The Whisperers by Orlando Figes
An Account of Private Life in Stalin’s Russia
Orlando Figes has the enviable distinction of being the writer of the excellent book A People’s Tragedy, arguably the best and most thorough account of the Russian Revolution from 1891 to 1924. In A People’s Tragedy Figes deftly managed to capture the epic impact of the war and the revolution but never lost sight of the human impact of such momentous events and the individual lives that were changed, more often for the worse.
With The Whisperers, Figes has continued his study of the impact of “history” on the people who live through it and has turned his attention to the struggles of the Russian public during the Soviet era when individualism was seen as a treasonable offence.
The People Speak
As Figes notes, one in eight Russian people were victims of Stalin’s Terror, but, despite the massive scale of the oppression, the individual experiences of the people who lived through Stalin’s rule have largely gone unreported. Made up largely of oral testimonies corroborated through letters, diaries and photographs taken from family archives, The Whisperers gives a voice to the people.
In order to write The Whisperers, Figes worked with Memorial, a Russian non-governmental organisation dedicated to preserving the memories and experiences of those who lived through the Soviet era, to conduct interviews with roughly a thousand people who were members of the “generation born in the first years of the Revolution, those lives thus followed the trajectory of the Soviet system”.
The stories that these people have to tell are both disturbing and fascinating as well as hugely important for anyone who wishes to understand life under Stalin and the impact that Soviet life had on twentieth century history as a whole.
A Forgotten Past
Figes has stated that, with The Whisperers, he did not want to write about Stalin but instead about “the way that Stalinism entered people’s minds and emotions, affecting all their values and relationships.”
Perhaps the greatest and, indeed, the most tragic impact that Stalinism had on the average person was the regime’s attempts at disintegration of the family. People were forced to deny their heritage and denounce family members if they wanted to survive. Many families lost relatives to execution squads or detention camps. Even those people that returned from the camps were not the same, many of those interviews by Figes recall how their loved ones refused to speak of their time in detention and how they returned home emotionally broken and cold.
It is incredibly difficult for people who did not live through the Terror to understand what it must be like to live in fear, to be constantly on edge and worried that the slightly misspoken comment could lead to imprisonment in one of the dreaded detention camps but the first hand accounts in The Whisperers give a powerful and shocking insight into Soviet life.
When talking about his father, Pyotr Kolobkov recalls how “every night he would stay awake – waiting for the sound of a car engine. When it came he would sit up rigid in his bed. … He was convinced that he would be arrested for something he said”. Although a car never did come to take away his father, the example of the Kolobkov family is typical of the pervading sense of dread that was in the air during the period of the Terror.
An Important Record
The Whisperers is a meticulously researched account of a profoundly tragic time. It is impossible to read tale after tale of oppression, fear and bereavement without being moved by the suffering that was visited on the ordinary people during the Soviet era. The Whisperers is also a vitally important book since, it they went unrecorded, it would be all to easy for these people’s stories to fade from the collective memory, leaving an incomplete picture of a momentous period of history.
The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russiaby Orlando Figes
ISBN 978-0713997026, Allen Lane, 2007, £25.00, pp740
