A Personal Take on Soviet History : MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS, <i> by Elena Bonner,</i> translated by Antonina W. Bouis, Alfred A. Knopf, $23; 349 pages

If you were going to choose a time and place to be born to a fairly easy life, you wouldn’t choose 1923 in the Soviet Union. (America in the late 1940s might be your best bet.)

Elena Bonner, now famous as the wife and political partner of Andrei Sakharov, Nobel Prize-winning leader of the Soviet human rights movement, was born in the Soviet Union in 1923. As she grew up, she was torn between two women, representing two drastically different chapters in Russian history: her grandmother, a product of the old regime, and her mother, a Stalinist. While “Mothers and Daughters” ends when Bonner was 14, she uses italicized passages to fill us in on some of what has happened since.

Bonner’s grandmother died in the siege of Leningrad in 1942. She was a nurse during the war, a pediatrician afterward and then one of the most stubborn and steadfast Soviet dissidents.

Bonner’s mother, Ruth, whose death four years ago opens the book, scorned any open expressions of affection. “Mama persistently and frequently told me that I was ugly,” Bonner recalls.

Bonner was near death twice before the age of 14, with scarlet fever and peritonitis. During one of her illnesses she recalls her mother standing at the end of the bed and saying, “Just think what a weakling she is. She’s always throwing up, or has a cold . . . “ Ruth despised bourgeois trappings like a potted geranium for the window, or matching dishes, or a Christmas tree.

Perhaps luckily for her, Bonner rarely saw her mother, or her father, who had few days off from their Party jobs. She was raised by her grandmother, Batanya. Batanya couldn’t stand Ruth’s Stalinist friends. She took her granddaughter to the ballet, opera and theater. Defiantly, she gave the little girl copies of books that were out of favor with the authorities, including “Little Women.”

Batanya did benefit from having a daughter and son-in-law who were loyal Stalinists. Bonner’s stepfather (she barely knew her real father, a shadowy figure in this book) was the secretary of various regional committees. Considered a “Big Boss,” he was able to secure comfortable apartments for the family in Moscow and Leningrad, and treatment for family members at the Kremlin hospital.

The family was often visited by various Communist dignitaries, whom Bonner names, though she doesn’t adequately explain their significance. As this memoir ends, her father has been purged from the party and taken away to an unknown destination. Her mother is about to spend 17 years at the Akmolinsky Camp for Wives of Traitors of the Homeland, and, at 14, Bonner is on her own.

Given the amazing material, this book ought to be better than it is. This woman’s life is touched by the Czar’s Russia and Stalin’s Soviet Union and World War II. Her own actions were part of what brought about the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The title “Mothers and Daughters” even sets the reader up for a feminine, nonfiction version of Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons.”

Bonner, however, is not well-served by her editors. “I fear the reader will find it hard following me,” she writes in her prologue, and her fear is well-founded. The confused reader often wants to ask, “Which Seryozha is this? Is this Nastya the same one who was your mother’s friend? Why mention crying at the death of one Agasi Khandzhyan without telling us who he is?”

Though readers are left unguided and disoriented, touching moments are still to be found in “Mothers and Daughters.” There are the kind of wonderful descriptions of summer and winter pleasures that we’ve come to expect of Russian memoirs--ice skating, gathering wild strawberries and mushrooms in the summer forest.

Bonner’s memories of her best friend, Binockha, and her first love, Seva, are moving. Oddly, her description of Seva’s mother being taken away by the state police is much more touching than her recounting of the forced departure of her own parents.

“How much longer do things outlive people?” she wonders, as she unfolds a pink tablecloth used when she was a child, mended with her mother’s stitches, and sets it on the table at her mother’s funeral.

The reader wonders how Bonner came to forgive her mother. Did Ruth ever regret her apparently unkind treatment of her daughter? Did she regret being a good Stalinist after Stalin imprisoned her as a traitor?

Bonner only suggests the answers, by quoting a passage from her mother’s diary. Not long before her death, Ruth wrote, “I’ve crawled into my solitude as if it were a black hole. I’ve sunk into the past and I’m perishing in it.”

Next: Jonathan Kirsch reviews “Future Shop” by Jim Snider and Terra Ziporyn (St. Martin’s) .