Decades on from these events, Owen Matthews—then a young journalist himself in Russia—came upon his grandfather's KGB file recording his "progress from life to death at the hands of Stalin's secret police." Stimulated by its revelations, he has pieced together the tangled and dramatic threads of his family's past and present, making sense of the magnetic pull that has drawn him back to his mother's homeland. Stalin's Children is an indelible portrait of Russia over seven decades and an unforgettable memoir about how we struggle to define ourselves in opposition to our ancestry only to find ourselves aligning with it.