THE VICTORY OF BUKHARIN'S WIDOW

Larina is the 74-year-old widow of Nikolai Bukharin, the

revolutionist and theoretician whom Lenin once called "the favorite of

the whole party." After Lenin's death in 1924, Bukharin, who like

Trotsky and others had been a key founder of the Soviet state, fought

Stalin for power and the soul of the Soviet future. A weak politician,

he was crushed and in the late 1930s jailed on trumped-up charges of

treason. He was sentenced to death in 1938 for what Stalin's men called

"the most perfidious and monstrous crimes known to the history of

mankind."

Larina was the daughter of revolutionaries, a witness to all that

came after "the Great October." As a child, she met Lenin and Trotsky;

as a young woman in the 1930s, she lived with her husband in the

Kremlin, down the hall from Stalin. Perhaps no one still alive had such

a clear window on Stalin's murderous rise to power and his eventual

creation of what became the modern Communist state.

But perhaps her keenest memory, the one that still burns in her

mind, is a letter, eight paragraphs long, a "testament" that Bukharin

gave her to memorize just a few days before his arrest.

"I am leaving life," it began. "I feel helpless before a hellish

machine."

Read today, the testament's appeal "to the future generation of

party leaders" for rehabilitation seems addressed directly to Mikhail

Gorbachev, the Soviet president. "I am confident that sooner or later

the filter of history will inevitably sweep the filth from my head," it

says. "Know, comrades, that on that banner, which you will be carrying

in the victorious march to communism, is also a drop of my blood."

For years, while she languished in prison cells and internal exile

as a "relative of an enemy of the state," Larina could not bring herself

to write down the testament for fear of informers. "I would just recite

it to myself in my cell. Like a prayer," she says. Once she returned

home, older and weaker, she clung to her widow's sense of mission,

waiting for the right moment in history.

In 1956, after Nikita Khrushchev denounced the crimes of Stalin in a

"secret speech" to the party leadership, she wrote out the testament for

the first time. "I finally had to get rid of this burden. It was

important to write it down exactly as it was, each and every phrase."

All through the years she sent letters to the party leadership asking

for the return "of my husband's honor and good name," but for that she

had to wait until the rise of Gorbachev.

Now, 100 years after his birth, 50 years after he was shot as an

enemy of the people, Bukharin has been legally and politically

rehabilitated. Pravda, in a long article yesterday, announced that

Bukharin's collected writings will soon be published, and a state

commission on the Stalinist past has opened the door of history to him.

In fact, after so many years of infamy, Bukharin is fast becoming an

icon of Soviet possibility, the "alternative to Stalinism" for some

historians, the road not taken.

There are Bukharin exhibits at the Tretyakov Exhibition Hall and the

Revolution Museum on Gorky Street. His political works, which denounced

Stalin's "Genghis Khan" plans for the creation of a "leviathan state,"

are now published in the official theoretical journals of the Communist

Party, as if to give a historical grounding for perestroika. Progress

Publishers, which once specialized in dreary tracts on the evils of

America and Israel, is about to bring out a Russian-language edition of

the definitive biography, "Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution,"

published in the West 15 years ago by Princeton University Prof. Stephen

Cohen.

"I have read your book on Bukharin," Gorbachev told Cohen at a

reception during the Washington summit. "It is a very good and useful

book. Of course there are things there that one could disagree with."

Standing under a portrait of a smiling Bukharin at the Revolution

Museum, the widow (now sometimes called Anna Larin-Bukharin in the

Soviet press) surveys this vault of her husband's memory: manuscripts,

letters, clippings, photographs, even Bukharin's amateur landscape

paintings. She turns to Cohen, who is here on a visit, and, glowing with

a sense of occasion, says, "I believed." Later she amends that a bit: "I

believed. I wrote letter after letter. I kept hoping. But I never was

sure that this would happen in my lifetime."

History's Memory Even now, Larina has the sort of physical

confidence, the bearing of someone known as "a great beauty in her day."

Her hair is gray, but her eyes, even behind thick glasses, are

brilliant. Though her memories span the length of Soviet history, she

seems, somehow, quite young. "I'm around to tell this story," she says,

"because I had such an early start." When she became Bukharin's third

wife in 1934, he was 45 and in the midst of a power struggle with

Stalin, and she just 19.

Her first memories are of her father, Yuri Larin, a Bolshevik

economist, who is buried in the boneyard of Soviet honor, the Kremlin

Wall. Because he was so ill in the '20s -- barely able to lift a

telephone -- Larin used to receive Lenin, Stalin, Bukharin and other

Bolshevik leaders at home in his study.

"I grew up in a family of professional revolutionaries," Larina

says. "One of the first memories I have is of Bukharin and Lenin. I was

very small. There was a funny episode. The minute Bukharin left my

father's study, Lenin said that 'Bukharin is a golden child of the

revolution.' I didn't understand the sense of this turn of phrase, and

so I decided that Lenin meant that Bukharin was really made of gold. And

so I said, 'No, he's not made of gold, he's alive.' "

In the first years after the revolution, the Bolshevik leaders lived

in hotels near the Kremlin. Lenin had rooms at the National, across

Revolution Square. The Larins and Bukharins were at the Metropole, near

the Bolshoi Theater. On the day of Lenin's funeral, Jan. 27, 1924,

Larina stood at her window and watched the cortege pass by.

"Outside it was wildly cold, awful. There were fires burning on the

streets, and the procession was 'round the clock, and I could see it all

from my window. I couldn't take my eyes off it, but not until later on,

with Bukharin, did I understand the tragedy of it."

Larina had known Bukharin all her life. He lived one floor up from

her family in Room 205 at the Metropole, and had always impressed the

young girl as "brilliant and kind." One day Larina saw Stalin on the

staircase. She handed him a love letter to deliver to Bukharin. For a

moment, one of the great murderers of the 20th century played mailman

for a young girl's crush.

"And by the time I was 16," Larina says of Bukharin, "it was already

love."

As the romance deepened, the leadership crisis heightened. In the

last years of Lenin's life, Bukharin helped develop the New Economic

Policy, which allowed the rise of market mechanisms and led to a measure

of calm and prosperity that the Soviet Union had never known.

"Nikolai Ivanovich was no democrat in the Western sense," Larina

says. But compared to what was to come in 1929 and thereafter, Bukharin

was flexible, realistic, capable of change. While Stalin feared

intellectuals and crushed them, Bukharin tried to save them. He was a

reliable ally for artists such as Osip Mandelstam, who would later be

wiped out in the purges. Years later Boris Pasternak would write a poem

in Bukharin's honor.

"It's clear that if Bukharin had won power instead of Stalin, the

deaths of millions of people would have been avoided," says Yuri

Afanasyev, one of the first Soviet historians to call for Bukharin's

rehabilitation.

For Larina, it was hard to see immediately Stalin's paranoia, the

hunger for "nothing but power."

"Even now it's impossible for me to look at everything through the

prism of those terrible crimes. It's impossible. I saw Stalin more in my

childhood. I often saw him at Bukharin's place at the Metropole. I could

see nothing criminal in him. I can't say I adored him or hated him. All

that came later."

Early on, though, there were hints of Stalin's aberrations, his

persecution mania. Larina writes in "Unforgettable," the title of the

memoirs she is publishing in the journal Znamya, that one day Bukharin

and Stalin's wife were taking a stroll near Stalin's dacha. Stalin hid

in the bushes, watching the two, and finally leapt into the clear,

screaming to Bukharin, "I'll kill you!"

When Stalin's second wife, Nadezhda Allilueva, died in late 1932 --

Larina, like Stalin biographer Robert C. Tucker, is unsure whether

Stalin murdered her after an argument or if it was suicide -- the Father

of the People called the Bukharins and said, "It's difficult for me to

stay in this flat." They were all living in the Kremlin then, and Stalin

switched apartments with Bukharin and Anna Larina.

"Maybe he was thinking of security," Larina says now. "His flat was

quite near to Troitsky Gate and one part overlooked Alexander Gardens.

He had persecution mania, so maybe he thought someone would penetrate

the flat from the garden. There was no access to the place where Stalin

lived eventually. There were guards, and when you passed by they always

questioned you."

In the Kremlin, the Bukharins lived "simply. Nikolai Ivanovich was

not materialistic. He didn't have any extra things. The apartments had

no 'facilities.' It wasn't particularly comfortable."

As he began to seize absolute power in the late '20s, Stalin turned

on Bukharin and the New Economic Policy, calling the policy "rotten

liberalism." Suddenly, Bukharin was known as the "right-wing opposition"

and he was thrown out of the Politburo. Stalin began carrying out a

massive industrialization program and a forced collectivization of the

countryside that led to starvation and the deaths of 14 million people,

according to historian Robert Conquest.

As Stalin managed to divide his opponents and rule with an iron,

erratic fist, Bukharin confessed to his young wife that he had come to

hate him. But even then, Bukharin could not anticipate what was to come,

Larina says. Stalin kept the whole party off balance. At various points,

most of the major Bolsheviks opposed him, but never at the same time. In

the '20s, at a party congress, Stalin had said, "You demand the blood of

Bukharin? You must know that you cannot have it." And in 1935, Stalin

once more pledged his friendship to Bukharin at a banquet. Raising his

glass to Bukharin, he said, "Let's drink to Nikolai Ivanovich."

"It was strange. As late as 1936, it looked as if Bukharin's

position was more stable," Larina says. "He was appointed editor of

Izvestia, he was on the constitutional commission, and it even looked as

if there could be a democratization process going on in the country. But

Stalin played his chess game very cleverly."

Bukharin was blind to the chess game, unable to conceive of his own

end. "He knew Stalin might kill him politically," Larina says now, "but

he was a talented man, and he would have survived. Or so he thought. He

thought he could work in the field on biological sciences. It didn't

scare him."

Perhaps the only one who anticipated Bukharin's bloody fall was a

fortune-teller in 1918 who told him in Berlin, "You will one day be

executed in your own country."

Finally, in the winter of 1938, it was clear that Stalin was about

to wage a mass purge against his enemies, a campaign that would wipe out

millions of political rivals, military leaders, intellectuals and

ordinary citizens.

"At last," Larina says, "he lost any hope that he would not be

arrested and shot. And so he wrote a very short letter. He quietly read

it to me. The rooms were known to be bugged. I had to repeat the words

back to him and to learn it by heart, because he was afraid that if the

letter was found during a search, I would be hurt. He couldn't imagine

that they would persecute me anyway."

Bukharin's trial was a surreal exercise. The prosecutor, Andrei

Vyshinsky, compared Bukharin to Judas Iscariot and Al Capone, a "cross

between a fox and a pig," and accused him of leading a "bloc" against

Stalin, of working as a foreign agent, of organizing a plot to murder

Lenin.

"The weed and the thistle will grow on the graves of these execrable

traitors," Vyshinsky said in the courtroom. "But, on us and our happy

country, our glorious sun will continue to shed his serene light. Guided

by our Beloved Leader and Master, Great Stalin, we will go forward to

communism along a path that has been cleansed of the sordid remnants of

the past."

Larina did not attend. She had been arrested and sent away. She

would spend years in prisons and exile in Astrakhan, Tomsk and

Novosibirsk. Her 13-month-old son Yuri was given to relatives. "It was

the last time I saw Yuri as a child," Larina says. And as for Bukharin,

Larina knew he was "dead from the day he was arrested."

In court, Bukharin played an astonishing linguistic and moral game

with Vyshinsky, admitting to generalities, but denying specifics. He at

once confessed and conducted his own countertrial of the Stalin regime

in a kind of Aesopian language. A British diplomat who attended the

trial, Fitzroy MacLean, believed Bukharin meant his confession as "a

last service" to unity and the party. Arthur Koestler, who based his

novel "Darkness at Noon" on Bukharin's trial, also took that view. Prof.

Cohen, however, insists that Bukharin was above all motivated by love,

that he wanted to save his young wife and child from harm.

While Larina sat in a cell, miles away from the Hall of Columns,

MacLean observed the drama of the "show trial":

"On the evening of March 12, Bukharin rose to speak for the last

time. Once more, by sheer force of personality and intellect, he

compelled attention. Staring up at him, row upon row, smug,

self-satisfied and hostile, sat the new generation of communists,

revolutionaries no longer in the old sense, but worshipers of the

established order, deeply suspicious of dangerous thoughts. ...

{S}tanding there, frail and defiant, was the last survivor of a vanished

race, of the men who had made the revolution, who had fought and toiled

all their lives for an ideal, and who now, rather than betray it, were

letting themselves be crushed by their own creation."

According to a death certificate now on display at the revolution

museum, Bukharin died on March 15, 1938.

The cause and place of death is not listed.

Stalin's Victim In her cell, Anna Larina thought for hours each

day about her son. Yuri was passed around from one relative to the next,

and finally lived in a children's home.

She thought, too, of her husband's final hours. At first she felt as

if she and Yuri "had been killed along with Nikolai Ivanovich." And: "I

was deeply depressed that Nikolai Ivanovich was proclaimed a traitor to

his people, a spy," Larina says. "I think for the benefit of the masses

he accepted his guilt. For educated people who could understand, well,

it's unbelievable now that they could have believed it all. They could

not understand the meaning, what it was all for."

She wrote a letter to Stalin: "Josef Vissarionovich, through the

thick walls of this prison, I look you straight in the eyes. I don't

believe in this miraculous trial. Why did you kill Nikolai Ivanovich? I

cannot understand it." Her letter probably never reached Stalin.

Larina's memoirs of the camps and her life with Bukharin may not

compare in depth with Nadezhda Mandelstam's "Hope Against Hope" or

Evgenia Ginzburg's memoirs of exile in the Soviet far east (though

literary judgments must await their complete publication). And yet

Larina, in "Unforgettable," offers a different angle of vision on an

era, and offers it without self-pity or self-deception.

Her best writing is the plain description of her awakening from

despair to a sense of mission; her uneasy, distant interrogations by the

feared secret police chief, Lavrenty Beria; the growth of her

friendships in the camps, friendships that became the foundation of her

later life in Moscow.

Sometimes the camps felt unreal, "as if I were Alice in Wonderland,

but not in a land of miracles or in a looking-glass, but in a

dictatorship of the proletariat that Lewis Carroll had never managed to

write about."

The authorities told Larina she could be free if she would only

renounce her husband. She chose confinement. She spent eight years in

prison and was in internal exile until the late 1950s. She lived for

years near a pig farm in Siberia.

When the authorities finally agreed to let her son visit her in

exile, Yuri was already 20 years old. They arranged to meet on a railway

platform in the Siberian village of Tirzhin. Larina looked all around

for features she recognized, a sign of her own face, of Bukharin's. But

Yuri recognized her first, and only seconds after they had embraced, he

wanted to know who his father had been. Yuri had no idea at all that he

was the son of Bukharin, "the favorite of the whole party."

"I put off the answer for one day after another," Larina says now.

"Then he said, 'I'll try to guess, and you just say yes or no.' "

Yuri's grandparents had told him he was the son of a revolutionary

leader. But who? Trotsky? Rykov? Kamenev? Zinoviev? When he finally

guessed "Bukharin," Larina said, "That's it." It was a strange feeling

for Yuri, for at the time Bukharin's name in official Soviet

historiography had the moral ring of "Hitler."

"When I finally told Yuri who his father was, I asked him not to

spread it around," says Larina. When necessary, Yuri would tell people

his father was a professor. To this day, Yuri, a painter who has had

exhibitions in New York and Western Europe, is proud of Bukharin but

does not use his name. Nor will he when he has his first solo exhibit in

Moscow in February. (Bukharin also had a daughter, historian Svetlana,

by his second wife, Esfir Gurvich. Both are still alive today.

Bukharin's first wife was killed during the terror.)

In the late 1940s, Larina married a fellow exile, but he died within

a few years after her return to Moscow a decade later. Her mother was

ailing and Larina herself had tuberculosis. "I couldn't work. All I

could do was take care of the people closest to me." She settled down to

the business of surviving, of reviving family life and Bukharin's good

name.

With the testament "to the future Bolshevik leaders" still burning

in her mind, Larina began to work steadily for her husband's

rehabilitation. She began writing letters to the Kremlin. She also began

thinking about the memoirs, jotting down "shining" moments and then

hiding the papers.

Life was brutally hard. Larina had long ago been stripped of all the

privileges of a widow of a revolutionary leader. She lived on a pension

of 100 rubles a month (about $160), and lived with her mother in a

cramped apartment near the Institute of History. In one year, Yuri's

wife died, and then Yuri himself was struck by a tumor.

The Brezhnev years, which featured a surge of neo-Stalinist feeling,

offered Larina no hope for her husband's rehabilitation. Even in 1985,

when the world press was writing about a transition to a new era of

anti-Stalinist sentiment, Larina says, "I had no idea at all what

Gorbachev would be like. When I wrote my first appeal it looked to me

that I had to influence his way of thinking right away."

While she waited, there were a few important signs of support.

Valery Pisigin, a young activist from the town of Nabarezhnaya Chelni,

told Larina that he and his friends were petitioning the government for

Bukharin's rehabilitation. More and more scholars and Soviet officials

were reading Cohen's biography. "Stephen's book was very important,"

Larina says. "He opened the cover of Bukharin's coffin."

Last year, Gorbachev gave a major address on the "blank spots" of

history. He denounced Stalin's crimes, a kind of public version of

Khrushchev's "secret speech." As for Bukharin, Gorbachev dealt with him

rather tentatively and, at times, critically. "Frankly I was a bit

disappointed when Gorbachev spoke last year," Larina says.

But as it turned out, the acknowledgment was all. On Feb. 5, a party

commission reviewing the purge trials issued a formal rehabilitation of

Bukharin, Alexei Rykov and eight others. For Larina, there was no

advance notice, no phone call or letter from the party leadership.

"I found out like everyone else, by radio, by TV. Then I got a

letter from the Military Legislative Collegium about his political

rehabilitation. Now I get so many letters I can't even count them."

With the rehabilitation came a better pension. Larina now received

200 rubles every month. She laughs at her "fortune."

"I'm a very rich woman now," she says through the laughter.

Anna Larina's Reward Now Bukharin's name is cleared, but there is

more to it than that. In a search for forebears and historical

supporters, Gorbachev seems to have drawn a line from the Lenin of the

NEP period to Bukharin to Khrushchev to himself. A new sort of Soviet

history and lineage is being written.

"It's not really manipulative. Every political culture does this,"

Cohen says. "The Soviets need a perspective that tells them that it

wasn't all sour after 1917. It was never a democracy, but they have to

know there is the chance for something other than Stalinism."

Larina seems satisfied with all that, and does not dwell much on the

question of what the Soviet Union would have been like under her

husband's rule.

"I don't speak in terms of 'if Bukharin had been leader.' It just

should have been somebody else. Anyone else: because all the rest were

honest people. They were not criminals. And what did happen under Stalin

would not have happened, nothing like it."

Larina's quest is over. Even though her mind is quick and her health

good enough, she has become, for nearly everyone around her, a symbol, a

witness to history, a memoir. She still lives in her memories. And they

are as vivid to her as any living thing.

Yuri Larin once told his daughter that to live 10 years with

Bukharin would be more fascinating than a lifetime with anyone else.

They had fewer years than that, but there are times when Anna Larina

still seems to be speaking straight at him:

"He suffered because he thought he had destroyed my life," she says

softly. "Oh, he loved me so."