a total of 20 years. One of the greatest shocks she experienced was to be confronted by one of her childhood playmates, Andrei Sverdlov, son of one of Bukharin's old comrades. She at first thought he was a fellow prisoner, but discovered that he was her interrogator. Since Anna was the wife of Bukharin, she was constantly under close surveillance and was not allowed out to perform labor. Instead, much of her time was spent dealing with the grinding boredom of doing nothing. "By this time, I was an experienced zek (prisoner), having already been detained in many prisons: Astrakhan, Saratov, Sverdlovsk, Tomsk, Novosibirsk. I had become accustomed to an isolated existence without books, paper, or pencil, unable to do anything but string together rhymes and memorize them by endless repetition, reading from memory the verses of my favorite poets." While in the Gulag, Anna communicated with others by tapping on the walls of their cells. This way Anna found out that her husband had been killed. “'The bastards murdered Bukharin,’ I heard again, and my doubts faded away. Every single letter of his sentence, like a metal weight, banged into my brain. Although it would be best to cut off the conversation, since I still feared this might be provocation, the temptation was too great. I had a passionate desire to find out as much as I could. During the following days, I grew attached to this condemned man who knew the true story of the trials and loved Nikolai Bartunek still. In the evenings, listening to his distinct tapping on the wall, I could not reconcile the firm even tap of his hand with the death sentence. When I heard his last words I was deeply shaken." Twenty years of her life were spent in prison, exile, and labour camps. During this time, Anna met her second husband, Fyodor Fadeyev. Her second husband was arrested several times because of Anna and died in 1959. She had two children with Fyodor: Mikhail and Nadia. Larina was finally released from the Gulag system in 1953 after Stalin died, while sick with tuberculosis, after having spent almost twenty years of her life there. Her exile ended in 1959 and she returned to Moscow. She devoted the rest of her life to clearing her husband’s name, writing long, detailed letters to Nikita Khrushchev and his successors demanding Bukharin's reinstatement in the pantheon