ABOUT THE BOOK
"A story told to show the horrors of fate, of personal mistreatment and suffering by real people"
--from the foreword by Robert Conquest

A founding father of the Soviet Union at the age of twenty nine, Nikolai Bukharin was the editor of Pravda and an intimate Lenin's exile. (Lenin later dubbed him "the favorite of the party.") But after forming an alliance with Stalin to remove Leon Trotsky from power, Bukharin crossed swords with Stalin over their differing visions of the world's first socialist state and paid the ultimate price with his life. Bukharin's 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.

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. 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 a story of courage and cowardice, strength and weakness, misplaced idealism, missed opportunities, bungling, and, above all, love.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paul R. Gregory, a Hoover Institution research fellow, holds an 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.

The holder of a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University, he is the author or coauthor of twelve books and many articles on economic history, the Soviet economy, transition economies, comparative economics, and economic demography including Lenin's Brain and Other Tales from the Secret Soviet Archives (Hoover Institution Press, 2008), The Political Economy of Stalinism (2004), Before Command: The Russian Economy from Emancipation to Stalin (1994), Restructuring the Soviet Economic Bureaucracy (1990, reissued 2006), and Russian National Income, 1885-1913 (1982, reissued 2005). He has edited Behind the Façade of Stalin's Command Economy (2001) and The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag (2003), both published by Hoover Institution Press and summarizing his research group's work on the Soviet state and party archives. His publications based on work in the Hoover Institution Archives have been awarded the Hewett Book Prize and the J.M. Montias Prize for the best article in the Journal of Comparative Economics. The research of his Hoover Soviet Archives Research Project team is summarized in part in "Allocation under Dictatorship: Research in Stalin's Archive" (coauthored with Hoover fellow Mark Harrison), published in the Journal of Economic Literature.

REVIEWS

Europe-Asia Studies—Volume, 64, Issue 7, 2012
"This book is a gem. Gregory has produced a riveting, concise and extremely well-written book. In few but elegant words Gregory presents life in Stalin's Kremlin in a lucid and credible fashion. To my mind, this is the best book by the prolific author Gregory, and it is a good read for anybody who wants to understand what Stalin and his regime were about at a human level."
Click here to read the full review by Anders Åslund.

Washington Times—December 28, 2010
"The story of Nikolai Bukharin presents a fascinating mix of selfless love and selfish ambition. In presenting this tale, Mr. Gregory teaches about both history and life. Perhaps the most important lesson is to remind us how lucky we are to live in a country where the price of political failure is not death."
Click here to read the full review, "Power struggle with a bloody end," by Doug Bandow.

PREVIEW