Stalin's Children: Summary and book reviews of Stalin's Children by Owen Matthews, plus links to an excerpt from Stalin's Children and a biography of Owen Matthews.
Stalin's Children Three Generations of Love, War, and Survival
by Owen Matthews
Hardcover: Sep 2008,
320 pages.
Paperback: Sep 2009,
320 pages.
On a midsummer day in 1937, a black car pulled up to a house in Chernigov, in the heart of the Ukraine. Boris Bibikov - Owen Matthews's grandfather - kissed his wife and two young daughters good-bye and disappeared inside the car. His family never saw him again. His wife would soon vanish as well, leaving Lyudmila and Lenina alone to drift across the vast Russian landscape during World War II . Separated as the Germans advanced in 1941, they were miraculously reunited against all odds at the war's end.
Some twenty-five years later, in the early 1960s, Mervyn Matthews - Owen's father - followed a lifelong passion for Russia and moved to Moscow to work for the British embassy. He fell in and out with the KGB, and despite having fallen in love with Lyudmila, he was summarily deported. For the next six years, Mervyn worked day and night to get Lyudmila out of Russia, and when he finally succeeded, they married.
Decades on from these events, Owen Matthews - then a young journalist himself in Russia - came upon his grandfather's KGB file recording his "progress from life to death at the hands of Stalin's secret police." Excited by its revelations, he has pieced together the tangled and dramatic threads of his family's past and present, making sense of the magnetic pull that has drawn him back to his mother's homeland. Stalin's Children is an indelible portrait of Russia over 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.
The quote featured on the jacket regarding Matthews' inspiration for Stalin's Children is extremely appropriate and neatly summarizes the book's intent. Matthews succeeds admirably in his goal of describing his family's journey from Russia to England and back again, in the process crafting a fascinating history that reads more like a novel than a work of non-fiction. (Reviewed by Kim Kovacs).
Publishers Weekly
Matthews...relates this dramatic tale in understated but lovely prose.
Kirkus Reviews
Lacks the soul-fire of a Doctor Zhivago, but this is a memorable depiction of what Pasternak called Russia's "damned capacity for suffering.
Library Journal
Starred Review. Matthews is a consummate storyteller; that this family history is true makes it all the more enthralling.
The Guardian
Some of Matthews's most vivid pages evoke the children's inconceivably brutal experience during the war, though he is brilliant, too, on what it was like to be one of Stalin's children.
The Times
[A] superb chronicle of the 20th-century Soviet Union, seen through the eyes of his parents and grandparents: a Russian Wild Swans.
The Spectator
Reconstruction of one’s parents’ love story is a rare enough undertaking; success to this extent puts Owen Matthews’s family biography into a special category ..... a remarkable book.
The History of Russia & The Soviet Union during the first half of the
20th Century
The history of Russia and the Soviet Union during the first half of the 20th
century is complex to say the least, characterized by near-constant turmoil. The autocratic
reign of the Tsars came to an end in 1917, sparked by economic hardship
instigated by Russia's involvement in World War I, rapid urban growth, and
the rise of the middle class. Various political parties emerged to vie for
leadership in the ensuing vacuum, with the Bolshevik Party led by Vladimir
Lenin ultimately prevailing. Lenin's death in 1924 led to a power struggle
which left party leadership in the hands of Joseph Stalin.
Stalin's policy of aggressive industrialization led to workers leaving the
farms for employment at the new factories. The result was fewer agricultural
workers producing food, and more industrial workers who needed to be fed. In
addition, the peasants resisted collectivization, destroying assets and
hiding food stores...
In 1946, two brothers and a Jewish girl fall into alignment in Moscow. The fraternal conflict then continues in Norlag, a slave-labor camp above the Arctic Circle, where a tryst in the coveted House of Meetings will haunt all three lovers long after the brothers are released.
Red Plenty is history, it's fiction, it's as ambitious as Sputnik, as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant, and as different from what you were expecting as a glass of Soviet champagne.
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(1148 words).
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