Stalin's Children

Cover Art for 9780802717146, Stalin's Children by Owen Matthews
ISBN: 9780802717146
Publisher: Walker & Company
Published: 16 September, 2008
Format: Hardcover
Language: English

A transcendent history/memoir of one family's always passionate, sometimes tragic connection to Russia.On a midsummer day in 1937, a black car pulled up to a house in Chernigov, in the heart of the Ukraine. Boris Bibikov--Owen Matthews's grandfather--kissed his wife and two young daughters good-bye and disappeared inside the car. His family never saw him again. His wife would soon vanish as well, leaving Lyudmila and Lenina 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 fell in and out with the KGB, and despite having fallen in love with Lyudmila, he 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--then a young journalist himself in Russia--came upon his grandfather's KGB file recording his "progress from life to death at the hands of Stalin's secret police." Stimulated 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. Stalin's Children is a

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