Anna Larina (1914–1996)

Anna Mikhailovna Larina's autobiography, "This I Cannot Forget," became an instant bestseller when it was published in 1988. She had married writer and Bolshevik revolutionary Nikolai I. Bukharin, 25 years her senior, in 1934 and had a son, Yuri. When her son was only a year old, she was separated from him and her husband and sent into exile and labor camps by the Stalinist regime as the wife of an "enemy of the people." Bukharin himself was subjected to one of the last of the infamous Moscow show trials and executed in 1938. Before they were parted, he told Anna to memorize his final testament, knowing that it would be banned. She would later recall that she used to lull herself to sleep in prison by repeating her husband's words silently to herself. She spent 20 years of her life in the Gulag and was finally released in 1959, several years after Stalin’s death. She devoted the rest of her life to trying to reinstate her husband as a writer and hero of the Soviet Revolution. Thanks to her efforts, Bukharin was finally "rehabilitated" and cleared of all charges 50 years after his death. She spent her final years attempting to recover Bukharin's long-hidden prison writings.