The Ties That Bind Us

When my father first arrived in Moscow, the city's soul was swelling with victory and pride, not deflating in exhaustion. The Moscow he knew was a controlled, oppressive place, not the teeming mayhem into which it was to descend after the Soviet Union collapsed. And emotionally, for my father, the distance was far greater. For a generation unused to travel, Russia might as well have been on a different planet. But Mervyn could not have been happier. For all its rigidity and control, my father found Moscow a place of adventures, where he was courted by the KGB and fell in love. He had finally loosed himself from his home place in the world, and was drifting toward a place where he fit in.

My Russia was a society adrift. Over the previous 70 years Russians had lost much of their culture and their God. But at least the Soviet state had compensated by filling the ideological vacuum with its own bold myths and strict codes. It fed people, taught and clothed them, ordered their lives from cradle to grave and, most important, thought for them. Communists—men like my grandfather—had tried to create a new kind of man, emptying men of their old beliefs and refilling them with civic duty, patriotism and docility. But when communist ideology was stripped away, so its quaintly '50s morality also disappeared into the black hole of discarded mythologies. People put their faith in television healers, Japanese apocalyptic cults, even in the jealous old God of Orthodoxy. But more profound than any of Russia's other, newfound faiths was an absolute, bottomless nihilism. Suddenly there were no rules, no holds barred, and everything went for those bold and ruthless enough to go out and grab as much as they could.

Even after years in Moscow, I can never quite shake the feeling of being in a weird cat's cradle of conflicting ages. Even the city's thrusting modernity is still laced with quaintly historic touches: soldiers in jackboots and breeches; timeless babushkas in headscarves; ragged, bearded beggars straight out of Dostoevsky; obligatory coat checks and rotary phones; fur hats; drivers and maids; bread with lard; abacuses instead of cash registers; inky newspapers; the smell of wood smoke and outdoor toilets in the suburbs. Some rhythms of life seem absolutely unchanged from my father's day, my grandfather's day even.

There have been a few moments during my time in Russia when I think I have caught glimpses of the nightmare world my grandfather entered in July 1937: a police station in Moscow where I was taken after being beaten up by some drunken Tatars one night in 1996, which was impregnated with the eternal Russian prison odor of sweat, piss and despair. The investigator's office where I watched for hours as the detective's crawling pen painstakingly took down details of my statement, denting the cheap official paper under harsh, institutional lamplight. And then a few days later, the dingy hall where I was taken to confront my assailants. They wept in manacles as I sat high on a dais with the investigator in front of their swelling criminal file. A journalistic visit to Butirskaya prison, where the heat and humidity were so intense that it was hard to inhale and the prisoners had empty, sunken eyes.

I tried to talk to a couple of them, briefly, but it was so uncomfortable speaking to a stranger in such unnatural proximity, chest to chest, I found I had nothing to say. Neither then nor later could I humanize the prisoners or relate to them as people. They had passed through the looking glass into another reality; they had been transformed into something less than human, closer to the casual brutality of a herd of animals. Their faces were the faces of men whose whole lives had imploded into the space of a few feet of the fetid room they inhabited. They stared at me as I pushed past from a distance of six inches, but when I looked into their eyes I knew they were looking at me from a distance I could never, ever cross. For a few hours, I imagine that I saw and smelled and touched the very Russian underworld of crime and punishment, which swallowed my grandfather two generations before. It was enough, perhaps, to start picturing what it was like, at least physically. What it was like in his head and heart is a place I never wish to visit.

Excerpted from Stalin’s Children: Three Generations Of Love, War, And Survival by Owen Matthews. © 2008 by Owen Matthews. Reprinted by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing PLC.

© 2008