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The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia
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.
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.
739 pages, Hardcover
First published October 4, 2007
About the author
Orlando Figes
24 books816 followersOrlando Figes is an English historian of Russia, and a professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 297 reviews
November 25, 2017
One of the most emotional account of the terror I've ever read. Detailed descriptions by ordinary people who had the misfortune to live in those times.
April 19, 2016
There's a quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn that Steven Pinker uses in Better Angels of Our Nature:
Consider another problem: housing in the cities. Collectivization brought millions flooding into the cities. They came to flee repression and famine in the countryside, and to assume personal histories more palatable to the State. That is to say, histories with a strong proletarian blood line. Why was there insufficient housing? Why were 17 people living to a single room, 113 people, in one instance, to a single toilet? Well, when you've defaulted on your international debt, scared investors off, and cratered your real estate sector what else could be expected? But, hey, you're Stalin and convinced that you're going to turn all this tragedy around. How will you do it? Simple: slave labor! Yes, that's how you're going to incentivize your people, that's how you'll spur them on the ever great achievements: throw them in jail and work them to death in the frozen tundra, or, if not in the tundra, in areas where you will not feed them enough to survive very long at all. The point I find astonishing is that such penal servitude was sold to the Party as a way of reeducating wayward elements, as a means of building the new Soviet citizen. "Reforging," was the term.
What a joke of a nation! Still, today, it is run with an iron fist. There's been very little development of durable institutions that will perpetuate democracy. Moreover, Russia is now a country without a heritage, because it was deracinated during the era of Stalin. Folkways, musical heritage, etc. etc., all was devastated by Stalin and his goons. Russia is today a shell of a nation, hollowed out, as it were, by more than seventy years of hideous repression and so-called class warfare. (Figes explains here why the concept "kulak" was completely rhetorical as used by the Soviets and did not reflect actual usage of the era.) Russia, when will you become a real democracy? Not as long as Vladimir Putin's in charge, that's for sure. Which is why I close with my best wishes to the inestimable Pussy Riot and their kind. Here's to a true democratic revolution.
(BTW, a 2013 biography, Karl Marx A Nineteenth-Century Life by Jonathan Sperber, makes compelling, amply sourced arguments that Marx's thought was never a coherent whole but often a piecemeal reaction to the politics of his day. Engels had to all but horsewhip him to get something publishable; still, it was not until after his death that the final volumes of Capital appeared.)
Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble--and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb, too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.And he's right. For it was solely by way of a demented, incoherent ideology that tens of millions were murdered by Stalin & Company. No conscience devoured them. The account given here of so-called "collectivization" and "dekulakization" takes the breath away. The absolute arbitrariness of the murderous suppression of anyone, any family, who by dint of hard work had been able to pull together some semblance of a living, is shattering. And these were the people who were most efficiently providing foodstuffs to the cities through a simple market mechanism that had been in place for millennia. When they were eliminated, the cities starved.
Consider another problem: housing in the cities. Collectivization brought millions flooding into the cities. They came to flee repression and famine in the countryside, and to assume personal histories more palatable to the State. That is to say, histories with a strong proletarian blood line. Why was there insufficient housing? Why were 17 people living to a single room, 113 people, in one instance, to a single toilet? Well, when you've defaulted on your international debt, scared investors off, and cratered your real estate sector what else could be expected? But, hey, you're Stalin and convinced that you're going to turn all this tragedy around. How will you do it? Simple: slave labor! Yes, that's how you're going to incentivize your people, that's how you'll spur them on the ever great achievements: throw them in jail and work them to death in the frozen tundra, or, if not in the tundra, in areas where you will not feed them enough to survive very long at all. The point I find astonishing is that such penal servitude was sold to the Party as a way of reeducating wayward elements, as a means of building the new Soviet citizen. "Reforging," was the term.
What a joke of a nation! Still, today, it is run with an iron fist. There's been very little development of durable institutions that will perpetuate democracy. Moreover, Russia is now a country without a heritage, because it was deracinated during the era of Stalin. Folkways, musical heritage, etc. etc., all was devastated by Stalin and his goons. Russia is today a shell of a nation, hollowed out, as it were, by more than seventy years of hideous repression and so-called class warfare. (Figes explains here why the concept "kulak" was completely rhetorical as used by the Soviets and did not reflect actual usage of the era.) Russia, when will you become a real democracy? Not as long as Vladimir Putin's in charge, that's for sure. Which is why I close with my best wishes to the inestimable Pussy Riot and their kind. Here's to a true democratic revolution.
(BTW, a 2013 biography, Karl Marx A Nineteenth-Century Life by Jonathan Sperber, makes compelling, amply sourced arguments that Marx's thought was never a coherent whole but often a piecemeal reaction to the politics of his day. Engels had to all but horsewhip him to get something publishable; still, it was not until after his death that the final volumes of Capital appeared.)
April 22, 2017
I loved this book as it is a sharp and shocking insight into Russia history that is extremely well written and informative
Every now and again I need to be shocked by history and while I have read a lot of books on this period in history and the terror of Stalin, The Whisperers has something entirely different to offer as it tells the accounts of the the loved ones left behind after their husbands wife's mothers or fathers have been informed on and either shot or sent to the Gulag.
The Whisperers draws on hundreds of family archives (letters, diaries, personal papers and memoirs and photographs) concealed by the survivors of the Stalin Terror in secret drawers and under mattresses across Russia. In each family extensive interviews were carried out with the oldest members to bring about the many many important and heart breaking accounts of ordinary family's who survived through Stalin's reign of terror.
I had a hard copy edition from my local library and at just under 750 pages is quite a slow but compelling read and while most memoirs or biographies of the survivors of Stalin's Great Terror concentrate on those who were imprisoned or killed, the Whisperers gives us an intimate look at the devastation experienced by the family members left behind. While numerous family accounts are catalogued in the book, each account is only a few pages long and therefore the reader only learns what is necessary for that particular account and family and yet some of the family stories are so memorable and heartbreaking that I will have a difficulty time leaving them behind. The book has a vast amount of photographs and it was nice to be able to put faces to some of the people concerned. There is also a terrific introduction at the beginning of the book which I found so informative and helpful.
I am aware that there was controversary surrounding this book when it was published but it did not affect my reading of this book.
I would recommend this book for readers who enjoy Russian history but be warned this is a long and detailed book and quite a slow read.
This was my first Library book as I only joined my local Library last month for research I was doing and while there I saw this book in the history section and knew it was right up my street. Having said that half ways through the book I ordered a copy as really want this one for my book shelf.
.
Every now and again I need to be shocked by history and while I have read a lot of books on this period in history and the terror of Stalin, The Whisperers has something entirely different to offer as it tells the accounts of the the loved ones left behind after their husbands wife's mothers or fathers have been informed on and either shot or sent to the Gulag.
The Whisperers draws on hundreds of family archives (letters, diaries, personal papers and memoirs and photographs) concealed by the survivors of the Stalin Terror in secret drawers and under mattresses across Russia. In each family extensive interviews were carried out with the oldest members to bring about the many many important and heart breaking accounts of ordinary family's who survived through Stalin's reign of terror.
I had a hard copy edition from my local library and at just under 750 pages is quite a slow but compelling read and while most memoirs or biographies of the survivors of Stalin's Great Terror concentrate on those who were imprisoned or killed, the Whisperers gives us an intimate look at the devastation experienced by the family members left behind. While numerous family accounts are catalogued in the book, each account is only a few pages long and therefore the reader only learns what is necessary for that particular account and family and yet some of the family stories are so memorable and heartbreaking that I will have a difficulty time leaving them behind. The book has a vast amount of photographs and it was nice to be able to put faces to some of the people concerned. There is also a terrific introduction at the beginning of the book which I found so informative and helpful.
I am aware that there was controversary surrounding this book when it was published but it did not affect my reading of this book.
I would recommend this book for readers who enjoy Russian history but be warned this is a long and detailed book and quite a slow read.
This was my first Library book as I only joined my local Library last month for research I was doing and while there I saw this book in the history section and knew it was right up my street. Having said that half ways through the book I ordered a copy as really want this one for my book shelf.
.
April 14, 2008
Private Life on The Stalin’s Conveyor of Deaths
(Some thoughts about Orlando Figes’ book)
By Sol Tetelbaum (Fremont, CA USA)
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: Stories of My Life in Soviet Russia, by Sol Tetelbaum) that was published recently. 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 witnessed many events, some of which were described in Orlando Figes’ book. Later 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 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 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 phenomena: 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, and 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, became “enemy of the people,” were arrested, and disappeared 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 with details the years from 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 later. 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.” 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.
November 26, 2012
A Million Tragedies
If you’ve seen the David Lean film version of Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago you may recall the scene where Lara, hearing wolves howl in the snowy distance, turns to Yuri in fright, saying that this is a terrible time to be alive. This is in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War that followed; history in action, a process that overwhelmed so many individual lives, consumed by fear, uncertainty and terror.
But Lara did not know then how bad things were to become, that the wolves would not stay in the distance or outside the door. In the end she herself was to be the victim of the greatest fear of all – Stalin’s all-consuming Purge of the late 1930s which reached its murderous height in 1937, the Yezhovchina, named after Nikolai Yezhov, then head of the NKVD security apparatus.
In his novel Pasternak writes of his character;
One day Lara went out and did not come back. She must have been arrested in the street, as so often happened in those days, and she died or vanished somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list that was later mislaid, in one of the innumerable mixed or women’s concentration camps in the north.
She was a nameless number, that’s all, drawn into the maelstrom like so many others. As Stalin is reputed to have said, a million deaths is not a tragedy, merely a statistic. The victims of his regime are gone beyond recall, just a meaningless list of meaningless names, voices that can no longer be heard. The rest is silence.
But it’s not. The silence has been broken with whispers. It has been broken by The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia by Orlando Figes, a British specialist in Russian history. It isn’t a new work; it was published as long ago as 2007. The subject certainly interests me, having read and reviewed other books on this phase in Russian history, on GoodReads, on my blog and elsewhere. I would have tackled it eventually though I finally came to it as the dust settled after one of the little sandstorms that overtake publishing and the academic world now and then, inevitably obscuring the horizon
I’ll come to this in a bit. Let me begin by saying that I consider Figes to be one of the best historians in his particular field. I hugely enjoyed his account of the Crimean War and I think A People’s Tragedy: the Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 is the single best account of the whole period.
I do not think The Whisperers has surpassed this achievement, but it is still an important forward step in historical research. Its achievement lies in what I would call ‘a panorama from below.’ This is the voice of the voiceless, of people who experienced the Great Terror at first hand, not the politicians, the ideologues and the apparatchiks but the ordinary people of Russia.
Working with a team of researchers, Figes has recovered so much personal testimony on the threshold of an even greater silence. For that alone he is to be commended. He also draws on family archives, letters, diaries, personal memoirs and so on, testimony that would have otherwise have been forgotten, unread and turning yellow with age.
In Stalin’s Russia Big Brother, in the shape of the secret police, was constantly keeping the private citizen under observation, ready to pounce, like a wolf, on the least sign of deviation. I write ‘private citizen’ but there really was no privacy and no retreat. Stalinism fed on moral corruption, and moral corruption begins at the level of the individual.
Yes, the state was ever watchful but it depended most particularly on those who were prepared to denounce others, either for base motives of personal gain – apartment space was at a premium - , or because they wanted to wash out some ‘stain’ in their personal biography by proving themselves more orthodox than the orthodox. One published notice serves here: “I, Nikolai Ivanov, renounce my father, an ex-priest, because for many years he deceived the people by telling them God exists, and for that reason I am severing my relations with him.”
Deception and self-deception, lies and half truths, all were absorbed into a jungle-like struggle for survival. Commenting on one journal from 1937 Figes notes that “…people were becoming so adept at concealing meaning in their speech that they were in danger of losing the capacity to speak the truth altogether.”
In a way personal life turned into a bizarre Greek tragedy, all emotion hidden behind masks. Those desperate to speak the truth turned in on themselves, like Winston Smith in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, confining their thoughts to diaries, a release carrying its own particular danger.
The title has a double meaning that becomes increasingly obvious the further one reads. Whisperer in Russian has two senses: those who speak quietly for fear of being overheard, and those who inform on others, even friends and family, for fear of being suspected. Denounce, in other words, before you are denounced. Figes writes that “The distinction has its origins in the idiom of the Stalin years, when the whole of society was made up of whisperers of one sort or another.”
Personal and moral corruption came through fear and intimidation. There is, however, another form of corruption, one which begins not with baseness but with idealism. The key example here is one Konstantin Siminov, whom Figes singles out as the ‘central figure’ of The Whisperers. He was a journalist, novelist and poet who enjoyed a particularly successful career under Stalin, demonstrating his loyalty time and again.
There was no opportunism here; he was a genuine believer. Even the arrest and disappearance of family, friends and colleagues did nothing to dent his enthusiasm. It was this enthusiasm that allowed him to embrace every ideological perversion, including Stalin’s late anti-Semitism. He was loyal even after the end. As the truth began to come out after the dictator’s death, Siminov held to his early course. The alternative was just too awful: the alternative was to admit that his whole life had been based on a fraud. In the end he did. This was to be his particular tragedy.
The Whisperers is an important book, I would go so far as to say a crucial one, a necessary testimony coming at just the right point in time, coming as a new fog of lies and misinformation about the past and about Stalin descends on Putin’s Russia. Even so it’s not a perfect book; there are flaws. As I hinted above, I read it in the aftermath of a controversy earlier this year. Russian publishers scrapped a projected translation because of alleged ‘inaccuracies.’ The story was picked up by Peter Reddaway and Stephen Cohen, two American academics, who published their findings in The Nation.
Errors of fact are always a concern, particularly when those errors concern people who are still alive. But it seems to me that given the scale and scope of The Whisperers, given the mountain of primary material, such a thing while not excusable is at least understandable. Many of the errors, though, seem to have been introduced by the Russian translators or were present in the source documents. Once this had been taken into account the author wrote that it left “…a few genuine errors in a book based on thousands of interviews and archival documents. These I regret.”
I do not regret this book, perhaps one of the most ambitions and worthwhile exercises in oral history ever undertaken. The flaws notwithstanding, it is a commendable achievement. It is, if you like, the story of a million tragedies.
If you’ve seen the David Lean film version of Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago you may recall the scene where Lara, hearing wolves howl in the snowy distance, turns to Yuri in fright, saying that this is a terrible time to be alive. This is in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War that followed; history in action, a process that overwhelmed so many individual lives, consumed by fear, uncertainty and terror.
But Lara did not know then how bad things were to become, that the wolves would not stay in the distance or outside the door. In the end she herself was to be the victim of the greatest fear of all – Stalin’s all-consuming Purge of the late 1930s which reached its murderous height in 1937, the Yezhovchina, named after Nikolai Yezhov, then head of the NKVD security apparatus.
In his novel Pasternak writes of his character;
One day Lara went out and did not come back. She must have been arrested in the street, as so often happened in those days, and she died or vanished somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list that was later mislaid, in one of the innumerable mixed or women’s concentration camps in the north.
She was a nameless number, that’s all, drawn into the maelstrom like so many others. As Stalin is reputed to have said, a million deaths is not a tragedy, merely a statistic. The victims of his regime are gone beyond recall, just a meaningless list of meaningless names, voices that can no longer be heard. The rest is silence.
But it’s not. The silence has been broken with whispers. It has been broken by The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia by Orlando Figes, a British specialist in Russian history. It isn’t a new work; it was published as long ago as 2007. The subject certainly interests me, having read and reviewed other books on this phase in Russian history, on GoodReads, on my blog and elsewhere. I would have tackled it eventually though I finally came to it as the dust settled after one of the little sandstorms that overtake publishing and the academic world now and then, inevitably obscuring the horizon
I’ll come to this in a bit. Let me begin by saying that I consider Figes to be one of the best historians in his particular field. I hugely enjoyed his account of the Crimean War and I think A People’s Tragedy: the Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 is the single best account of the whole period.
I do not think The Whisperers has surpassed this achievement, but it is still an important forward step in historical research. Its achievement lies in what I would call ‘a panorama from below.’ This is the voice of the voiceless, of people who experienced the Great Terror at first hand, not the politicians, the ideologues and the apparatchiks but the ordinary people of Russia.
Working with a team of researchers, Figes has recovered so much personal testimony on the threshold of an even greater silence. For that alone he is to be commended. He also draws on family archives, letters, diaries, personal memoirs and so on, testimony that would have otherwise have been forgotten, unread and turning yellow with age.
In Stalin’s Russia Big Brother, in the shape of the secret police, was constantly keeping the private citizen under observation, ready to pounce, like a wolf, on the least sign of deviation. I write ‘private citizen’ but there really was no privacy and no retreat. Stalinism fed on moral corruption, and moral corruption begins at the level of the individual.
Yes, the state was ever watchful but it depended most particularly on those who were prepared to denounce others, either for base motives of personal gain – apartment space was at a premium - , or because they wanted to wash out some ‘stain’ in their personal biography by proving themselves more orthodox than the orthodox. One published notice serves here: “I, Nikolai Ivanov, renounce my father, an ex-priest, because for many years he deceived the people by telling them God exists, and for that reason I am severing my relations with him.”
Deception and self-deception, lies and half truths, all were absorbed into a jungle-like struggle for survival. Commenting on one journal from 1937 Figes notes that “…people were becoming so adept at concealing meaning in their speech that they were in danger of losing the capacity to speak the truth altogether.”
In a way personal life turned into a bizarre Greek tragedy, all emotion hidden behind masks. Those desperate to speak the truth turned in on themselves, like Winston Smith in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, confining their thoughts to diaries, a release carrying its own particular danger.
The title has a double meaning that becomes increasingly obvious the further one reads. Whisperer in Russian has two senses: those who speak quietly for fear of being overheard, and those who inform on others, even friends and family, for fear of being suspected. Denounce, in other words, before you are denounced. Figes writes that “The distinction has its origins in the idiom of the Stalin years, when the whole of society was made up of whisperers of one sort or another.”
Personal and moral corruption came through fear and intimidation. There is, however, another form of corruption, one which begins not with baseness but with idealism. The key example here is one Konstantin Siminov, whom Figes singles out as the ‘central figure’ of The Whisperers. He was a journalist, novelist and poet who enjoyed a particularly successful career under Stalin, demonstrating his loyalty time and again.
There was no opportunism here; he was a genuine believer. Even the arrest and disappearance of family, friends and colleagues did nothing to dent his enthusiasm. It was this enthusiasm that allowed him to embrace every ideological perversion, including Stalin’s late anti-Semitism. He was loyal even after the end. As the truth began to come out after the dictator’s death, Siminov held to his early course. The alternative was just too awful: the alternative was to admit that his whole life had been based on a fraud. In the end he did. This was to be his particular tragedy.
The Whisperers is an important book, I would go so far as to say a crucial one, a necessary testimony coming at just the right point in time, coming as a new fog of lies and misinformation about the past and about Stalin descends on Putin’s Russia. Even so it’s not a perfect book; there are flaws. As I hinted above, I read it in the aftermath of a controversy earlier this year. Russian publishers scrapped a projected translation because of alleged ‘inaccuracies.’ The story was picked up by Peter Reddaway and Stephen Cohen, two American academics, who published their findings in The Nation.
Errors of fact are always a concern, particularly when those errors concern people who are still alive. But it seems to me that given the scale and scope of The Whisperers, given the mountain of primary material, such a thing while not excusable is at least understandable. Many of the errors, though, seem to have been introduced by the Russian translators or were present in the source documents. Once this had been taken into account the author wrote that it left “…a few genuine errors in a book based on thousands of interviews and archival documents. These I regret.”
I do not regret this book, perhaps one of the most ambitions and worthwhile exercises in oral history ever undertaken. The flaws notwithstanding, it is a commendable achievement. It is, if you like, the story of a million tragedies.
Shelved as 'own'
October 28, 2014This is a vital article published recently in The Nation about this controversial book and why it was not published in Russia after two attempts by different publishers. I hope that in its wake its readers' rankings would be less upbeat.
Orlando Figes and Stalin's Victims. Peter Reddaway and Stephen F. Cohen
May 23, 2012
Many Western observers believe that Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian regime has in effect banned a Russian edition of a widely acclaimed 2007 book by the British historian Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia. A professor at University of London’s Birkbeck College, Figes himself inspired this explanation. In an interview and in an article in 2009, he suggested that his first Russian publisher dropped the project due to “political pressure” because his large-scale study of Stalin-era terror “is inconvenient to the current regime.” Three years later, his explanation continues to circulate.
We doubted Figes’s explanation at the time—partly because excellent Russian historians were themselves publishing so many uncensored exposés of the horrors of Stalinism, and continue to do so—but only now are we able to disprove it. (Since neither of us knows Figes or has ever had any contact with him, there was no personal animus in our investigation.) Our examination of transcripts of original Russian-language interviews he used to write The Whisperers, and of documents provided by Russians close to the project, tells a different story. A second Russian publisher, Corpus, had no political qualms about soon contracting for its own edition of the book. In 2010, however, Corpus also canceled the project. The reasons had nothing to do with Putin’s regime but everything to do with Figes himself.
* * *
In 2004 specialists at the Memorial Society, a widely respected Russian historical and human rights organization founded in 1988 on behalf of victims and survivors of Stalin’s terror, were contracted by Figes to conduct hundreds of interviews that form the basis of The Whisperers, and are now archived at Memorial. In preparing for the Russian edition, Corpus commissioned Memorial to provide the original Russian-language versions of Figes’s quotations and to check his other English-language translations. What Memorial’s researchers found was a startling number of minor and major errors. Its publication “as is,” it was concluded, would cause a scandal in Russia.
This revelation, which we learned about several months ago, did not entirely surprise us, though our subsequent discoveries were shocking. Separately, we had been following Figes’s academic and related abuses for some time. They began in 1997, with his book A People’s Tragedy, in which the Harvard historian Richard Pipes found scholarly shortcomings. In 2002 Figes’s cultural history of Russia, Natasha’s Dance, was greeted with enthusiasm by many reviewers until it encountered a careful critic in the Times Literary Supplement, Rachel Polonsky of Cambridge University. Polonsky pointed out various defects in the book, including Figes’s careless borrowing of words and ideas of other writers without adequate acknowledgment. One of those writers, the American historian Priscilla Roosevelt, wrote to us, “Figes appropriated obscure memoirs I had used in my book Life on the Russian Country Estate (Yale University Press, 1995), but changed their content and messed up the references.” Another leading scholar, T.J. Binyon, published similar criticism of Natasha’s Dance: “Factual errors and mistaken assertions strew its pages more thickly than autumnal leaves in Vallombrosa.”
In 2010 a different dimension of Figes’s practices came to light. For some time he had been writing anonymous derogatory reviews on Amazon of books by his colleagues in Russian history, notably Polonsky and Robert Service of Oxford University. Polonsky’s Molotov’s Magic Lantern, for example, was “pretentious” and “the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever published.” Meanwhile, Figes wrote on Amazon, also anonymously, a rave review of his own recent The Whisperers. It was, Figes said, a “beautiful and necessary” account of Soviet history written by an author with “superb story-telling skills…. I hope he writes forever.”
When Service and Polonsky expressed their suspicion that Figes had written the reviews, his lawyer threatened Service with court action. Soon, however, Figes was compelled to admit that he had indeed written the anonymous reviews. Service summed up the affair: Figes had “lied through his teeth for a week and threatened to sue me for libel if I didn’t say black was white…. If there is one thing that should come out of this, it is the importance of giving people freedom to speak the truth without the menace of financial ruin.”
* * *
At about the same time, as we later learned, the true story of the Russian edition of Figes’s The Whisperers was unfolding behind the scenes in Moscow. In summer 2010, representatives of three Russian organizations involved—the publisher Corpus, Memorial and a foundation, Dynastia (which owned the Russian rights and paid for the translation)—met to consider what Memorial’s researchers had uncovered. According to a detailed account by one participant, the group tried to find a way to salvage the project, but the researchers had documented too many “anachronisms, incorrect interpretations, stupid mistakes and pure nonsense.” All of The Whisperers’ “facts, dates, names and terms, and the biographies of its central figures, need to be checked,” the participant added. It was too much. A decision was made against proceeding with the Russian edition. After re-examining the relevant materials, Dynastia informed Figes of the decision in an April 6, 2011, letter to his London literary agency.
Indeed, after looking at only a few chapters of The Whisperers, Memorial found so many misrepresentations of the life stories of Stalin’s victims that its chief researcher, a woman with extensive experience working on such materials, said, “I simply wept as I read it and tried to make corrections.” Here are just three examples, which we have also examined, whose gravity readers can decide for themselves:
§ To begin with an example that blends mistakes with invention, consider Figes’s treatment of Natalia Danilova (p. 253), whose father had been arrested. After misrepresenting her family history, Figes puts words in her mouth, evidently to help justify the title of his book: Except for an aunt, “the rest of us could only whisper in dissent.” The “quotation” does not appear in Memorial’s meticulous transcription of its recorded interview with Danilova.
§ Figes invents “facts” in other cases, apparently also for dramatic purpose. According to The Whisperers (pp. 215-17, 292-93), “it is inconceivable” that Mikhail Stroikov could have completed his dissertation while in prison “without the support of the political police. He had two uncles in the OGPU” (the political police). However, there is no evidence that Stroikov had any uncles, nor is there any reason to allege that he had the support of the secret police. Figes also claims that for helping Stroikov’s family, a friend then in exile was “rearrested, imprisoned and later shot.” In reality, this friend was not rearrested, imprisoned or executed, but lived almost to the age of 90.
§ Figes’s distortion of the fate of Dina Ielson-Grodzianskaia (pp. 361-62), who survived eight years in the Gulag, is grievous in a different respect. After placing her in the wrong concentration camp, he alleges that she was “one of the many ‘trusties’” whose collaboration earned them “those small advantages which…could make the difference between life and death.” There is no evidence in the interviews used by Figes that Ielson-Grodzianskaia was ever a “trusty” or received any special privileges. As a leading Memorial researcher commented, Figes’s account is “a direct insult to the memory of a prisoner.”
The Whisperers may be consistent with Figes’s other practices, but for us, longtime students (and friends) of victims of Stalinist and other Soviet-era repressions, the book’s defects are especially grave. For many Russians, particularly surviving family members, Stalin’s millions of victims are a “sacred memory.” Figes has not, to say the least, been faithful to that memory—nor to the truth-telling mission of the often politically embattled Memorial, which, despite the effort expended, honorably agreed with the decision against publishing the Russian edition. Still more, a great many Russians have suffered, even died, for, as Service put it, the “freedom to speak the truth.” Figes has not honored that martyrdom either.
* * *
Unfortunately, The Whisperers is still regarded by many Western readers, including scholars, as an exemplary study of Soviet history. These new revelations show, however, that Figes’s work cannot be read without considerable caution. Historians are obliged to be especially meticulous in using generally inaccessible archive materials, but Figes cannot be fully trusted even with open sources. Thus, in The Whisperers he also maligns the memory of the late Soviet poet and longtime editor of Novyi Mir, Aleksandr Tvardovsky, a bold forerunner of Mikhail Gorbachev’s anti-Stalinist thinking, by stating that Tvardovsky “betrayed” his own father to the police during the terror (p. 134). Figes’s allegation has been convincingly refuted in the Russian press.
We hope that in his latest book, Just Send Me Word, published in May, Figes has treated his unique sources with more care. This book tells the saga of a deeply moving, secret, more than eight-year correspondence between an inmate in Stalin’s remote Gulag and a devoted woman in Moscow, who later became his wife. Regrettably, the book conveys the impression that Figes retains the full support of Memorial, through, for example, the insertion at the end of the volume of “A Note from Memorial” (an analysis of the correspondence by a Memorial researcher that was apparently designed for another purpose).
In truth, Memorial has come to a different decision regarding Figes. In a letter, one of its leading figures recently wrote about Figes, “Many of us have formed an impression of him as being…a very mediocre researcher and an incompetent handler of sources who is poorly oriented in his chosen topic, but an energetic and talented businessman.” As a result, the writer continued, “In the future, we do not want to link his name with that of Memorial.”
Response From Orlando Figes
I have seventy-five words to respond to an article I’ve not been allowed to read. The first cancellation (Atticus, 2009) cited commercial reasons, though I speculated that politics was involved. The second (Dynastia, 2011) cited about a dozen “factual inaccuracies” and “misrepresentations.” I responded: some were in Memorial’s sources, others debatable, or mistranslated by Dynastia—leaving a few genuine errors in a book based on thousands of interviews and archival documents. These I regret.
It is longstanding Nation policy not to share the full text of an article with the subject of that article before publication. Our Letters page remains open to Figes. —The Editors
Orlando Figes and Stalin's Victims. Peter Reddaway and Stephen F. Cohen
May 23, 2012
Many Western observers believe that Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian regime has in effect banned a Russian edition of a widely acclaimed 2007 book by the British historian Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia. A professor at University of London’s Birkbeck College, Figes himself inspired this explanation. In an interview and in an article in 2009, he suggested that his first Russian publisher dropped the project due to “political pressure” because his large-scale study of Stalin-era terror “is inconvenient to the current regime.” Three years later, his explanation continues to circulate.
We doubted Figes’s explanation at the time—partly because excellent Russian historians were themselves publishing so many uncensored exposés of the horrors of Stalinism, and continue to do so—but only now are we able to disprove it. (Since neither of us knows Figes or has ever had any contact with him, there was no personal animus in our investigation.) Our examination of transcripts of original Russian-language interviews he used to write The Whisperers, and of documents provided by Russians close to the project, tells a different story. A second Russian publisher, Corpus, had no political qualms about soon contracting for its own edition of the book. In 2010, however, Corpus also canceled the project. The reasons had nothing to do with Putin’s regime but everything to do with Figes himself.
* * *
In 2004 specialists at the Memorial Society, a widely respected Russian historical and human rights organization founded in 1988 on behalf of victims and survivors of Stalin’s terror, were contracted by Figes to conduct hundreds of interviews that form the basis of The Whisperers, and are now archived at Memorial. In preparing for the Russian edition, Corpus commissioned Memorial to provide the original Russian-language versions of Figes’s quotations and to check his other English-language translations. What Memorial’s researchers found was a startling number of minor and major errors. Its publication “as is,” it was concluded, would cause a scandal in Russia.
This revelation, which we learned about several months ago, did not entirely surprise us, though our subsequent discoveries were shocking. Separately, we had been following Figes’s academic and related abuses for some time. They began in 1997, with his book A People’s Tragedy, in which the Harvard historian Richard Pipes found scholarly shortcomings. In 2002 Figes’s cultural history of Russia, Natasha’s Dance, was greeted with enthusiasm by many reviewers until it encountered a careful critic in the Times Literary Supplement, Rachel Polonsky of Cambridge University. Polonsky pointed out various defects in the book, including Figes’s careless borrowing of words and ideas of other writers without adequate acknowledgment. One of those writers, the American historian Priscilla Roosevelt, wrote to us, “Figes appropriated obscure memoirs I had used in my book Life on the Russian Country Estate (Yale University Press, 1995), but changed their content and messed up the references.” Another leading scholar, T.J. Binyon, published similar criticism of Natasha’s Dance: “Factual errors and mistaken assertions strew its pages more thickly than autumnal leaves in Vallombrosa.”
In 2010 a different dimension of Figes’s practices came to light. For some time he had been writing anonymous derogatory reviews on Amazon of books by his colleagues in Russian history, notably Polonsky and Robert Service of Oxford University. Polonsky’s Molotov’s Magic Lantern, for example, was “pretentious” and “the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever published.” Meanwhile, Figes wrote on Amazon, also anonymously, a rave review of his own recent The Whisperers. It was, Figes said, a “beautiful and necessary” account of Soviet history written by an author with “superb story-telling skills…. I hope he writes forever.”
When Service and Polonsky expressed their suspicion that Figes had written the reviews, his lawyer threatened Service with court action. Soon, however, Figes was compelled to admit that he had indeed written the anonymous reviews. Service summed up the affair: Figes had “lied through his teeth for a week and threatened to sue me for libel if I didn’t say black was white…. If there is one thing that should come out of this, it is the importance of giving people freedom to speak the truth without the menace of financial ruin.”
* * *
At about the same time, as we later learned, the true story of the Russian edition of Figes’s The Whisperers was unfolding behind the scenes in Moscow. In summer 2010, representatives of three Russian organizations involved—the publisher Corpus, Memorial and a foundation, Dynastia (which owned the Russian rights and paid for the translation)—met to consider what Memorial’s researchers had uncovered. According to a detailed account by one participant, the group tried to find a way to salvage the project, but the researchers had documented too many “anachronisms, incorrect interpretations, stupid mistakes and pure nonsense.” All of The Whisperers’ “facts, dates, names and terms, and the biographies of its central figures, need to be checked,” the participant added. It was too much. A decision was made against proceeding with the Russian edition. After re-examining the relevant materials, Dynastia informed Figes of the decision in an April 6, 2011, letter to his London literary agency.
Indeed, after looking at only a few chapters of The Whisperers, Memorial found so many misrepresentations of the life stories of Stalin’s victims that its chief researcher, a woman with extensive experience working on such materials, said, “I simply wept as I read it and tried to make corrections.” Here are just three examples, which we have also examined, whose gravity readers can decide for themselves:
§ To begin with an example that blends mistakes with invention, consider Figes’s treatment of Natalia Danilova (p. 253), whose father had been arrested. After misrepresenting her family history, Figes puts words in her mouth, evidently to help justify the title of his book: Except for an aunt, “the rest of us could only whisper in dissent.” The “quotation” does not appear in Memorial’s meticulous transcription of its recorded interview with Danilova.
§ Figes invents “facts” in other cases, apparently also for dramatic purpose. According to The Whisperers (pp. 215-17, 292-93), “it is inconceivable” that Mikhail Stroikov could have completed his dissertation while in prison “without the support of the political police. He had two uncles in the OGPU” (the political police). However, there is no evidence that Stroikov had any uncles, nor is there any reason to allege that he had the support of the secret police. Figes also claims that for helping Stroikov’s family, a friend then in exile was “rearrested, imprisoned and later shot.” In reality, this friend was not rearrested, imprisoned or executed, but lived almost to the age of 90.
§ Figes’s distortion of the fate of Dina Ielson-Grodzianskaia (pp. 361-62), who survived eight years in the Gulag, is grievous in a different respect. After placing her in the wrong concentration camp, he alleges that she was “one of the many ‘trusties’” whose collaboration earned them “those small advantages which…could make the difference between life and death.” There is no evidence in the interviews used by Figes that Ielson-Grodzianskaia was ever a “trusty” or received any special privileges. As a leading Memorial researcher commented, Figes’s account is “a direct insult to the memory of a prisoner.”
The Whisperers may be consistent with Figes’s other practices, but for us, longtime students (and friends) of victims of Stalinist and other Soviet-era repressions, the book’s defects are especially grave. For many Russians, particularly surviving family members, Stalin’s millions of victims are a “sacred memory.” Figes has not, to say the least, been faithful to that memory—nor to the truth-telling mission of the often politically embattled Memorial, which, despite the effort expended, honorably agreed with the decision against publishing the Russian edition. Still more, a great many Russians have suffered, even died, for, as Service put it, the “freedom to speak the truth.” Figes has not honored that martyrdom either.
* * *
Unfortunately, The Whisperers is still regarded by many Western readers, including scholars, as an exemplary study of Soviet history. These new revelations show, however, that Figes’s work cannot be read without considerable caution. Historians are obliged to be especially meticulous in using generally inaccessible archive materials, but Figes cannot be fully trusted even with open sources. Thus, in The Whisperers he also maligns the memory of the late Soviet poet and longtime editor of Novyi Mir, Aleksandr Tvardovsky, a bold forerunner of Mikhail Gorbachev’s anti-Stalinist thinking, by stating that Tvardovsky “betrayed” his own father to the police during the terror (p. 134). Figes’s allegation has been convincingly refuted in the Russian press.
We hope that in his latest book, Just Send Me Word, published in May, Figes has treated his unique sources with more care. This book tells the saga of a deeply moving, secret, more than eight-year correspondence between an inmate in Stalin’s remote Gulag and a devoted woman in Moscow, who later became his wife. Regrettably, the book conveys the impression that Figes retains the full support of Memorial, through, for example, the insertion at the end of the volume of “A Note from Memorial” (an analysis of the correspondence by a Memorial researcher that was apparently designed for another purpose).
In truth, Memorial has come to a different decision regarding Figes. In a letter, one of its leading figures recently wrote about Figes, “Many of us have formed an impression of him as being…a very mediocre researcher and an incompetent handler of sources who is poorly oriented in his chosen topic, but an energetic and talented businessman.” As a result, the writer continued, “In the future, we do not want to link his name with that of Memorial.”
Response From Orlando Figes
I have seventy-five words to respond to an article I’ve not been allowed to read. The first cancellation (Atticus, 2009) cited commercial reasons, though I speculated that politics was involved. The second (Dynastia, 2011) cited about a dozen “factual inaccuracies” and “misrepresentations.” I responded: some were in Memorial’s sources, others debatable, or mistranslated by Dynastia—leaving a few genuine errors in a book based on thousands of interviews and archival documents. These I regret.
It is longstanding Nation policy not to share the full text of an article with the subject of that article before publication. Our Letters page remains open to Figes. —The Editors
August 30, 2024
I can't say anything other than how frightening I found this. I think it is easier to dismiss the story told, by suggesting, 'that's not the truth, it's a gross exaggeration.' I did look Mr Figes up on the www and I find it difficult to think he would be guilty of such. Frightened by this, I still am and at the same time accept I have lived in a bubble, expecting life to be rosy for all. Why not? How could I imagine how these poor people were forced to live?
I sat with one of the residents, he is a very kind and very educated man. We talked of my thoughts and feelings. He said, "It's hard to imagine." I agreed. He said, "Not that hard. Read 1984?" Which I am now going to read.
I sat with one of the residents, he is a very kind and very educated man. We talked of my thoughts and feelings. He said, "It's hard to imagine." I agreed. He said, "Not that hard. Read 1984?" Which I am now going to read.
May 4, 2012
A very interesting book; parts of it are very moving. I found the explanation for the Terror in Ch. 8 quite persuasive (see * below). OTOH, it is really not necessary to publish 700 page books that consist mainly of repetitive examples. That's what footnotes and reference systems, after all, are for...
* Stalin was expecting war with the fascist powers, and believed (not without cause) that the Western powers were trying to divert Hitler "to the East". And he feared (as the Tsar had suffered in WWI) social revolution "in the rear". At the same time, he observed the failure of the Republicans in Spain, undone by infighting on the Left (Anarchist, Communists, Trotskyites) -- from which he concluded that only repression at home could maintain the unity necessary to fight the Germans.
Stalin did not, of coures, believe that all these many people were actually spies or enemies (by Figes' count, nearly 1.5 million were arrested, and over 700,000 shot, in 1937-1938 alone). But he believed that if one or two real enemies could be caught, it was worth shooting a hundred..., or a thousand innocent men and women. They were simply trying, as Kaganovich (who lived to the ripe old age of 98) put it in the 1980's, to "drain the swamp"; or as Molotov, as late as 1986: The Terror for Stalin was merely "an insurance policy".
* Stalin was expecting war with the fascist powers, and believed (not without cause) that the Western powers were trying to divert Hitler "to the East". And he feared (as the Tsar had suffered in WWI) social revolution "in the rear". At the same time, he observed the failure of the Republicans in Spain, undone by infighting on the Left (Anarchist, Communists, Trotskyites) -- from which he concluded that only repression at home could maintain the unity necessary to fight the Germans.
Stalin did not, of coures, believe that all these many people were actually spies or enemies (by Figes' count, nearly 1.5 million were arrested, and over 700,000 shot, in 1937-1938 alone). But he believed that if one or two real enemies could be caught, it was worth shooting a hundred..., or a thousand innocent men and women. They were simply trying, as Kaganovich (who lived to the ripe old age of 98) put it in the 1980's, to "drain the swamp"; or as Molotov, as late as 1986: The Terror for Stalin was merely "an insurance policy".
August 20, 2022
The first thing that is worth saying here is that this book is lengthy. And I don't just mean it has a high page length. No, what I mean is that the pages cannot be whizzed through at speed; rather they need to be digested at best at a moderate pace, slowly cogitated upon and considered at length. Consequently, don't expect to finish this book super-quick.
But the 'lengthiness' of The Whisperers by Orlando Figes is in many senses, it's strongpoint. It demonstrates the meticulously detailed research of the author; research that yields a tide of mostly highly moving personal stories, together with a comprehensive history of a dark period in Russia's recent history. So dark is the subject matter at hand in fact, that it is almost beyond the comprehension of someone such as myself, brought up in a Western democracy, the tenets of which form the mainstay of my understanding of the world around me.
And yet a sense of the dark conditions under which Russians were forced to live for close to thirty years is exactly what Figes conveys so well in this text. The effect on families, whose children were actively encouraged to report to the authorities the conversations they overheard between their parents. Couples whose unquestionable love was torn asunder by forced separation, as one...or both, were sentenced and deported to the gulag, often to be executed shortly thereafter. The sense of distrust felt by the populace, as they questioned who was likely to betray them next. The communal apartments, or kommunalka, with their wafer-thin walls that allowed informers, deliberately placed by the Party, to eavesdrop and report on 'traitors'. The divisions....deeply rent divisions between communities and families, caused by deeply held political viewpoints that were irreconcilable...Figes gives us a sense of all this and so much more in this text.
If you can persevere to the end, this is a book well worth reading. It isn't warm and fuzzy. It's not this years feel-good summer read. But nonetheless, it's a story that had to be told. And it's one that deserves to be read.
But the 'lengthiness' of The Whisperers by Orlando Figes is in many senses, it's strongpoint. It demonstrates the meticulously detailed research of the author; research that yields a tide of mostly highly moving personal stories, together with a comprehensive history of a dark period in Russia's recent history. So dark is the subject matter at hand in fact, that it is almost beyond the comprehension of someone such as myself, brought up in a Western democracy, the tenets of which form the mainstay of my understanding of the world around me.
And yet a sense of the dark conditions under which Russians were forced to live for close to thirty years is exactly what Figes conveys so well in this text. The effect on families, whose children were actively encouraged to report to the authorities the conversations they overheard between their parents. Couples whose unquestionable love was torn asunder by forced separation, as one...or both, were sentenced and deported to the gulag, often to be executed shortly thereafter. The sense of distrust felt by the populace, as they questioned who was likely to betray them next. The communal apartments, or kommunalka, with their wafer-thin walls that allowed informers, deliberately placed by the Party, to eavesdrop and report on 'traitors'. The divisions....deeply rent divisions between communities and families, caused by deeply held political viewpoints that were irreconcilable...Figes gives us a sense of all this and so much more in this text.
If you can persevere to the end, this is a book well worth reading. It isn't warm and fuzzy. It's not this years feel-good summer read. But nonetheless, it's a story that had to be told. And it's one that deserves to be read.
October 15, 2021
Comunismul si viata privata:
"Pentru bolsevici, exprimarea deplina a "personalitatii colective" presupunea "sfaramarea cochiliei pe care o reprezinta viata privata". A se permite "delimitarea dintre viata privata si cea publica [...] va duce mai devreme sau mai tarziu la tradarea comunismului".In opinia bolsevicilor, "viata privata" separata de domeniul politicului este un nonsens, caci politica influenta totul. Nu exista nimic in asa-numita "viata privata" a unei persoane care sa nu se afle sub imperiul politicului. Universul personal trebuia, prin urmare, supus controlului si supravegherii publice. Spatiile private ca nu intrau sub controlul statului erau considerate terenuri periculoase, propice activitatii contrarevolutionare, care trebuia demascata si starpita."
"Pentru bolsevici, exprimarea deplina a "personalitatii colective" presupunea "sfaramarea cochiliei pe care o reprezinta viata privata". A se permite "delimitarea dintre viata privata si cea publica [...] va duce mai devreme sau mai tarziu la tradarea comunismului".In opinia bolsevicilor, "viata privata" separata de domeniul politicului este un nonsens, caci politica influenta totul. Nu exista nimic in asa-numita "viata privata" a unei persoane care sa nu se afle sub imperiul politicului. Universul personal trebuia, prin urmare, supus controlului si supravegherii publice. Spatiile private ca nu intrau sub controlul statului erau considerate terenuri periculoase, propice activitatii contrarevolutionare, care trebuia demascata si starpita."
November 17, 2023
A must read for all.
Should be obligatory at school and for those keen to understand the history of Russia.
I need say no more - all that should be said already has.
Should be obligatory at school and for those keen to understand the history of Russia.
I need say no more - all that should be said already has.
January 12, 2021
Even as an adult, when I went out at night, I would always look for the Great Bear and think about my mother. […] I saw it as a sign that one day she would return.
Too often, when faced with such accounts of human-made horror like the Stalinist repressions, we tend to dehumanize the victims, not because of cynicism, but maybe for the sake of self-preservation. When we learn that millions of people suffered as a consequence of the Terror, we tend to see the numbers and not the people.
Through an unbelievably comprehensive work of research in oral accounts and archives, Orlando Figes manages to reverse this defense process, by showing the readers the individuals behind the numbers, telling us their stories, often through their own voices by quoting personal letters or memoirs.
The most striking feature of this historical account is the compassionate way of telling each family or individual’s story. The reader cannot help but feel empathy for the people he is reading about, something that very few history books or reportage, however well researched and written, achieve to this extent.
Figes does not focus on solely the direct victims of the Stalinist madness, those people who were shot or ended up in the GULag or disappeared without a trace, he mostly describes the life of those who were left behind at home, who had to deal with the disappearance of their loved ones and had to carry the grief, the doubt, the stigma and the fear of being related to “enemies of the people” as those accused were defined. This way, he provides an overview of how a whole country, for several generations, was traumatized by the system that came to be in the 1920s-1950s.
Despite the dreadful subject matter, I was mostly amazed by the positive, encouraging and beautiful messages the humans in this book managed to send their loved ones straight from hell, which prove their resilience and inner strength.
Too often, when faced with such accounts of human-made horror like the Stalinist repressions, we tend to dehumanize the victims, not because of cynicism, but maybe for the sake of self-preservation. When we learn that millions of people suffered as a consequence of the Terror, we tend to see the numbers and not the people.
Through an unbelievably comprehensive work of research in oral accounts and archives, Orlando Figes manages to reverse this defense process, by showing the readers the individuals behind the numbers, telling us their stories, often through their own voices by quoting personal letters or memoirs.
The most striking feature of this historical account is the compassionate way of telling each family or individual’s story. The reader cannot help but feel empathy for the people he is reading about, something that very few history books or reportage, however well researched and written, achieve to this extent.
Figes does not focus on solely the direct victims of the Stalinist madness, those people who were shot or ended up in the GULag or disappeared without a trace, he mostly describes the life of those who were left behind at home, who had to deal with the disappearance of their loved ones and had to carry the grief, the doubt, the stigma and the fear of being related to “enemies of the people” as those accused were defined. This way, he provides an overview of how a whole country, for several generations, was traumatized by the system that came to be in the 1920s-1950s.
Despite the dreadful subject matter, I was mostly amazed by the positive, encouraging and beautiful messages the humans in this book managed to send their loved ones straight from hell, which prove their resilience and inner strength.
July 16, 2022
Orlando Figes, who I do admire, has allowed us, an insight of life for the proletariate when trying to survive within 'the peoples democracy' whilst under the rod of the tyrant, Stalin.
At school I was given a glimpse of life for the masses under Adolf's whip, but never a mention, was there, of the nasty, hateful, psychotic, Josef. I do wonder of that, now I'm a little wiser to way of the world.
Figes uses a plethora of personal accounts from those who did endure, and that is simply all they could do: endure.
This does not hold back and can easily be described as a horror story. I've never found a want for that genre and so cannot really say, with any authority, but if you do, then I would say this will still shock: real people, living a real terror for all of their time on this earth. Generations upon generations held in a prison like society.
The numbers executed, tortured and sent to hellish labour camps causes nausea. If you ever have wondered of why there are stories of brother betraying brother, father, mother, sister. Sister lying to the Cheka, NKVD, KGB about brother, mother, father; this will fully explain the reasons why such tragedy did happen.
I asked myself, did the Western World know of this atrocity, whilst appeasing and dealing with this monster? I am sure I know the answer.
In a fact-based fiction book I read a while back, a character speaks of the proletariate as an enduring people. I think those words, as recognition of Russia's past, captures the essence of this work.
I have also read of Russia being called 'the Wild West' post the fall of communism. I do not question that now and I understand why that was.
Well-written, as much of Orlando Figes' work is, this is not an easy read; its subject matter, I found difficult to entertain for long periods. However, I am glad I chose to do so.
At school I was given a glimpse of life for the masses under Adolf's whip, but never a mention, was there, of the nasty, hateful, psychotic, Josef. I do wonder of that, now I'm a little wiser to way of the world.
Figes uses a plethora of personal accounts from those who did endure, and that is simply all they could do: endure.
This does not hold back and can easily be described as a horror story. I've never found a want for that genre and so cannot really say, with any authority, but if you do, then I would say this will still shock: real people, living a real terror for all of their time on this earth. Generations upon generations held in a prison like society.
The numbers executed, tortured and sent to hellish labour camps causes nausea. If you ever have wondered of why there are stories of brother betraying brother, father, mother, sister. Sister lying to the Cheka, NKVD, KGB about brother, mother, father; this will fully explain the reasons why such tragedy did happen.
I asked myself, did the Western World know of this atrocity, whilst appeasing and dealing with this monster? I am sure I know the answer.
In a fact-based fiction book I read a while back, a character speaks of the proletariate as an enduring people. I think those words, as recognition of Russia's past, captures the essence of this work.
I have also read of Russia being called 'the Wild West' post the fall of communism. I do not question that now and I understand why that was.
Well-written, as much of Orlando Figes' work is, this is not an easy read; its subject matter, I found difficult to entertain for long periods. However, I am glad I chose to do so.
May 19, 2021
Pentru cei care au trait in "comunism", varianta stalinista si/sau ceausista, cartea de fata este o amintire amara.
Un sir de biografii si destine, mutilate de teroare, minciuna, lipsuri.
Pentru cei care nu cunosc ororile unei oranduiri ce se dorea ideala cartea de fata constituie un material documentar foarte bine documentat.
Comunismul a murit, dar fantoma lui inca ne bantuie.
Si asa va fi pana cand regimul acesta abject nu va fi judecat asa cum s-a intamplat cu o alta monstruozitate condamnata la Nurnberg.
Un sir de biografii si destine, mutilate de teroare, minciuna, lipsuri.
Pentru cei care nu cunosc ororile unei oranduiri ce se dorea ideala cartea de fata constituie un material documentar foarte bine documentat.
Comunismul a murit, dar fantoma lui inca ne bantuie.
Si asa va fi pana cand regimul acesta abject nu va fi judecat asa cum s-a intamplat cu o alta monstruozitate condamnata la Nurnberg.
June 21, 2022
I have no left leanings and if, and that is a BIG IF, I do tilt right it is less than imperceptible.
This work does not condemn communism - it condemns the psychotic, murderous, Stalinist regime masquerading as communism. The same regime embraced by the deluded minds languishing as intellectuals in the halls of Trinity College.
Anyone who has the slightest inkling that the world would benefit from governance that denounces a free and democratic social order needs to read this book more than once.
At present our 'democratic' society is drowning in the disorder and corruption it, itself, created; and much needs to be done to put right those faults.
But, before we heave the rudder around please accept, after what must have been years of painstaking research, Orlando Figes has given us testament of where communism, regardless of how equal we all want to feel at the outset, WILL eventually lead us.
None of what we read here is an exaggeration: the author is too fine a historian to allow that; and, my family, on my mother's side, lived through these times. I have sat quietly on many a long evening listening to the never-ending fear my elders endured.
In a letter to a bishop when discussing the abuse of power by former rulers, and more specifically by former popes. Lord Acton, (1834–1902), the English historian, said, "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
Where should this book sit? ... On every bookshelf? ... In every school bag?
I sat for a history degree:
whilst discussing the battle for Stalingrad, a fellow student said, 'The Russian people must have seen Stalin as a hero.' I said, 'Read The Whisperers, then think about what you've just said,' - he'd never heard of the book.
whilst discussing The October Revolution a fellow student said, 'A brave and selfless attempt at providing a better standard of living for all." Our lecturer, a doctor of history, offered a sanguine smile. I said, 'Read The Whisperers, then think about what you've just said.' The doctor's face hardened.
Where should this book sit?
It is essential reading.
Read it, ... most especially if you're thinking of setting foot inside a university.
This work does not condemn communism - it condemns the psychotic, murderous, Stalinist regime masquerading as communism. The same regime embraced by the deluded minds languishing as intellectuals in the halls of Trinity College.
Anyone who has the slightest inkling that the world would benefit from governance that denounces a free and democratic social order needs to read this book more than once.
At present our 'democratic' society is drowning in the disorder and corruption it, itself, created; and much needs to be done to put right those faults.
But, before we heave the rudder around please accept, after what must have been years of painstaking research, Orlando Figes has given us testament of where communism, regardless of how equal we all want to feel at the outset, WILL eventually lead us.
None of what we read here is an exaggeration: the author is too fine a historian to allow that; and, my family, on my mother's side, lived through these times. I have sat quietly on many a long evening listening to the never-ending fear my elders endured.
In a letter to a bishop when discussing the abuse of power by former rulers, and more specifically by former popes. Lord Acton, (1834–1902), the English historian, said, "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
Where should this book sit? ... On every bookshelf? ... In every school bag?
I sat for a history degree:
whilst discussing the battle for Stalingrad, a fellow student said, 'The Russian people must have seen Stalin as a hero.' I said, 'Read The Whisperers, then think about what you've just said,' - he'd never heard of the book.
whilst discussing The October Revolution a fellow student said, 'A brave and selfless attempt at providing a better standard of living for all." Our lecturer, a doctor of history, offered a sanguine smile. I said, 'Read The Whisperers, then think about what you've just said.' The doctor's face hardened.
Where should this book sit?
It is essential reading.
Read it, ... most especially if you're thinking of setting foot inside a university.
January 8, 2008
I thought I had satisfied by obsession with Russia this decade, but this new study by Figes -- who wrote the marvelous cultural history Nastaha's Dance -- makes it all the more fascinating, terrible and human.
December 24, 2014
Back in 2012 I voted `Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea` by Barbara Demick as my favourite book of that year. It gave the readers a searing look into the life of ordinary people in the present day hell that is North Korea. Think of THE WHISPERERS, as `Nothing to Envy` on a much larger canvas and far more disturbing in its well researched details.
Some background : Growing up in the CBSE educational system in India meant you were invariably fed the bland sanitized Congress party approved version of global history and this invariably meant you were fed laughable lies that the `Planned Economy` , borrowed from the great USSR, was the ideal and only way for India to follow into its own destined utopia and that the USSR was already a well planned paradise. Nothing could be further from this appalling lie and it is exposed in excruciating detail in this book. The cost of following the corrupting ideology of Communism is scrupulously documented by Figes and reading the book helps you grasp the horrors that millions of Soviet citizens went through. It is frequently claimed that Winston Churchill once said “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others”. Reading the book helps you understand what he was on about and how right he really was. The book goes a long way in explaining why Russians, even today, have only this barely tenuous link to a sense of civic duty and urban manners and why they are keenly reticent and mostly keep to themselves. And drink. Who can blame them after the horrors their parents and grandparents went through for almost 7 decades. And ow they are stuck with Putin.
There are so many sad tales well told here of families broken up, imprisoned, killed, tortured and dispersed. Roberto Benigni could make about another thousand ’Life is Beautiful’ movies from real life scripts. The one that most affected me was this gut wrenching story of a father, Nikolai, imprisoned for no reason really, because that is how real communism operates, who in the book, is writing to his young daughter, Alyonushka, from the Gulag, and trying to reassure her everything is going to be OK. He starts penning a tale, sent in parts, titled “THE UNUSUAL ADVENTURES OF SHAMMI” and the heart breaking details in the letters he writes to her are so depressing that I was forced to frequently stop reading and catch myself from giving up and just walking into oncoming traffic. That chapter, ironically titled “THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS”, ends with “…THIS WAS THE LAST LETTER. SHORTLY AFTERWARDS, ON 17 SEPTEMBER, NIKOLA WAS EXECUTED BY A FIRING SQUAD”.
The October 1917 revolution consumed its children in the end. The chapter THE GREAT FEAR brings to mind this stanza I once read :
The dogs of hell, my friend,
Will find you too.
Maybe after they tire a while,
Of the taste of Me
Joseph Stalin was a thug and what he did to USSR makes what Hitler did to Germany and Europe and the Jews look like amateur hour. It is shocking to realize even today the Hitler has more publicity as THE EVIL MAN when Stalin was far far far more brutal on a far longer time scale. While Hitler was forced to commit suicide, Stalin lived out his day in regal comfort right till the end.
In summary why read `The Whisperers’?
Understand the USSR in far better detail that you were allowed in the classroom
Truly familiarize yourself with Orwell was attacking in `1984` and `Animal Farm`. Totalitarianism is just a word. The reality is much much more scary and painful.
See how the best intentions of founding visionaries get corrupted by the subsequent thugs who follow inevitably in their footsteps. Farmers and Workers (histories inevitable useful idiots) are always taken for a ride by these villains.
All in all, this is a really good book that I highly recommend.
Some background : Growing up in the CBSE educational system in India meant you were invariably fed the bland sanitized Congress party approved version of global history and this invariably meant you were fed laughable lies that the `Planned Economy` , borrowed from the great USSR, was the ideal and only way for India to follow into its own destined utopia and that the USSR was already a well planned paradise. Nothing could be further from this appalling lie and it is exposed in excruciating detail in this book. The cost of following the corrupting ideology of Communism is scrupulously documented by Figes and reading the book helps you grasp the horrors that millions of Soviet citizens went through. It is frequently claimed that Winston Churchill once said “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others”. Reading the book helps you understand what he was on about and how right he really was. The book goes a long way in explaining why Russians, even today, have only this barely tenuous link to a sense of civic duty and urban manners and why they are keenly reticent and mostly keep to themselves. And drink. Who can blame them after the horrors their parents and grandparents went through for almost 7 decades. And ow they are stuck with Putin.
There are so many sad tales well told here of families broken up, imprisoned, killed, tortured and dispersed. Roberto Benigni could make about another thousand ’Life is Beautiful’ movies from real life scripts. The one that most affected me was this gut wrenching story of a father, Nikolai, imprisoned for no reason really, because that is how real communism operates, who in the book, is writing to his young daughter, Alyonushka, from the Gulag, and trying to reassure her everything is going to be OK. He starts penning a tale, sent in parts, titled “THE UNUSUAL ADVENTURES OF SHAMMI” and the heart breaking details in the letters he writes to her are so depressing that I was forced to frequently stop reading and catch myself from giving up and just walking into oncoming traffic. That chapter, ironically titled “THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS”, ends with “…THIS WAS THE LAST LETTER. SHORTLY AFTERWARDS, ON 17 SEPTEMBER, NIKOLA WAS EXECUTED BY A FIRING SQUAD”.
The October 1917 revolution consumed its children in the end. The chapter THE GREAT FEAR brings to mind this stanza I once read :
The dogs of hell, my friend,
Will find you too.
Maybe after they tire a while,
Of the taste of Me
Joseph Stalin was a thug and what he did to USSR makes what Hitler did to Germany and Europe and the Jews look like amateur hour. It is shocking to realize even today the Hitler has more publicity as THE EVIL MAN when Stalin was far far far more brutal on a far longer time scale. While Hitler was forced to commit suicide, Stalin lived out his day in regal comfort right till the end.
In summary why read `The Whisperers’?
Understand the USSR in far better detail that you were allowed in the classroom
Truly familiarize yourself with Orwell was attacking in `1984` and `Animal Farm`. Totalitarianism is just a word. The reality is much much more scary and painful.
See how the best intentions of founding visionaries get corrupted by the subsequent thugs who follow inevitably in their footsteps. Farmers and Workers (histories inevitable useful idiots) are always taken for a ride by these villains.
All in all, this is a really good book that I highly recommend.
November 7, 2019
This is a monumental work from author Orlando Figes. It is an incredibly detailed chronicling of life in Stalinist Russia. The book tracks many characters through the years, with a central focus on the life of famous Russian author and poet Konstantin Simonov.
This is one of the most depressing and horrifying books I have ever read.
"The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia" is the telling of the absolute disregard and wholesale destruction of life in Stalinist Russia. It is more horrible than can even be imagined. No matter how bad you could envision life to be like then, this book illuminates a reality beyond your worst nightmare...
It covers Stalin's "Great Terror" from 1937-38, his purges of the Red Army, the mass incarceration and murder of "Kulaks" and other "enemies of the people" in the Gulag camps throughout his reign.
The book is a terrifying glimpse into the human condition, and illuminates the absolute worst side of human nature. The cult of Stalinism in the Soviet quest for utopian Communism reads like the worst horror story you've ever heard. There are not enough pages to describe how unimaginably terrible life in Soviet Russia was. The book is replete with stories of children left orphans after their parents were carted away by the NKVD in the middle of the night, people executed for no more than trivial offenses (if not for no reason at all), and other assorted horrors in the enormous social/cultural experiment that was Soviet socialism.
The book's title refers the culture of silence that resulted from the mass arrests and persecution of entire swaths of the Russian population.
Even more tragic than the culture of silence (in my opinion) was the unblinking loyalty to Stalin that many young party members exhibited; many even after their own families had been torn apart by the NKVD and the Stalin government. The author talks about how even Simanov remained an ardent Stalinist until well after the dictator's death in 1953, even though two of his aunts were sent to the Gulag.
Figes drops a dire quote near the beginning of the book:
While this book is incredibly horrifying and depressing, I think it is extremely important. People need to be aware of how shockingly terrible life under a socialist/communist regime was.
Figes has compiled a masterpiece of a work here, and I look forward to reading more of his books.
This is a must-read to anyone interested in history, Russian history, and social psychology.
5 stars.
This is one of the most depressing and horrifying books I have ever read.
"The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia" is the telling of the absolute disregard and wholesale destruction of life in Stalinist Russia. It is more horrible than can even be imagined. No matter how bad you could envision life to be like then, this book illuminates a reality beyond your worst nightmare...
It covers Stalin's "Great Terror" from 1937-38, his purges of the Red Army, the mass incarceration and murder of "Kulaks" and other "enemies of the people" in the Gulag camps throughout his reign.
The book is a terrifying glimpse into the human condition, and illuminates the absolute worst side of human nature. The cult of Stalinism in the Soviet quest for utopian Communism reads like the worst horror story you've ever heard. There are not enough pages to describe how unimaginably terrible life in Soviet Russia was. The book is replete with stories of children left orphans after their parents were carted away by the NKVD in the middle of the night, people executed for no more than trivial offenses (if not for no reason at all), and other assorted horrors in the enormous social/cultural experiment that was Soviet socialism.
The book's title refers the culture of silence that resulted from the mass arrests and persecution of entire swaths of the Russian population.
Even more tragic than the culture of silence (in my opinion) was the unblinking loyalty to Stalin that many young party members exhibited; many even after their own families had been torn apart by the NKVD and the Stalin government. The author talks about how even Simanov remained an ardent Stalinist until well after the dictator's death in 1953, even though two of his aunts were sent to the Gulag.
Figes drops a dire quote near the beginning of the book:
"For few families were unaffected by the Stalinist Terror. By conservative estimates, approximately 25 million people were repressed by the Soviet regime between 1928, when Stalin seized control of the Party leadership, and 1953, when the dictator died, and his reign of terror, if not the system he had developed over the past quarter of a century, was at last brought to an end. These 25 million – people shot by execution squads, Gulag prisoners, ‘kulaks’ sent to ‘special settlements’, slave labourers of various kinds and members of deported nationalities – represent about one-eighth of the Soviet population, approximately 200 million people in 1941, or, on average, one person for every 1.5 families in the Soviet Union. These figures do not include famine victims or war dead.
In addition to the millions who died, or were enslaved, there were tens of millions, the relatives of Stalin’s victims, whose lives were damaged in disturbing ways, with profound social consequences that are still felt today. After years of separation by the Gulag, families could not be reunited easily; relationships were lost; and there was no longer any ‘normal life’ to which people could return."
While this book is incredibly horrifying and depressing, I think it is extremely important. People need to be aware of how shockingly terrible life under a socialist/communist regime was.
Figes has compiled a masterpiece of a work here, and I look forward to reading more of his books.
This is a must-read to anyone interested in history, Russian history, and social psychology.
5 stars.
December 12, 2018
"Los que susurran" son millones de almas crujidas por el totalitarismo marxista, la obra de Figes se convierte en una biografía coral de todas ellas a lo largo de la existencia de la URSS (1917-1991), setenta años de opresión, miedo, hambre y muerte. Sin embargo, el factor humano impregna cada una de las líneas de este libro, es un libro que chorrea humanidad a través de los testimonios de sus docenas de protagonistas, y no lo duden, los humanos no somos siempre valientes, consecuentes, decididos, abnegados, ejemplares... Todas las miserias de nuestro comportamiento salen a la luz cuando el estado es capaz de acorralarte dentro de un mundo "orwelliano", sin referencias morales aparte de las dictadas por la nueva ideología (el atroz marxismo) que convierte por decreto a sus esclavos en "hombres nuevos", destruyendo instituciones sociales como familia, amigos, empresa o etnia. La soledad del individuo ante el omnipresente estado, que castiga ciegamente por capricho (¿acaso no es desasosegante que pagues culpas solo por ser de una familia o etnia?) es el objeto último de esta magnífica obra.
Tampoco a la muerte del tirano "LeninStalin" (1917-1953) debemos esperar un final feliz, esto no es Hollywood... La capacidad de verdugos o víctimas por engañarse a sí mismos es inaudita en la condición humana, cuando la opresión se afloja se desencadenan los mecanismos de negación, autojustificación, olvido selectivo, estupor, cinismo... Nada nos debería sorprender a estas alturas.
"Los que susurran" es una obra maestra, la prosa de Figes es magistral y te lleva de un testigo a otro sin interrupción, absorbido por el relato, es una inmersión en el alma humana que no te deja incólume.
Tampoco a la muerte del tirano "LeninStalin" (1917-1953) debemos esperar un final feliz, esto no es Hollywood... La capacidad de verdugos o víctimas por engañarse a sí mismos es inaudita en la condición humana, cuando la opresión se afloja se desencadenan los mecanismos de negación, autojustificación, olvido selectivo, estupor, cinismo... Nada nos debería sorprender a estas alturas.
"Los que susurran" es una obra maestra, la prosa de Figes es magistral y te lleva de un testigo a otro sin interrupción, absorbido por el relato, es una inmersión en el alma humana que no te deja incólume.
September 26, 2017
this is, with very little competition, one of the best books i've ever read. i am a lithuanian who studied history, i have read many similar books, but none of them tried actually answering a question i have always had - how did these people appear. i mean in my surroundings there are many post-soviet mentality people. i was born in 88 so i have trouble understanding my own parents. and i have been seeking the answer many ears, how can their mentality be so different, so dull from my perspective. this book helped a lot, it shows the way mentality formed during the years, the nation is trying to move on, but a lot of people are stuck in the mental state that was normal before i was born. none, none of the books ever tried to explain how the mentality i was born in was formed. so this book helped me to actually understand where we are now and why and how this happened. also, it is a lot clearer how to get over it, without just trying to forget it. i cannot thank the author enough. i gained a lot of personal calamity from it. oh i definitely recommend it
August 3, 2011
The Whisperers’ uplifting ending is worth the wait. This compelling tome took me a long time to read, but not in a negative way. Orlando Figes’ oral history of Stalin’s Russia is largely based on several hundred interviews, from which several dozen ordinary family histories emerge at various points in time. The flip side was that, on many occasions, I forgot who was who and kept having to refer to the index, which then directed me to a point two hundred pages earlier. I ended up reading large parts of the book several times. If you have a humanities degree, or the ability to do one, then you won’t have this problem.
But taking so long to read this was no bad thing – the book became a big part of my life for a few months. The stories bring to life the lot of the Russian people between 1917 and 1956, when Khrushchev publicly exposed the truth of Stalin’s dictatorship.
The book is structured in several chapters, each of which covers a different era: each era was largely defined by Stalin’s enemy of the time.
Stalin’s first enemies were, as you may well remember from school, the so-called “kulaks”, or rich peasants. What emerges from the individual interviews is that most of them were not that rich, and in some cases they were identified simply to meet government targets: these are my words and I use them deliberately but they reflect the reality - the secret police had to identify a set number of “kulaks” in each village. This "target-gaming" does not make the mass arrests any worse of course: everyone was innocent from the perspective of a Western liberal democracy.
Early on, and throughout the book, we learn about the gulags. I spent a lot of time looking at maps: it is striking that nearly half the Russian land is north of the Arctic Circle. Use your imagination. But the book concentrates not so much on what happened at the gulags, but its effect on families. Fathers disappeared in the middle of the night. Children were left to fend for themselves because there was so little money. Sentences were often for ten years or more, so when families were finally reunited entire childhoods had been lost. Time and again, interviews described how young children remember their families being torn apart: if you are a parent yourself then you won’t be able to avoid considering the events through the eyes of your own children.
The enemies continue to stack up: next in line were the bourgeois “NEP Men” who were given the freedom to run businesses during the New Economic Policy of the 1920’s, before being turned upon. By the 1930’s most city dwellers were forced into communal apartments, and everyone was encouraged to spy on everyone else. The Kafkaesque nightmares then really began: if you didn’t report on your neighbours enough, then you weren’t being “vigilant”. Associates of those arrested were targeted. With exponential effects, more and more people were sent to the gulags. Then something very odd emerges: gulag work was highly productive to the Soviet economy – huge infrastructure, manufacturing and mining programmes were fulfilled largely on the basis of slave labour in these places - and many prisoners started to take pride in their work. Indeed significant numbers stayed on at the gulags in a voluntary capacity, believing they were helping to build a communist utopia.
In the late 1930’s the enemy changed again. A joke of the time went something like this: a door knocks in the middle of the night and the occupant shouts, “you’ve got the wrong address – the communists are upstairs”. Led by Stalin, the Communist Party membership was purged. Unlike the “kulaks” and “NEP Men”, many of the Communist Party members arrested at this time were simply shot. As a reader, you might expect to have less sympathy with these latest victims. But because, again, many of the stories are personalised, the tragedy continues. By this time many Communist Party Members were second generation, children at the time of the revolution in 1917, and their membership of the Communist Party was less of a political statement and more of a cultural one. Often the wives of those arrested were also sent to ALZhIR: the Akmolinsk Labour Camp for the Wives of Traitors of the Motherland - had George Orwell invented this term, it would have been considered too far-fetched.
During the war, a new enemy emerged, and not the obvious one. It was the Russian soldiers, from generals to infantry, who Stalin feared might lead a revolution post-victory. A despicable image emerges: the secret police followed the Russian Army into battle, at a safe distance. On the orders of Stalin, their job was to ensure that no-one retreated, even temporarily. Many Russian officers bravely disobeyed, retreating tactically, while advancing strategically. But like the gulag prisoners, soldiers never turned against their regime, seeing a greater cause: in this case the defeat of the Nazis.
The post war era brought new enemies including, inevitably, the Jews. Chapter 8 is entitled simply “Return” and it describes the return from the gulags of millions of Russians during the 1950’s, both before and after Stalin’s death. It takes much longer for them to be pardoned as Khrushchev was wary of a backlash. He need not have worried. The rest of the book is about reconciliation, not revenge, and this left me feeling quite uplifted – the human race has this amazing ability to forgive the most heinous crimes. This was well-documented in South Africa, but quite undocumented in Russia. Until now.
But taking so long to read this was no bad thing – the book became a big part of my life for a few months. The stories bring to life the lot of the Russian people between 1917 and 1956, when Khrushchev publicly exposed the truth of Stalin’s dictatorship.
The book is structured in several chapters, each of which covers a different era: each era was largely defined by Stalin’s enemy of the time.
Stalin’s first enemies were, as you may well remember from school, the so-called “kulaks”, or rich peasants. What emerges from the individual interviews is that most of them were not that rich, and in some cases they were identified simply to meet government targets: these are my words and I use them deliberately but they reflect the reality - the secret police had to identify a set number of “kulaks” in each village. This "target-gaming" does not make the mass arrests any worse of course: everyone was innocent from the perspective of a Western liberal democracy.
Early on, and throughout the book, we learn about the gulags. I spent a lot of time looking at maps: it is striking that nearly half the Russian land is north of the Arctic Circle. Use your imagination. But the book concentrates not so much on what happened at the gulags, but its effect on families. Fathers disappeared in the middle of the night. Children were left to fend for themselves because there was so little money. Sentences were often for ten years or more, so when families were finally reunited entire childhoods had been lost. Time and again, interviews described how young children remember their families being torn apart: if you are a parent yourself then you won’t be able to avoid considering the events through the eyes of your own children.
The enemies continue to stack up: next in line were the bourgeois “NEP Men” who were given the freedom to run businesses during the New Economic Policy of the 1920’s, before being turned upon. By the 1930’s most city dwellers were forced into communal apartments, and everyone was encouraged to spy on everyone else. The Kafkaesque nightmares then really began: if you didn’t report on your neighbours enough, then you weren’t being “vigilant”. Associates of those arrested were targeted. With exponential effects, more and more people were sent to the gulags. Then something very odd emerges: gulag work was highly productive to the Soviet economy – huge infrastructure, manufacturing and mining programmes were fulfilled largely on the basis of slave labour in these places - and many prisoners started to take pride in their work. Indeed significant numbers stayed on at the gulags in a voluntary capacity, believing they were helping to build a communist utopia.
In the late 1930’s the enemy changed again. A joke of the time went something like this: a door knocks in the middle of the night and the occupant shouts, “you’ve got the wrong address – the communists are upstairs”. Led by Stalin, the Communist Party membership was purged. Unlike the “kulaks” and “NEP Men”, many of the Communist Party members arrested at this time were simply shot. As a reader, you might expect to have less sympathy with these latest victims. But because, again, many of the stories are personalised, the tragedy continues. By this time many Communist Party Members were second generation, children at the time of the revolution in 1917, and their membership of the Communist Party was less of a political statement and more of a cultural one. Often the wives of those arrested were also sent to ALZhIR: the Akmolinsk Labour Camp for the Wives of Traitors of the Motherland - had George Orwell invented this term, it would have been considered too far-fetched.
During the war, a new enemy emerged, and not the obvious one. It was the Russian soldiers, from generals to infantry, who Stalin feared might lead a revolution post-victory. A despicable image emerges: the secret police followed the Russian Army into battle, at a safe distance. On the orders of Stalin, their job was to ensure that no-one retreated, even temporarily. Many Russian officers bravely disobeyed, retreating tactically, while advancing strategically. But like the gulag prisoners, soldiers never turned against their regime, seeing a greater cause: in this case the defeat of the Nazis.
The post war era brought new enemies including, inevitably, the Jews. Chapter 8 is entitled simply “Return” and it describes the return from the gulags of millions of Russians during the 1950’s, both before and after Stalin’s death. It takes much longer for them to be pardoned as Khrushchev was wary of a backlash. He need not have worried. The rest of the book is about reconciliation, not revenge, and this left me feeling quite uplifted – the human race has this amazing ability to forgive the most heinous crimes. This was well-documented in South Africa, but quite undocumented in Russia. Until now.
November 12, 2017
Orlando Figes wrote the book I would have dreamed of writing had I earned a PhD, was well connected, able to secure grant money and been fluent in Russian. I appreciate this massive undertaking involving teams of researchers and much travel. Thank God he got to so many witnesses to History before they died! The result offers insight into the minds of Stalinists and their victims Often, sadly, overlapping in the same mind. To be a victim was not necessarily to shed your faith in Stalin. As I plod my way through Russian history and literature I do begin to understand a very foreign mindset amid circumstances I shall not encounter. Although, I suppose my dear leader would enjoy having his enemies shot. Or at least beaten. Possibly tortured. Golden showers may be reserved for him and his friends.
Figes argues that “… oral testimonies, on the whole, are more reliable than literary memoirs…. Like all memory, the testimony given in an interview is unreliable, but, unlike a book, it can be cross-examined and tested against other evidence to disentangle true memories from received or imagined ones.”
If you yearn to understand how people got through the 1930s in the USSR, this is the book for you. It covers private life during Stalin’s entire reign. I focus on The Great Terror cuz it’s so unbelievable. Figes relies on archives of and interviews with survivors and their families, as well as a sampling of those who did ok, or even very well, under Stalin. His main character is K. Simonov who evolves from a loyal Stalinist bigwig to an older man with a more nuanced take on politics.
Stalin’s terror was internalized en masse and passed down through the generations. Figes writes about its lingering effect on sufferers and their descendants even in the 1990s. He had some trouble getting his interviewees to focus on their inner selves (as opposed to the external events of enslavement), what happened without hindsight and without mixing their memories up with other victims’ stories. Sometimes they had played their public-self role so long they had become that person.
“During the terror of the 1930s, when secrecy and deception became necessary survival strategies for almost everyone on the Soviet Union, a whole new type of personality and society arose.” Sometimes they were fearful of another round of state brutality. And often times it seems they didn’t feel connected to their inner self. Nor did they even see any point to do so. These are damaged people who don’t always realize it.
CPSU/The State
It wasn’t a matter of truth, “..it was a matter of whether they accepted the judgement of the Party in which they placed their faith.”
According to Figes, the Great Terror was a calculated policy of mass murder. Stalin believed war loomed in the East against Japan and in the West against the fascists. He felt surrounded and had little hope the other Western powers would help. He learned from WWI that the tsar was undone by “social revolution in the rear.” He observed the Spanish Civil War and how that all played out. Stalin decided to maintain his grip on power by having “all potential opposition” removed. He had “paranoic fantasies” resulting in “the great purge” as an “insurance policy.”
The CP’s “collective judgement was to be accepted as Justice.” “To defend oneself was to add another crime: dissent from the will of the Party.”
“[L]oyalty to the State was higher virtue than family love”
Life was depicted as a struggle.
“Perekovka” was touted as ”the remouding of the human soul through penal labor.”
As the Old Bolshivik true believers were purged, the new Party members were generally more “conformist and obedient” rather than intellectual and educated.
Collectivization broke up the old way of life for most of the population rendering them vulnerable to, and dependant upon, the State.
Stalin and his propaganda team insisted that enemies were among and all around: Bourgeois private traders, capitalist elements, Kulaks, spies, the Church….
An increasingly tighter system of “propiska” (residence and employment permits) provided the State with yet another means of control. The Party knew where to find you. Plus if you had no propiska or a forged one, you could/would be off to the Gulag.
From the State perspective, gulag slave labor was essential to economic improvement. “Forced development” of the First Five Year Plan required slave labor. The Gulag output was an “integral component of the Soviet industrial economy.” Furthermore, had the State not enslaved potential ‘enemies’, they wouldn’t have been able to hire legitimate workers to go to the inhospitable regions where lucrative mining and extracting of resources enriched the State.
Justification/Willingness
The whole Zeitgeis of 1930s USSR , of utopianism with its “emotional force,” “messianic hopes,” “living for the future rather than the present”and the “fanaticism it engendered” resulted in belief of “the higher Revolutionary Truth of the Party.” Enough people desperately bought into this dangerous idealism while letting go of their individuality. “The Revolution demanded the sacrifice of today’s pleasures for a better life in the future.” As in “Darkness at Noon,” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) people could be convinced to confess to crimes they did not commit, understanding that they would be shot “for the good of the Revolution.”
“Even Stalin’s victims believed in ‘enemies of the people’. They blamed them for their own arrest… or presumed that they themselves had been mistaken for the real ‘enemies of the people’.” Or that Stalin was “deceived by ‘enemies of the people’.” The cult of Stalin resulted in much obfuscation and self-delusion.
Fear paralyzed people. “[T]he urban population, by and large, remained in place, without any sign of resistance, and waited for the Terror to take them.” Having a suitcase ready to go in case of a knock in the middle of the night was a thing.
For the people who had doubt about friends and relatives being arrested and carted off, they consoled themselves by believing they were arrested by mistake and things would get cleared up or that these people must have committed crimes or that Stalin didn’t know what was going on with the mass arrests and shootings.
Yezhov was replaced by Beria because Yezhov was an ‘enemy of the people’.” Stalin figured it out and sent him to his death. This reassured people.
People born just before, during and after the Revolution and Civil War were inculcated with romantic, glorified images. They regretted missing out. They were naïve and unquestioning. The CP was either always right or the ends justify the means. These people made great cannon fodder in WWII.
Many people who managed not to get hauled off to the Gulag or shot closer to home, profited from the disappearance of those less fortunate. Education of younger peasants resulted in the desire for a better life in a city. They could replace workers who wanted to become professionals, as the former professionals were purged. While prerevolutionaries and their progeny from the middle and upper classes often sought proletarian jobs to solidify their bona fides in the new order. People with “spoilt biographies” were vulnerable and often became “Soviet activists” and could even be terrified into informing on others. One of Figes’ informer-subjects “is proud of the honors she received for what she calls her work in ‘counterespionage’.”
“Indeed, this mistrust of the elites helps to explain the broad appeal of the purges among certain segments of the population, which perceived the Great Terror as a ‘quarrel among the masters’ that did not affect them.”
The rise of fascism also brought people together and allowed them to overlook domestic terror as they banded together against a common enemy. Stalin would often refer to domestic enemies and called for arrests.
“It took extraordinary will-power, usually connected to a different value system [non-Soviet], for a person to discount the press reports and question the basic assumptions of the Terror. “
Denunciations
“Many denunciations were motivated by malice,” jealousy, career advancement, apartment space and/or other “material rewards.” Forced communal living arrangements resulted in little to no privacy and loads of resentment. “Fear tore apart the bonds of friendship, love and trust. It tore apart the moral ties that hold together a society, as people turned against each other in the chaotic scramble to survive.” These were times when “…. frightened people agreed to betrayals and denunciations in the desperate struggle to save their lives and families.” Societal institutions such as “the orphanage, the army and the labour camp” helped raise millions with “strong collective and weak familial links.” For people born after the revolution, “Stalin was their moral refernce point.”
Coping
There was widespread “acceptance of Soviet reality.” People “shun[ned] all politics and withdr[e]w entirely into private life.”
“... Russians became so used to suppressing their emotions and remaining silent about their suffering – not so much in the sense of unconscious avoidance (‘denial’) but as a conscious strategy or coping mechanism….”
After the Gulag
Victims consoled themselves by invoking the “common Soviet purpose” for which they suffered. Some of the prisoners were even proud of their work building a stronger Soviet Union (often by hand while malnourished in the permafrost).
“….placing their experiences in the context of a broader narrative, which gives them meaning and purpose…. The survival narrative… the human spirit of the survivor; and the Soviet narrative, in which that suffering was redeemed by the Communist ideal, the winning of the Great Patriotic War, or the achievements of the Soviet Union.”
“It was Stalin’s lasting achievement to create a whole society in which stoicism and passivity were social norms.” If he was able to accomplish this it was because the tsars tempered the Russian soil before him. Tradition.
Nostalgia for Stalin, Postmortem
As with all of us, “emotions [are] invested in the remembrance of the past.” “Stalin did the thinking for them and told them what to do.” I think a cowed, isolated, uninformed people yearns for strong leadership. Abuse even.
Russians today are certainly less cowed (excluding foes of Putin who keep getting whacked) and isolated and more informed, if only through travel and contact with visitors. The State-run media can be outmaneuvered with the Internet should people seek other perspectives, argument and truth. Will the Putin regime continue after his demise?
Lots of good stuff here: http://www.orlandofiges.com/
Figes argues that “… oral testimonies, on the whole, are more reliable than literary memoirs…. Like all memory, the testimony given in an interview is unreliable, but, unlike a book, it can be cross-examined and tested against other evidence to disentangle true memories from received or imagined ones.”
If you yearn to understand how people got through the 1930s in the USSR, this is the book for you. It covers private life during Stalin’s entire reign. I focus on The Great Terror cuz it’s so unbelievable. Figes relies on archives of and interviews with survivors and their families, as well as a sampling of those who did ok, or even very well, under Stalin. His main character is K. Simonov who evolves from a loyal Stalinist bigwig to an older man with a more nuanced take on politics.
Stalin’s terror was internalized en masse and passed down through the generations. Figes writes about its lingering effect on sufferers and their descendants even in the 1990s. He had some trouble getting his interviewees to focus on their inner selves (as opposed to the external events of enslavement), what happened without hindsight and without mixing their memories up with other victims’ stories. Sometimes they had played their public-self role so long they had become that person.
“During the terror of the 1930s, when secrecy and deception became necessary survival strategies for almost everyone on the Soviet Union, a whole new type of personality and society arose.” Sometimes they were fearful of another round of state brutality. And often times it seems they didn’t feel connected to their inner self. Nor did they even see any point to do so. These are damaged people who don’t always realize it.
CPSU/The State
It wasn’t a matter of truth, “..it was a matter of whether they accepted the judgement of the Party in which they placed their faith.”
According to Figes, the Great Terror was a calculated policy of mass murder. Stalin believed war loomed in the East against Japan and in the West against the fascists. He felt surrounded and had little hope the other Western powers would help. He learned from WWI that the tsar was undone by “social revolution in the rear.” He observed the Spanish Civil War and how that all played out. Stalin decided to maintain his grip on power by having “all potential opposition” removed. He had “paranoic fantasies” resulting in “the great purge” as an “insurance policy.”
The CP’s “collective judgement was to be accepted as Justice.” “To defend oneself was to add another crime: dissent from the will of the Party.”
“[L]oyalty to the State was higher virtue than family love”
Life was depicted as a struggle.
“Perekovka” was touted as ”the remouding of the human soul through penal labor.”
As the Old Bolshivik true believers were purged, the new Party members were generally more “conformist and obedient” rather than intellectual and educated.
Collectivization broke up the old way of life for most of the population rendering them vulnerable to, and dependant upon, the State.
Stalin and his propaganda team insisted that enemies were among and all around: Bourgeois private traders, capitalist elements, Kulaks, spies, the Church….
An increasingly tighter system of “propiska” (residence and employment permits) provided the State with yet another means of control. The Party knew where to find you. Plus if you had no propiska or a forged one, you could/would be off to the Gulag.
From the State perspective, gulag slave labor was essential to economic improvement. “Forced development” of the First Five Year Plan required slave labor. The Gulag output was an “integral component of the Soviet industrial economy.” Furthermore, had the State not enslaved potential ‘enemies’, they wouldn’t have been able to hire legitimate workers to go to the inhospitable regions where lucrative mining and extracting of resources enriched the State.
Justification/Willingness
The whole Zeitgeis of 1930s USSR , of utopianism with its “emotional force,” “messianic hopes,” “living for the future rather than the present”and the “fanaticism it engendered” resulted in belief of “the higher Revolutionary Truth of the Party.” Enough people desperately bought into this dangerous idealism while letting go of their individuality. “The Revolution demanded the sacrifice of today’s pleasures for a better life in the future.” As in “Darkness at Noon,” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) people could be convinced to confess to crimes they did not commit, understanding that they would be shot “for the good of the Revolution.”
“Even Stalin’s victims believed in ‘enemies of the people’. They blamed them for their own arrest… or presumed that they themselves had been mistaken for the real ‘enemies of the people’.” Or that Stalin was “deceived by ‘enemies of the people’.” The cult of Stalin resulted in much obfuscation and self-delusion.
Fear paralyzed people. “[T]he urban population, by and large, remained in place, without any sign of resistance, and waited for the Terror to take them.” Having a suitcase ready to go in case of a knock in the middle of the night was a thing.
For the people who had doubt about friends and relatives being arrested and carted off, they consoled themselves by believing they were arrested by mistake and things would get cleared up or that these people must have committed crimes or that Stalin didn’t know what was going on with the mass arrests and shootings.
Yezhov was replaced by Beria because Yezhov was an ‘enemy of the people’.” Stalin figured it out and sent him to his death. This reassured people.
People born just before, during and after the Revolution and Civil War were inculcated with romantic, glorified images. They regretted missing out. They were naïve and unquestioning. The CP was either always right or the ends justify the means. These people made great cannon fodder in WWII.
Many people who managed not to get hauled off to the Gulag or shot closer to home, profited from the disappearance of those less fortunate. Education of younger peasants resulted in the desire for a better life in a city. They could replace workers who wanted to become professionals, as the former professionals were purged. While prerevolutionaries and their progeny from the middle and upper classes often sought proletarian jobs to solidify their bona fides in the new order. People with “spoilt biographies” were vulnerable and often became “Soviet activists” and could even be terrified into informing on others. One of Figes’ informer-subjects “is proud of the honors she received for what she calls her work in ‘counterespionage’.”
“Indeed, this mistrust of the elites helps to explain the broad appeal of the purges among certain segments of the population, which perceived the Great Terror as a ‘quarrel among the masters’ that did not affect them.”
The rise of fascism also brought people together and allowed them to overlook domestic terror as they banded together against a common enemy. Stalin would often refer to domestic enemies and called for arrests.
“It took extraordinary will-power, usually connected to a different value system [non-Soviet], for a person to discount the press reports and question the basic assumptions of the Terror. “
Denunciations
“Many denunciations were motivated by malice,” jealousy, career advancement, apartment space and/or other “material rewards.” Forced communal living arrangements resulted in little to no privacy and loads of resentment. “Fear tore apart the bonds of friendship, love and trust. It tore apart the moral ties that hold together a society, as people turned against each other in the chaotic scramble to survive.” These were times when “…. frightened people agreed to betrayals and denunciations in the desperate struggle to save their lives and families.” Societal institutions such as “the orphanage, the army and the labour camp” helped raise millions with “strong collective and weak familial links.” For people born after the revolution, “Stalin was their moral refernce point.”
Coping
There was widespread “acceptance of Soviet reality.” People “shun[ned] all politics and withdr[e]w entirely into private life.”
“... Russians became so used to suppressing their emotions and remaining silent about their suffering – not so much in the sense of unconscious avoidance (‘denial’) but as a conscious strategy or coping mechanism….”
After the Gulag
Victims consoled themselves by invoking the “common Soviet purpose” for which they suffered. Some of the prisoners were even proud of their work building a stronger Soviet Union (often by hand while malnourished in the permafrost).
“….placing their experiences in the context of a broader narrative, which gives them meaning and purpose…. The survival narrative… the human spirit of the survivor; and the Soviet narrative, in which that suffering was redeemed by the Communist ideal, the winning of the Great Patriotic War, or the achievements of the Soviet Union.”
“It was Stalin’s lasting achievement to create a whole society in which stoicism and passivity were social norms.” If he was able to accomplish this it was because the tsars tempered the Russian soil before him. Tradition.
Nostalgia for Stalin, Postmortem
As with all of us, “emotions [are] invested in the remembrance of the past.” “Stalin did the thinking for them and told them what to do.” I think a cowed, isolated, uninformed people yearns for strong leadership. Abuse even.
Russians today are certainly less cowed (excluding foes of Putin who keep getting whacked) and isolated and more informed, if only through travel and contact with visitors. The State-run media can be outmaneuvered with the Internet should people seek other perspectives, argument and truth. Will the Putin regime continue after his demise?
Lots of good stuff here: http://www.orlandofiges.com/
December 16, 2021
The sheer amount of research in this is astonishing by itself. The whisperers is an amazing social history, and the kind of family sagas novelists can only dream of painstakingly laid out in it's pages. Wow.
December 1, 2019
هذا الكتاب أحد أفضل الكتب التي قرأتها هذا العام
وبالتأكيد أفضل كتب السير لهذا العام
أورلندو فايجز مؤرخ متخصص في التاريخ الروسي
وكاتب بارع استطاع في أسلوب سلس ممتع التأريخ
لسيرة شعب طوال فترة عهد ستالين وأخرج كتابا
متوازن يجمع بين عشرات الشهادات وبين التحليل العام
لوضع الشعب الروسي بفئاته المختلفة طوال سنوات ستالين ليصل إلى صورة عامة تؤيدها القصص الفردية
وتعرض جوانبها المختلفة. أيضا أعجبني أن عدد من
العائلات المذكورة استطاع الكاتب أن يعرض قصتها
إلى النهاية ليس بصورة متصلة وانما
كل جزء في مكانه مما أعطى الكتاب طابع الأفلام
الوثائقية
الكتاب مقسم لتسعة أبواب، كل باب يختص بعدد معين
من السنوات ويقع تحت عنوان يصف الطابع المميز لهذه
الفترة بدء بسنوات الصراع على السلطة بين ستالين
وغيره من كبار الحزب عقب وفاة لينين وانتهاء بما بعد
وفاته، مرورا بسنوات الحرب العالمية الثانية.
لمن لا يهوى تاريخ الحكومات ورجالها، هذا الكتاب يركز
بالكامل على التأريخ للشعب ودراسته نفسيا واجتماعيا
ولا يخوض في تاريخ الحكومة وسياساتها إلا ما يكفي
لإيصال الصورة للقارئ .
في الكتاب نرى كيف نجحت الدولة في التغلغل إلى
أعماق الفرد مما أزال أي مساحة بين الحياة الشخصية
والحياة العامة وحطم أقرب الروابط بين الفرد وأسرته.
الكل غرباء، الكل خائفون، الكل معزلون... سنوات
وسنوات من الحياة المزدوجة حتى يفقد المرء نفسه
وينسى من يكون أو يتحطم ويسير ركاما بشريا.
أيضا كيف يحول الرعب الب��ر إلى مسوخ ويخرج أسوء
ما فيهم حتى تصير أبسط المسلمات الإنسانية بطولة
حقيقة ومخاطرة كبيرة. وكيف كسرت سنوات الحرب
جدار الصمت وجو الرعب لتطهر القلوب وتعيد إلى
الشعب إنسانيته المفقودة برغم معاناة الحرب وف داحة
الخسائر .
ستظل التجربة الشيوعية أحد أهم التجارب وأكثرها
إثارة للاهتمام لأنها مثال كامل حي على نتيجة أي
يوتيوبيا يشرع الإنسان في بناءها بعيدا عن شريعة
السماء واستنادا على عقله فقط. سيظل الناس دائما
في طوق إلى رؤية جماعية، إلى معنى كلي يتجاوز
الأفراد، يتجاوز الحياة وآلامها، والى مثاليات تمنح حياتهم خلودا يموتون من أجلها، وإلى معبود ومخلص
يؤمنون به ويلتفون حوله ليقودهم إلى الأرض الموعودة. لهذا تحديدا رثى الكثيرون ( بما فيهم ضحايا)
سقوط الاتحاد السوفيتي وموت ستالين وتمنى آخرون
عودته ( 42 % عام 2005) ! من الواضح أن البشر لا
يستطيعون الحياة بدون دين فلما المكابرة!
وبالتأكيد أفضل كتب السير لهذا العام
أورلندو فايجز مؤرخ متخصص في التاريخ الروسي
وكاتب بارع استطاع في أسلوب سلس ممتع التأريخ
لسيرة شعب طوال فترة عهد ستالين وأخرج كتابا
متوازن يجمع بين عشرات الشهادات وبين التحليل العام
لوضع الشعب الروسي بفئاته المختلفة طوال سنوات ستالين ليصل إلى صورة عامة تؤيدها القصص الفردية
وتعرض جوانبها المختلفة. أيضا أعجبني أن عدد من
العائلات المذكورة استطاع الكاتب أن يعرض قصتها
إلى النهاية ليس بصورة متصلة وانما
كل جزء في مكانه مما أعطى الكتاب طابع الأفلام
الوثائقية
الكتاب مقسم لتسعة أبواب، كل باب يختص بعدد معين
من السنوات ويقع تحت عنوان يصف الطابع المميز لهذه
الفترة بدء بسنوات الصراع على السلطة بين ستالين
وغيره من كبار الحزب عقب وفاة لينين وانتهاء بما بعد
وفاته، مرورا بسنوات الحرب العالمية الثانية.
لمن لا يهوى تاريخ الحكومات ورجالها، هذا الكتاب يركز
بالكامل على التأريخ للشعب ودراسته نفسيا واجتماعيا
ولا يخوض في تاريخ الحكومة وسياساتها إلا ما يكفي
لإيصال الصورة للقارئ .
في الكتاب نرى كيف نجحت الدولة في التغلغل إلى
أعماق الفرد مما أزال أي مساحة بين الحياة الشخصية
والحياة العامة وحطم أقرب الروابط بين الفرد وأسرته.
الكل غرباء، الكل خائفون، الكل معزلون... سنوات
وسنوات من الحياة المزدوجة حتى يفقد المرء نفسه
وينسى من يكون أو يتحطم ويسير ركاما بشريا.
أيضا كيف يحول الرعب الب��ر إلى مسوخ ويخرج أسوء
ما فيهم حتى تصير أبسط المسلمات الإنسانية بطولة
حقيقة ومخاطرة كبيرة. وكيف كسرت سنوات الحرب
جدار الصمت وجو الرعب لتطهر القلوب وتعيد إلى
الشعب إنسانيته المفقودة برغم معاناة الحرب وف داحة
الخسائر .
ستظل التجربة الشيوعية أحد أهم التجارب وأكثرها
إثارة للاهتمام لأنها مثال كامل حي على نتيجة أي
يوتيوبيا يشرع الإنسان في بناءها بعيدا عن شريعة
السماء واستنادا على عقله فقط. سيظل الناس دائما
في طوق إلى رؤية جماعية، إلى معنى كلي يتجاوز
الأفراد، يتجاوز الحياة وآلامها، والى مثاليات تمنح حياتهم خلودا يموتون من أجلها، وإلى معبود ومخلص
يؤمنون به ويلتفون حوله ليقودهم إلى الأرض الموعودة. لهذا تحديدا رثى الكثيرون ( بما فيهم ضحايا)
سقوط الاتحاد السوفيتي وموت ستالين وتمنى آخرون
عودته ( 42 % عام 2005) ! من الواضح أن البشر لا
يستطيعون الحياة بدون دين فلما المكابرة!
December 1, 2019
Figes’ account of life in the USSR has a broader viewpoint than the standard histories of politicians and generals. A great deal of research has clearly gone into the book.
Some readers may think it’s too long and sometimes repetitive but I feel that it is necessary to portray a range of experiences to give a realistic and meaningful picture of life in a vast country in “interesting times”.
For many groups of people, from the earliest days, deception became vital in order to have an existence in any way tolerable. There were many reasons to do so. Class (not just aristocratic origins, but modest relative prosperity), ethnic origins (anything except Russian, even though Stalin himself was Georgian), family members who’d fallen foul of the régime, careless talk, and much more, turned the people into whisperers.
If the Jews of Tsarist Russia hoped for an end to antisemitism after the revolution they were sadly mistaken. Admittedly there wasn’t the industrial scale massacre of Nazi Germany, but that’s about all.
Individual stories are more revealing and immediate than facts about vast numbers of people, and Figes has presented a moving history of diverse human beings in horrible times.
Some readers may think it’s too long and sometimes repetitive but I feel that it is necessary to portray a range of experiences to give a realistic and meaningful picture of life in a vast country in “interesting times”.
For many groups of people, from the earliest days, deception became vital in order to have an existence in any way tolerable. There were many reasons to do so. Class (not just aristocratic origins, but modest relative prosperity), ethnic origins (anything except Russian, even though Stalin himself was Georgian), family members who’d fallen foul of the régime, careless talk, and much more, turned the people into whisperers.
If the Jews of Tsarist Russia hoped for an end to antisemitism after the revolution they were sadly mistaken. Admittedly there wasn’t the industrial scale massacre of Nazi Germany, but that’s about all.
Individual stories are more revealing and immediate than facts about vast numbers of people, and Figes has presented a moving history of diverse human beings in horrible times.
August 19, 2024
An astonishingly graphic account of the terror the people live under for decades. Using endless personal stories to evidence the fears held, Figes shows how people withdrew from colleagues, friends and family in the belief that being accused meant guilt; evidence of guilt was unnecessary and many, from the fear for themselves and their family, were willing to dob-in their neighbours, members of their family even, in an effort to fend any suspicion from themselves. The establishment, themselves fear ridden, knowing individuals were innocent pressed ahead with the imprisonments and executions: again, in an effort to fend any suspicion from themselves. A society left to whispering and only to those you placed complete trust in.
The numbers of people executed, raped, imprisoned in hell-hole gulags, left without a life to live is mind-numbing.
I was left asking, how could this happen in the 20th Century? How could this happen when all along the world knew?
The numbers of people executed, raped, imprisoned in hell-hole gulags, left without a life to live is mind-numbing.
I was left asking, how could this happen in the 20th Century? How could this happen when all along the world knew?
August 7, 2017
El título de este libro (muy bueno, si bien algo deprimente) hace referencia tanto al miedo a la gente a hablar con libertad, como a los susurros de los confidentes al denunciar. Figes recopila testimonios (principalmente orales) de víctimas de la represión, los enlaza con la vida del escritor Estalinista Konstantin Simonov y los combina para formar un fresco de la historia de la URSS (con énfasis en el periodo de 1930 a 1956) El autor consigue contar las historias sin marcar las tintas en lo dramático de las situaciones (ya de por sí bastante terribles) y pasa de una a otra con agilidad.
En fin, un libro excelente (aunque aviso que está centrado en histórias "a pie de calle" el que quiera saber sobre la política interna de la URSS debería acudir a libros como los de de Conquest o Montefiore)
En fin, un libro excelente (aunque aviso que está centrado en histórias "a pie de calle" el que quiera saber sobre la política interna de la URSS debería acudir a libros como los de de Conquest o Montefiore)
July 26, 2016
The Whisperers is undoubtedly an extraordinary work of history. Indeed, I'm awed at the time and effort that Figes took (and recounts at the end) to collect the oral histories that make up a large amount of the book. But the great irony of The Whisperers is that for a book intent on reversing the effacement of the experiences of an entire generation of people, it's too full of poorly integrated individual accounts for any literary cohesion. Story after story after indistinguishable story renders the book an unfortunate slog; where it does bother to elaborate these histories within a thematic-historic context, it often implies a familiarity with Stalinist-era history that a popular history should probably not do. As a massive fan of both A People's Tragedy and Natasha's Dance, this was a definite let down. Wouldn't recommend for the casual Russian history reader.
October 20, 2017
This is an impressively well-researched book written in a very vivid manner. It took me quite a while to finish it not only because of its length but also because of the moving story of the lives of ordinary people in Russia that it depicts. The story starts in 1917 with flashbacks to the earlier years and lasts till the collapse of the Soviet Union, and poignantly describes past events and a footprint they left on the people who were victims of the circumstances. The pain inflicted by the perpetrators came back to them with a higher force many decades later. History is a good teacher but not many learn their lesson. Brilliant work of non-fiction that makes one ponder about life.
January 27, 2008
If you have read The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov, you should read this book too! An exceptional book that not only records the facts but also analyzes how people react and why they react in the way that they do. What seems incomprehensible behavior is better understood. So a book not only concerned with historical facts but even more importantly about people and what makes us who we are. I have a different hardcover edition which is not available on GoodReads. I prefer it. The two small children on the cover say so much......
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