History as seen across the kitchen table

books:

	• The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia Orlando Figes Metropolitan Books, 2007 - 740 pages average customer review:based on 23 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Superb and chilling

Over the last decade or so, a flurry of excellent works about Stalin and his times have appeared on bookstore shelves. But even among this stellar company, The Whisperers stands out. It draws on oral histories, interviews and privately-written manuscripts -- the raw material that is the first draft of history -- of all kinds to describe the experience of everyday life in Stalin's Russia. What was it like for a "kulak", a party worker, a scientist or engineer, a journalist, a housewife, to try and survive this totalitarian regime and its vast network of spies and labor camps? Figes doesn't just tell us, he shows us. The reader ends up caring so much about each of the characters he portrays so deftly that it's almost impossible to resist the temptation to fast-forward, using the index to jump to the pages where the next installment of that individual's life is described, in order to find out what happened to them. It's chilling -- especially when you combine it with a recognition of the nostalgia that some Russians now feel for the Stalinist era. Scholarly in nature and extent, almost impossibly ambitious in scope -- and yetsomehow Figes has managed to turn this into a gripping read.

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A moving and important book

This must be the most important book on the Soviet Union since The Gulag Archipelago, in 1973. It is based on hundreds of family archives and thousands of interviews with the survivors of the Stalin Terror which Figes and his team of researchers have spent years collecting from homes throughout Russia. The stories which they tell are amazing, heartbreaking. I defy anyone not to be moved.

Figes is a great writer - anyone who has read Natasha's Dance or the multi prize-winning A People's Tragedy will tell you that. But in The Whisperers he doesn't let his style get in the way of the people's stories which almost seem to come to us in their own voice. This transparency (and humility on Figes's part) only adds to the emotional and moral impact of the book.

Figes says that he hasn't set out to explain the origins of the Great Terror, or Stalin's cult or policies, but actually, as a student of these things, I learned much more from the stories of these people than from conventional histories. The story of Konstantin Simonov, which Figes places at the centre of The Whisperers, tells us far more about the nature of the Stalinist regime, about how it got people to collaborate with it, than any history book I've ever read.

The Whisperers is sub-titled Private Life in Stalin's Russia, but it is really about the Soviet system as a whole (its first chapter starts in 1917 and its last ends in the present) and about its legacies of seventy years of totalitarianism for Russia today. For anyone who wants to understand Russia (or the twentieth century) it is essential reading.

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History as seen across the kitchen table

The Whisperers is history as seen across the kitchen table through a standard, 50 mm lens. Whereas much of the history of the Stalin era is writ large, swimming in the Gulag's sea of death and destruction, defined by war, purges and diplomacy, here Figes writes about Russian life on a smaller, more human scale. Tracing the lives of seven or so families from the 1917 revolution forward, this is not unlike a Ken Burns documentary in prose. Mined from memoirs and personal interviews, The Whisperers is intimate and deeply textured, particularly in its biography of the main character, the writer Konstantin Simonov, whose life was Molotov-esque in its reflection of the warped Russian reality of the 20th century. (Reviewed in Russian Life)

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Brilliant

This is one the great history books of our times. Based on hundreds of family archives and interviews with the last survivors of the Stalinist regime, it opens up the hidden private lives of ordinary people, exploring family relationships and the interior lives of individuals. Brilliantly researched and written with compassion, it is full of heartbreaking human tragedies, stories of betrayal and lost relationships. It is a very draining read emotionally, but not depressing, for there are also stories of human kindness, love and sacrifice. There were many moments when I had to put the book down and take a breath, moments when I had stop and cry.

Figes and his team of researchers have done something amazing in getting all these people to speak so openly about their lives, and historians will remain in his debt for many years. The book is a monument to the suffering of millions under Stalin, and it will be read in a hundred years.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

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.

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