Anna Larina

Anna Mikhailovna Larina (; 27 January 1914 – 24 February 1996) was the third wife of the Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin and spent many years trying to rehabilitate her husband after he was executed in 1938. She was the author of a memoir entitled This I Cannot Forget. As a young girl, she came to know Bukharin, who was 26 years her senior, and she constantly wrote girlish love notes to him. She married Bukharin in 1934 and they had a son, Yuri, in 1936.

In 1937, when her son was less than one year old, she was separated from him for almost 20 years when the NKVD arrested her. In 1937, Bukharin was accused of spying, attempting to dismember the Soviet Union, organising kulak uprisings, plotting to murder Joseph Stalin, and attempting mysterious acts towards Vladimir Lenin in the past. Bukharin never understood why he was being slandered but was mentally and psychologically prepared for death.

Before they were separated, Bukharin instructed Anna to memorise his final testament (knowing that it would be suppressed by Stalin) in which he implored future generations of Communist leaders to exonerate him. Not daring to write it down, she later recalled, she used to lull herself to sleep in prison by repeating her husband's words silently to herself "like a prayer". It was not published in full until 1988.

In Larina's memoir, she wrote mostly about her first year in the Gulag, even though she was in the Gulag for a total of 20 years. One of the greatest shocks she experienced was to be confronted by one of her childhood playmates, Andrei Sverdlov, son of one of Bukharin's old comrades. She at first thought he was a fellow prisoner, but discovered that he was her interrogator. Since Anna was the wife of Bukharin, she was constantly under close surveillance and was not allowed out to perform labor. Instead, much of her time was spent dealing with the grinding boredom of doing nothing.

Twenty years of her life were spent in prison, exile, and labour camps. During this time, Anna met her second husband, Fyodor Fadeyev. Her second husband was arrested several times because of Anna and died in 1959. She had two children with Fyodor: Mikhail and Nadia. after Stalin died, while sick with tuberculosis, after having spent almost twenty years of her life there. Her exile ended in 1959 and she returned to Moscow. She devoted the rest of her life to clearing her husband’s name, writing long, detailed letters to Nikita Khrushchev and his successors demanding Bukharin's reinstatement in the pantheon of revolutionary heroes. He was finally "rehabilitated" and cleared of all charges in 1988 during the Perestroika – fifty years after his death. In 1988, she gave a speech at a conference commemorating the hundredth anniversary of Bukharin's birth given by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Communist Party Central Committee.

She died in Moscow and is buried in Troyekurovskoye Cemetery.