stalin feared that the charismatic Trotsky, the fiery Zinovyev, and the lawyerly Kamenev would be formidable rivals if they combined forces. He needed to get them out of the way for good. In this endeavor, Stalin could count on Bukharin, who had clear ideological differences with the United Opposition's program of forced industrialization, hostility to peasant agriculture, and opposition to alliances with European social democrats, as well as its complaints of weak support for the Chinese communists.

Stalin's own policy positions fluctuated according to political expediency. In fact, he would soon adopt Trotsky's position as his own. At this point, however, he needed a pretext to remove the United Oppositionists from power.

Major decisions were still being made by majority vote of the Politburo, with Central Committee plenums called to ratify major Politburo decisions; the plenums could nonetheless be contentious and required careful preparation. There were nine full (voting) members of the Politburo. Of these, Stalin could rely on the faithful V. M. Molotov and could intimidate three other "neutral" members. The alliance with Bukharin gave him a comfortable majority. Stalin controlled the party machine, and Bukharin and his group delivered the necessary Politburo votes.

Stalin knew that alliances could shift. If he had political enemies, it was best to eliminate them permanently. He had not yet the power to kill them, but removal from the party was the next best thing. As of 1926, no Politburo member had been expelled. The only way to leave was to die, sometimes quietly expedited by Stalin. Removing the civil war hero, Trotsky; the head of the Leningrad party and Comintern, Zinovyev; and Lenin's former right-hand administrator, Kamenev, was a daunting task, but one Stalin was prepared to take on. What he needed was to catch the United Opposition in a "crime" against the party that would justify Draconian punishment.

The crime he settled on was "factionalism." In Stalin's vocabulary, that meant advocacy of any policy that differed from his own. Conveniently for him, Bukharin, not Stalin himself, could lead the attack. After a fiery Bukharin speech against Trotsky at a party forum in 1926, Stalin called out: "Well done, Bukharin. He does not speak; he slashes."

The factionalism charge was not new. Stalin had maintained that all loyal party members must accept the "unified party line of the Central Committee," an organization that he conveniently headed. Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinovyev were free to voice their opposition within the Politburo; but if they publicly opposed the official line, they were "splitting the party." If the United Opposition accepted Stalin's interpretation, of course, it held losing cards in this deadly game. Stalin had the party machinery under tight control, and with the help of Bukharin, he commanded a decisive Politburo majority.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Politics, Murder, and Love in Stalin's Kremlin by Paul R. Gregory. Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Hoover Institution Press.
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Table of Contents

Foreword Robert Conquest ix

Preface xi

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction xv

1 April 15, 1937: A Plea from Prison 1

2 March 15, 1938: A Husband Executed 6

3 September 8, 1927: Digging His Own Grave 9

4 1926: Stalin Plays an Unlikely Cupid 14

5 Summer with Stalin (1927) 16

6 June 1928: "You and I Are the Himalayas" 19

7 July 4-12, 1928: Bukharin Fights Back 22

8 Autumn 1928: Pity Not Me 28

9 Autumn 1928: A Fifteen-Year-Old "Co-conspirator" 30

10 January 23, 1929: "To a New Catastrophe with Closed Eyes" 33

11 Early Warnings: Stalin Is Dangerous 37

12 Father and Daughter as Bolshevik Idealists 40

13 January 30, 1929: "You Can Test the Nerves of an Elephant, Bukhashka" 44

14 Summer of 1934: A Second Fateful Meeting 47

15 April 16-23, 1929: Waterloo 49

16 1929-1931: The Woman on the Train 58

17 August 1929: Removal from the Politburo 61

18 New Year's Eve, 1929: Chastened Schoolboys Drop In on the Boss 65

19 April 16, 1930: Bukharin Sinks to His Knees 66

20 July 1930: With Anna in the Crimea 67

21 October 14, 1930: Overtaken by "Insanities" 70

22 January 27, 1934: Courtship, Bad Omens, and Marriage 72

23 December 1, 1934: Kirov Is Shot 75

24 August 23, 1936: Nadezhda Tries to Help 77

25 April 25, 1935: Humiliating Editor Bukharin 80

26 March-April 1936: Bukharin Opts to Stay and Fight 83

27 August 27, 1936: What Accusers? They're Dead 86

28 November 16, 1936: Bukharin Grovels 90

29 December 4, 1936: Dress Rehearsal for Arrest 92

30 December 1936-January 1937: Confrontations 99

31 February 15, 1937: "I Will Begin a Hunger Strike" 103

32 February 24, 1937: To a Future Generation 109

33 February 24-25, 1937: On the Whipping Post 110

34 February 27, 1937: For or Against the Death Penalty? 116

35 February 27, 1937: Arrest Warrant for "Bukharin, N. I." 119

36 February 27, 1937: Arrest and Parting 121

37 February 1937: Anna Larina Is Betrayed 123

38 April 1937: Impossible Dream 125

39 June 2, 1937: Bukharin's Cagey Confession 126

40 June 1937: Anna Meets a New Widow 130

41 March 2-13, 1938: Twenty-one on Trial 133

42 March 12, 1938: Papering over Bukharin's Final Defiance 138

43 March 15, 1938: The Ultimate Payback: A Ghastly Death 142

44 May 1938: Anna's Own Ordeal 144

45 December 1938: Back from the Precipice 146

46 Late December 1938: Advice from a Mass Murderer 148

47 Summer of 1956: Reunion with Iura 150

48 February 5, 1988: Rehabilitated by Old Men 153

49 A Special (Specially Tardy) Delivery 158

50 Bukharin, Stalin, and the Bolshevik Revolution 160

Notes 167

Cast of Characters 179

About the Author 185

Index 187