Stalin's Children: Three Generations of Love, War, and Survival | 
 enlarge | Author: Owen Matthews
Publisher: Walker & Company
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
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Rating:  28 reviews
Sales Rank: 105293
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.3
ISBN: 0802717144
Dewey Decimal Number: 947.08420922
EAN: 9780802717146
ASIN: 0802717144
Publication Date: September 16, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
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 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.” Stimulated 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. “I came to Russia to get away from my parents,” writes Matthews. “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.”
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| Customer Reviews: Read 23 more reviews...
 A Personal Journey January 5, 2009
Owen Matthews' enthralling contribution, Stalin's Children, is ostensibly the author's personal journey - excavating his family history (his father married a Russian in the 1960s). But, in the process, he unearths everyday Stalinist reality, showing the very graphic and personal effects of the events and decisions Khlevniuk writes about in Master of the House: Stalin and His Inner Circle (The Yale-Hoover Series on Stalin, Stalinism, and the Cold War) - in particular the infamous 1934 "Congress of Victors" and the murder of Kirov. Two things make Matthews' tale truly engaging. First are his narrative leaps back and forth in time, paralleling the Russian experiences of his father and grandfather with his own as a Moscow Times reporter in the 1990s. It brings the stories home and makes the past all the more palpable. And sets your head nodding when he makes passing comments like, "The Wannsee memorandum of 1942 which mapped out the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem is more famous - but the Soviet Communist Party's condemnation of the kulaks to extermination was to prove twice as deadly." Second, is his keen reportorial eye:
The investigator appointed to the case was Svetlana Timofeyevna,
a Lieutenant-Colonel of the Moscow Criminal Investigation
Department. She was a confident and matronly woman who sized
me up with a shameless, penetrating stare, well used to separating
men into wimps and loudmouths. She was one of those portly, invincible,
middle-aged Russian women, whose kind lurked like
Dobermans in the front office of all Russia's great men; they ruled
ticket offices and lorded it over hotel reception desks.
One of the most wonderful books I've read in a long time January 2, 2009
Since taking a class during college on Russian folklore, I have been intrigued by the history of Russia and the former Soviet Union. It has always struck me as profoundly proud, wonderfully fascinating, and, perhaps above all, deeply sad. Owen Matthews's book about his family's history with the former Soviet Union is all of the above.
Matthews is a powerful storyteller and has an amazing story to tell. He artfully weaves a deeply powerful and interesting narrative, moving backward and forward through roughly 80 years of a family history that intersects with the history of the world at large. He does a wonderful job of placing his own family's background deep in the context of the former Soviet Union; his grandfather, a Party higher-up who ended up being arrested and executed in the late 1930s, was around for the beginning of the Soviet Union, while Matthews was there to witness the fall and the immediate aftermath. All that happened in between, including the incredible tale of his parents' love-affair-turned-national-incident, creates a story that is heartbreaking and deeply engaging. I was hardly able to put the book down, and there were points in the story where I was moved to tears.
Matthews does the best job in describing the entire story with gritty realism. Nothing is sugarcoated, as nothing should be when describing the brutality the Russian people underwent during the first years of the Soviet Union and the ensuing years of Communist rule. Despite what happened to his family, however, he maintains a fairly nonjudgmental attitude, giving only the facts and seeming to take his own personal feelings out of the mix.
This book is well worth reading--the reader is in for a great history of the USSR, but an incredibly engaging one in which the people involved become deeply human, rather than just a jumble of statistics. Definitely one of the best I have read in a very long time.
Life in the Soviet Union/Russia through foreign eyes November 27, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Somehow I expected something more. This book is more 'literature' than 'history.' The metaphors and similes are nauseating more often than not and the ideas put into people's minds, including the authors thoughts of what they must have been 'feeling,' 'thinking,' in the midst of 'understanding,' etc seem like a waste of time and space since we'll never know what they truly were thinking and/or feeling. The author is obviously new to Soviet history, his rapid and general descriptions of what was going on there in the late 1920s and early 1930s speak volumes, including his thoughts on the famine of the early 30s, which occurred throughout the Soviet Union. For example, the author explains that in December of 1932 internal passports were introduced "in an effort to stem the exodus of the starving into the cities" (pg. 40) What isn't discuss is the fact that starving peasants streaming into the cities would only make the food shortages in cities THAT much worse. While it is true that collectivization policies were brutal, as was the dekulakization campaign, the author forgets all the resistance that the Soviets encountered from the peasants in the countryside. This was not a smooth process or transition on the part of the Soviets, but a bloody affair for all sides. I wasn't surprised to find a bibliography in the book, but I was surprised that no footnotes were used. Quite a bit of the information offered is interesting in and of itself in regards to the history of the Soviet Union, but where did it come from?
The author getting to see his grandfather's (Bibikov's) NKVD file was an enlightening story. It was interested to see who implicated whom, and as I expected, his grandfather, after days of what we can only presume were filled with torture, finally implicates his co-workers and they in turn, when interrogated, implicate him. This becomes a common theme throughout the purges as those being interrogated, if they cannot endure it, implicate everyone they can think of, and they in turn do the same. This is one of the reasons for why the purges become so widespread. Even more interesting was that within the same file was contained information about the men who had tortured and interrogated Bibikov, they were all dead within a year. Something few like to remember, or know, about the Soviet Union is that it routinely eliminated those doing the interrogations and torture. This mainly occurs when the heads of the NKVD are changed and they 'cleanse' those put in charge by those they are replacing. There are quite a few touching, at times heart rendering, scenes throughout the Second World War period which the authors describes; the chaos of the times, the wounded Red Army men, retreat, Stalingrad, women digging anti-tank ditches, orphanages, etc. After the war is over the author's grandmother, who was imprisoned for 11 years in a GULag camp in Kazakhstan, comes to live with one of her daughters, the author's aunt, in Moscow. What follows can only be described as a tragedy. Her treatment of her children is simply inhumane at times, she lashes out at them, throws household objects at them, and her daughter and husband endure it all. Few held onto their sanity and human decency while enduring GULag life. It is hard to blame a woman who has lived through more than ten years of such an existence for her actions, some can only endure and wait for it to end, in one way or another.
The above covers a little less than half the book. The rest deals with the author's parents, largely, through their letters to each other. The reader is also told how his father arrived in Moscow (and why) as well as his travels throughout the Soviet Union, how a KGB agent tried to recruit him, how his parents met, who their friends were, etc. And, again, more stories of visits and living in Russia by the author himself. All interesting in their own way, especially in regards to how foreigners viewed Russia and vice versa. Overall an good book which moves along quickly enough but at times offers too much 'literary flare' (and takes artistic license) for my liking.
The Years of Stalin on a Personal Level November 2, 2008
The years of terror and anguish under Josef Stalin's rule have been described in increasingly vivid detail since the fall of the USSR, and seemingly covered from every angle by now. But Owen Matthews' book "Stalin's Children" finds just one more angle, a new one, and makes the years of the purges come alive on a personal level.
"Stalin's Children" chronicles Matthews' mother's family saga and the Matthews family's relationship with Russia. From a Bolshevik grandfather purged in the 1930s to an orphaned mother who suffered greatly during the Great Patriotic War and to an impossible love story in the 1960s, Matthews demonstrates how the past does determine the future sometimes and how an event in the history books played out and affected one family in the Soviet Union. The details are sometimes heartbreaking.
The book meanders some towards the end with the recounting of the post-Soviet thief's bacchanalia in Russia, but overall Owen Matthews' work is commendable for illuminating the dark past from a most personal viewpoint. Very much worth the reader's time.
 Moving Memoir October 23, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
As memoirs go, this chronicle of 3 generations of a Russian family allmost destroyed by Stalin's purges is a good one. Unfortunately, the most riveting parts of the tale occur in the first part of the book where the family patriarch is destroyed and the rest of the family is scattered and emotionally damaged, left to try to survive the German invasion. Once the author starts to talk about his English father and his own life in the USSR, the book hits a dry patch. The thwarted romance between his father and his Russian mother who battle long odds to be together is moving, but could've been better edited. Worth reading for Russianophiles and history buffs. Since this is the author's own family, it gives the story an extra dose of emotion for the reader...
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