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Title: The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia
ISBN: 0805074619
Author:
Orlando Figes
Publicate Date: 2007-11-13
Publish: 2007-11-13
List Price: $35.00
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Format: Hardcover
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $20.00
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $9.84
Amazon Merchant Price: $23.10
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| Customer Review: |
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1: 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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2: 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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3: 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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4: GOOD JOURNALISM, BAD HISTORY
This book cannot be classified as history.To write something based mostly on a myriad of interviews does not qualify it under the category of scientific research.It distorts and minimizes the historical framework of those horrible Stalin times by ignoring the overall historical dimension. .
A great disappointment and a great miss indeed.
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5: Dangerous whispers
"The Whisperers" by Orlando Figes is an outstanding piece of scholarship painting a harrowing picture of the results which Stalinist terror had on its victims and on the society it created. The book combines facts of historical developments at various significant stages of the Soviet bid for power, its consolidation, the phases of Stalin's rule and post-Stalinist developments with a wide variety of biographical data. In addition to following the life of one outstanding literary figure - Konstantin Simonov - and his family throughout the complete time span, Figes portrays people from all walks of life, so that the reader is able to identify with many individual lives and at the same time perceives that the people presented still are but a tiny minority, each person representing many whose stories remain untold. The book depicts the development in the oppression of the Soviet people, ordinary and powerful alike, from the almost rational liquidation of certain groups in the early years to the total terror of the hight of the Stalinist purges, when practically everybody could be arrested, tortured and shot or sentenced to up to 25 years of forced labour on the basis of a denunciation. It shows the effects both physical and mental which this had on the victims, their families and the others - those who remained unconcerned either because they believed in the official propaganda which pronounced those sentenced to be guilty of hideous crimes against the state or because they managed not to notice anything at all. The book goes on to describe the years of the Second World War and the aftermath. It answers the questions of what happens after terror lightens up, what happens, when people try to take up their lives after 5, 10 or more years, to rejoin their families, to find children scattered all over the country after being sent to different orphanages, when it slowly becomes clear what fear has done to people's minds, having eaten into them like acid for decades. The final claim is that "stoicism and passivity" as dominant features of the collective (post-)Socialist psyche are the results of those many years, in which people talked in whispers and were afraid of whisperers.
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