Through a chink in the Iron Curtain
Michael Bourdeaux on Owen Matthews’s family biography. Reconstruction of one’s parents’ love story is a rare enough undertaking; success to this extent puts Owen Matthews’s family biography into a special category. Mervyn Matthews and Lyudmila Bibikova fell in love in Moscow in 1963, when he was studying there and she was a brilliant graduate of Moscow State University, then working at the Institute of Marxism and Leninism. They were prevented from marrying the next year when Lyudmila was already in her wedding dress; Mervyn was deported. Their painful attempts, eventually successful, over the next six years to obtain an exit visa for her became one of the causes célèbres in Anglo-Soviet relations of the 1960s.