This I Cannot Forget

An extraordinary and powerful book, this personal journey through an almost unimaginable landscape of terror, fear, defiance, endurance, and survival will touch a vital human and political nerve. The memoirs of this remarkable woman - the 78-year-old widow of the charismatic Bolshevik leader, revolutionist, and chief theoretician Nikolai I. Bukharin - offer a new dimension to our understanding of Soviet history and one of its darkest periods. No other widow of the men who "shook the world" survived to publish uncensored memoirs. We have here not only an astonishing family saga of tragedy, survival, and ultimate triumph. Not only the personal story of perhaps the most attractive, admired, and still - mourned old Bolshevik, Bukharin. We have also in Anna Larina a unique voice, memory, and woman's story, as well as much firsthand knowledge from within the revolutionary elite that created the Soviet Union, ruled it until the 1930s, and then was swept away forever in the Crimson tide of Stalin's twenty-year mass terror. A sensation when published in Moscow, and a bestseller in Europe, Norton's edition also has an introduction by Sovietologist Stephen F. Cohen, letters of emotional recollection from Russian readers, photographs, and a newly discovered letter written by Bukharin, excavated from the Kremlin Archive, and delivered unofficially to Anna Larina in June 1992, fifty-four years after he wrote it to her in prison on the eve of his trial and execution.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.