Stalinist Russia Grad Class Papers #7

The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia

Orlando Figes

Orlando Figes’s The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia is a superbly written but heartbreaking book in which the author unveils the tragic life stories and personal struggles of people who lived and survived the horrors of the Stalinist years. Figes juxtaposes personal experiences of the generation born around the time of the Bolshevik Revolution against the political upheavals of the dekulakization, the Great Terror, the Second World War and traces some of their lives to the present day. Those who were fortunate enough to survive the terror and the destitute of Stalinism were mentally and sometimes physically scarred for the rest of their lives. They lived in fear and often concealed their past even from their loved ones in order to protect them and give them a chance to adapt and survive in the Soviet system. 

Through out the book the author traces life stories of individuals and families such as Elizaveta Drabkina, Anatoly and Liuba Golovnia, the Laskins, the Simonov, the Golovins, the Buhuevs and many others. Through reconstructing their backgrounds and events that took place in their lives, their attitudes and beliefs, actions that they took, letters and poems that they wrote the authors paints a picture of the times not only of that took place in the Soviet Union directed from above but also how the ordinary and not so ordinary people have been affected by it and how they have responded. For example, the Laskins and the Golovins have survived and stayed a close knit family despite all the hardships they have endured. 

Some were not so fortunate. The whole generation of children whose parents disappeared in the purges was brought up in orphanages, by grandparents, distant relatives or strangers as in the case of the Goldenshteins. Some had to work from the early age and fend for themselves as did Marksena Karpitskaya after her parents were arrested and her brother taken away. These events were undoubtedly traumatic for the victims. Some believed that their relatives were in fact guilty of opposing the regimes, but most believed in their innocence. Those brought up by relatives preserved the centrality of the family and the memory of their parents, but many of less fortunate who were taken by the state were often morphed into new Soviet citizens – it was a policy in children’s homes to remold them by erasing their original identity. 

Kulaks’ children fear of expulsion was frequently reflected in a desperate urge to prove themselves as “Soviet citizens” by distancing themselves from their families and many ended up as ardent Stalinists and even made careers for themselves by joining the repressive organs of the state. Orlando Figes underscores that fear was only one of a number of contradictory impulses and emotions. Passivity, the desire to withdraw, shame, inferiority, which could give in the same person to both a secret hatred of the Soviet regime and a will to overcome one’s stigma by demonstrating devotion to the Soviet cause.  

The author places Konstantin Simonov at the center of his book and traces his life and his convictions though out the period of Stalinism and up to his death in 1979. Simonov was the famous Soviet poet and decorated war journalist, famous for his poem “Wait for Me” and other works not only in the U.S.S.R. but also in the West. His blind devotion to the regime and its cause is often filled with self-doubt and remorse as he lives through the ebb and flow of the Soviet system and reflects on his life. 

Figes’s book is such a powerful account of private life in Stalinist Russia not only because of the breadth of research he presents and the way he brings to light the extent of human suffering that took place, but also because he does such a superb job of placing historical events as the backdrop for his narrative. In his discussion of the Great Terror, Figes makes it clear that Stalin was the mastermind of the terror and that the regime made a conscious effort to arrest at least 1.3 million people, almost 700,000 of which were shot.  His attempt to explain the motives and the inner world of those who carried out and believed in the regime– Gulag guards who shot and imprisoned people, those who denounced kulaks as Kolya Kuzmin did, and Simonov who attacked some of his colleagues and continued to support Stalinism – is extremely valuable and insightful. 

Dr. W: An excellent critique. A