Product Description

Penguin's lead autumn history book

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #106904 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 740 pages

The Washington Post
'Excellent ... riveting, at once solemn and lively. Figes has unwrapped the mystery inside the enigma of Stalinism'

Eric Hobsbawn
`Few historians have the courage to attack great subjects, fewer have the grasp to succeed ... will do more to help us understand the Russian revolution than any other book I know'

Max Hastings
`Brilliant ... he leaves one awed by the beauty and suffering'

Customer Reviews

A very 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.

A memorable book
As a former citizen of the USSR, I want to thank Professor Figes for this memorable book. It is a monument to the millions of people who could not tell their stories out of fear. I know this history. It is the history of my family, which also suffered by Stalin, and afterwards. I think this book is really the first to tell in full what it was like to live in Stalin's time. There are so many details that ringed true to me, like, for example, what it was like to live in a communal apartment and be afraid of the neighbours. Also I know what it was like to live without talk about vanished members of the family. There are memoirs by famous writers like Ginzburg, but this book is the first to speak for the millions of ordinary Soviet citizens.

An Extraordinary Book that will Move and Disturb You
This is the most amazing book. Really - it is! I bought it after reading rave reviews in the Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph and read it almost in two days, totally engrossed and often moved to tears by the stories of ordinary families surviving the Stalin years.

The book is based on several hundred family archives and on interviews with more than a thousand people, the last survivors of the Stalin Terror, in towns across Russia (Figes has done something very important by collecting all these testimonies for posterity). But The Whisperers is not just a book of voices or an oral history in the usual sense. Figes draws on these materials and interweaves a few of the more important family histories to construct a broader narrative that speaks for a whole generation.

I particularly liked the story of the Laskins and the Simonovs which is interwoven through the book. Figes manages to make us understand how educated people like the writer Konstantin Simonov lost themselves in the Stalinist system, how they took part in its repressions and even betrayed friends, without making easy moral judgements about their behaviour.

This is obviously a very important book. It tells us more about the nature of the Soviet regime, about the deep and long-term damage of terror and dictatorship, than any book I know; but it also tells us a great deal about the resilience of human beings.