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The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia

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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.

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.

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!

I learned about the book The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia, by Orlando Figes due to Amazon.com which linked it with my memoir Family Matters and More. My first thought was that a person like me, who was born in Soviet Russia in the middle of the thirties, read a lot of about Stalin's time could hardly find much new in The Whisperers.

I left Soviet Russia at the end of 1988 and had witnessed many events, some of which were described in Orlando Figes' book. I was able to find and read a few books that were prohibited in the USSR. I didn't know the author of The Whisperers, never read his books before, and doubted that a foreign writer would be able to find many unknown details about this gloomy tragic time. Nevertheless, I decided to read it for the sake of curiosity.

I was hugely impressed; the book literally overwhelmed me. The author has done an incredible job interviewing thousands of people - victims of many years of terror. Those people were among the lucky few who managed to survive. I must say that the author recreated the forest while paying attention to each tree.

Telling about the fates of individual people and their families, the author shows what was going on in the Soviet Union behind the Iron Curtain. Living in the USSR over 50 years, I knew and had read a lot, but reading The Whisperers I felt indescribable pain and horror. Fates of hundreds of thousands, even millions of Soviet people were possible to describe with the same four words: falsely accused, arrested and shot. And what was even more horrible, all of this became habitual.

Recalling that not very remote time, I think about one more phenomenon: despite everything that was going on in the country, people wanted to live a normal life. In the daytime, they worked, entertained, attended theaters, movies and were busy with other activities. But at night they could learn that they, or their relatives, or their friends, or people they knew for a long time, all of a sudden, had become "enemies of the people," and were arrested, disappearing forever.

Orlando Figes in his The Whisperers showed very truthfully, through the tragic lives of many thousands of victims, one of the most awful political systems - totalitarian power. I would like everybody to read this book, both supporters and opponents of democracy. The opponents vividly will see that the totalitarian system is deadly for all, and the supporters one more time will be convinced that democracy is weak; it is needed to be defended.

In his book, the author of The Whisperers described in detail the years 1917 to 1956. Stalin died in 1953. It was the time when I began to understand events and the difference between slogans and reality; I began to realize that the Soviet power was killing in people everything human. The author showed great insight and deepness describing those times. But most importantly, he noticed that the fear of Great Terror penetrated deeply into Soviet people's souls and didn't disappear. He wrote that the KGB " had access to a huge range of draconian punishments ... and its power of surveillance...instilled fear in anyone...who could be seen as anti-Soviet."

In my second book, The Door Slammed in Ladspoli, I showed that this fear was so deep that in people of my generation and older it didn't disappear after many years, even when some of them were leaving the country. I still remember that paralyzing fear, but I also remember that despite that fear, people were dying to have a human life; Soviet power wasn't able to kill in people everything and this could be seen as a victory of humanity. "Human spirit cannot be destroyed" as Mr. Tsitrin wrote in his review." I would be extremely glad to see this topic as Orlando Figes' next project about Soviet Russia.

I would like to emphasize the actuality of Orlando Figes' book, especially now, in Putin's time when, according to the author, "the restoration of authoritarian government encouraged many Russians to return to their reticent habits."

I strongly recommend everybody to read the book. Nothing should be forgotten because what is forgotten has a tendency to be repeated.

Sol Tetelbaum.

The whisperers is a remarkable book. In nine large chronological chapters Figes treats Russian history from 1917 till now, but does so from the viewpoint of its victims. Describing the several waves of repression during the Stalin-regime, and its effects on private life, Figes gives us the stories, not of he ones who were shot - as a simple, but many times repeated sentence tells us - but of the ones who survived and wound up in the miriad of camps all over the Soviet Union, from the Solovietsky Islands - now a tourist attraction - to Magadan and Kolyma. In a nutshell - one of 650 pages - it tells of the millions of families who were ripped apart, whose members disappeared and surfaced again after many years, trying to find their loved ones, or take up a normal life. It is not about hatred, as you would perhaps expect, but about shame, guilt, spoilt biographies, about silence, hiding your past and trying to build up a new life. And fear of course. Very much about fear. The book is based on interviews, letters and diaries, all collected with the help of Memorial which, as its website says, is many things, but especially a movement commemorating the millions who were killed, or held as slave labourers in the Russian gulag.
The Whisperers consists of hundreds of very sad short stories, and if there is one complaint you could have, it is this: that the book has no real center. Although Figes obviously tried to do what he did in A People's tragedy - where he uses several recurring figures as bearers of the story - and has said that he considers Konstantin Simonov, the Soviet writer, as the main character of The whisperers, and Simonov does indeed get extensive treatment, and although other characters are present in several parts of the book as well, the enormous amount of stories does not always make for light reading, certainly not for those who have a hard time distinguishing the Russian names. Simonov's story is interesting, by the way, and is well told, like everything else in the book. I didn't know he was responsible for publishing Bulgakovs Master and Margerita. The Whisperers is in effect a monument, a memorial, one with many names ingraved, and it would perhaps serve well, perhaps even better, as material for a series of documentaries, two of which have indeed been broadcasted by BBC radio. And I doubt if is is a coincidence that Figes' name on the cover of the book is printed in very small letters.
The saddest thing of course is that one wished to be able to say that Russian things have changed. But we all know that that is not the case. In the afterword Figes tells us that as a result of his investigations of Simonovs literary estate the official archives were closed for researchers until 2025. Didn't Putin, when Politkovskaja was shot - as the sentence goes again - say something like: She was an unimportant old woman?

Over the years I've read many books about Russian and Soviet history, from Roy Medvedev's "Let History Judge"to Montefiore's "Stalin: Court of the Red Tsar," with significant stops along the way for Solzhenitsyn's magisterial polemic "The Gulag Archipelago." Orlando Fige's "The Whisperers" is one of the best single-volume studies of life in Soviet times I have read. It is a fairly long book, but very engaging: I found myself reading 30 to 50 pages at a stretch. There is a cast of characters as long as in one of Tolstoy's great novels, but these are all real people, describing or recollecting their experiences in Stalin's Russia. It is a tribute to Mr. Figes that he arranges the narratives in such a way that this reader was never confused following the threads of so many lives over the course of such turbulent decades. In addition, Figes provides short accounts of the ideological, political and economic shifts in the Kremlin which directly influenced the lives of the people in the chapters which follow. For conciseness, clarity and readability, his narrative is outstanding when he writes about the NEP, Stalin's anti-Kulak campaign and collectivization of the countryside, the rapid rise of the Gulag and slave labor as a mainstay of the Soviet economy, and the malign influence on family relations of the1930s propaganda cult surrounding Pavel Morozov. Figes includes information in this book which I've simply not seen in histories before. He shows floor plans of communal apartments which makes clear how little privacy many urban dwellers in Moscow and Leningrad had at home, and how Stalin's regime nurtured malicious watchers as well as whisperers. The diary and letter extracts in "The Whisperers" can be deeply moving. There is a photo in the book of Nikolai Kondratiev's letter to his daughter Elena, written from a labor camp. It shows a drawing he'd done illustrating a fairy-tale in verse he'd written for Elena entitled "The Unusual Adventures of Shammi." The drawing is simple, the verse is charming. It makes one think of how many millions of times in different times and places parents have entertained their children by spinning stories. But the circumstances here are grotesque: Kondratiev was one of millions of innocents imprisoned under Stalin. And the outcome is tragic: in 1938 he was shot by a firing squad. This is just one example of the dozens of different accounts of lives of ordinary people warped or crushed by this monstrous regime. The sum of such narratives creates a very rich mosaic of a society and its time which even those of us who have visited Russia in the recent past have difficulties understanding.

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.

I first heard of The Whisperers on a NPR interview with the author. I was intrigued with the focus of the book and bought it the same evening. It was a stunning historic read. I was gripped by the individual stories weaved within the various political changes of the moment.

The deep level of research performed and then assembled to create this book is mind boggling at the least. I highly recommend this for those who want a more person-centric view of the purges.

On college campuses across the United States, there are thousands of professors who consider themselves Marxists, socialists or some derivation thereof. Ask them about the misery their professed political beliefs caused in the 20th Century and they will become irritated, perhaps claim that socialism hasn't been given the proper chance or simply be ignorant of the 100 million or so murdered by socialist regimes and the more than 1 billion essentially enslaved.

Imagine as these self-proclaimed socialists, Communists and Marxists won't, that it is 3 a.m. There is loud insistent knocking on the door of the apartment you share with other families. Armed men enter. Some begin turning out the contents of drawers and cabinets. Others take your father or brother or mother or sister or maybe you into custody. (Many people had anticipated this moment and had a suitcase packed.) You are an enemy of the people. You might be tried by a tribunal where the verdict was almost always guilty. You might simply be arrested and shot. The system varied. In the 1930s, however, millions of people suffered this fate in the Soviet Union, the worker's paradise, the land where Marxism ruled.

Millions of families were ripped apart by the socialist doctrine. Orlando Figes here concentrates upon perhaps the unluckiest generation ever born: those who came of age in Russia at the time of the Communist Revolution. Perhaps the most primitive "civilized" nation, Tsarist Russia was already killing its sons and fathers in WWI. Then came the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution with its immediate imposition of terroristic repression. Those unlucky enough to have been born in the wrong place at the wrong time still had to live through the socialist imposed famines of the 1920s, the Great Terror of the 1930s and World War II.

Present durng all of this was the fear. Relatives, friends, co-workers disappeared. Women whose husbands had been taken were thrown out of their housing, often arrested themselves and their children placed in horrific orphanages for the offspring of "enemies of the people" or left to wander the streets.

Through it all was the silence. No one talked. It was too easy to become a victim yourself if an informer overheard even the slightest criticism of the socialist regime. Often enough, an informer would simply act out of personal malice or ambition. During the mid 1930s, 2.4 million were in the Gulag, the slave labor camps, another half-million in prisons and nearly 900,000 had been shot during a two year period.

"The Whisperers" recounts the stories of just a few who were victimized by socialism in this period. There are stories of how "enemies of the people" were blacked out in family photos. How people concealed their relationships to the murdered and imprisoned. The society that the socialists created was bizarre and Figes tells the story of how people adapted to it.

Known informers, the people who caused so many arrests, were treated as if their horrible deeds weren't known. At the death of Stalin, many of the victims wept for him. After Stalin's death when many of the political prisoners were freed, children were reunited with a parent or parents - and found they knew nothing of them. Of the million or so members of the secret police and Gulag administration, many of whom had tortured or even murdered prisoners, very few were punished. Many never learned the fate of their fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers or other family members.

Socialist society in the transformed Russia was intent on crushing the memory of old, traditional ways and creating the "New Soviet Man". Western leftists like George Bernard Shaw thought it was wonderful. New York Times Pulitzer prize winner Walter Duranty, an American left-winger, was awarded the Lenin Prize, for covering up millions of starvation deaths.

Figes captures the pathos of the era and the inherent cruelty of the socialist system.

This is not pleasant reading. It is frightening to see how dedicated socialists crushed anyone who did not conform or obey. The common claim of those left-wingers who even admit to the horrors of the Soviet Worker's Paradise is to either blame it all on Stalin or to claim that Stalin knew nothing about it.

The truth is that the repression started with Lenin and continued with Stalin, operating through dedicated socialists.

This is te story of an awful era, an tragic grotesquery of history, brought about by belief in a system that claimed to wante everyone equal, but instead provided the substance of Orwell's classic line: "all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others".

Of the millions of victms of socialist glory, only a few stories are told here - and they sre enough to make you weep and appreciate the glory of the United States.

Yet, even as more and more and more of the truth about the socialist paradises of the former Soviet Union, China and others comes out, the campus socialists keep feeding their lies to our children.

They have no interest in the truth that Orlando Figes has so painstakingly compiled here.

Jerry

"The Whisperers" by Orlando Figes is an outstanding piece of scholarship painting a harrowing picture of the results which Stalinist terror had on its victims and on the society it created. The book combines facts of historical developments at various significant stages of the Soviet bid for power, its consolidation, the phases of Stalin's rule and post-Stalinist developments with a wide variety of biographical data. In addition to following the life of one outstanding literary figure - Konstantin Simonov - and his family throughout the complete time span, Figes portrays people from all walks of life, so that the reader is able to identify with many individual lives and at the same time perceives that the people presented still are but a tiny minority, each person representing many whose stories remain untold. The book depicts the development in the oppression of the Soviet people, ordinary and powerful alike, from the almost rational liquidation of certain groups in the early years to the total terror of the hight of the Stalinist purges, when practically everybody could be arrested, tortured and shot or sentenced to up to 25 years of forced labour on the basis of a denunciation. It shows the effects both physical and mental which this had on the victims, their families and the others - those who remained unconcerned either because they believed in the official propaganda which pronounced those sentenced to be guilty of hideous crimes against the state or because they managed not to notice anything at all. The book goes on to describe the years of the Second World War and the aftermath. It answers the questions of what happens after terror lightens up, what happens, when people try to take up their lives after 5, 10 or more years, to rejoin their families, to find children scattered all over the country after being sent to different orphanages, when it slowly becomes clear what fear has done to people's minds, having eaten into them like acid for decades. The final claim is that "stoicism and passivity" as dominant features of the collective (post-)Socialist psyche are the results of those many years, in which people talked in whispers and were afraid of whisperers.

This book is captivating! I came into it with only the most basic knowledge of Russian history. A little more would have been helpful, but I managed to get what I needed from the internet. This book focuses on the impact of communism under Stalin on the lives of everyday people. It is full of fascinating details that give you an incredible picture of the fear and uncertainty that Soviets at the time would have felt. One of the striking points of the book is that no one was exempt from being spied upon or being reported to the Party. It was impossible to just keep your head down and go through life without being noticed, because if those in charge didn't notice, your neighbors surely would, and heaven help you if they were being pressured to inform, or if they wanted your space, your belongings, or were jealous in some other way. Normally I tend to zoom through books, but I found myself really slowing down to absorb every detail. If I found myself skimming because I was tired, I would put the book down and pick it up later when I was fresh, simply because I did not want to miss anything. Do not let the length and density scare you off- give it a try. I started reading "Natasha's Dance" by the same author, but I don't find it as captivating, so if you tried that one and didn't like it, your experience may not be representative of your attitude towards this book.