Stalin's Children

This memoir by Owen Matthews, born in 1971 to an English father and Russian mother, is at its best in its telling of the life of the author's maternal grandfather, Boris Bibikov, an upstanding and patriotic Soviet who ran a tractor factory in the 1930s only to be accused of Trotskyite tendencies and executed during the Terror. The harrowing tale of Bibikov's two daughters, separated by war but united in privation, who eventually, miraculously, reunite, is also well told. Matthews spends a good deal of the second half of the book on an account of his parents' efforts to reunite across the Iron Curtain, a half-decade epistolary love story that is heightened by extensive quoting from the letters. Matthews' own life, as a journalist in post-Communist Russia, is not particularly remarkable, but even in these sections, as he does in the rest of the book, the author sheds light on the Russian character. Matthews quotes Solzhenitsyn: "The line dividing good from evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" In a more prosaic sense, whenever I think of the Russian character, I think of the anecdote I read somewhere that if a Russian is late to an appointment, he will walk slower.