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The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia | 
 enlarge | Author: Orlando Figes
Publisher: Allen Lane
Category: Book
List Price: £25.00
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Media: Hardcover
Pages: 740
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.8
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 6.2 x 1.9
ISBN: 0713997028
EAN: 9780713997026
ASIN: 0713997028
Publication Date: October 4, 2007
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
 An Insightful Historical Document March 26, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
In this book, Figes has diluted and refined his mastery of the art of weaving historical sources together. These family narratives which, without this book, would certainly have been lost, provide a compelling insight into the reality of Soviet Russia - the 'historical' backdrop of dates and movements takes a back seat to the gritty honesty of real people's testimony of what living through this era was actually like.
A fantastic read.
A necessary book February 5, 2008
9 out of 10 found this review helpful
This is a really first-rate book. Like no other book before, it lets the reader feel what it was like to live through the Stalin years. Based on interviews and family archives, which Figes has collected from homes across Russia, it is made up of small stories, which are beautifully woven into a tapestry of Soviet life. Some of the stories are harrowing, at times I found it hard to keep reading, but there are also tales of extraordinary courage and resilience that give the book a moral lift.
At the centre of the book is the fascinating figure of Konstantin Simonov, a writer deeply implicated in the Stalinist regime, who nonetheless is portrayed here as a sympathetic personality with many admirable qualities that were gradually lost through moral compromise. Was it possible, Figes seems to ask, be a "good Stalinist"? The Simonov sections make this book worth reading on their own.
The Whisperers is a real triumph. Meticulously researched and beautifully written, without the slightest moralizing, lecturing, or taking sides, at times it has the moral quality of Primo Levi in its recounting of human suffering and resilience. Read this book - it will make you re-examine what it means to be a human being.
 The Whisperers February 4, 2008
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
"The Whisperers" performs the valuable historical task of collating and reporting what it was like to live in Soviet Russia under the constant threat of being sent to a labour camp or summarily executed. In selecting what to report the author imposed the constraint of using only oral testimony which was supported by documentary testimony (family photographs, private letters, official records, etc.). To ensure accuracy the draft of the text in English was translated into Russian to get the observations of those who had been interviewed.
What the book reveals is the depth to which fear permeated the whole of Soviet society - not only during but long after the death of Stalin. Whilst the camps were very strongly supported by Stalin it was for economic as much as political considerations that they were dismantled after his death. The camps may have gone but the fear of being sent to a camp as a result of an injudicious remark remained.
The testimonies in the book are supported my own, admittedly very limited, experience. The father of a Ukrainian colleague died in 2005. While working he (the father) had attained a high position in the Ukrainian Socialist Republic. For last year or two before his death he insisted every night on packing a suitcase of essentials in case he was sent to the camps; similar actions are reported in the book.
Wide ranging though the book is there are still some gaps. The testimonies are centred around those living in St Petersburg, Moscow and Perm: what about those in rural areas, in other Soviet republics and in "fraternal socialist countries" such as Poland and Hungary? Most of the people appearing in the book had close experience of the terror; either having been in camps themselves or having a close relative sent there. Again the question arises: how did other people avoid being sent to the camps? Did people become politically apathetic? What part did luck play? It would be nice to know.
Throughout the book the camps themselves remain in the background. For a better understanding of the camps themselves I recommend "Gulag: A History" By Anne Applebaum".
A fine history lacking the narrative impact of Figes's earlier work February 1, 2008
5 out of 8 found this review helpful
The Whisperers is Orlando Figes's moving book recounting the private lives of Soviet citizens living under Stalin's tyranny. It is a fine book, impeccably and widely researched and stands up well both as an academic work and as a relatively accessible history. Figes's achievements in this wide ranging bok are many, but the most telling thing I learned from reading The Whisperers was the sense of shame that the families of those persecuted by Stalin suffered even decades later.
While this is a very good work, there are a couple of shortcomings that preclude The Whisperers from attaining greatness and becoming a landmark text on the USSR - as Figes's earlier work A People's Tragedy was.
The first is its subject range. The uniqueness of this book is purportedly that it's the first history to tell of the private lives of Soviet citizens. But the Stalin era, on which Figes focuses, is indivisible from three phenemona it bred - the Terror, the war, the gulag - and they are well documented elsewhere. Although there is no questioning the breadth of Figes' research, there is a recurrent sense that we are getting the same stories already told elsewhere (In Anne Applebaum's The Gulag, for example).
More interesting, I feel, would have been a narrative that stretched until 1989. So what if the era is less coloured with the horrors of war and repression? There are numerous questions about the USSR still waiting to be answered. How did people live under Brezhnev? What cat and mouse games did private citizens have to play with the secret police? What were perceptions of the west? Were there fears about nuclear war? How did people react to perestroika and glasnost? I could go on.
My second criticism is the lack of narrative drive. A People's Tragedy, Figes's best book - and the finest history of its era in my opinion -showed that populist history could be written with academic rigour. In it, Figes used personal histories - General Brusilov and Maxim Gorky, for example - to illuminate the wider story of the Russian revolution and civil war. He uses the same device in The Whisperers with the poet Konstantin Simonov, but it is less effective because there are a lack of other identifiable characters to accompany Simonov in driving the text forward. Figes recounts hundreds of individual case studies effectively, but in the end they are just names on a page. As a reader it is difficult to emphasise with them in the same way as an individual who reappears throughout the duration of the book.
One of the criticisms of A People's Tragedy was that it owed `more to Tolstoy than to E.H.Carr or Richard Pipes' and Figes was (unfairly) pillioried by some critics for writing with the verve of a novelist rather than the muted prose of an academic. I get the sense with The Whisperers and his last book Natasha's Dance that he is in some way holding back, at once trying to prove his populist and academic credentials when he doesn't really need to. In a way, Figes suffers criticism by comparison to his earlier masterpiece when the reality is that few other historians would be able to produce as powerful a work as the Whisperers, never mind A People's Tragedy. A People's Tragedy was a supreme example of how history can be written with the dramatic thrust of a novel, while retaining its credibility as a history. Figes would do well to return to these principles -- for if he does he could emerge as the finest historian of his generation.
 WHISPERING IN PARADISE January 23, 2008
5 out of 20 found this review helpful
WHISPERING IN PARADISE
By IAIN FRASER GRIGOR
POPULAR HISTORIES in English about Stalin's Russia are on a roll and easily-read titles seem to tumble from their authors every few months. One of the most reliably prolific of these writers is Orlando Figes, professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London, who - though barely 50 - already has his name on three major contributions to the genre.
Figes' cultural history of Russia, Natasha's Dance (the title redolent of the famous scene in Tolstoy's War and Peace) is a substantial and delightfully-written contribution to the subject. His history of the Russian revolution, A People's Tragedy, properly puts the Leninist coup d'etat of 1917 in its wider context, and helps deconstruct post-Leninist myth-making about the nature of the revolution. And his Peasant Russia Civil War - a study of the Volga countryside during Civil War and War Communism - tends to read like the diligently instructive post-graduate thesis that it probably was.
Figes' latest contribution is something of a departure from this sort of mainstream history, at least in terms of sources. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, large quantities of private and strictly-unofficial archival material have come to light. Much work has also been done in recording the memoirs of some of those who considered themselves to be victims of the Stalinist Paradise, thanks to the work of the late-Soviet human-rights organisation Memorial. It is on these sources (including 450 interviews) that this present book is based, as a victims' history of the USSR (which might, actually, have been a better title for the book than the one it bears).
Of course, not everyone will agree with Figes' assertion that, "Oral testimonies, on the whole, are more reliable that literary memoirs, which have usually been seen as a more authentic record of the past. 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".
Still, The Whisperers is certainly readable enough - given it subject, it could hardly be otherwise, and a writer of Figes' natural calibre makes appropriate use of the marvellously colourful tales of tragedy and treachery available to him.
We read here, for instance, of the onetime-Zionist Ilia Slavin, "Who defended the perpetrators of a working-class pogrom against the Jews in 1919, on the grounds that it was an expression of their class hatred of their Jewish factory managers". This moral degradation extended far into the ranks of the party - and began very quickly. In the very early days of the Revolution, "Marksena was forbidden by her mother to invite friends home from school, because, she said, it was better that they did not see how comfortably the Party's leaders lived". Or as the Great Stalin proudly claimed in 1934, "We Communists are people of a special brand. We are made of better stuff ... There is nothing higher than the honour of belonging to this army".
Already, the Soviet bureaucracy was ten times larger than the Tsarist one had ever been. As early as 1921, there were 2.4 million state officials, "More than twice the number of industrial workers in Russia. They formed the main social basis of the regime". (By 1936, this New Class had grown to number five or six million, according to Trotsky).
Thus, "The problem with Soviet power is the fact that it gives rise to the vilest type of official. All I see around me is loathsome politicising, dirty tricks and people being destroyed for slips of the tongue. There's no end to the denunciations. The less gifted a b******, the meaner his slander".
Thus the Komsomol endeavour to expel a fifteen-year old girl for failing to denounce her mother as "an enemy of the people". Thus the re-introduction of middle-school fees from 1938. Thus valedictions such as, "A steadfast fighter on the ideological front, an iron broom sweeping the vermin from the academic heights".
Thus too (and perhaps not altogether surprisingly) the inveterate survival of religious faith (or superstition). By 1925, half of the members recently expelled from the Party had been thrown-out on the grounds of religious observance. Well into the 1930s, one family had a Christmas tree, although they had been banned in 1929 as "relics of a bourgeois way of life".
But Figes is (at least in this book) no economist, and his oral and memorial sources do not unduly detain themselves with some of the great questions of Soviet history. What if the other parties had not been destroyed in the very early days of Soviet power? What if NEP had been allowed to run its course? What if collectivisation had not happened or had been allowed to work - rather than become a mechanism to squeeze the last ear of grain from the new class of socialist serf? What if Stalin had been ditched by the party leadership in the early `thirties (when that was still possible)? What, indeed, if diplomacy had averted or postponed the German attack of 1941 (also possible)? Or what if the Red Army had not only halted but had destroyed German forces by the summer of 1942 (as it might well have done, had it not been for Stalin's criminal stupidity with regard to his pre-war officer corps and the reports of his own intelligence services)?
And Figes' focus on oral and unofficial sources sheds no light on any of the famous plots with which Stalin's Russia teemed. There is little here which illuminates the alleged military plots of the late 1930s, the various opposition plots of which so much was made, the inner-party and foreign-intelligence plots, or the nationalist plots (within or without the party) from the Ukraine and elsewhere.
In all, this book reminds us that the planned economy was a lot harder than it looked. And the book also reminds us that oral history has its limitations, whether in a Russian or other national context. What, one wonders incidentally, would a victims' oral history of 20th century Britain read like? And isn't it time that someone wrote it?
www.iain-fraser-grigor.co.uk
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