Как молоды мы были,
Как искренно любили,
Как верили в себя!

How young we were,
How sincerely we loved,
How we believed in ourselves!

(Popular song of 1975)

I have on my desk three memoirs which have moved me profoundly, often to tears, and I would like to recommend them as a ‘must read’ to all our readers.  They are Mila & Mervusya: A Russian Wedding, by Mervyn Matthews (1999), Stalin’s Children: Three Generations of Love and War, by Owen Matthews (2008), and Comrade Jim: The Spy who Played for Spartak, by Jim Riordan (2008).

I had the privilege of working with both Mervyn and Jim at the University of Surrey and they have both become dear friends.  Mila, Meryn’s wife, was very kind to me and helped me with references and various linguistic conundrums while I was preparing my translations of Mozhaev stories.  I was also delighted to be invited to Owen’s book launch last summer at Pushkin House.  Furthermore, Mila and Jim are both members of the GB-Russia Society.  It is, therefore, a great privilege for me to review these books and add a few memories of my own time in Moscow to fill in the gaps where they left off: I studied at Moscow State University a good number of years after Mervyn and Jim.  These books, and my own experiences, are not just an exercise in navel-gazing or narcissistic self-indulgence—they are testimony to a Russia which has now disappeared.  The Moscow Mervyn knew in the mid- to late-1950s, that which Jim knew as a communist in the 1960s, and life as I witnessed it at MGU (Moscow State University) in 1975-76 are now lost to the present generation.  But I believe they shed an important light on today’s Russia (if Moscow can be said to be at all typical of Russia as a whole), and they convey at least an insight into the roots of present-day Russia.