Most writers would do something quite unspeakable to inherit the kind of
material Owen Matthews has here. But there is no begrudging him. In Stalin's
Children he has written a superb chronicle of the 20th-century Soviet Union,
seen through the eyes of his parents and grandparents: a Russian Wild Swans.
Matthews's maternal grandfather was Commissar Boris Bibikov, a good party man
and loyal servant of the people, who was executed in Stalin's purges of
1937, for no obvious reason. Lyudmila (Mila), Matthews's mother, was born in
1934. When her father was arrested and disappeared into the Stalinist prison
system (they didn't know he had been executed until years later) and their
mother was packed off to the Gulag in December of the same year, she and her
sister Lenina, eight years her senior, effectively became orphans, and a
childhood of almost unimaginable hardship began. In comparison, says
Matthews, his cosseted European contemporaries who complain of “parental
indifference, spousal cruelty or personal failure” raise only a sardonic
smile. A powerful subtext of the book, subtle but unmistakable, is: You
think you've had a hard time of it? Listen to my mother's story - then shut
up and be grateful.
After their mother's arrest, the two girls were sent to a prison for underage
offenders, locked in a cell with straw on the floor and a barking guard dog
outside. Lyudmila was three. Later they were transferred to an orphanage
where every other child in Lyudmila's dormitory died of TB. She walked three
miles to school daily, and scrubbed floors in exchange for smoked pig fat,
sugar and apples. By the end of 1938, the bones in her right leg had
half-rotted from TB. In 1941, Barbarossa began. As the Nazis invaded, the
children were put to digging trenches in the black earth, and then fled down
the Dniepr on rafts, while artillery barrages lit up the night sky. Later
they travelled in carts, clutching branches for camouflage so that the
German planes wouldn't strafe them on the road, “trundling eastwards into
the emptiness of the Volga steppes”.
They spent the winter in a snowbound village, eating dry ears of corn filched
from the barns. “Day and night, horse carts trundled through the village
full of horribly injured soldiers, covered in blood, some missing limbs.”
Later, they ate steppe grass mixed with salt. Aged nine, on her
half-crippled legs, the right fully six inches shorter than the left,
Lyudmila took her classmates on 16-mile walks to find berries, belting out
Young Pioneer songs. She became skipping champion of her class, organised
lice checks for the other children, and led singing sessions and games of
hopscotch. Rather than seeing herself as a victim, she felt gratitude simply
for being alive, when so many others had died.
In 1964, Mila met Mervyn Matthews, a young Welshman and Russophile, who was
working at the British embassy, and they fell in love. The KGB told Mervyn
that if he agreed to work for them, he and Mila could marry. Mervyn refused.
In the same situation, admits Matthews, “I would have considered the cause
of my personal happiness supreme above all others.” But Mervyn, a man of his
time as his son is of his, kept his honour, and was expelled from the Soviet
Union. He spent five long bleak years fighting for Mila to join him in
England. Their letters from this time have survived, and their son finds
himself “overwhelmed by admiration and love” on rereading them. They are
beautifully written and desperately moving, Mila's especially. She writes
that “life is so cold and orphan-like since you left...This is the cry of my
love...My love is stronger than their hate...My unending, deep, warm and
eternally sad love for you...light and beautiful but burningly
painful...Wait for me, wait until the snows have gone, wait until everyone
else has stopped waiting, wait”.
Finally, in 1969, she was allowed to leave. They were reunited, the sweet,
agonising years of romantic separation and letter writing were over, and the
quotidian business of the married state began. It was not without its
problems. London was chilly and damp, “worse than Moscow”, and so were the
English.
But Mila and Mervyn endured and flourished. In many ways, this book is a son's
hymn of praise to his mother, and what a magnificently visual portrait he
paints of her: this tiny, undefeated woman, still Russian to her fingertips,
presiding over dinner parties in her London flat, “ferociously witty and
intelligent”, sitting sideways because of her damaged bones, “pronouncing
her opinions with unfashionable certainty”, discussing books with passion,
scorning Nabokov, praising Kharms, “utterly at home in the dense kasbah of
her country's literature”, “dismissive hand-waves interspersed with gasps of
admiration and hands rapturously clasped”. And then sometimes moving her
guests to tears with a single anecdote from her childhood.
All the cruelty and misery chronicled here would scarcely be bearable if it
weren't for the countervailing qualities of courage, honour and love. Some
of the stories will stay with me forever, not least that of how Mila's
sister Lenina got married. At the start of the war, she fell in love with a
smiling, handsome young captain called Sasha, and after two weeks of
hurried, war-shadowed courtship, they became engaged. Then he returned to
the front. Near Smolensk, his car hit an anti-tank mine and his leg was
shredded. Convinced that Lenina deserved better than he could now give her,
he wrote to her saying he had been burnt and horribly disfigured, and that
she must marry someone else. Noble enough: but her response was equal to it.
She hurried immediately to the huge military hospital at Ivanovo, still
believing he was horribly disfigured but unshaken in her love, only to find
him standing there in the hospital yard, on crutches, one-legged, but as
handsome as ever. She was 19, he was 26. They were married for 36 years.
Stalin's Children by Owen Matthews
Bloomsbury £17.99 pp308 Buy
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