Stalin’s Children

by Owen Matthews; Bloomsbury 320pp; £17.99 In Stalin's Children, Owen Matthews has written a "Russian Wild Swans", said Christopher Hart in the Sunday Times – a superb chronicle of Russia in the 20th century, seen through the eyes of Matthews's parents and grandparents. His maternal grandfather was Commissar Boris Bibikov, a loyal party man executed in the purges of 1937 because he had briefly backed an opponent of Stalin. His grandmother was sent to a labour camp, and his mother, Lyudmila (Mila), grew up in an orphanage. She was malnourished and TB rotted her right leg so badly that it was left six inches shorter than the other – and that was before the Nazis invaded in 1941. Yet she not only survived, but thrived, cheerfully singing Young Pioneer songs and organising police checks for the other children in her class.

In 1964, she met a young Welshman, Mervyn Matthews, who was studying in Moscow, and they fell in love. The KGB said that if Matthews worked for them, the pair could marry. He refused, and spent "five long, bleak years" fighting for Mila to join him in England – a fight that became a minor cause celebre. "It's not giving anything away to say that they were eventually reunited," said Andrew Miller in the Observer– after all, the author exists, and now lives in Russia himself, having worked there as a journalist since 1995. He "writes amusingly" in this book about today's Moscow and its "hedonism and injustice".

But it is his parents' story – and the letters they wrote to each other every day – that are the real attraction. "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."

"There are many moments of almost unbearable poignancy in Stalin's Children," said Virginia Rounding in the Independent, "but perhaps one of the saddest aspects is the way Mila and Mervyn's great romance seemed to fizzle out once their struggles were finally over." Their enforced separation was painful, but Matthews thinks it was probably the happiest period of their lives. Married life in "a rather dreary England" was something of an anti-climax.

The relationship often faltered, said Matthew Dennison in the Sunday Telegraph: Mervyn lost his job at St Anthony's in Oxford because of his battle with Moscow (the college saw it as bad publicity) and Mila bore the scars of her past. Still, she emerges as a deeply admirable figure. "At its most touching, Stalin's Children is a love letter from a child to a mother – beautifully written and intensely moving."

FIRST POSTED JULY 24, 2008