"This I Cannot Forget" (41 cents)

"This I Cannot Forget" is a remarkable book by Anna Larina Bukharina, the widow of Bolshevik Nicholai Bukharin, who spent twenty years in the Siberian Gulag, returning to Moscow in 1959, and writing her memoirs of her life with Bukharin thirty years later.

The book is remarkable in several respects. Most importantly, the author was not onlly the wife of a prominent Bolshevike leader murdered during the Stalinist purges of the 1960s, but the daughter of another. In fact, her husband was a contemporary of her father's, thirty years older than she. Because of her background, she knew everyone - Lenin, Stalin, Beria, you name him; she knew him. And she knew their spouses and their children. Thus her story of life in the exciting days of the revolution through the extraordinarily tragic days of Stalin's regime comes from a perspective like none other. And her portraits of all of these famous Russian politicians is unmatched.

Secondly, her husband was a remarkable man, breaking with Stalin on a number of things, but most significantly on whether there was a need to collectivize the peasantry with all of the horror and dislocation which went along with it. As Stalin grew more power hungry and paranoid, as allies became traitors, as friends became stool pigeons, you could see a world crumble, a world created by like minded people who grew more and more fearful and venal.

And, you see the gulag itself. Prisons and workcamps scattered across the vast Russian expanses, and the amount of work that went into keeping the system going. Work by dedicated (and terrified) Communists, who themselves would become victims the next month or the next year. Like the Nazi concentration camps, we have an extraordinary amount of organization and expense and activity---and for what?

The style of the book is also unique. It is not quite chronological. She is thinking back to her time in prison, and thinking back to her thoughts, while in prison, of her childhood and her adolescence. It is flashback upon flashback, without rhyme or reason as to sequence, it would seem, but bringing about a fascinating weave of reminiscences.

How accurate are her extraordinarily detailed memories of events and conversations and speeches and gossip of 60 years before? I obviously don't know. But they sound accurate. And she comes across as brilliant.

She says that there are two more books to be written. A book about her twenty years in the gulag, not concentrating on Bukharin, but on her contemporary experiences more and over a longer period of time. And a book about her life after she was freed, and after her late husband was brought back into repute by Gorbachev. But they never will be written it appears, as she died in her upper 80s about ten years ago without writing them.

Do you have to be a Russian devotee to read the book? Yes, to understand the cast of characters. But not at all to get a feel for the author, the times, and the people. This book is to be highly recommended.