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.
The final section, recounting the parents’ old age, the decline of their careers and the cooling of their love is heart-rending, but this summary of the contents of Stalin’s Children gives no idea of its quality. Not only does Owen Matthews write with extraordinary vividness (befitting, perhaps, the Moscow bureau chief of Newsweek, which he now is), but his technique is more that of a novelist than a journalist — and a master craftsman at that. The most remarkable feature of the book is a constant cross-cutting between his researches into family history and his own experiences of Russia, beginning when he was a small bilingual child, following in his father’s footsteps in a junior job at the British Embassy four decades earlier. Then he reported the first Chechen War — 13 visits in all, with his (understated) bravery and near-death under Russian helicopter fire. Earlier mentions of the Red Army in the book are inevitably coloured by this experience. For a public schoolboy and Oxford graduate, Russia was originally a place where he did not feel at home, but eventually he too married a Russian wife — and settled to life in Moscow.
There is a psychological journey here, too. Close to his mother, Owen felt distant from his academic father. However, as the book progresses one can sense his admiration for Mervyn growing, culminating in his statement: ‘If I have realised anything in writing this book, it is that my father is a deeply honourable man.’ The author is referring, not only to his father’s single-mindedness in campaigning for his fiancée’s right to emigrate, but also to his utter rejection of numerous blandishments by the KGB to collaborate. Compromise, on the surface, would have made life so much easier.
The establishment comes out of the book badly. To the Foreign Office, Mervyn was a constant irritant. They focussed on exchanging the Krogers, Soviet spies, for Gerald Brooke, the imprisoned British lecturer, who was not a spy. Lyudmila’s exit visa was included in the deal, a shameful blurring of the lines of morality. St Antony’s College, Oxford, receives a negative press, too. A modicum of pastoral concern would have ensured retaining the treasure that was Mervyn Matthews. Instead, they annulled his fellowship because of occasional outbursts brought on by his constant frustration at the long-running non-success of his campaign for Lyudmila.
Stalin’s Children, when translated, should enter the canon of Russian literature, too. Readers there, as well as here, will be moved by it.
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