"Kiss baby Yuri for me. It may be just as well that he cannot read yet. The boy must have grown quite a bit, but he does not know me. Give him a big hug." These are the final lines from the last letter of Nikolai Bukharin, a prominent Bolshevik and at one time a Politburo member, to his wife, Anna Larina, dated January 15, 1938. He was arrested eight months after his son was born, and was executed a year later on charges of counterrevolutionary activities. The "spy's" wife was sent into internal exile and his son was placed in a children's home. He did not find out who his father was until 20
years later.
"I was so distraught that I felt I was going to collapse. I was afraid of missing my son; I had no idea what he looked like. And suddenly I felt someone embrace and kiss me. I could only have recognized him by his eyes - just as radiant as in his childhood. As soon as he started talking, my heart
ached: The timbre of his voice, his gestures, the expression of his eyes - they were all exactly like his father's," Anna Larina wrote in her memoirs about a meeting with her son in the Siberian settlement of Tisul, in 1956.
At the time her son bore the surname of his foster father, who he thought was his real father, and was registered in his internal passport as Yuri Borisovich Gusman. It took considerable effort for both mother and son, after 20 years of separation, to dare tell and learn the truth, respectively. Anna
Larina had prepared for the meeting newspaper clippings on the issue of Stalin's personality cult, including Lenin's article, "A Letter to the Congress." The documents proved unnecessary: Upon learning the first name and patronymic of his grandfather - Ivan Gavrilovich - and on finding out that his father had been a prominent political figure, he guessed the name himself - Bukharin, identifying the only Ivanovich among Lenin's associates. A former children's home ward, now a second-year student at an agricultural institute, he knew the names and patronymics of all major statesmen.
He had landed in a children's home a second time (his relatives had taken him away from the first one) in 1946, when his adoptive parents were arrested: They were picked up in the morning, when the boy was at school, and so people in civilian clothes took him away, explaining that his parents had gone on a
long business trip. At the special home in Stalingrad for children of people
who had suffered from political reprisals, he contracted a nasty disease that struck decades later. A ringworm epidemic that affected the children at the special home at the time was treated with radiation. In 1985, Yuri Larin realized that something was wrong when, walking along the shore of the Gulf of Finland in Riga with his mother, he suddenly felt his whole body go numb.
Several months later, in Moscow, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor.
"My doctor took a long time asking me what diseases I had had as a child, and I kept enumerating: measles, scarlet fever, etc. And then he asked: ‘Did you by any chance have ringworm?' And it instantly came back to me: how we were taken to a hospital and how an apparatus was applied to my head."
For a long time after an eight-hour operation he could barely talk and walk,
living in constant fear of epileptic convulsions, not knowing where he might
collapse next time. Shortly afterward his wife, Inga, had cancer and died in
1987.
"Everything was so terrible that I thought I'd had it. But I had amazing luck."
At a rehabilitation unit he met a doctor whose name was Olga and who became his second wife - "a wonderful, rare personality." Fortune also smiled on him 30 years ago, when he took up painting.
"I followed in the footsteps of my adoptive father, becoming a hydraulic engineer and even working on some construction projects, but I soon realized
that I would simply die doing that."
He enrolled at the Krupskaya People's University extramural department and then went on to the Stroganov School of Arts, and he has never been without his paints and brushes since. Some of his watercolors are in the Russian Museum. His favorite work - A White Tree, which could not be further removed
from the canons of Socialist Realism - he keeps at home:
"I wanted it to give whoever looks at it an instant sense of lightness, a sense of freedom."
It was at his mother's urging that, in 1956, he adopted her family name, becoming Yuri Borisovich Larin. Acting on the advice of people who were helping him to enter the institute or get a job, he did not indicate in his CVs who his father had been so as not to cause problems for them. By Soviet laws, a person could not change his patronymic, so he did not become Yuri Nikolaevich until 1988, following Bukharin's political rehabilitation. No matter what, Yuri Larin has always been Bukharin's son.
In the late 1970s, together with Yevgeny Gnedin, he started translating into
Russian one of Nikolai Bukharin's best-known biographies, written by Stephen
Cohen. At that time there was some tentative talk about a possible rehabilitation, and so Larin filed an application with the Supreme Court. When it was rejected, he "came home, lay on the couch, and out of despair wrote a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Italy," which at the time was a fairly liberal organization. The letter was delivered by an Italian Communist he knew, and a month later was published in several newspapers across the world. In Italy, in the wake of the publication, the Bertrand Russell Foundation organized an international conference, Bukharin and the International Communist Movement, while in Moscow, Anna Larina was phoning her son - a Stroganovka student on field practice - several times a day: "They have once again talked about you on the radio, and I am so afraid
for you."
Twenty years later, however, it required a tremendous effort on my part to get Yuri Nikolaevich to tell me about his struggle for his father's political rehabilitation. He prefers to talk about art, not bring back the past.
"That was but an episode while art is my whole life. It is impossible to lie
or pretend in art. Indeed, I took a great interest in everything that had to
do with father because I wanted to understand what kind of person he had been. But then I realized that I knew everything there was to know. Art has been paramount for me ever since."
Yuri Larin the artist says:
"Please understand that I am not simply Bukharin's son but an independent, self-sufficient artist. Let others go on fighting everything under the sun, but I for one have been trying to understand the era and my path, including through painting. This is what I've been doing."
The upshot of his analysis, in short, is as follows: First, Bolshevism was an absolute evil while those who destroyed it - Yeltsin and his followers - acted no better than the Bolsheviks themselves, trying to undo history by using revolutionary methods. Yuri Nikolaevich would not be drawn on with the
subject of how else Soviet power could have been dealt with: "I do not want to talk politics." The second conclusion, which at the same time is the most
pithy description of Yuri Larin's artistic creed, accounting for his reluctance to read newspapers, logically follows from the first: "Art is superior."
Actually, this is the main result of his study of the era. It is less than comforting, but then Nikolai Yuryevich Larin, Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin's grandson, is the only person who will be able to disprove it.