I was left breathless looking at Fechin's charcoal drawings! They are arguably the best ever drawn next to Michaelangelo! This book contains the largest collection of Fechin drawings and paintings out there. Profusely illustrated. I was lucky to find this book at a used bookstore-buy at any price if found. You won't be disappointed!

I often checked this book out when I was attending Ringling School of Art in the early 80's. Fechin had a wonderful ability of painting realisticly in an impressionistic manner. He was very much an influence on Illustrator Bob Peak and many others, including myself. I have looked for this book since my graduation in 1981 and have been unable to find it. Fechin, in addition to being a talented painter ans colorist was also a master drawer. This book shows his versatility and enormous talent. Someone needs to reprint this book or publish a new one on this artist!

I am a plant scientist, and approached this book attracted by the name of one of the greatest biologists of this century. I did not expect, however, the deep emotions which emanate from this enticing story. Well written; investigative journalism at its best. Almost Dr. Zhivago-like true story under the Stalin regime. I enjoyed every line. Mandatory for Plant Biologists, but undoubtedly appealing to any reader with interest in Science and modern History.

This is a remarkable book. It combines three forms in a single work: 1) a detailed and evocative story of a boy growing up in late 19th century Russia, 2) an informative and moving autobiography of one of the most important Bolshevik leaders, and 3) commentary on the social and economic developments leading up to the 1905 and 1917 revolutions, including (in the tradition of Russian novels) imagined descriptions of important meetings of leaders of state. Most remarkable, though, is that the entire book was written in the nights of Bukharin's confinement in Moscow's Lubyanka Prison while he awaited almost certain execution following his notorious "show trial". The idea of a man who knows he could be shot at any moment writing such detailed, even leisurely descriptions of his childhood in Moscow and Bessarabia is almost beyond comprehension. Indeed, the novel breaks off in mid-sentence. This book should not be missed by anyone interested in 19th and 20th century Russian history, and will be enjoyed by anyone interested in a good coming-of-age novel as well.

Bukharin's autobiographical work is a lyrical, moving, story of the life of a young boy in pre-Soviet russia. Unlike Leon Trotsky's autobiography, which is a similar work in content, this is a novel. And a grand one. When you read the touching descriptions of Kolya's then idyllic, then tragic domestic life, you feel helpless, sad, for you know that this boy will eventually be dead, the New World he helped to create corrupted and turned against him. The very existence of this novel is a message of hope, that even under the most tragic and ironic circumstances there can something joyous (Bukharin wrote the novel while in Lubyanka prison). The poignancy of all this is further increased by the included letter by Bukharin, written to his wife Anna Larina and not given to her for 50+ years. This book also stands as a monument (in a medium I belief he would have perhaps preferred) to Nikolai Bukharin, a brilliant scholar, writer, and Revolutionary

In reading this remarkable book, one should not forget that it is a widow's memoir, not an historical work. Anna Larina was but a child when she fell in love with the charismatic Nikolai Bukharin, one of the inner circle of Bolshevik intellectuals who seized control of Russia during the October Revolution in 1917. When they married, she was a beautiful Russian girl barely out of her teens and Bukharin was a celebrated national figure of 43. They had a very short married life together before Bukharin was swept into Stalin's counter-revolutionary net with trumped-up charges that he was plotting an anti-Bolshevik takeover including a plan to assassinate Stalin himself. This culminated in the celebrated "Moscow Show Trials" of the 1930's where Bukharin "confessed" his guilt and was executed.

All this is written about from the horrified wife's perspective and it makes an absorbing narrative, indeed. It was not enough for the Stalinist Communists of that era to imprison the accused. They imprisoned the family of the accused as well. Being the wife of a counter-revolutionist was a crime in Communist Russia. And so -- off to imprisonment or exile. That Anna's and Bukharin's son was only a year old at the time, made no difference to the proletarian authority. The child was taken from the mother's arms and finally was raised in foster homes. It took 20 years before mother and son were reunited. The scene describing the reunion of the mother with her lost son is one of the many high points of her book. Anna's vivid descriptions of her life in squalid, filthy prisons she was sent to over the years is reminiscent of Solzhenitsyn's work. Yet, somehow she did not fully convey the intense moral outrage of such an unjust treatment. Perhaps, that is because she had to learn to suppress those feelings to keep alive, to hang on to sanity.

In her view, it was not Bolshevism but Stalin who was the villain. He is everyone's villain in post-communist Russia. Anna Larina makes no effort to soften her feelings for the dictator who once had been a friend of Bukharin's but who finally did him in.

She argues Bukharin's innocence not as a lawyer would but with all the emotion of a wife whose husband, son and youth were stolen unjustly from her by one of the Century's most vicious despots.

I highly recommend this book to be read after obtaining a more historical perspective in Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution : A Political Biography, 1888-1938 by Stephen F. Cohen who, incidentally, penned the introduction to Anna Larina's most interesting and memorable book.

This is one of the most haunting books I have ever read. Larina provides a window into one of the most disturbing periods of modern history. The reader will find himself (or herself) drawn into the madness that was Stalin's system of terror of the 1930's. The author's survival of the purges, and her determined faith in her doomed husband, are a testimony to the spirit of the Russian people.

Jansen and Petrov's biography tells everything worthwhile likely to be known about N. I. Yezhov, Commissar of the NKVD (Stalin's secret police) during the Great Purge of 1936-38. It also summarizes the mechanics and motivation of the Purge itself, using extensive Russian-language sources emerging since 1988.

In some ways Yezhov was more a pathetic than an evil character, unfortunately falling under the spell of a brilliant but evil man. Good-natured and helpful before getting drawn into Stalin's work of repression, Yezhov would degenerate into a torturer and murderer, incapable of distinguishing true from imaginary charges.

The book is a bit dry in places, but that is a hazard of the subject: relatively little "human" detail is known about Yezhov. (Aleksei Polyansky's Russian-language biography tried to get around this problem by inventing dialogue.) Yezhov and his close associates were nearly all liquidated in 1939-1940; those who survived knew they should keep silent. Indeed, apart from some generic execration, Yezhov would remain taboo until the age of Glasnost' (1988), 48 years after his death.