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The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia Kindle Edition
From the award-winning author of A People's Tragedy and Natasha's Dance, a landmark account of what private life was like for Russians in the worst years of Soviet repression
There have been many accounts of the public aspects of Stalin's dictatorship: the arrests and trials, the enslavement and killing in the gulags. No previous book, however, has explored the regime's effect on people's personal lives, what one historian called "the Stalinism that entered into all of us." Now, drawing on a huge collection of newly discovered documents, The Whisperers reveals for the first time the inner world of ordinary Soviet citizens as they struggled to survive amidst the mistrust, fear, compromises, and betrayals that pervaded their existence.
Moving from the Revolution of 1917 to the death of Stalin and beyond, Orlando Figes re-creates the moral maze in which Russians found themselves, where one wrong turn could destroy a family or, perversely, end up saving it. He brings us inside cramped communal apartments, where minor squabbles could lead to fatal denunciations; he examines the Communist faithful, who often rationalized even their own arrest as a case of mistaken identity; and he casts a humanizing light on informers, demonstrating how, in a repressive system, anyone could easily become a collaborator.
A vast panoramic portrait of a society in which everyone spoke in whispers—whether to protect their families and friends, or to inform upon them—The Whisperers is a gripping account of lives lived in impossible times.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMetropolitan Books
- Publication dateNovember 25, 2008
- File size9904 KB
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
“Extraordinary… vividly reveals a people whose entire existence was defined by the taboo against private life as well as the resilience, and resistance, of the human soul in the face of forcible reorientation.”—The New Yorker
“Extraordinary… Thanks to Figes, these survivors overcame their silence and have lifted their voices above a whisper.”—Joshua Rubenstein, The New York Times Book Review
“Gripping… The Whisperers is one of the best literary monuments to the Soviet people… a fascinating encyclopedia of human relations during the Stalinist Terror.”—Andrey Kurkov, New Statesman
“Brilliant and shocking… a powerful history of emotional life in a society in which the personal was ruthlessly repressed for three-quarters of a century.”—Geraldine Bedell, The Guardian (UK)
“The everyday lives of Russians between the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the death of Josef Stalin in 1953 is the subject of Orlando Figes’ illuminating and profoundly moving new book. Filled with the stories of hundreds of survivors, many of which make for desperately painful reading, The Whisperers offers the most thorough account so far of what it meant to live under Soviet totalitarianism.”—Douglas Smith, The Seattle Times
“A tapestry of the Stalinist era woven from the personal experiences and words of Soviet citizens, both betrayers and betrayed… the research is extensive and subtle, Figes uses it to elucidate the texture of daily life and the ways humanity was perverted by a regime of terror.”—The Atlantic
“Remarkable.”—The New York Sun
‘“Magisterial’ may be an overworked adjective in book reviews, but it accurately describes Orlando Figes’s latest volume. He deserves kudos for his penetrating narrative.”—The New Leader
“This book, about the breakers and the broken, explains in brutal detail how a political ideal contrived to beat an entire country's heart out of place. The author of A People’s Tragedy and Natasha’s Dance has outdone himself.”
—Telegraph (UK)
“Figes organizes his material superbly, and writes with such self-effacing lucidity that these people seem to speak directly to the reader. This is a very important book—authoritative, vivid, precise, and in places, almost unbearably moving.”
—Sunday Telegraph
“Masterfully composed and controlled as a narrative by Figes, this is a collective testimony in which you can hear voices through a doorway open at last, recounting the hopes, fears and numberless awful tragedies of the Soviet era…. The Whisperers is like a rainbow over a graveyard.”
—Alexander Cockburn, The Sunday Times (UK)
“This book is the result of a large-scale research project and its importance cannot be overestimated. Figes and his team have unearthed diaries and accounts from archives and interviewed hundreds of survivors. This is a heartrending book… which should be made compulsory reading in Russia today.”
—Antony Beevor, The Times (UK)
About the Author
John Telfer is best known for playing the character of Willy Pettit in five seasons of "Bergerac". He has appeared many times in various television dramas, while his parallel theatrical career has involved him in leading roles at the Bristol Old Vic, the Royal National Theatre, the Old Vic in London, and many regional theaters. He has made hundreds of radio broadcasts, and he plays the part of Alan, the vicar, in "The Archers".
Orlando Figes is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. Born in London in 1959, he graduated with a Double-Starred First from Cambridge University, where he was a Lecturer in History and Fellow of Trinity College from 1984 to 1999. He is the author of many books on Russian history.
From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Vladislav Zubok
For decades Russians old enough to remember Stalinism despaired whenever a foreigner asked: How was life in those times? The best way to respond was to roll one's eyes and spread one's arms. Where to begin? The enormity and extremity of experiences totally alien to a Westerner (unless, perhaps, he or she had fought on the front lines in World War II or survived the Holocaust) defied explanation. How could you express why so many of Stalin's victims wept when the tyrant died on March 3, 1953? Writers and poets who had been tormented in the gulag mourned his death as "all our people's loss." And they were sincere!
Orlando Figes is known for exploring Russian history in eminently readable books. He has unwrapped the mystery inside the enigma of Stalinism with the help of Memorial, a Russian non-governmental organization dedicated to preserving the memory of victims of Soviet repression. Figes and Memorial's researchers interviewed more than 1,000 members of the "generation born in the first years of the Revolution, whose lives thus followed the trajectory of the Soviet system." The result is a riveting pastiche, at once solemn and lively, of the stories of barely literate peasants and sophisticated urbanites, executioners and collaborators, prisoners and children.
Russians who had only whispered to their closest kin about their tribulations spoke to Figes or Memorial's researchers. Marina Ilina was reunited after World War II with her mother, who had been arrested as an "enemy of the people," but they never grew close. Having grown up in an orphanage, Ilina says, "I had no real idea what a mother was." Valentina Kropotkina made a career of informing; married to a naval officer, she befriended the wives of other navy officers and then reported on their private lives and opinions, leading to numerous arrests. Today, Figes writes, she is still proud of the honors she received for what Kropotkina calls her work in "counter-espionage."
Stalin's victims and their relatives shared diaries, letters and photographs, some not merely faded but literally defaced. On the book's cover is a family portrait with the central figure blotted out. This is the father -- arrested at night, shot in some secret police dungeon, expunged even from the family album.
Fear led to the destruction even of memory. It is stunning how many voices in the book belong to people with pedigrees going back to czarist aristocrats or generals, merchants or priests. Yet they grew up knowing little or nothing about their ancestry. Their parents were too afraid to tell. In Stalinist Russia, everyone had to fit into a few categories: workers, soldiers, collectivized peasants, the party, the intelligentsia and the group that struck fear in all the rest: the "chekists," i.e., over 1 million secret policemen and camp guards.
Secrecy became habitual, for it was easy to betray oneself. The majority of city dwellers resided in kommunalki, or communal apartments, one room per family. Grandparents slept on a divan, parents on a "regular" bed (half of a queen-size) and children sometimes on the floor. In the next room, behind a thin wall, lived another extended family, and so on. As Figes notes, "rooms used for the most intimate functions were shared by everyone. The clothes line in the kitchen, the personal items in the bathroom, the night-time trips to the toilet -- these told neighbors everything." In the paranoia of the time, each occupant was a potential informer who might denounce the neighbors in order to take over their coveted space. "The communal apartment," Figes correctly observes, "had a profound psychological impact on those who lived in them for many years."
If there is a shortcoming to this excellent book, it is its focus on city residents and camp inmates, to the near exclusion of collectivized farmers, whose private lives remain to this day better described in fiction and under-studied by historians. The book also does not mention pets. Dogs, cats and birds were hard to feed, but many people took joy from companions that could never betray them; they held on to their pets for as long as they could. Still, what happens to a dog whose master is hauled away in the night? By the end of Stalin's era, Moscow and other cities were full of strays.
In his final chapter, Figes explores popular nostalgia for Stalin. He attributes it to the emotional capital invested in the beliefs of one's youth, an inability to face up to "common guilt" and a particular brand of Russian stoicism. As I finished the book, I recalled my own childhood in Moscow -- the Stalinist way of life immured in many kommunalki, but rapidly becoming a fossil. The resettlement of millions of families to separate apartments did more to de-Stalinize Russia than did all of Khrushchev's denunciations. My grandparents lived in a communal apartment in Moscow's downtown until 1978. I will never forget going there for the last time, for a party with my university classmates. The tenants had all moved out; the old building was scheduled for renovation. In hollow booming rooms with barren walls, we performed the tribal dances of our new era to the music of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Product details
- ASIN : B009E7GVLW
- Publisher : Metropolitan Books; First edition (November 25, 2008)
- Publication date : November 25, 2008
- Language : English
- File size : 9904 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 788 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #618,886 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #519 in History of Russia eBooks
- #936 in 20th Century World History
- #1,758 in Russian History (Books)
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In the long essay which follows the fictional story of War and Peace, Tolstoy first developed the concept that armies are not just regiments of men following the will of their commander, but individuals who have individual consciences. History isn't just the deeds of Napoleon and Alexander, but of each aristocrat, tradesman, artisan or peasant who fought in the Napoleonic wars, and of their families back home. Each of their lives is as worthy of examination as that of any Tsar or Generalissimo. Because of this, I think Tolstoy is properly the godfather of oral history. Orlando Figes has done a great job gathering and editing the accounts of ordinary and not-so-ordinary people living during the cruelest years of Stalinism. He also conveys the sense of freedom and comradeship experienced by many during the worst days of the second World War (which the Soviets hallowed as the "Great Patriotic War"), a mistaken sense of freedom which landed Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag. For all these reasons, I think old Tolstoy might be pleased in literary heaven could he only read these accounts of real lives and real consciences played out in the pages of "The Whisperers."
One small caveat: Kirill Simonov was a very successful writer in the Stalin literary establishment who came of age during World War II. Because of his public life of letters and his colorful personal life he occupies many pages in "The Whisperers." As was the case with many successful people in the Arts world under Stalin, Simonov was morally compromised. (I'm paraphrasing Lev Kopelev, but that writer has a pithy quote that "Every society has bad people who do bad things. But under communism, good people were encouraged to do bad things." This describes Simonov.) For better or worse, and because he wrote so much and was so active for all the decades from the Thirties until the Seventies, Simonov emerges as the main "character" in this book. This has its merits, but it also throws into harsh relief the fact that many of the less-lettered accounts in this oral history don't always seem as real, or as present, as Simonov. Because this is a history and not a work of fiction I'm not sure this imbalance could ever have been effectively redressed, but the imbalance is there.
A final word of praise: I've travelled to Russia several times since the overdue demise of the Soviet Union, and seen life change radically not only because of the introduction of Russian-style market capitalism, but because a generation has grown up without memory of life under communism. Figes points out that young people in Russia have no great interest in what to them has also become the story of an alien life lived by grandparents and great-grandparents during the 5-year plans. The people who do remember are old, dying out, with failing memories. "The Whisperers," and the archives on which it is based, is commendable because it helps to save so many of these survivors' accounts to historical memory.
The underlying premise of the book is that all the written and printed, primary source material from the Stalin era is so unreliable that the only way and best way of understanding it is by interviewing people who experienced it. By interviewing people there is also an opportunity to address inaccuracies and omissions and also to probe further. So after getting an amazing 1500 (!!!) interviews with the assistance of several Memorial Societies that formed for this purpose in Russia after Glasnost, Figes is able to finally tell the "real" story of what happened.
I'm not an expert on the topic, and honestly, given books by Solzhenitsyn and Ginzburg and others, I can't imagine that Figes' book contains anything new, in the larger sense. It's just that Figes has this amazing source of 1500 personal interviews to work with as source material, so, in other ways, perhaps to the contrary, almost everything in the book is new and original and interesting information.
The book is exceedingly well written. It is organized very tightly and chronologically by hundreds upon hundreds of personal stories during the run up to the Civil War, to the gulags, the death of Stalin, and the lingering affects of Stalinism. The book also probes psychologically how the population dealt with and perceived Stalin's actions.
Figes is passionate about his subject. He dedicates the book to his mother's family who came out of or died (?) in Nazi Germany (Figes is Jewish). So even though he never mentions this per se, I'm sure this is the reason he is so passionate about this subject and the book--he understands the importance of accurately and completely documenting Stalin's crimes against humanity, "never again".
Frustratingly, the Russian people are unbelievably still reluctant to talk about the inhumanity that happened on an unbelievably gargantuan scale 50-60 years ago for fear of reprisal, even though they are at the very end of their lives and half a century has passed. Once people die, their stories and the history of the Terror dies with them. The personal stories seem tantalizingly easy to get, yet elusive and vanishing. This must also have motivated Figes.
One concern I had was that by selecting who to interview and by selecting which interview to include in the book, I know that the book must have been biased in some way. On the other hand, the big picture of Stalin and the gulags is so well known and information such as the 1500 interviews so scarce, that you have to appreciate the book for what it is--groundbreaking!
PS While the first 100-200 pages on the Civil War were really, really good, I had a hard time putting it down once Stalin made an appearance in the late 1920's.
Top reviews from other countries
This book tells their story.
Was Figes Interviewpartner ihm über ihr Leben unter der stalinistischen Herrschaft erzählt haben, lässt sich in Kurzform gar nicht wiedergeben. Auch die über 700 Seiten dieses Buches sind nicht zu viel. Figes wiederholt sich nicht und "The Whisperers" wird trotz seines Umfangs niemals langweilig, höchstens ermüdend, wegen des ungeheuerlichen Ausmaßes an Leiden, das seinen Protagonisten widerfahren ist. Man muss es lesen, um es zu glauben.
Figes Verdienst ist nicht allein, dass er ein bewegendes Buch geschrieben hat. Er hat darüber hinaus einen Teil der russischen Geschichte erforscht, den selbst die damaligen Opfer größtenteils verdrängt hatten und der in Russland nie aufgearbeitet wurde. Er beschäftigt sich dabei nicht allein mit den Gräueln des Stalinismus, sondern auch mit dessen Ursachen und Folgen. Fesselnder und bedeutender als "The Whisperers" kann ein Geschichtswerk kaum sein.