A Year of Soviet Studies

      Teaching at North Park University has a lot of benefits. I love being in the classroom. Being around young people keep me young at heart and gives me a wonderful perspective on what young folks are really like. I really enjoy the schedule that provides for lots of free time. I am free to improve my courses, do research, and to write. I am also “free” to squander that time. It has been a lifelong and constant struggle to use this free time productively.
     This year, I have been using said free time to read and watch some film. I did not start out with this in mind, but the theme has been the Soviet Union. I have read two books and watched the HBO miniseries on Chernobyl. This experience provided an insight on an aspect of the dysfunction of the Soviet system that I had not been truly aware of: the push for productivity to the point where corners and quality were cut to give the illusion of achieving goals.
     Secondly, I watched a wickedly delicious and dark comic film, The Death of Stalin, which provided another perspective on Beria, Khrushchev, Molotov, and Zhukov in the passing of Stalin and ascension of Khrushchev. I also watched the very well-done Steven Spielberg film, Bridge of Spies, that documented the story of about the exchange of Soviet Spy Rudolf Abel for Francis Gary Powers the US U2 pilot.
     I was not planning on reading more on the Soviet Union during this winter break between terms. I planned on reading a few books but had not queued up any titles. I saw a book, Stalin’s Children by Owen Matthews, on one of our bookshelves and started reading it. It was a book that my wife actually picked up thinking it might contain an Armenian connection. I assumed it was about Stalin’s actual children Svetlana and Vasily which is why I started to read it. I was definitely wrong and there were very few Armenian references in the book.
     The subtitle of the Stalin’s Children is: Three Generations of Love, War, and Survival. The book is a telling of the Bibikov family saga starting with the author’s grandfather Boris. Boris Bibikov was too young to have participate in the Bolshevik revolution but certainly was swept up by the fervor in the 1920s. From the book:

I don’t believe that my grandfather was a hero, but he lived in heroic times and such times brought out greatness in people large and small. The slogans of the Bolshevik Revolution were Peace, Love, and Bread; and at the time this message must, to ambitious and idealistic men, must have seemed fresh, vibrant and couched in the language of prophesy.

     Boris was young and ambitious to took to the Bolshevik slogan. He became a party member in the Ukraine and rose quickly in the ranks. By the early 1930s he was a central figure in building the giant Kharkov Tractor Factory that was one of the great achievements of the first Five Year Plan.
     Boris married and had two daughters Lenina and Lyudmilla. The family was doing well and living the Soviet dream, if there was such a thing. As it seems that most happiness in the Soviet Union was temporal, it didn’t last. Boris was swept up in the Stalin’s purges and was killed or died in prison. His wife was banished to Central Asia to a gulag and the daughters, stayed together, but were bounced around in the Soviet orphanage system where they were considered Stalin’s Children.
     Lyudmila was to become the authors mother. His father, Mervyn Matthews, hailed from a coal mining town in Wales. Mervyn raised himself out of his humble beginnings, developing an interest in all things Russian and being educated at Manchester University and Oxford. Circumstances and career moves took him to Moscow where he worked at the British Embassy. This is where Mervyn met the equally well-educated Lyudmila who was working at Institute of Marxism and Leninism. They fell in madly in love and decided to marry. During this same time, the KGB tried to recruit Mervyn. He turned them down and as a

result their application to marry was rejected and he was summarily deported. The remainder of the book is how Mervyn spent five years trying to get reunited with Lyudmila. He worked every angle of PR and subterfuge to achieve the goal. He ventured, illegally, to the Soviet Union a few times to see her and was lucky that he was only arrested and not jailed. Finally, he prevailed in an exchange akin to another great movie of the era, The Bridge of Spies, involving the same East German lawyer from the movie, Wolgang Vogel.
     When finally, together, Mervyn and Lyudmila settled into a life where the passion and desires when separated were never equaled in married life. I was kind of hoping what we all hoped would happen if Lara and Zhivago had ever reunited. But that would have been more Hollywood and this true story was definitely more Russian.
     I am not sure if my Russian studies will continue in 2020 or if I will gravitate to a new subject of study. Rest assured, I will blog about it.