The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: literary institute, prison zone, communal apartment, Soviet Union, Red Army, Civil War (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. One in eight people in the Soviet Union were victims of Stalin's terror—virtually no family was untouched by purges, the gulag, forced collectivization and resettlement, says Figes in this nuanced, highly textured look at personal life under Soviet rule. Relying heavily on oral history, Figes, winner of an L.A. Times Book Prize for A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924, highlights how individuals attempted to maintain a sense of self even in the worst years of the Stalinist purges. More often than not, they learned to stay silent and conform, even after Khrushchev's thaw lifted the veil on some of Stalin's crimes. Figes shows how, beginning with the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, the Soviet experience radically changed personal and family life. People denied their experiences, roots and their condemned relatives in order to survive and, in some cases, thrive. At the same time, Soviet residents achieved great things, including the defeat of the Nazis in WWII, that Russians remember with pride. By seamlessly integrating the political, cultural and social with the stories of particular people and families, Figes retells all of Soviet history and enlarges our understanding of it. Photos. (Oct. 2)
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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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 740 pages
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books; 1st edition (November 13, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805074619
• ISBN-13: 978-0805074611
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #84,492 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

56 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars beautiful and essential , December 6, 2007

By	J. Anderson (Monterey, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

An absolutely fascinating book, and another jewel in the canon of Orlando Figes, whose every book quickly becomes essential. Tough to think of another scribe of Russian history at present who can match Figes' combination of scholarship and compelling prose. He really knuckles down in this epic book about the interior lives, really, of Russians during the Stalin years. Beautifully written, there's no fluff in The Whisperers, nothing unnecessary. It's pared down and boiled out. The result is a rich, moving account of a huge swath of human history, of violence and justice, told with exquisitely patient intimacy, told almost with a whisper. It's a remarkable achievement. From beginning to end, Figes takes us deep within the mystery of 'whispered' lives, going again and again to specific people with names and families, the nuts and bolts of suffering detailed clearly, coursing like a monodic procession ejecting myth forever. The opportunity to hear these Russians speak of these things as individuals, in their own voices, is overwhelming, and a gift to us. Orlando Figes visits these ordeals with enormous compassion, and a clearly gifted touch as a storyteller. I hope he writes forever. Recommended with gusto!

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Shout it out, January 25, 2008

By	M. A Newman (Alexandria, VA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I like this book so much that I wish I had written it. Orlando Figes is the author of several great books including "Natasha's Dance" and also a history of the Russian Revolution. These were great works. This book is even better in that it rescues from oblivion stories of life during Stalin's reign.

The problem that historians in the 21st century will have writing a history of the Soviet Union will be the lack of conventional sources to learn what life was like. Historians looking at the United States in 1935 will have a whole host of magazines and newspapers that convey what life was like for a segment of the population. Anyone attempting to understand the mindset of the Soviet Union at the same period will be confronted with a sense that the entire population had to have been brain washed.

What Figes has accomplished is to bring to light the lives of the ordinary people who were swept up in Stalin's destruction of his own country in some cases before it is too late. He begins with the late 20s and continues through to the period after Stalin's death. A great deal of the material involves the use of interviews with survivors. There are also diaries from Stalin's victims as well. All in all, this is a work which is likely to have increased significance in the future.

I am certain that this book will be one of the more important works on Soviet history, not only does it provide the casual reader with a sense of what happened in the larger sense, but it also illustrates what life was like for those who found themselves the victims of history.

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Dark Tale Movingly Told!, January 11, 2008

By	Gilberto Villahermosa - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a tremendously moving book! It is incredibly well written, meticulously and thoroughly researched, powerful, and heartbreaking.

Indeed, it seems at times that the heartbreak will not end, as the author narrates the tragic lives of one family after another, and the reader must force him- or herself to plunge ahead and delve into the ruined lives of dozens and dozens of individuals and families that suffered unendurable heartbreak and tragedy.

Those individuals represent the tens of millions who were swallowed up by Stalin's prison camps, the notorious GULAGs. Many were executed or were simply worked to death, while even those that survived were emotionally, physically, and psychologically shattered.

But then the author provides an uplifting story, a ray of light in this evil history, and his dark spell is temporarily broken, allowing the reader to breath freely once more and to believe that the good in Man outweighs the bad.

This is a difficult book to finish, simply because the human heart and mind can only absorb so much tragedy and suffering. And yet this is a story that should be read by all, simply to remind ourselves of our capability for cruelty and kindness, suffering and forgiveness, condemnation and redemption.