Global Context (Russia): Stalin’s Children
By: Bruce Riley Ashford
It was my privilege to live in Russia from 1998-2000 and that is one reason that this book held me captive from the very first page. But that is not the only reason. Stalin’s Children is a masterful work of historical autobiography, telling the tale of three generations of love, war, and survival. It is told from the perspective of Owen Matthews, whose grandfather and father are the central characters of this story. Matthews, who is the Bureau Chief for Newsweek in Moscow, draws upon the voluminous correspondence of his parents, access to KGB files, and his own lived experience of Russia, giving us not only a tale of three generations of his family, but also an ironic, enlightening, and ultimately bleak portrayal of the last seven decades of life in Russia.
“This is a story about Russia and my family,” writes Matthews, “about a place which made us and inspired us and very nearly broke us. And it is ultimately a story about escape, about how we all escaped from Russia, even though all of us-even my father, a Welshman who has no Russian blood, even me, who grew up in England-still carry something of Russia inside ourselves, infecting our blood like a fever.“
Stalin’s Children is a story in three acts. The first act tells the story of the author’s maternal grandfather, Boris Bibikov, a privileged Communist party leader in Ukraine, who was a real (albeit minor) enemy of Stalin and his vision for the USSR. As Matthews tells it, one morning Bibikov kissed his wife and two daughters goodbye, never to return again. Bibikov’s wife, Martha, soon disappeared also (imprisoned in the Gulag), leaving their two little girls, Lyudmila and Lenina, to fend for themselves. They became, in a phrase, “Stalin’s children.” The two little girls were separated during the Glorious Russian Patriotic War (Soviet nomenclature for World War II), but were reunited against all odds at the end of the war.
The author paints a bleak picture of this early chapter of Soviet history: “Communists-men like my grandfather-had tried to create a new kind of man, emptying people of their old beliefs and refilling them with civic duty patriotism and docility. But when Communist ideology was stripped away, so its quaint fifties morality also disappeared into the black hole of discarded mythologies. People put their faith in television healers, Japanese apocalyptic cults, even in the jealous old God of Orthodoxy. But more profound than any of Russia’s other, new-found faiths, was an absolute, bottomless nihilism. Suddenly there were no rules, no holds barred, and everything went for those bold and ruthless enough to go out and grab as much as they could.” Rather than creating a New Communist Man, and nourishing a new society devoid of societal ills, the Communist regime produced a police state and a Gulag with millions of victims, and fostered a chaotic and nihilistic society and culture.
The second act picks up some twenty five years after the disappearance of Bibikov and is, essentially, a love story. Matthews’ father, Mervyn, grew up in London dreaming of moving to Russia and soon fulfilled his dream by moving to Russia to become a British embassy staffer in Moscow. While in Moscow, he immerses himself in Russian culture, eventually being recruited by the KGB in the 1960s.
At the same time, little Lyudmila has grown up, become an excellent student, and is trying to make the most of her disadvantaged life. In 1963, Mervyn and Lyudmila meet and fall in love. Mervyn, however is thrown out of Russia for the atrocious crime of making a personal sale (although the author makes clear that Mervyn’s true crime is a refusal to be an informant for the KGB). For the next six years, Mervyn worked tirelessly to reunite with Lyudmilla and marry her. He waged an international campaign through the media, friends, and embassy staffers, to reunite with and marry her. Finally, she was allowed to leave the USSR in 1969, and they were married.
The third act picks up with the author Owen Matthews-at that time a young journalist in Russia-discovering Bibikov’s KGB File which recounts in detail the grandfather’s fate at the hands of the KGB. Matthews is able to put together the pieces of his family puzzle, making sense of the parts of the narrative that he already knew. Among other discoveries, he finds the record of his grandfather’s final act: his signature on a confession of treason. The third act is, on the whole, not as exciting as the first two, but nonetheless provides the author with an opportunity to paint a picture of life in Russia at the turn of the 21st century.
I found myself taken in by this story about three generations of the Bibikov/Matthews family. For one thing, it is a well-told story by a man with an eye for detail. Take, for example, his portrayal of Lt. Colonel Timofeyevna: “The investigator appointed to the case was Svetlana Timofeyevna, a Lieutenant-Colonel of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department. She was a confident and matronly woman who sized me up with a shameless, penetrating stare, well used to separating men into wimps and loudmouths. She was one of those portly, invincible, middle-aged Russian women, whose kind lurked like Dobermans in the front office of all Russia’s great men; they ruled ticket offices and lorded it over hotel reception desks.” Now that is hard to top.
But in addition to being a well-told story, it also has stirred up a bit of my own affection for Russia. As Matthews recounts Bibikov’s fate, I cannot help but remember my childhood, when my parents received The Prisoner Bulletin, an underground newsletter that told the fate of pastors and other believers who were sent to the Gulag. I think of the deep faith of these martyrs, many of them Russian Baptists, who believed that the Lord Jesus Christ is better than anything that life could give or that torture and death could take away.
Further, as I worked through the chapters of the book, face to face with a Russian family through the past seven decades of Russian history, I remembered my Russian friends and their families whose warmth and hospitality I will never forget. Matthews’ narrative really is an existential entry into the tragedy of atheistic communism and the nihilism it fostered. The majority of my Russian friends found it hard to believe there exists a just and loving God, and likewise could not imagine that their lives had any real purpose or meaning.
Although Matthews does not communicate the point explicitly, the discerning reader will see that Soviet Communism provided a narrative that was intended to subvert and overthrow biblical religion. It provided a false god (the state) with a false savior, (Marx), false prophets (Lenin, Stalin), and a false church (the Communist Party, whose youth meetings were marked by, inter alia, atheistic hymns and sermons), all of which gave hope of a false eschatological salvation (a “New Heavens and Earth” which would appear when the Communist Man has overthrown class society and lives in Communist utopia).
The result of this fundamental misunderstanding of cosmic history has been nihilism, hedonism, and antinomianism. Matthews points out the ills of the past 70 years of Russian history, stretching from the brutality of Stalin’ purges to the chaos and nihilism of contemporary Russian culture. But perhaps the more significant lesson to be drawn for Western readers is that democratic capitalism, while it may fare better as a political and economic system, fares no better than neo-Marxism as a Savior of mankind, or as an interpretive key for cosmic history. At bottom of cosmic history are not economic, political, or military forces, but rather the Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer of history, and He alone holds history in his hand.
Book: Stalin’s Children (2008)
Author: Owen Matthews
Genre: Historical Autobiography
Length: 308 pp.