The Past Recaptured

Daughter of a prominent Bolshevik intellectual, Anna Larina was twenty years old when she married the forty-five-year-old Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin in 1935. As a little girl delighted by Bukharin’s playfulness and charm, she had looked forward to his visits to her father. By the 1930s Bukharin had completely lost political power to Stalin; he was allowed to hold government posts on condition he not criticize the policies of The Boss, as Stalin’s fearful subordinates called him. Like most former oppositionists, Bukharin was now a broken man politically and perhaps psychologically too—though his adoring young wife did not see this. Now 79 years old, she still does not.

Bukharin had been a major Bolshevik figure...