Super Short Summary

Owen Matthews' memoir Stalin’s Children: Three Generations of Love and War tells the story of his family, beginning with his grandfather, Boris Bibikov, who was a fervent supporter of Stalinist communism in Ukraine and was executed during the Great Purge. His daughter, Lyudmila, survived the turmoil of WWII, escaped German forces, met British student Mervyn Matthews in Moscow, and fought against bureaucracy to marry him. Owen Matthews, their son, later uncovered his family's history and his grandfather’s fate while working as a journalist in Moscow. The book includes distressing themes such as political persecution, forced labor, and family separation.