Feminism in Russia - Passport magazine

Ian Mitchell
Owen Matthews’ book, Stalin’s Children,
goes to the heart of the émigré
experience in relation to Russia. It is
subtitled Three Generations of Love, War
and Survival, and each of those generations
had a different experience of émigré
life. Matthews’ mother emigrated to
England, and he emigrated—though on
a less permanent basis—to Russia. His
grandparents in Russia became émigrés
in their own land—at least those who
were not killed by Stalin. The history of
this family is artfully told by interweaving
the stories of the three generations
in a way which ultimately illustrates the
old proverb that it is better to travel
hopefully than to arrive.
There is a subtext, which is that, having
arrived, it is essential not to look
back, lest the road once travelled begins
to seem more attractive than the unavoidable
present. The most successful
mover in this story is Matthews’ mother,
Lyudmilla, who gave hardly a thought to
Russia after she had left it. Her husband,
Mervyn, by contrast, hovered between
looking forward to Russia, back from it,
and then casting his gaze all over the
world when life eventually forced him
to settle in England.
Mervyn is the least contented of all
the characters in this story. Somewhere
between him and Lyudmilla is Matthews
himself, who is currently Moscow
bureau chief for Newsweek. He is married
to a Russian woman, with whom he
has two children. But, perhaps sniffing
the wind (though this is not explained),
his family now lives in Istanbul.
Beyond the text and subtext in this
complex and interesting book is a
lightly-drawn moral: that love is not
necessarily always all that it is cracked
up to be, or at least there needs to be
more than young love continued for a
relationship to last a lifetime. A couple
needs to have something practical in
common, and that is not easy when
they come from cultures as different as
Britain and Russia.
Mervyn came from a poor but respectable
family in Swansea “clinging
desperately to the bottom rung of petitbourgeois
society”. His home life “was
punctuated by screaming rows between
his parents”, which ended in walk-outs.
Mervyn’s mother was a highly-strung
woman who lived entirely for her son. In
later life, “Mervyn was to devote much
energy to getting as far away from her
intense, controlling love as possible.”
After studying Russian at Manchester
University, he was awarded a Fellowship
at Oxford, and shortly afterwards
found himself in Moscow at the Festival
of Students and Youth, which was “an
intoxicating immersion in the world he
had studied so long. Mervyn was so excited
he hardly slept.” Soon after that, he
landed a job at the British Embassy here,
then moved to Moscow State University.
Finally he found himself being entertained
in expensive dachas and taken on
trips to Siberia, all of which turned out to
have been funded by the KGB, who were
hoping to recruit a new agent.
Then he met Lyudmilla. But their plans
to marry were shattered when Mervyn
was expelled from Russia after refusing
to work for the KGB. A long, intense
courtship ensued. Mervyn was a lonely
academic, and he lobbied hard to get
her released from the Soviet Union. But
to no avail. But she was a strong-willed,
single-minded woman who was able to
stand the five years of separation and
uncertainty without faltering in her determination
to marry her sweetheart.
Perhaps this was due to the staggering
hardships of her childhood, in an
originally privileged Communist family
which fell foul of the great purge machine
in 1939, then got in the way of the
Nazi war machine two years later. She
ended up in a Soviet orphanage, emaciated
and ill, but undaunted.
The most unusual aspect of this story—given
that star-crossed lovers are
not uncommon—is what happened
when this dynamic woman arrived
in London, to live with a Sovietologist
who was persona non grata in the
Soviet Union, and who had also managed
to irritate the powers-that-be at
Oxford sufficiently to get himself expelled.
Worse, he had largely lost interest
in Russia. Matthews gives sympathetic
consideration to the problem
of a person who, at a young age, forms
an attachment which ultimately disappoints
him.
Book Review
Don’t Look Back
Stalin’s Children
Owen Matthews
Bloomsbury £8.99
Mervyn is not the only person I have
heard about who fell under the weirdly
exotic spell of the Soviet Union, invested
his whole intellectual life in mastering
the Russian language and Soviet
politics, only to discover twenty years
on that it was a Potemkin exoticism that
lay at the end of his personal rainbow.
This is not a question of what happened
after 1991, it is to do with the
truism that, just as beauty is in the eye
of the beholder, so exoticism is in the
mind of the observer. Mervyn was one
of those who thought the old “Moscow
kitchens”, with their vodka, cucumbers,
tea, philosophy, thick journals and that
sense of cosy, besieged hugger-muggerdom
which Western dining tables
could never match, was something intrinsic
to Russia.
Now that “freedom” has arrived, we
see Russian life is, and in many ways
always was, much the same sort of “sobaka-eat-sobaka”
world of biznismenni
and operators that we have in the
West. In the end, if you subtract the
violence (which was never part of the
ideal anyway), communism amounted
to little more than capitalism without
consumerism. P
April 2011
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