Mervyn's Russia: A memoir of Russia

by Mervyn Matthews

Looking back on their lives, most people have a tale to tell, sad or happy. Mervyn's first volume of reminiscences, Mervyn's Lot, covered his troubled boyhood in war-torn Swansea of the thirties and forties, and his second memoir, Mila and Mervusya, recounts the gripping tale of his extraordinary adventures with the KGB in Khrushchev's Russia during the Cold War - described in the Spectator as 'absorbing' and 'thrilling.'
Here, in a third volume, he tells of his life in Pimlico with a colorful Russian wife Ludmilla, following their marriage under the shadow of Lenin's statue in the Moscow Palace of Weddings in 1969; his return visits to the new, post-Soviet Russia and the many unusual Russians he met; and a splendid Russian wedding on a beautiful island in the Marmara Sea.
These events, together with the unexpected ups and downs of life in a mixed, Anglo-Russian family, make captivating reading.
Mervyn Matthews taught Russian and Soviet affairs for many years at the University of Surrey and is a prolific writer and broadcaster.

254 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 13, 2010

About the author

William Haydn Mervyn Matthews was a British expert on Soviet society, writer, and broadcaster. His star-crossed love affair with a Russian woman became a cause célèbre in Anglo-Soviet relations in the 1960s; their story was later told by their son, Owen, in a bestselling family memoir, "Stalin’s Children" (2012), and by Matthews himself in "Mila and Mervusya: A Russian Wedding" (1999).

His early years are described in his 2002 memoir "Mervyn's Lot". He took a degree in Russian at Manchester University, then moved to St Catherine's College, Oxford, then St Antony's College for work on his Ph.D.

He was accepted as a research fellow at Moscow University, but expelled from the Soviet Union in 1964 for "anti-Soviet propaganda and speculation". St Antony's College annulled his research fellowship for political troublemaking, after which he moved to Nottingham University. He eventually settled as reader in the University of Surrey's linguistic and regional studies department.