Stalin's Children

On a calm mid-summer day in 1937, a black car pulled up to the peaceful household of the Bibikov family. Boris, the father, quickly kissed his two daughters goodbye and disappeared inside the car. His family never saw him again. His wife would later vanish, leaving the young Lyudmila and Lenina alone to drift across the vast Russian landscape as the Wehrmacht advanced. Years later, Owen's father, Mervyn, moved to Russia to work for the British embassy after a childhood in Wales dreaming of Russia. He fell in with the KBG, and in love with Lyudmila, and before he could disentangle himself from the former he was ordered to leave the country. Thus began a six-year separation with love letters flying from all corners of the world as Mervyn tried desperately to get Lyudmila out of Russia. Decades on from these events, Owen Matthews pieces together the files that record the life and death of his grandfather at the hands of Stalin's secret police, and the highly-wrought love letters that fuelled his parents' Cold War love-affair. Interspersed with the story of his family is his own journey as a young reporter in nineties Moscow, a world of anarchy, death and drugs.