Stalin's children : three generations of love, war and survival

Author / Creator

Matthews, Owen

Available as

Physical

Summary

"On a midsummer day in 1937, a black car pulled up to a house in Chernigov, in the heart of the Ukraine. Boris Bibikov - author Owen Matthews's grandfather - kissed his wife and two young daughters...

"On a midsummer day in 1937, a black car pulled up to a house in Chernigov, in the heart of the Ukraine. Boris Bibikov - author Owen Matthews's grandfather - kissed his wife and two young daughters good-bye and disappeared inside the car. His family never saw him again, for, though they would only find out much later, he had been caught up in one of Josef Stalin's purges. His wife would soon vanish as well, leaving Lyudmila (then three) and Lenina (twelve) 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 met and fell in love with Lyudmila, but also fell afoul of the KGB, and 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 - Lyudmila and Mervyn's oldest child, and then a young journalist in Russia himself - came upon his grandfather's KGB file recording his "progress from life to death at the hands of Stalin's secret police." Inspired 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."--BOOK JACKET.

Show More