Overview

In Politics, Murder, and Love in Stalin’s Kremlin: The Story of Nikolai Bukharin and Anna Larina, Paul Gregory sheds light on how the world’s first socialist state went terribly wrong and why  it was likely to veer off course through the story of  two of Stalin’s most prominent victims. A founding father of the Soviet Union at the age of twenty-nine, Nikolai Bukharin was the editor of Pravda and an intimate of Lenin’s exile. (Lenin later dubbed him “the favorite of the party.”) But after Bukharin crossed swords with Stalin over their differing visions of the world’s first socialist state, he paid the ultimate price with his life. His wife, Anna Larina, the stepdaughter of a high Bolshevik official, spent much of her life in prison camps and in exile after her husband’s execution.Drawn from Hoover Institution archival documents, the story of Nikolai Bukharin and Anna Larina begins with the optimism of the socialist revolution and then turns into a dark saga of foreboding and terror as the game changes from political struggle to physical survival. Told for the most part in the words of the participants, it is, as Robert Conquest says in his foreword, “a story told to show the horrors of fate, of personal mistreatment and suffering by real people.” It is also a story of courage and cowardice, strength and weakness, misplaced idealism, missed opportunities, bungling, and, above all, love.

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Paul R. Gregory, a Hoover Institution research fellow, holds the Cullen Endowed Professorship in the Department of Economics at the University of Houston, Texas, and is a research professor at the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin. He is also the chair of the International Advisory Board of the Kiev School of Economics. Gregory is the author of Terror by Quota (2009), Lenin’s Brain and Other Tales from the Secret Soviet Archives (2008), and The Political Economy of Stalinism (2004), all based on his work in the Hoover Institution Archives. He has also coedited archival publications, such as the prize-winning seven-volume History of Stalin’s Gulag (2004) and the three-volume Stenograms of Meetings of the Politburo of the Central Committee (2007). His publications have been awarded the Hewett Book Prize and the J. M. Montias Prize. Gregory is the coeditor of the Yale-Hoover series on Stalin, Stalinism, and the Cold War. He divides his time between Houston, Palo Alto, and Berlin.

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