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Friday 5 December 2008

Stalin’s Children: Three Generations of Love and War

Through a chink in the Iron Curtain

Michael Bourdeaux on  Owen Matthews’s family biography.

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. Mervyn Matthews and Lyudmila Bibikova fell in love in Moscow in 1963, when he was studying there and she was a brilliant graduate of Moscow State University, then working at the Institute of Marxism and Leninism. They were prevented from marrying the next year when Lyudmila was already in her wedding dress; Mervyn was deported. Their painful attempts, eventually successful, over the next six years to obtain an exit visa for her became one of the causes célèbres in Anglo-Soviet relations of the 1960s.

But this is not even the bare bones of this remarkable book. The first third of it recounts the Bibikovs’ family history, going back beyond the Russian Revolution. Lyudmila’s father, Boris, was a true hero of ‘building communism’ in the 1930s, when he played a leading role in the construction of the Kharkov Tractor Factory, beginning without even the most basic building tools for such a colossal enterprise. Inevitably, in 1937 he was falsely accused of sabotaging his own creation and was liquidated in the Great Purge. In a few pages Owen Matthews recreates the atmosphere of these years in a series of compelling images, taking some of his material from his grandfather, Boris’s, KGB file, to which he eventually gained access at Chernigov in Ukraine.

The love story itself, occupying the central section of the book, is based on verbal memoirs, as well as the huge stack of correspondence between the two separated lovers in the family archive. It is surprising that the censors allowed so many of these through; sensational that Mervyn slipped into Estonia, Leningrad and Moscow, evading the KGB’s monitors on three occasions for clandestine meetings with his fiancée.

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