Bukharin made his wife memorise his last letter before his arrest, and she carried it through 20 years of camps and exile until he was cleared in 1988

Nikolai Bukharin married Anna Larina in 1934; she was more than 25 years younger. Their son, Yuri, was born in 1936. Bukharin expected arrest and judged it too dangerous to write his last testament down. He had Anna memorise a letter addressed to a future generation of party leaders. It includes the line "I have never been a traitor." He was arrested in February 1937, held a year, tried and executed in 1938. Anna was arrested as the wife of an enemy of the people, exiled, and held in prisons and camps in several cities. Her baby son was taken from her, and she did not see him again until he was 21. In prison she learned of her husband's death by messages tapped through the wall. She was released, ill with tuberculosis, in 1953, and her exile ended in 1959. For decades she wrote to Khrushchev and his successors asking for his rehabilitation. In February 1988 Gorbachev said the trial had been rigged and the evidence falsified. That year, 50 years after his death, Bukharin was cleared of all charges and his party membership was restored. In October 1992 Izvestia published a letter Bukharin had written to Anna from prison on 15 January 1938; it took over 50 years to reach her. Her memoir, This I Cannot Forget, appeared in English in 1991. She died in Moscow in 1996.