Stalin's Children: Three Generations of Love and War
by Owen Matthews
Bloomsbury £17.99, pp320
Coversations with elderly Russians often involve a jolt of humility. Suddenly, they mention how they survived the siege of Leningrad or lost an uncle in the purges, some casual detail that can make a Western listener feel hopelessly pampered and naive. Owen Matthews grew up amid such memories of otherworldly hardship, but also with his parents' near-miraculous love story.
His grandfather Boris was a senior communist in the Ukraine, with all the perks of Stalinist office, and also the perils. He was arrested in the terror of 1937, accused of sabotaging the tractor factory he'd helped to build for the mad five-year plan, tortured and killed. His grandson is clear-eyed about his fate: Boris, Matthews concludes in this gripping family history, was 'a fanatic of the new morality', consumed by the dehumanising creed he believed in. Boris's tough peasant wife was dispatched to hard labour in Kazakhstan.
Their younger daughter, Lyudmila, or Mila, was three. She wound up in an orphanage where the inmates were taught to chant: 'Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for a happy childhood.' During the Great Patriotic War, she hid in forests, escaped the Germans on a raft, faced malnourishment and disease. She lost her older sister, but found her again, amazingly, in a camp in the Urals. After 11 years, their mother came back, but it was one of those pitiful Russian reunions that were almost as terrible in their way as exile.
So Mila had an unimaginably tragic - but also normal - Russian childhood. Her next separation was less routine. Mervyn Matthews, the author's father, grew up in Swansea, the son of a boozy First World War veteran and a fallen woman. His was a cold, loveless upbringing, similar to Mila's emotionally, if not in its degree of suffering. He took up Russian, made it to Oxford and then to Moscow, as a student and a junior in the embassy. They met in 1963, when Mila was living in a Moscow kommunalka (communal apartment). Nine months later, having rebuffed the KGB's efforts to recruit him, Mervyn was thrown out. Naturally, Mila couldn't follow him.
It is not giving anything away - since the author and the book exist - to say that they were eventually reunited too, after a campaign by Matthews senior involving heroic resilience and massive personal sacrifices. Mila's aim, she wrote, was to 'show this avenging eagle, this ravenous predator, that my love is stronger than their hate'.
The author weaves in some staccato reflections on the Russia he discovered when, in 1995, he moved to Moscow as a young journalist. He writes amusingly about the Western bankers and mountebanks, whom the city sucked in, and the monster of cynical hedonism and injustice that it became. He also relates some of the ways in which Russia hasn't changed. He finds echoes of his parents' experiences in post-Soviet prisons, the police and bureaucracy and in the Kremlin's brutal war in Chechnya.
But it's his parents' letters to each other that are the book's main attraction. Their affair, Mila declares, is 'something wonderful and painful at the same time ... light and beautiful but burningly painful'. 'Why don't we just build a hut for ourselves at the end of the world,' she asks in 1966, 'far from all the evil and cruelty and hatred?' Gradually, however, the letters supersede reality and the short relationship that sparked them. Afterwards, 'living with each other as real human beings', Matthews records, was an unglamorous challenge, with its own disappointments.
This fascinating book is not a footnote to Soviet history: it is Soviet history, one of the millions of private tales of evil and astonishing endurance that make up the awful whole.
· Andrew Miller is a former Moscow correspondent of the Economist and author of The Earl of Petticoat Lane
