BookBrowse Reviews Stalin's Children by Owen Matthews

BookBrowse:

A transcendent history/memoir of one family's always passionate, sometimes tragic connection to Russia

The quote featured on the jacket regarding Matthews' inspiration for Stalin's Children is extremely appropriate and neatly summarizes the book's intent. Matthews succeeds admirably in his goal of describing his family's journey from Russia to England and back again, in the process crafting a fascinating history that reads more like a novel than a work of non-fiction.

The book chronicles the lives of Matthews' Russian grandparents, aunt, mother, and Welsh father (as well as delving briefly into his own) who were all directly effected by one or more of the multiple political upheavals that characterized much of Russia's 20th century history. Victims of Stalin's Purge and later Communist crackdowns, most of the family somehow managed to survive. Matthews, a one-time war correspondent for Newsweek, relates his family's experiences with a reporter's eye for description and detail, completely drawing his readers into his family's saga.

The narrative comes across as surprisingly objective, particularly when Matthews discusses his male relatives. He says of his grandfather's execution during the Great Purge:

Bibikov himself would have perfectly understood, with his rational mind, as he stood in a cellar or faced a prison wall in his last moments, the logic of his executioners. And perhaps – why not? – he might, if he had met different people in his early days in the Party, found different patrons, have become an executioner himself. Did he not explain away the famine which his Party had brought to the Ukraine as a necessary purging of enemy elements? Did he not consider himself one of the Revolution's chosen, ruled by a higher morality? Bibikov was no innocent, caught by an evil and alien force beyond his comprehension. On the contrary, he was a propagandist, a fanatic of the new morality – the morality which now demanded his life, however pointlessly, for the greater good.

Additionally, Matthews provides a dispassionate account of his emotionally distant relationship with his father Mervyn, blaming neither his father nor himself for the rift. Few authors are able to achieve this sense of balanced reporting while still making a book interesting, particularly when discussing so intimate a subject. Matthews, however, manages to do just that.

The information in Stalin's Children comes from numerous conversations with Matthews' surviving Russian relatives, an enormous amount of research, and the letters written between his mother and father during their six-year separation. Much of the work, too, is based on Matthews' own observations made during his visits to the country, as well as personal knowledge gleaned during the years he lived in Moscow. He attempts to show parallels between his life and that of his father's, bouncing back and forth between the two eras. This is perhaps the only weak part of the book. Readers may find themselves so wrapped up in the father's tale that the switch to the son's is an interruption. Matthews relates more of his own life later in the book, including a particularly harrowing account of reporting from the war in Chechnya. Unfortunately, while it's apparent from his press clippings that Matthews has lived a fairly adventurous life, most of his experiences aren't recorded in Stalin's Children.

Overall, Stalin's Children is a well-written biography about resilient people living in a tense, and dangerous, political climate. Non-fiction readers will want to put this one high on their list.

Photos - Top: Joseph Stalin c.1942. Bottom: The author. Right: Nikolai Yezhov

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in October 2008, and has been updated for the October 2009 edition. Click here to go to this issue.