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Stalin's Children: Three Generations of Love, War, and Survival (2008)

by Owen Matthews

Other authors: See the other authors section.

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2732796,217 (3.67)21
On a midsummer day in 1937, Boris Bibikov kissed his two daughters goodbye and disappeared. One of those girls, Lyudmila, was to fall in love with a tall young foreigner in Moscow at the height of the Cold War and embark on a dangerous and passionate affair. Decades later, a reporter in nineties Moscow, her son Owen Matthews pieces together his grandfather's passage through the harrowing world of Stalin's purges, and tells the story of his parents' Cold War love affair through their heartbreaking letters and memories. Stalin's Children is a raw, vivid memoir about a young man's struggle to understand his parents' lives and the history of the strange country in which they lived.… (more)
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English (22)  Dutch (2)  Norwegian (2)  French (1)  German (1)  All languages (28)
Showing 1-5 of 22 (next | show all)
This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
In Stalin's Children, British journalist Owen Matthews traces his family's deep involvement twentieth-century Russia back several generations. His maternal grandfather was a rising star in pre-Stalin Soviet Russia, and imprisonment and subsequent execution by the KGB. Matthews's mother struggled to survive after her mother was also imprisoned, but eventually met a nice Welsh man and decided to get married...only to wait eight years as Matthews's father was barred repeatedly from entering Russia.

Matthews ties in his own experience as a young man in post-Cold War Russia. The book doesn't have a really tight structure, but it works wonderfully. It's captivating, and is a love letter of sorts to the author's parents, and the country and people who are inextricably linked to his family's history. ( )
  wordsampersand | Jan 24, 2013 |
This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
I found the historical aspects of the book to be fascinating, but it is not the fastest paced book I have ever read. Interesting, but took awhile to plow through. ( )
  yankeesfan1 | Nov 14, 2011 |
This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
Stalin's Children is a memoir that follows the author's family from his maternal grandparents caught up in Stalin's purges, to his English father's efforts to reunite with his mother during the height of the Cold War, to his own experiences living in Moscow as a journalist during the fall of the Soviets and the subsequent Chechen war. Through their stories, mainly the lives of his mother and father, their courtship and bureaucratic struggles to be together, Matthews shows how the global politics of WWII and the Cold War effected the personal lives of common people living in Russia.

I found the story of his parents to be compelling and heart-wrenching, even though I knew generally how it would end (the author was born, after all), and the story of his grandparents and early life his mother and aunt under Stalin to be equally interesting, but the interjections of the author's own life and experiences in Moscow were too disjointed and random to be interesting. I believe the intention was to draw parallels between his experiences in Moscow in the 90's with that of his parents, but they lacked the narrative quality of the rest of the arc and I found them to be distracting. However, these stories amount to less than ten percent of the book, so they do not detract too much from the rest of the book.

This is not a book that will teach you about the global politics and high level machinations of the Soviet system through the twentieth century, but if one is already familiar with the geopolitics of the time, it will give you insight into how those politics effected the personal lives of the people living in Moscow during that time. All in all a very compelling read. ( )
  craigim | Aug 10, 2010 |
Owen Matthews's book is a history of Russia from the 1930s on, as shown through three generations of his family. The title, I think, is somewhat misleading. His grandfather, a loyal-Party worker was swept up in Stalin's purges, never to be seen again. His story and that of his wife and two daughters was fascinating reading. But when the story moved forward to daughter Mila's romance with Mervyn Matthews (Owen's parents), I found their story of fighting bureaucracy in the 1960s much less interesting. The third generation, represented by Owen Matthews, himself, in Russia in the 1990s, struck me as even less interesting. I've decided to read further about Stalin and Russia's role in World War II, topics that, based on this book, I think will be of much more interest to me. "Stalin's Children" has a good selection of photos of many of the people involved. ( )
  y2pk | Jul 18, 2010 |
This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
"Stalin's Children" is an incredible account encompassing three generations. I didn't really know too much about the time or place, but I was utterly fascinated. Owen Matthews is a wonderful storyteller.
  Judsia | Jul 12, 2010 |
Showing 1-5 of 22 (next | show all)
Tre generasjoner i krig og kjærlighet 1900-tallet er historie, og det blir produsert mange bøker som tar utgangspunkt i det 20. århundret. Ei av disse er "Barn av Stalin". Owen Matthews er født på begynnelsen av 1970-tallet, men rakk å utrette mye før vi gikk over i et nytt århundre. Han har jobbet som journalist og er i dag leder for magasinet Newsweeks kontor i Moskva. I boka "Barn av Stalin" presenterer han 1900-tallets Sovjetunionen, den kalde krigen og de elleville 1990-årene i Moskva ved å fortelle historiene om sine besteforeldre, foreldre og om sitt eget liv.

added by annek49 | editNRK, Ole Jan Larsen (Feb 5, 2009)
 
Call it irrationality, call it Russian maximalism, but the letters, papers and confidences Matthews inhabits in “Stalin’s Children” rehabilitate all the generations they touch — including his own — showing how their times shaped their choices.
 
Owen Matthews has an extraordinary story to tell, spanning three generations of his own family, all caught up with the cataclysmic events of Russia in the 20th century.
 

» Add other authors (3 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Owen Matthewsprimary authorall editionscalculated
Moody, PaulineTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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The hand that signed the paper felled a city . . .
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country.

Dylan Thomas
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To my parents
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Information from the Dutch Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to your language.
Op een kastplank in een kelder in het voormalige hoofdkwartier van de KGB in Tsjernigov, in het gebied van de zwarte aarde in het hart van de Oekraïne, ligt een dik dossier in een map van verbrokkelend bruin karton.
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On a midsummer day in 1937, Boris Bibikov kissed his two daughters goodbye and disappeared. One of those girls, Lyudmila, was to fall in love with a tall young foreigner in Moscow at the height of the Cold War and embark on a dangerous and passionate affair. Decades later, a reporter in nineties Moscow, her son Owen Matthews pieces together his grandfather's passage through the harrowing world of Stalin's purges, and tells the story of his parents' Cold War love affair through their heartbreaking letters and memories. Stalin's Children is a raw, vivid memoir about a young man's struggle to understand his parents' lives and the history of the strange country in which they lived.

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