Stalin's Children

British historian and journalist Owen Matthew’s memoir, Stalin’s Children: Three Generations of Love and War (2008), is part mystery and part love story. Matthew’s grandfather, Boris Bibikov, championed Stalin’s communist vision and led efforts to realize it in Ukraine. In 1937, he was taken from his home by party officials and never seen again. Years later, his younger daughter, Lyudmila, met Mervyn Matthews, a young British Russophile studying in Moscow. They fell in love but tangled with state bureaucracy for years before they could marry. In the 1990s, Owen Matthews, their son, returned to Moscow as a journalist and uncovered the truth about his grandfather’s fate and his own history.

Born in the Crimea into a family of some distinction, Boris Bibikov is just beginning his teen years when the Bolshevik Revolution “swept away the old Russia,” ushering in a new era of communist idealism. With slogans such as “Peace, Land, and Bread,” the new ruling Party promises a future of prosperity for all, and young Boris is eager to advance their objectives. He enrolls in the Higher Party school, where he receives “training in theoretical Marxist-Leninism and the rudiments of agitation and propaganda,” and, at age 21, becomes a card-carrying member of the Party.

Ambitious “to serve the Revolution” and rise in the Party ranks, Boris heads to Kurman Kimilchi for his first assignment: supervising a newly collectivized tomato farm. His work “in the dusty summer fields” might fall short of the momentous responsibilities he had imagined for himself, but it does introduce him to his future wife, Martha Shcherbak, an itinerant field worker from a poor Ukrainian village. Because of her poverty, “Martha and Boris’s liaison was a revolutionary marriage. He was a fast-rising and educated member of the revolutionary elite, she a simple farm girl with impeccable proletarian credentials.”



In 1929, under the leadership of Josef Stalin, “the Sixteenth Communist Party Conference approved the first Five Year Plan for the Development of the People’s Economy.” A key part of the plan involves bundling the peasants’ small-scale, individual farms into “vast” collective fields, thereby transforming “the countryside into a ‘grain factory.’” Unfortunately, most peasants do not want to surrender their land, nor do they buy into the Communist ideology, which has limited appeal outside of urban areas. To “turn the muzhik, the peasant man, into a Communist,” the Party plans to relocate as many as possible to cities and offset the lost agricultural labor force with 100,000 tractors. As the number of tractors stands at just five in all of Ukraine, “Stalin personally ordered two giant tractor factories built in … south-central Russia—one in Kharkov, in the Ukraine, the empire’s breadbasket.”

Boris is dispatched to Kharkov to preside over the construction of the tractor factory. “A fanatic of the new morality,” he urges his men to work with spirit and speed, posting in the bathroom the words, “Lads, let's fulfill the Plan!” The enormous factory rises in just 18 months, and the first tractor rolls out in 1931. Meanwhile, the peasants are not cooperating with the program of forced collectivization. The Party deploys armed forces to the countryside, leading to bloodshed and, afterward, famine, as the collectivized farming operations fail. No amount of tractor power can rescue the 1931 harvest, and the masses starve. When the 17th Party Conference convenes, many members, including Boris, express support for Sergei Kirov, who calls for collectivizing at a slower pace. Stalin has Kirov shot, and one by one, those who supported him disappear, as does Boris, in a black car, never to return.

Boris’s wife, Martha, is sent to a gulag and their daughters, Lenina (12) and Lyudmila (3), are placed in an orphanage. The girls won’t see their mother again for 11 years. During that time, they are separated; tuberculosis cripples Lyudmila; WWII occurs; Lyudmila escapes the Germans on a barge, and the sisters miraculously reunite at an orphan camp in the Urals.



Although frail, Lyudmila is “a dynamo of emotional energy” with a formidable intellect. In 1963, while studying at Moscow University, Lyudmila meets Mervyn Matthews, an Oxford student who is working at the British embassy. Both have endured traumatic childhoods and are immediately drawn to one another. Just as Mervyn’s “joyless” upbringing inspires Lyudmila with pity and a desire to make his “life rich and happy,” so Mervyn admits, “She’d had such a miserable life I wanted to give her a decent deal.” They are soon making arrangements to marry.

During Mervyn’s time in Moscow, the KGB has been trying to recruit him. When he finally, unequivocally refuses, he is deported from the country, leaving Lyudmila standing at the altar, so to speak. The Kremlin denies her a visa to go to England, and, for the next six years, Mervyn lobbies every conceivable public official to get Lyudmila out of the Soviet Union. His career suffers as he wages this campaign, and he loses his position at Oxford when he corners a visiting scholar to plead Lyudmila’s case. In 1969, Mervyn’s dogged perseverance pays off. Lyudmila receives her visa as part of a package deal the Kremlin negotiates with Britain to extradite two Soviet spies.

Although Mervyn had managed to slip into the Soviet Union several times to see Lyudmila during their long separation, they sustained—even enflamed—their romance with frequent, passionate letters. Owen Matthews includes passages from his parents’ love letters in his narrative, noting, “The letters are charged with loss, and loneliness, and with a love so great, my mother wrote, ‘that it can move mountains and turn the world on its axis.’” Once they are reunited in London, and their thwarted love no longer requires “moving mountains,” their passion cools. Matthews remembers his parents’ relationship as brittle and antagonistic.



Matthews punctuates his family biography with memories of his childhood and his trips to Russia. He learned Russian from his mother, and, during the 1990s, worked as a young journalist in Moscow. In 1995, after the declassification of Boris’s KGB file, Matthews read the 260-page record charting his “grandfather’s progress from life to death at the hands of Stalin’s secret police, the NKDV.” Although Boris was a Party loyalist to the end, he was swept up in Stalin’s purge of accused dissidents. Included in his file is his signed confession to counter-revolutionary activities (“apparently written under torture”), as well as a form “verifying that the sentence of death had been carried out.”

Stalin’s Children was shortlisted for three separate 2008 literary prizes: The Guardian First Books Award, the Orwell Prize, and France’s Prix Medicis Etranger.