Stalin's Children: Three Generations of Love, War, and Survival

By Owen Matthews

On a mid-summer day in 1937, a car pulled up to the house of the Bibikov family in Chernigov in the heart of the Ukraine. Boris, the father, kissed his two daughters and wife goodbye and disappeared inside the car. His family never saw him again. His wife would later vanish, leaving the young Lyudmila and Lenina alone to drift across the vast Russian landscape as the Wehrmacht advanced in WWII. In the early 1960s Owen Matthews' father, Mervyn, moved to Moscow to work for the British embassy after a childhood in Wales dreaming of Russia. He fell in with the KGB, and in love with Lyudmila, and before he could disentangle himself from the former he was ordered to leave the country. For the next six years, Mervyn tried desperately to get Lyudmila out of Russia, and when he finally succeeded they married. Decades on from these events, their son, now Newsweek's bureau chief in Moscow, pieces together the tangled threads of his family's past and present-the extraordinary files that record the life and death of his grandfather at the hands of Stalin's secret police; his mother's and aunt's perilous journey to adulthood; his parents' Cold War love affair and the magnet that has drawn him back to the Russia-to present an indelible portrait of the country over the past seven decades and an unforgettable memoir about how we struggle to define ourselves in opposition to our ancestry only to find ourselves aligning with it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Release date: Jul 23, 2010
• ISBN: 9780802777621

Owen Matthews

Owen Matthews studied Modern History at Oxford University before beginning his career as a journalist in Bosnia. He has written for the Moscow Times, The Times, the Spectator and the Independent. In 1997, he became a correspondent at Newsweek magazine in Moscow where he covered the second Chechen war, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the conflict in Eastern Ukraine. His first book on Russian history, Stalin's Children, was translated into 28 languages and shortlisted for The Guardian First Books Award and France's Prix Medicis. Owen's first book on Russian history was Stalin's Children, a family memoir, which was published to great critical acclaim in 2008. The book was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Orwell Prize for political writing, and selected as one of the Books of the Year by the Sunday Times, Sunday Telegraph and the Spectator. It has been translated into twenty-eight languages and was shortlisted for France's Medici Prize and French Elle Magazine's Grand Prix Litteraire, as well as being selected as one of the FNAC chain's twenty featured titles for the Rentree Litteraire of 2009. Owen is currently a contributing editor for Newsweek magazine, based in Istanbul and Moscow.

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Praise for Stalin's Children

"At a time when Russia is reasserting itself on the international stage, Stalin's Children should be required reading for anyone involved with economic, cultural or political relations with that country . . . All in all Mathews' contribution offers a poignant and insightful reading experience, leaving one with a keener sense of the unseen forces that drive present-day Russia."

-New York Post

A moving book written with a tender yet unsentimental eye, a deeply intimate account that reveals through the lives of Matthews' own family how the Soviet experience shaped, and destroyed, millions of people.

-Douglas Smith, Seattle Times

"Few countries have been haunted more by a terrible past than Russia. In Stalin's Children Owen Matthews has written of the ghosts of his own family, with grandparents arrested in the Great Terror and his mother consigned to a Soviet orphanage when still an infant. His parents' love for each other, kept alight across the Iron Curtain, makes an extraordinary story. This wonderful memoir brings to life the human victims of a terrifyingly inhuman system."

-Antony Beevor, Sunday Telegraph

[A] fascinating family memoir. Matthews relates this dramatic tale in understated but lovely prose . . . [an] extraordinary tale.

-Publishers Weekly

A heartbreaking, romantic and utterly compelling piece of reportage that superbly tells the story of four generations of the author's own family across 20th Century Russia . . . Here is an astonishing personal history of love, death and betrayal in Russia by a half-Russian writer who really knows the texture of the Motherland.

-Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar and Young Stalin

An epic account . . . brilliantly written.

-Guardian

"A superb chronicle of the 20th-century Soviet Union, seen through the eyes of his parents and grandparents: a Russian Wild Swans. Some of the stories will stay with me forever."

-Sunday Times (UK)

Beautifully written and intensely moving.

-Daily Telegraph

One of the most fascinating family memoirs of recent times.

-Literary Review

Few books say so much about Russia then and now, and its effect on those it touches.

-Economist

An extraordinary story . . . there are many moments of almost unbearable poignancy.

-Independent (UK)

Gripping family history . . . This fascinating book is not a footnote to Soviet history: it is Soviet history, one of the millions of private tales of evil and astonishing endurance that make up the awful whole.

-Observer (UK)

Remarkable . . . not only does Owen Matthews write with extraordinary vividness . . . but his technique is more that of a novelist than a journalist-and a master craftsman at that.

-Spectator

STALIN'S CHILDREN

Three Generations of Love, War, and Survival

OWEN MATTHEWS

To my parents

CONTENTS

Prologue

1. The Last Day

2. 'Not Men but Giants!'

3. Death of a Party Man

4. Arrest

5. Prison

6. War

7. Mila

8. Mervyn

9. Drinks with the KGB

10. Love

11. Mila and Mervusya

12. On Different Planets

13. Escape

14. Crisis

Epilogue

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Prologue

The hand that signed the paper felled a city . . .

Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country.

Dylan Thomas

On a shelf in a cellar in the former KGB headquarters in Chernigov, in the black earth country in the heart of the Ukraine, lies a thick file with a crumbling brown cardboard cover. It contains about three pounds of paper, the sheets carefully numbered and bound. Its subject is my mother's father, Bibikov, Boris Lvovich, whose name is entered on the cover in curiously elaborate, copperplate script. Just under his name is the printed title, 'Top Secret. People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Anti-Soviet Rightist-Trotskyite Organization in the Ukraine.'

The file records my grandfather's progress from life to death at the hands of Stalin's secret police as the summer of 1937 turned to autumn. I saw it in a dingy office in Kiev fifty-eight years after his death. The file sat heavily in my lap, eerily malignant, a swollen tumour of paper. It smelled of slightly acidic musk.

Most of the file's pages are flimsy official onion-skin forms, punched through in places by heavy typewriting. Interspersed are a few slips of thicker, raggy scrap paper. Towards the end are several sheets of plain writing paper covered in a thin, blotted handwriting, my grandfather's confessions to being an enemy of the people. The seventy-eighth document is a receipt confirming that he had read and understood the death sentence passed on him by a closed court in Kiev. The scribbled signature is his last recorded act on earth. The final document is a clumsily mimeographed slip, confirming that the sentence was carried out on the following day, 14 October 1937. The signature of his executioner is a casual squiggle. Since the careful bureaucrats who compiled the file neglected to record where he was buried, this stack of paper is the closest thing to Boris Bibikov's earthly remains.

In the attic of 7 Alderney Street, Pimlico, London, is a handsome steamer trunk, marked 'W.H.M. Matthews, St Antony's College, Oxford, AHrJIHA' in neat black painted letters. It contains a love story. Or perhaps it contains a love.

In the trunk are hundreds of my parents' love letters, carefully arranged by date in stacks, starting in July 1964, ending in October 1969. Many are on thin airmail paper, others on multiple sheets of neat white writing paper. Half - the letters of my mother, Lyudmila Bibikova, to my father - are covered in looping, cursive handwriting, even yet very feminine. Most of my father's letters to my mother are typed, because he liked to keep carbon copies of every one he sent, but each has a handwritten note at the bottom above his extravagant signature, or sometimes a charming little drawing. But those which he wrote by hand are closely written in tight, upright and very correct Cyrillic.

For the six years that my parents were separated by the fortunes of the Cold War, they wrote to each other every day, sometimes twice a day. His letters are from Nottingham, Oxford, London, Cologne, Berlin, Prague, Paris, Marrakech, Istanbul, New York. Hers are from Moscow, from Leningrad, from the family dacha at Vnukovo. The letters detail every act, every thought of my parents' daily lives. He sits in a lonely bedsit on a smoggy night in Nottingham, typing about his curry dinners and minor academic squabbles. She pines in her tiny room off Moscow's Arbat Street, writing about conversations with her friends, trips to the ballet, books she's reading.

At some moments their epistolary conversation is so intimate that reading the letters feels like a violation. At others the pain of separation is so intense that the paper seems to tremble with it. They talk of tiny incidents from the few months they spent together in Moscow, in the winter and spring of 1964, their talks and walks. They gossip about mutual friends and meals and films. But above all the letters are charged with loss, and loneliness, and with a love so great, my mother wrote, 'that it can move mountains and turn the world on its axis'. And though the letters are full of pain, I think that they also describe the happiest period of my parents' lives.

As I leaf through the letters now, sitting on the floor of the attic which was my childhood room, where I slept for eighteen years not a yard from where the letters lay in their locked trunk, in the box room under the eaves of the house, and where I listened to my parents' raised voices drifting up the stairs, it occurs to me that here is where their love is. 'Every letter is a piece of our soul, they mustn't get lost,' my mother wrote during their first agonizing months. 'Your letters bring me little pieces of you, of your life, your breath, your beating heart.' And so they spilled their souls out on to paper - reams of paper, impregnated with pain, desire and love, chains of paper, relays of it, rumbling through the night on mail trains across Europe almost without interruption for six years. 'As our letters travel they take on a magical quality . . . in that lies their strength,' wrote Mila. 'Every line is the blood of my heart, and there is no limit to how much I can pour out.' But by the time my parents met again they found there was barely enough love left over. It had all been turned to ink and written over a thousand sheets of paper, which now lie carefully folded in a trunk in the attic of a terraced house in London.

* * *

We believe we think with our rational minds, but in reality we think with our blood. In Moscow I found blood all around me. I spent much of my early adult life in Russia, and during those years I found myself, time and again, tripping over the roots of experience which grew into recognizable elements of my parents' character. Echoes of my parents' lives kept cropping up in mine like ghosts, things which remained unchanged in the rhythms of the city which I had believed was so full of the new and the now. The damp-wool smell of the Metro in winter. Rainy nights on the backstreets off the Arbat when the eerie bulk of the Foreign Ministry glows like a fog-bound liner. The lights of a Siberian city like an island in a sea of forest seen from the window of a tiny, bouncing plane. The smell of the sea-wind at Tallinn docks. And, towards the end of my time in Moscow, the sudden, piercing realization that all my life, I had loved precisely the woman who was sitting by my side at a table among friends in a warm fug of cigarette smoke and conversation in the kitchen of an apartment near the Arbat.

Yet the Russia I lived in was a very different place from the one my parents had known. Their Russia was a rigidly controlled society where unorthodox thought was a crime, where everyone knew their neighbours' business and where the collective imposed a powerful moral terror on any member who dared defy convention. My Russia was a society adrift. During the seventy years of Soviet rule, Russians had lost much of their culture, their religion, their God; and many of them also lost their minds. But at least the Soviet state had compensated by filling the ideological vacuum with its own bold myths and strict codes. It fed people, taught and clothed them, ordered their lives from cradle to grave and, most importantly, thought for them. Communists - men like my grandfather - had tried to create a new kind of man, emptying the people of their old beliefs and refilling them with civic duty, patriotism and docility. But when Communist ideology was stripped away, so its quaint fifties morality also disappeared into the black hole of discarded mythologies. People put their faith in television healers, Japanese apocalyptic cults, even in the jealous old God of Orthodoxy. But more profound than any of Russia's other, new-found faiths, was an absolute, bottomless nihilism. Suddenly there were no rules, no holds barred, and everything went for those bold and ruthless enough to go out and grab as much as they could.

There were plenty of ashes, but few phoenixes. Mostly the narod, the people, retreated into themselves, continuing with their old routines, ignoring the seismic shocks which had shaken their world. Work, school, car, dacha, allotment, television, sausage and potatoes for dinner. Russia after the Fall often reminded me of a maze full of lab rats trapped in an abandoned experiment, still vainly nuzzling the sugar-water dispenser long after the scientists had switched off the lights and emigrated.

Some of the Russian intelligentsia called it the revolutsiya v soznanii, the revolution in consciousness. But that didn't begin to describe it. It wasn't really a revolution, because only a small minority chose or had the imagination to seize the day, to reinvent themselves and adapt to the brave new world. For the rest, it was more like a quiet implosion, like a puffball mushroom collapsing, a sudden telescoping of life's possibilities, not a revolution but a slow sagging into poverty and confusion.

For most of my time in Russia, I thought I was in a story without a narrative, a constantly changing slides how of phantasmagoria which Moscow was projecting on to my life for my personal delectation. In fact I was caught in a cool web of blood knowledge which was slowly winding me in.

I came to Moscow to get away from my parents. Instead, I found them there, though for a long time I didn't know it, or refused to see it. This is a story about Russia and my family, about a place which made us and freed us and inspired us and very nearly broke us. And it's ultimately a story about escape, about how we all escaped from Russia, even though all of us even my father, a Welshman, who has no Russian blood, even me, who grew up in England - still carry something of Russia inside ourselves, infecting our blood like a fever.

1

The Last Day

I believe in one thing only, the power of human will.

Iosif Stalin

Ispoke Russian before I spoke English. Until I was sent to an English prep school, dressed up in a cap, blazer and shorts, I saw the world in Russian. If languages have a colour, Russian was the hot pink of my mother's seventies dresses, the warm red of an old Uzbek teapot she had brought with her from Moscow, the kitschy black and gold of the painted Russian wooden spoons which hung on the wall in the kitchen. English, which I spoke with my father, was the muted green of his study carpet, the faded brown of his tweed jackets. Russian was an intimate language, a private code I would speak to my mother, warm and carnal and coarse, the language of the kitchen and the bedroom, and its smell was warm bed-fug and steaming mashed potatoes. English was the language of formality, adulthood, learning, reading Janet and John on my father's lap, and its smell was Gauloises and coffee and the engine oil on his collection of model steam engines.

My mother would read me Pushkin stories like the extraordinary folk epic 'Ruslan and Lyudmila'. The supernatural world of dark Russian forests, of brooding evil and bright, shining heroes conjured on winter evenings in a small London drawing room and punctuated by the distant squeal of trains coming into Victoria station, was infinitely more vivid to my childhood self than anything my father could summon. 'There is the Russian spirit, it smells of Russia there,' wrote Pushkin, of a mysterious land by the sea where a great green oak stood; round the oak was twined a golden chain, and on the chain a black cat paced, and in its tangled branches a mermaid swam.

At the end of the scorching summer of 1976 my grandmother Martha came to visit us in London. I was four-and-a half years old, and the lawns of Eccleston Square garden were scorched yellow by a heatwave. It was a summer of baking pavements, the flavour of strawberry lollipops, a favourite pair of beige corduroy dungarees with a large yellow flower sewn on the leg. I remember my grandmother's heaviness, her musty Russian smell, her soft, pudgy face. In photographs she looks uncomfortable, large and angry and masculine, holding me like a wriggling sack while my mother smiles nervously. She scared me with her brusque scolding, her unpredictability, a sensed tension. She would sit for hours, alone and silent in an armchair by the drawing room window. Sometimes she pushed me away when I tried to climb on her lap.

One afternoon we were in Eccleston Square, my mother chatting with other mothers, my grandmother sitting on a bench. I was playing cops and robbers with myself, wearing a plastic policeman's helmet and touting a cowboy pistol, running around the garden. I crept up behind my grandmother, jumped out from behind the bench and tried to put a pair of toy handcuffs on her wrists. She sat there motionless as I struggled to close the handcuffs, and when I looked up she was crying. I ran to my mother, who came over and they sat together for a long time while I hid in the bushes. Then we went home, my grandmother still silently weeping.

'Don't be upset,' my mother said. 'Granny is crying because the handcuffs reminded her of when she was in prison. But it was a long time ago and it's all right now.'

For most of her life my mother lived for an imaginary future. Her parents were taken away to prison when she was three. From that moment, she was raised by the Soviet state, which moulded her mind, if not her spirit, in its ways. A bright dawn was just over the horizon, her generation was told, but could only be attained, Aztec-like, by the spilling of blood and by the sacrifice of individual will to the greater good. 'Simple Soviet people are everywhere performing miracles,' is a phrase from a popular 1930s song my mother often cites, always with heavy irony, when she is confronted by an example of bureaucratic stupidity or crassness. But in a profound sense, the idea that the individual could overcome seemingly impossible obstacles shaped her life.

Her father Boris Bibikov believed the same. He inspired and terrified - thousands of men and women to raise a giant factory quite literally from the mud on which it stood. In her turn, my mother performed a scarcely less remarkable miracle. Armed with nothing but her unshakeable conviction, she took on the whole behemoth of the Soviet state, and won.

I never think of my mother as small, though she is in fact tiny, a shade under five feet tall. But she is a woman of gigantic character; the kinetic field of her presence fills large houses. I have often seen her crying, but never at a loss. Even at her weakest moments, she is never in doubt of herself. She has no time for navel-gazing, for the self-indulgent lives that my generation have led, though for all her iron self-discipline she possesses a vast fund of forgiveness for human failure in others. From my earliest childhood, my mother has insisted that everything in life must be fought for, that any failure is primarily a failure of will. All her life she imposed uncompromising demands on herself, and met them. 'We must be worthy of their belief in us, we must fight,' she wrote to my father. 'We have no right to be weak . . . Life will crush us in a minute and no one will hear our cries.'

She is also ferociously witty and intelligent, though I usually only see this side of her when she is in company. At the dinner table with guests her voice is clear and emphatic, pronouncing her opinions with unfashionable certainty in roundly enunciated English.

'Everything is relative,' she will say archly. 'One hair in a bowl of soup is too much, one hair on your head is not enough.' Or she will declare: 'Russian has so many reflexive verbs because Russians are pathologically irresponsible! In English you say, I want, I need. In Russian it's want has arisen, need has arisen. Grammar reflects psychology! The psychology of an infantile society!'

When she speaks she slips effortlessly from Nureyev to Dostoyevsky to Karamzin and Blok, her snorts of derision and dismissive hand-waves interspersed with gasps of admiration and hands rapturously clapped to the chest as she swerves on to a new subject like a racing driver taking a corner. 'Huh, Nabokov!' she will say with pursed lips and a raised eyebrow, letting all present know that she finds him an incorrigible show-off and a cold, heartless and artificial individual. 'Ah, Kharms,' she says, raising a palm to the sky, signalling that here is a man with a true understanding of Russia's absurdity, its pathos and everyday tragedy. Like many Russian intellectuals of her generation, she is utterly at home in the dense kasbah of her country's literature, navigating its alleys like a native daughter. I have always admired my mother, but at these moments, when she holds a table in awe, I am intensely proud of her.

Milan Kundera wrote that 'The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.' And so it is for my mother, in telling this story. She rarely spoke to me about her childhood when I was myself a child. But as an adult, when I asked, she began to speak about it freely, without melodrama. Now, she recalls her own life with striking dispassion and candour. But at the same time, she worries that when I tell the story it will be too grim, too depressing. 'Write about the good people, not just about the darkness,' my mother has said to me when describing her childhood. 'There was so much human generosity, so many wonderful, soulful people.'

One final image of my mother, before we begin her story. Aged seventy-two, she is sitting at a lunch table spread with food and dappled with sunlight. We are at a friend's house on an island near Istanbul, on a cool terrace overlooking the Sea of Marmara. My mother perches sideways on a dining chair, as she has always done because of her hip, crippled by tuberculosis in childhood. Our host, a Turkish writer, is tanned as golden brown as an ancient sea god. He pours wine, passes plates of mussels he has gathered himself and plates of food that his excellent cook has prepared.

My mother is relaxed, at her most charming. Among the guests is a Turkish ballet dancer, a tall, beautiful woman with a dancer's rangy physicality. She and my mother are talking ballet with great passion. I am at the end of the table, talking to our host, when I hear the tone of my mother's voice change; nothing dramatic, a modulation only. But the tiny shift cuts across the various conversations at the table and we turn to listen.

She is telling a story about Solikamsk, a wartime town of lost children to which she was evacuated in 1943. The teacher at the overcrowded school she attended would bring a tray of plain black bread at lunchtime with which to feed her class. She would tell the local children to leave their pieces for the orphans, though they were all close to starving.

My mother tells the story simply, with no great pathos. She looks at no one. On her face is what I can only describe as a smile of pain. With a small gesture of her two index fingers she shows us the size of the pieces of bread on the tray. Her eyes stream with tears. The dancer begins to cry too, and hugs my mother. I, though I have heard the story before, am struck by the ordinary miracle of human life and fate - that the hungry child in that wartime winter schoolroom is the very same person sitting among us on that hot afternoon, as though she has joined our carefree modern lives from another, distant world of war and hunger.

My aunt Lenina's kitchen on Frunzenskaya Embankment, on a luminous Moscow summer evening in the late 1990s. I am sitting on my aunt's wide window sill, smoking a cigarette after a gargantuan, greasy dinner which I have been forced to praise at least five times before she is satisfied that I am content. Lenina is boiling water in her old enamel kettle, disdaining the German electric kettle her daughters have given her.

Lenina, my mother's sister, is as heavy-set as their mother Martha was, wide-hipped and large-breasted, her back bowed with the weight of the world's troubles. She has Martha's piercing blue eyes. So does my mother, so do I, so does my son Nikita. But in temperament Lenina seems to be more like her gregarious father, Boris Bibikov. She loves gathering friends around the kitchen table, chatting, gossiping, intriguing. She likes to pull strings and to organize other people's lives by means of epic telephone conversations. She is highly skilled at terrorizing television presenters during phone-ins and shop managers in person. She is a big woman with a powerful voice, and suffers from many, many near-fatal illnesses which she loves to talk about.

As she pours the tea, Lenina launches into her favourite subject, her nephew's variegated love life. Her eye gleams with a girlish prurience. I have seen through Lenina's stern old lady act long before. That is just one weapon in the formidable arsenal she deploys in the daily drama of struggle, conflict and scandal with the outside world. What she really wants to do is sit forward on her stool at the corner of the table, put an elbow on the table, fix her nephew with a beady eye and hear the latest details. At the naughty bits she cackles like a fishwife.

'You're lucky I don't tell your mother any of this,' she chortles. Strangely, though she never tires of scolding her own daughters, she seldom criticizes me during our weekly gossip sessions. Instead, she chips in with worldly-wise and often rather cynical advice. My aunt Lenina is, despite the halfcentury's difference in our ages, a true friend and confidante.

Lenina has a phenomenal memory for detail. Our conversations always start in the present, but that is transient and quickly dealt with, insufficiently colourful and dramatic to hold her attention for long. She drifts back into the past, quite seamlessly, from one sentence to the next, setting off on a nightly ramble through the paths of her memory, her attention pulled this way and that, like a glass on a Ouija board, by different stories and voices.

As she gets older, less mobile and blinder, her imagination seems to become clearer and clearer. The past is becoming more immediate to her than the present. At night the dead visit her, she complains. They won't leave her alone - her husband, her parents, her friends, her granddaughter Masha, dead of cancer at twenty-six, all arguing, cajoling, laughing, nagging, getting on with the business of life as though they don't realize that they're dead. She sees the past in her dreams, incessantly. 'It's like a cinema,' she says. As she approaches the end of her life, its beginning seems to her ever more vivid. Details float up, conversations, incidents, stories, snippets of life seen as tiny film clips, which she notes down in order to tell me the next time I come over. She knows I know the dramatis personae so well by now that they need no introduction.

'Did I tell you what I remembered about Uncle Yasha and the girls he picked up in his Mercedes? What Varya said?' she asks over the phone, and I know immediately that she's talking about a famously immoral automobile my great-uncle Yakov shipped back from Berlin in 1946, and the fury that this invoked in my great-aunt. 'She was so furious that she threw all the flowerpots in the house at him, and the crockery from the kitchen. Yasha couldn't stop laughing, even as the plates smashed around him. That's what made her most angry!'

Lenina sees the world in terms of conversations, tones of voice, people. She doesn't read much, unlike her sister, my bookish mother. She's a performer, with the kitchen table as her auditorium and an ever-changing set of friends, supplicants, former students, neighbours and relatives as the audience.

Lyudmila and Lenina's story begins in another kitchen in a handsome, high-ceilinged apartment in the centre of Chernigov in midsummer 1937. The tall windows stood wide open to catch the breeze off the River Desna. In a corner, my three year-old mother was playing with a rag doll. My aunt Lenina leaned on the wide window sill, watching the street for the sleek silhouette of her father's big black official Packard. She was twelve years old, round-faced with large, intelligent eyes. She was fashionably dressed in her favourite white cotton tennis skirt, copied from a Moscow magazine. Outside, across the tops of the plane trees of Lermontov Street, she could see the golden domes of the cathedral of Chernigov's medieval Kremlin.

At the kitchen table her mother Martha fussed over a packed lunch for her husband Boris: roast chicken, boiled eggs and cucumber, some biscuits, a pinch of salt wrapped in newspaper, all packed in greaseproof paper. Boris was due to

Reviews for Stalin's Children

[eumaeus · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Stalin’s Children, published in June 2008, has emerged as one of most critically praised recent books about Russia, gathering favorable reviews in The Economist and Times Literary Supplement among other publications. The book is actually two works: one exceptionally good and the other so manifestly awful that it is hard to believe they come from the same author. The story of his parents and his mother’s Russian family is well written, judicious, and compassionate. In a strange lapse of critical judgment, however, the author, a foreign correspondent for Newsweek, mars what should have been a remarkable first book by continuing the family history with his own adventures in the seamy world of Moscow nightlife that are every bit as banal as his family’s story is interesting. As tedious as Matthews is when writing about himself, he is gripping in telling the story of his mother’s childhood during the Stalin terror and World War II. Matthews here reveals himself to be a gifted journalist with the ability to choose telling details and anecdotes which suggest larger insights into the marks left on Russian society by the Revolution and Stalin years. Even seasoned readers about the gulag will find the story of Matthews’s grandmother, Martha, harrowing—the wife of a fast-rising party boss in Ukraine, she was arrested with her husband in 1937 (her children were taken first to a prison for juveniles and later to an orphanage). Ten years later, she emerged from the labor camps, driven mad and filled with rage, behaving to her family “as though she believed that by meting out hatred and extinguishing love and hope in those around her she could revenge herself on the world which had treated her so cruelly.” Ultimately, Stalin’s Children (an allusion to a Stalin-era slogan, “Thank you, Comrade Stalin for our happy childhood.”) is the story of the author’s parents. His father, Mervyn, a Russian specialist and lecturer at Oxford fell in love with his mother while in an exchange program with Moscow State University in 1963. His mother Lyudmila, a survivor from age four of prison, tuberculosis, orphanages, and war-time starvation, was iron-willed, intellectual, and romantic. When they tried to marry in Moscow, Mervyn was declared persona non grata and expelled from the Soviet Union. What followed was a five year campaign against both Soviet and British bureaucracies to bring Lyudmila to Britain. During this time the, the couple wrote to each other almost every day letters that ache with the pain of separation: “Your letters bring me little pieces of you, of your life, your breath, and your beating heart.” “Every line is the blood of my heart, and there is no limit to how much I can pour out.” When the elder Matthews’ campaign finally succeeded in achieving his fiancé’s emigration, it is perhaps not surprising that married life could not possibly provide the transfiguring power of love felt through imposed separation. Commenting on his parents’ letters, Matthews writes poignantly, “but by the time my parents met again they found there was barely enough love left over. It had all been turned to ink and written over a thousand sheets of paper…” If marriage failed to bring the anticipated bliss, Lyudmila did accept the counsel of her sister’s husband to “love Mervyn; have children.” The marriage survives to this day. Stalin’s Children is a unique story of a family in Russia from 1917 up to 1969, the year of Lyudmila’s emigration. Matthews spent five years researching and writing this relatively short book, and it still could have been improved with more thorough editing and re-writing. Nevertheless, the author has succeeded in telling a deeply affecting story that will interest both novices and experts in Russian history.

[wassilissa · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Owen Matthews Eltern mussten lange kämpfen um zusammenzukommen: Seine Mutter ist Russin, sein Vater Engländer - eine Beziehung, die im kalten Krieg unmöglich erschien. Der 1971 geborene Autor erzählt seine Familiengeschichte akribisch, recherchierte genau und über viele Jahre. Er beginnt mit den Großeltern. Sein Großvater Boris Bibikow war ein linientreuer Kommunist, der aber dem Stalinismus zum Opfer fällt. Die beiden Kinder kommen in Waisenhäuser und finden sich erst durch einen unglaublichen Zufall wieder. Die Mutter des Autors ist trotz aller Schwierigkeiten eine frohe, lebenbejahende Person geblieben.Mir hat das Buch gefallen. Der Autor streut immer wieder Ausblicke und Rückblicke ein, erzählt auch seine eigene Geschichte. Ich fand es sehr interessant.

[yankeesfan1_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I found the historical aspects of the book to be fascinating, but it is not the fastest paced book I have ever read. Interesting, but took awhile to plow through.

[craigim · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Stalin's Children is a memoir that follows the author's family from his maternal grandparents caught up in Stalin's purges, to his English father's efforts to reunite with his mother during the height of the Cold War, to his own experiences living in Moscow as a journalist during the fall of the Soviets and the subsequent Chechen war. Through their stories, mainly the lives of his mother and father, their courtship and bureaucratic struggles to be together, Matthews shows how the global politics of WWII and the Cold War effected the personal lives of common people living in Russia.I found the story of his parents to be compelling and heart-wrenching, even though I knew generally how it would end (the author was born, after all), and the story of his grandparents and early life his mother and aunt under Stalin to be equally interesting, but the interjections of the author's own life and experiences in Moscow were too disjointed and random to be interesting. I believe the intention was to draw parallels between his experiences in Moscow in the 90's with that of his parents, but they lacked the narrative quality of the rest of the arc and I found them to be distracting. However, these stories amount to less than ten percent of the book, so they do not detract too much from the rest of the book.This is not a book that will teach you about the global politics and high level machinations of the Soviet system through the twentieth century, but if one is already familiar with the geopolitics of the time, it will give you insight into how those politics effected the personal lives of the people living in Moscow during that time. All in all a very compelling read.

[mickeyfreak_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Not knowing a lot about Russian history, I found this book to be very interesting, but it took a long time to get through as I tried to comprehend the political and cultural aspects of it. It's great to see the insights and experiences of 3 generations,..it helps to understand how people survived and coped with all of the things happening to and around them that were not within their power to control.

[ekl1773 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Matthew's book is based around a collection of his parents' love letters written across the Iron Curtain in a six-year long distance relationship. He delves into the history of both sides of his family, and relates their stories in terms of the larger picture of Russia as a whole. Unfortunately, the letters come across as a bit desperate and insular in some parts of the book, and the story stops being about Russia. The first section of the book takes place when the author's mother, Mila and her sister, Lenina, are orphaned children attempting to survive Stalin's Russia after the Purges. Where Matthew's has less information, further in the past, the story is based on general facts of the times but highlighted with references to more personal experiences. This is, in my opinion, the best part of the book. If you are already familiar with this period of Russian history and desire a closer look from a personal viewpoint, this is probably a decent book for you. The first time delver into the subject may wish to supplement it with a history text.

[artisu_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed Stalin's Children very much, the trauma and sadness of Owen's grandparents and parents lives was moving and sad. We in the US are so blessed that we often don't appreciate what life was like in the Soviet Union for everyday folks - the hunger, oppression, war and severe deprivations. We have had freedom and we often take it for granted - this story is one that should be read in schools, by all - so that we can see how very fortunate we are to have enjoyed so much while much of the world was suffering incredibly in WWII and after. I had the fascinating experience of visiting Russia for two weeks - two summers ago, and found the people to be very much as Owen describes in his experiences in contemporary Russia. Life is different there, and the character of the people is shaped by their rich and turbulent past. Without books like this, we lack understanding of modern political relationships between East and West - and Stalin's Children provides a revealing glimpse into the history that has shaped modern Russia. Great read!

[scunagorelik · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Reading this memoir, I was struck by the fact that, as a Soviet emigre, I would somehow connect with Owen's experiences. I just finished the book and realized that our experiences are not alike at all.I was four when we left (1979) via Austria, via Italy and finally to New York. I remember nothing. I was told nothing. If I had been a little older I would have been an indoctrinated "Pionerka," a child-Commie. But that never happened. Sure, my grandfather and my parents told me the stories of waiting in lines and fear of Soviet snitchery. But mostly, my family wanted to forget Stalin, Lenin, all of them. They remember only certain things fondly, such as family, school chums, fun times from their youth. My chance to see Kiev (where we were from) came in 2005. I hated every moment spent in that depressing place. I have been all over the world and had never been more afraid to be detained at Customs than when I entered (and thankfully left) Kiev. I was thinking that it must have been my in-born Soviet fear of imprisonment (similar to my instinct for waiting in lines). After performing the required Russian/Ukrainian duties of visiting every dead relative in the cemetaries, eating at the Pelmenyi, and hailing a personal taxi (this is a real thing that non-taxi licensed individuals do to earn money), I called my mom once on U.S. soil and thanked her for taking me out of that dark, dank country.My experiences aside, the author had this need to identify with all things Russian--lived there, became absolutely fluent (reading/writing), married a Russian girl. Those are all things with which I cannot identify. Maybe it would have been different if he had been born there. I don't know.Well, this book is definitely interesting and readable. I recommend.

[phille_4 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Stalin's children gives a good primer on the evolution of modern day Russia (of course not covering all possible aspects), beginning in the Stalin era, as portrayed by three generations of one family . It may not be the most beautifully written novel, though it is intriguingly enough to keep you reading. All in all, it is the story itself that makes the book worth reading. The fact that it is based on the real destinies of real people increases the impact on the reader. Especially for younger people I believe it can contribute to a wider understanding of the oppression that people lived under in former Soviet and similar states, some still existing.

[carlislemlh · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Stalin’s Children by Owen MatthewsThree Generations of Love, War, and SurvivalReview for LibraryThing.com by MaryLouise H. CarlisleThe voice of this author is compelling. The tone is always a finely-tuned balance between the clear voice of authority through bare-bones statement of historical fact, the lyrical voice of storyteller through enchantingly vivid depiction, and the personal voice of survivor resonant with tempered emotion. These three voices are woven together like a beautifully crafted Bach Invention.Not being a writer myself I struggled to find a satisfying metaphor for Matthews’ writing style. Being a musician, and finding the Invention as the perfect metaphor, I realized why I appreciate his composition so much. The contrapuntal nature of his interweaving of biography, memoir, and historical documentation is not only aesthetically satisfying but is also very practical. He supplies the larger national and political context for the particular storyline of his family while also giving a simultaneous commentary or comparison of Russia’s various cultural and political eras. While the book reads like a novel, the factual content is well researched and documented making it suitable as an adjunct text for anyone interested in Russian studies.What I believe is most impressive is how, even though not all of the characters in Matthews’ family are appealing, he makes it possible to empathize with each of their struggles. By reading Stalin’s Children, I’ve gained not only knowledge about the Russian experience of the Soviet era, but also more compassion for the Russian people and all people who struggle to survive in the midst of political upheaval.

[awriterspen_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Stalin's Children, Three Generations of Love, War, and Survival, is a story of three generations and their experiences under the various incarnations of Russian government.The opening chapters are rather sad but expected. The author did a wonderful job of explaining the past through photographs, excerpts of correspondence, and generational storytelling passed down from his grandmother and mother. The most central story of this book is author Owen Matthews' mother being separated from her parents at a very young age and raised in orphanages.Growing up without a mother or father was so pivotal in shaping his mothers outlook on life and the direction her life took. Probably eighty percent or better of this book is about his mother and father, Mila and Mervyn, in one way or another.Building on top of this and other tragedies in this book, this book is also a story of love lost and love gained, and the family ties that defy odds. Owen Matthews recounts his father Mervyn's early years working in academia and as a foreign exchange student in Russia. Mervyn of course falls in love, is seduced by the KGB, is deported from the country, sneaks back into the country, and fights with every ounce of his soul to be with his beloved fiancée, Mila.Russophiles will love this families story. Despite the fact that this is a non-fiction book, it reads as nicely as a novel.

[elizajane_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is the story of 20th century Russia told through the lives of one family, three generations long. Starting just after the Russian Revolution the author talks of his grandfather who was a good communist and belonged to the Party. Unfortunately, he said something he shouldn't have at the wrong time and was executed as a dissident against the Party. Then we are told the lives of the author's mother and father. The mother was a Russian girl and the father was a British man who had a deep interest in Russian literature, language and the people. So he went to Russia on a scholarship and fell in love with the Russian girl. They tried to recruit him into the KGB but he refused to betray his own country and was blacklisted from Russia. The two of them then spend the next 6 years writing letters almost daily to each other as he tries to get through the communist bureaucracy and blackmark on his name so he can marry his sweetheart and take her out of Russia. Meanwhile, the author inserts himself into the story when he is born and speaks of events that happened in the past then returns to his experiences in modern Russia. The author is a journalist and currently works for Newsweek in Russia.This is a very interesting book if you are interested in modern Russian history. The author manages to combine the new trend of biography/memoir very well. The author never makes the book about himself, even though he does write of himself. He keeps the story of his ancestors in the forefront. By telling his families history he also tells the history of Russia, its transformation to Communism, perestroika and finally to today's democratic society. I found at times the political parts made me start wool-gathering but, of course, it is necessary to understand the politics to understand the lives these people lived and the book is definitely not heavy-handed with politics. The people always remain in the forefront. Recommended to those with an interest in Russian history.

[jgoto_4 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Last summer I read Jung Chang’s memoir, Wild Swans, and I was very moved by it. Her descriptions of life in Mao’s China were unexpected and compelling. When I saw that an arc of Owen Matthews’ Stalin’s Children, a memoir of life in Communist Russia, was available for review, I was excited by the prospect of comparing the two. While Stalin’s Children was not nearly as gripping as Wild Swans, parts of it were fascinating. I particularly enjoyed reading about the author’s mother’s and aunt's childhood during the forties.In these two memoirs, the main difference I noted between the people of the two countries was the effect that the government propaganda had on them. In the early days of Communism in China, Mao was a beloved leader. Even as life became harder for the party members, there was a belief in the ideals that Communism stood for. Chinese children were grateful, because no matter how hard their lives were, at least they had some food and shelter, unlike the poor children of the West, who they believed were starving and homeless. In the USSR, the pervading feeling seemed more cynical. The Russians tried to gauge the way the wind was blowing, and made decisions that would be most beneficial to themselves and their families. The cover of Stalin’s Children states that it is the story of three generations living in twentieth century Russia. The bulk of the book concentrates on the lives of the author’s parents (a Russian mother and Welsh father), with a substantial section devoted to their struggle to be reunited after his father was deported from the country before their wedding. Matthews also includes snippets from his own experiences in Russia, including a stint as a journalist covering the war in Chechnya. Unfortunately, these sections were written with far less detail than the painstaking explanations of his father’s letter writing campaign to be reunited with his fiancé, which was not nearly as appealing to me. All in all, I would say that Stalin’s Children was interesting, and painted a picture of life in Russia in both the days of Stalin and the KGB and in 1990’s Moscow after the break-up of the Soviet Union. The index in the back is useful, but a map of the USSR would have been even more helpful, especially in the earlier sections of the book.

[zibilee_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Stalin's Children is the story of one family's unique experiences amid the changing social and political sphere of Russia. Encompassing Russia's history from the 1920s onwards, Matthews acquaints us with three generations of his family who experienced extreme persecution and overwhelming odds, each bearing witness to pre- and post-Stalinist Russia. The memoir begins with the story of Boris Bibikov, a prominent Russian party member in the 1920s. Bibikov and his small family lived in relative comfort and plenty, taking full advantage that his status afforded him, until, like so many others, he was accused of anti-Party sentiments. After his arrest and imprisonment, his wife and two young daughters were left to fend for themselves. Eventually the girls were taken to a state-run orphanage after their mother was also imprisoned. It is here that the girls, Lyudmilla and Lenina, became separated. Lenina eventually moved in with relatives, and Lyudmilla remained a ward of the state until her adulthood, in essence becoming one of Stalin's many children. After many heartrending circumstances, including the orphans' harrowing escape from the Germans invasion of the city in the early days of WWII, near starvation, and serious disease, the sisters were once again reunited by miracle and chance. Although their years of separation and abandonment left indelible marks upon them for all time, they remained optimistic.The second section of the book tells of the love affair between Lyudmilla and Mervin, the author's parents. Mervyn, a British russophile, begins a scholarly career in Moscow, living his dream of immersing himself in Russia. When Lyudmilla and Mervyn meet, it is clear to both that they should be together. But after Mervyn rejects the courting of KGB officials in their attempts to recruit him into their organization, he becomes persona non grata to the Russian government and is deported. He must leave Lyudmilla behind in Russia with promises that he will return soon to marry her. What follows is the couple's anguished battle to attain Lyudmilla's right to marry a foreigner and leave the country. Peppered throughout this tale is the author's own story of returning to a Russia in the 1990s that has changed in so many ways, yet in some ways remains the same.This book was very impressive. From the distinct and eloquent nature of the author's ability to express his family's story, to the staunch and ardent persistence of the players involved, I found myself completely captivated by this memoir. Not only were the stories of his family very moving, the author has a very encompassing and instructive way of conveying the politics of Russia from the early 1900s until today. The book was informative and dealt with a vast amount of history, but it was not sluggish or boring. Each era of political change in the country was illustrated not only in terms of what was going on in the government, but also in how these changes affected the people living amongst the tumult of their oppression. In addition, the shifts in the narrative melding the past and present were deftly handled, blending the stories of each of these generations into a panoramic view of life in Soviet Russia. Although at times the author's sentiments appear somewhat dark and maudlin, I would argue that his attitude fits perfectly with the story he tells. Although there are small triumphs and large victories, there is also a sense of grim strife throughout the story. In particular, I found the hardships that Lyudmilla endured as a ward of the state to be very tragic and distressing, but I truly marveled at her optimism and perseverance. She had a quintessentially hardy spirit that I found remarkable. In addition, the struggles that Lyudmilla and Mervin face in their efforts to be married were by turns bitter and poignant. I admired the strength and conviction of these two lovers, fighting with indomitable resoluteness for their relationship. I read with mixed emotions the joys and disappointments of the couple, and felt that the inclusion of pieces of actual love letters between the two was a a brilliant touch that gave Lyudmilla and Mervyn a real sense of humanity. I liked this book for so many reasons. From the soulfulness of the characters, to the conversational style of the history, I found much here to be impressed with. This is not only a story of history and politics, but a story of people. People with hopes and fears and dreams that were expertly captured by the author.I would recommend this book to anyone who has a curiosity about Russia. It is easily the best and most concise history of the times and people that I have ever read. The bonus of reading this for the history is that you will also get the very wonderfully rendered story of the people inside this country, and the sacrifices and joys that shaped their lives. Filled with unforgettable characters and relateable history, this book was a great read. Highly recommended.

[trishnyc · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Owen Matthews weaves an unforgettable tale in this celebration of his family and the lives that they lived both by choice and by force. Matthews' mother is Russian and his father is Welsh and their love story is the central theme of this memoir. With their letters to each other serving as a springboard, Matthews gives us an intimate portrait of how much his Mother, Lyudmila, and his father, Mervyn, fought to keep alive their love, a love that was considered inconvenient by both their governments. Both Lyudmila and Meryvn came from family background that would scar them in physical and mental ways. Lyudmila's father Boris Bibikov was a loyal party member who served his government without question. He saw the deaths and brutalizations that his beloved government carried out but he excused it all because he like many party members believed that the communist philosophy was supreme. The hunger and starvation that farmers suffered due to collectivization were not unknown to him but they were inconvenient truths that he was not ready to deal with, so he ignored them. But Bibikov did not just ignore the atrocities, he also benefited directly by being a minion of the state, living in a beautiful house, buying foreign goods and taking vacations in beautiful sanatoriums. Unfortunately for Bibikov, he later sides with Sergei Kirov who was seen by many at the time as Stalin's heir apparent. Bibikov like many who took this stand thought that Stalin was slowly going to step down and did not realize that their stance would eventually lead to their demise. Kirov dies quite unexpectedly and all his supporters realize that they are in hot water. But Stalin like the master manipulator he was, does not take any action for awhile. He even promotes some of Kirov's supporters, Bibikov included. Just when some thought it was over, Stalin exacts his revenge and all or most of Kirov's support are dragged into jail, brutalize, tortured and made to confess to conspiracy against their government. Bibikov is one of this number and he is seized while on vacation. His family never sees him again. Left behind are his wife,Martha, and his two young daughters, Lenina and Lyudmila. Their lives are reduced to extreme poverty in a matter of days and eventually Martha is hurled into jail where she remains for a little over a decade. Somewhere in her twenties, Lyudmila meets Mervyn, a diplomat at first and later student. They form a deep attachment and love for each other. But unfortunately for them Mervyn finds himself being recruited by the KGB who think that by wowing him with nice meals, fancy vacations and talk of a better world, he will turn against his government. But when he continuously refuses, he is eventually repatriated. The rest of the book chronicles his fight to marry the woman he loves and the Russian government's refusal to allow this and his own government's ineptitude in offering any help. Through it all, Lyudmila and Mervyn write letters to each other for five years, vowing their love and continued fight to be together. This book is fascinating and the writer is a master storyteller who somehow manages to keep all of the story interesting. Matthews family history is the history of Russia and a testament to cold war politics. I could not put this book down and every page was a discovery. I was saddened by the end but the facts of it I will leave the reader to discover on their own. I highly recommend this great book.