The Whisperers Private Life in Stalin's Russia

by Figes, Orlando

• ISBN13: 9780805074611
• ISBN10: 0805074619
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-11-13
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books

Summary

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. Orlando Figes is the author of Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia and A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891'1924 , which received the Wolfson Prize for History and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A frequent contributor to The New York Times and The New York Review of Books , among other publications, Figes is a professor of history at Birbeck College, University of London. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction 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 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. "The everyday lives of Russians between the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the death of Josef Stalin in 1953 is the subject of Orlando Figes'' illuminating and profoundly moving new book. Filled with the stories of hundreds of survivors, many of which make for desperately painful reading, The Whisperers offers the most thorough account so far of what it meant to live under Soviet totalitarianism."'” Douglas Smith, The Seattle Times "As Figes, a leading historian of the Soviet period, concludes in The Whisperers , his extraordinary book about the impact of the gulag on ''the inner world of ordinary citizens,'' a great many victims ''silently accepted and internalized the system's basic values'' and ''conformed to its public rules.'' Behind highly documented episodes of persecution, famine a

Author Biography

Orlando Figes is the author of Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia and A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924, which received the Wolfson Prize for History and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A frequent contributor to The New York Times and The New York Review of Books, among other publications, Figes is a professor of history at Birbeck College, University of London.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. viii
Note on Proper Names	p. xiii
Maps	p. xiv
Family Trees	p. xxi
Introduction	p. xxvii
Children of 1917 (1917-28)	p. 1
The Great Break (1928-32)	p. 76
The Pursuit of Happiness (1932-6)	p. 148
The Great Fear (1937-8)	p. 227
Remnants of Terror (1938-41)	p. 316
'Wait For Me' (1941-5)	p. 379
Ordinary Stalinists (1945-53)	p. 455
Return (1953-6)	p. 535
Memory (1956-2006)	p. 597
Afterword and Acknowledgements	p. 657
Permissions	p. 666
Notes	p. 667
Sources	p. 703
Index	p. 713
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