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

By Owen Matthews

Book Overview

A transcendent history/memoir of one family's always passionate, sometimes tragic connection to Russia. On a midsummer day in 1937, a black car pulled up to a house in Chernigov, in the heart of the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802717608
• ISBN13: 9780802717603
• Release Date: September 2009
• Publisher: Walker Books
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 0.9" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Feast of irony

"Stalin's Children" is like one of those massive, three-generation novels full of endless crises, except that it isn't a novel. Had the events, particularly in the generation of author Owen Matthews' mother, occurred anywhere but Russia, they would hardly be believable. Since these were real people, their lives did not fit exactly the images that Americans have of Russians. The patriarch, Boris Bibikov, starts the tale by getting himself shot, with the execution warrant signed by Andrei Vyshinsky himself. But Bibikov was not some hapless innocent swept up in the Purges. He was a Kirovite, and a real, if minor, enemy of Stalin. Even paranoids can have real enemies. Matthews, as a reporter based in Moscow, was able to look at his grandfather's police file. Although Boris Bibikov himself perished, the Bibikovs were net winners under communism, which explains how this book -- and Owen Matthews himself -- came to be. Like all memoirs and histories of the Purges, "Stalin's Children" is skewed by survivor bias. Most of the millions who were shot or frozen left no progeny, and if their police files still exist, no one cares to dig them out. Bibikov's daughters, Lenina and Lyudmila, 12 and 4 when he died, probably would not have survived if not for their uncle Bibikov, a general in the Red Air Force. Lyudmila certainly would not have obtained the advanced literary education that entangled her life with Matthews' father`s. Matthews has a good sense of the situation: the Stalin era could not possibly have been as grim for everyone as it was for Boris Bibikov, and many people -- including, originally, Boris Bibikov -- were pleased with the Revolution. People like the Bibikovs, recruited into the intelligenstia by the Revolution, which would not have happened under the tsars, were both victims and architects. "It is hard to believe these prodigies of industrialization were created by fear alone," Matthews comments. Just so. Despite their incredible suffering, the Bibikovs (and millions more) lived in hope for the future under Communism. For very few was the hope that tsarism would be restored. The little girls survived the war, "Stalin's children," and there remains a picture of them, taken at an orphanage, thanking Stalin for a "happy childhood." It was not happy, and the coincidences that separated, then reunited the sisters would be past accepting in a novel. The second act is less terrible but as bizarre as the first. A poor Welsh boy, recruited into the English intelligentsia, Mervyn Matthews, becomes a Sovietologist, moves to Russia as an early exchange student, meets the charming Lyudmila and the middle portion of this adventure becomes a love story. The tragedy -- much less tragic than the 20 million deaths of the Great Patriotic War but a whacking good yarn nevertheless -- is that the lovers are separated for six years by KGB interference. Neither is willing to give up. "Mila," in particular, had "the idea that the individual could overcome seemi

Stalin's Children Trying to Find Their Way

I seriously doubt that many people have as interesting a family history as Owen Matthews. The book is called "Stalin's Children," and it is apropos to describing the three generations of characters therein. Through a twisting and touching biography of his grandparents' and parents' lives in Russia, Matthews gives us a unique insight into what Stalin- and post-Stalin- Russia was like. First, there is Matthews' grandfather, Boris. He worked for the party and attained a very high rank working on the communal farming project KhTZ. When the project did not turn out as planned, due mainly to gross mismanagement, Russia's leadership got paranoid, and Boris - along with several other top ranking party members - were arrested and jailed in the Gulag. Next, there are the author's parents - Lyudmila and Mervyn. As Lyudmila's parents were jailed, she grew up in state-run orphanages fighting off a deathly illness. Mervyn grew up in lower-class Britian, and was infatuated with Russia. When given a chance to live there, he took it. As a foreigner, he endured constant following by the KGB and by the time he met Lyudmila, he was exiled from Russia for the unpardonable offense of trying to make a private sale! Thus ensues a touching love story of Mervyn's attempts to get Mila out of jeolously guarded Russia. Lastly, there is the author's own recounting of his time in Russia (which is interspersed between sections of his ancestors' stories). His Russia was the quite different and equally chaotic russia of Boris Yeltsin - a country trying to rebuild itself, make new traditions, and forget its brutal past. For a young journalist like Matthews, this Russia was rife with interesting nuances - at once depressed and desperately trying to be happy and normal. "Stalin's Children" is a thrilling ride through three generations in a country trying to find its way. Matthew's prose is artful and he treats his characters with care. In so doing, Matthews teaches a lot about the daily life and attitude of Russians living under and after Stalin. I highly reccomend "Stalin's Children" to both explorers of Russian history and those who are interested in a gripping story.

A Family Split Into East And West

Owen Matthews is an Englishman on his father's side and a Russian on his mother's. In this fascinating history of his mother's family he provides a biography in brief of the Soviet Union and a fine memoir of his own life growing up caught between East and West. The Bibikov family were minor aristocrats in Tsarist Russia. Boris Bibikov, born a few years before the Revolution brought the Bolsheviks to power in Russia, recognized that the only hope he had to survive and flourish in the new world being created by Lenin and his followers was to join it wholeheartedly. Bibikov rose through the ranks of Communist party bureaucracy and appeared to be a high flyer, destined for the highest ranks of Party power. Then, in 1937, he was arrested, tried, and shot for anti-Party activities, another victim of Stalin's paranoia. His wife was arrested shortly after he was, and their two daughters were forced into orphanages. Years later, Bibikov's younger daughter met a British diplomat named Mervyn Matthews, fell in love, and conducted a courtship and engagement by letter for five years until Cold War politics thawed sufficiently to allow her to leave the Soviet Union. As the son of this couple, Owen Matthews grew up in Britain and the United States, with infrequent visits from his mother's relatives and even less frequent trips to the Soviet Union itself. As Matthews grew up in the 1970s and 1980s the Soviet Union began to crumble, and he was eventually able to travel there fairly freely and to investigate the arrest and execution of his grandfather. This is a book I could not put down. I was fascinated by the stories of life inside the Soviet Union and I could understand the attraction and repulsion for the place Matthews still feels. The story of the Bibikovs and the Matthews is in many ways the history of the Soviet Union and its relations with the West in miniature. Now that nearly twenty years have passed since the fall of the Soviet Union and an entire generation has grown up with no memories of the Cold War, stories such as these are even more important to preserve and pass on.

Luminous, Wise and Soulful

I read this little autobiographical and family history offering from Owen Matthews hoping for some insight into the history of the Soviet Union, Russia and Ukraine. Having recently returned from lecturing on law at Kyiv International University, and other schools, I met families in Ukraine much like the Bibikovs--survivors of a century of upheaval under the Soviet and Nazi regimes. I came away with much, much more. Matthews is a writer of rare power and richness. Soulful is the best descriptor of the beautiful prose. Honestly, the closest comparison to this non-fiction work is Richard Powers'Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. The way in which Matthews paints his real-life characters is simply masterful. Other insights: 1. I have not read any history of post-Soviet Russia which captures the essence of the grand dilemma as richly and tellingly as this little vignette of a book. For example, Matthews describes the situation thus: "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." 2. There are few fiction writers with the narrative powers of Matthews. It is, above all, his character descriptions which draw us into the story, which are so powerful they seem living, breathing things. Examples: "There are only two surviving photographs of Boris Bibikov. . . . There is no hint of the man in either picture, only of the man he wanted to be." "She is a big woman, with a powerful voice, and suffers from many, many near-fatal illnesses which she loves to talk about." "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..." "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." Masterful! 3. The most moving aspect of this story are the central themes of escape and recovery. Ultimately, for Matthews and his family, it is the written treasure trove of letters preserved by his parents, which provide the life blood of the family and this work. In his parents' love letters, his mother had written, "Every letter is a piece of our soul, they mustn't get lost... Your letters bring me little pieces of you, of your life, your breath, your beating heart... As our letters travel they take on a magical quality... in that lies their strength...Every line is the blood of my heart, and there is no limit to how much I can pour out."

Wonderfully dark and hopeful

Few writers would begin their family's history with the discovery of a grandfather's final, tragic act: his signature on his (certainly forced) confession of treason: a death warrant. But this is how Stalin's Children begins, and how it continues: a series of tragedies and struggles and powerful excesses, a caravan of dark images only made palatable by the strength and hope of those who endure it. Owen Matthew's grandfather was a privileged communist party leader in the Ukraine, until his party turned on him. Matthew's mother fell in love with his father (a Welsh ambassador in the British embassy in Moscow), and Matthew's himself returned to Russia to become the Moscow bureau chief for Newsweek (which accounts for his excellent, snappy writing). Matthews weaves these three generations together to give us a history of not only his family, but of Russia's recent directionless political and cultural upheaval ("like a quiet implosion...a slow sagging into poverty and confusion"). This is not one of those cheesy, over dramatized "heartwarming tales of love and redemption across generations and continents." This is a stark and often brutal story of cold-war survival and compensation; the love is there, but it makes concessions to the harsh realities of the dark middle of the 20th century. An impressive account of an era largely chronicled by those who experienced it first hand; Matthew's history represents a new generation--the third since WWII--of world war and cold-war autobiographers who are coming to terms with the life and stories that affected their parents and grandparents, reminding us that the terror of war and misguided political idealism does not end once a treaty is signed or an iron curtain falls, but lives on and on in the memories of those they so egregiously affected.