The Whisperers: Private Life In Stalin's Russia (2007) - Plot & Excerpts
This is a vital article published recently in The Nation about this controversial book and why it was not published in Russia after two attempts by different publishers. I hope that in its wake its readers' rankings would be less upbeat.Orlando Figes and Stalin's Victims. Peter Reddaway and Stephen F. CohenMay 23, 2012 Many Western observers believe that Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian regime has in effect banned a Russian edition of a widely acclaimed 2007 book by the British historian Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia. A professor at University of London’s Birkbeck College, Figes himself inspired this explanation. In an interview and in an article in 2009, he suggested that his first Russian publisher dropped the project due to “political pressure” because his large-scale study of Stalin-era terror “is inconvenient to the current regime.” Three years later, his explanation continues to circulate.We doubted Figes’s explanation at the time—partly because excellent Russian historians were themselves publishing so many uncensored exposés of the horrors of Stalinism, and continue to do so—but only now are we able to disprove it. (Since neither of us knows Figes or has ever had any contact with him, there was no personal animus in our investigation.) Our examination of transcripts of original Russian-language interviews he used to write The Whisperers, and of documents provided by Russians close to the project, tells a different story. A second Russian publisher, Corpus, had no political qualms about soon contracting for its own edition of the book. In 2010, however, Corpus also canceled the project. The reasons had nothing to do with Putin’s regime but everything to do with Figes himself.* * *In 2004 specialists at the Memorial Society, a widely respected Russian historical and human rights organization founded in 1988 on behalf of victims and survivors of Stalin’s terror, were contracted by Figes to conduct hundreds of interviews that form the basis of The Whisperers, and are now archived at Memorial. In preparing for the Russian edition, Corpus commissioned Memorial to provide the original Russian-language versions of Figes’s quotations and to check his other English-language translations. What Memorial’s researchers found was a startling number of minor and major errors. Its publication “as is,” it was concluded, would cause a scandal in Russia.This revelation, which we learned about several months ago, did not entirely surprise us, though our subsequent discoveries were shocking. Separately, we had been following Figes’s academic and related abuses for some time. They began in 1997, with his book A People’s Tragedy, in which the Harvard historian Richard Pipes found scholarly shortcomings. In 2002 Figes’s cultural history of Russia, Natasha’s Dance, was greeted with enthusiasm by many reviewers until it encountered a careful critic in the Times Literary Supplement, Rachel Polonsky of Cambridge University. Polonsky pointed out various defects in the book, including Figes’s careless borrowing of words and ideas of other writers without adequate acknowledgment. One of those writers, the American historian Priscilla Roosevelt, wrote to us, “Figes appropriated obscure memoirs I had used in my book Life on the Russian Country Estate (Yale University Press, 1995), but changed their content and messed up the references.” Another leading scholar, T.J. Binyon, published similar criticism of Natasha’s Dance: “Factual errors and mistaken assertions strew its pages more thickly than autumnal leaves in Vallombrosa.”In 2010 a different dimension of Figes’s practices came to light. For some time he had been writing anonymous derogatory reviews on Amazon of books by his colleagues in Russian history, notably Polonsky and Robert Service of Oxford University. Polonsky’s Molotov’s Magic Lantern, for example, was “pretentious” and “the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever published.” Meanwhile, Figes wrote on Amazon, also anonymously, a rave review of his own recent The Whisperers. It was, Figes said, a “beautiful and necessary” account of Soviet history written by an author with “superb story-telling skills…. I hope he writes forever.”When Service and Polonsky expressed their suspicion that Figes had written the reviews, his lawyer threatened Service with court action. Soon, however, Figes was compelled to admit that he had indeed written the anonymous reviews. Service summed up the affair: Figes had “lied through his teeth for a week and threatened to sue me for libel if I didn’t say black was white…. If there is one thing that should come out of this, it is the importance of giving people freedom to speak the truth without the menace of financial ruin.”* * *At about the same time, as we later learned, the true story of the Russian edition of Figes’s The Whisperers was unfolding behind the scenes in Moscow. In summer 2010, representatives of three Russian organizations involved—the publisher Corpus, Memorial and a foundation, Dynastia (which owned the Russian rights and paid for the translation)—met to consider what Memorial’s researchers had uncovered. According to a detailed account by one participant, the group tried to find a way to salvage the project, but the researchers had documented too many “anachronisms, incorrect interpretations, stupid mistakes and pure nonsense.” All of The Whisperers’ “facts, dates, names and terms, and the biographies of its central figures, need to be checked,” the participant added. It was too much. A decision was made against proceeding with the Russian edition. After re-examining the relevant materials, Dynastia informed Figes of the decision in an April 6, 2011, letter to his London literary agency.Indeed, after looking at only a few chapters of The Whisperers, Memorial found so many misrepresentations of the life stories of Stalin’s victims that its chief researcher, a woman with extensive experience working on such materials, said, “I simply wept as I read it and tried to make corrections.” Here are just three examples, which we have also examined, whose gravity readers can decide for themselves:§ To begin with an example that blends mistakes with invention, consider Figes’s treatment of Natalia Danilova (p. 253), whose father had been arrested. After misrepresenting her family history, Figes puts words in her mouth, evidently to help justify the title of his book: Except for an aunt, “the rest of us could only whisper in dissent.” The “quotation” does not appear in Memorial’s meticulous transcription of its recorded interview with Danilova.§ Figes invents “facts” in other cases, apparently also for dramatic purpose. According to The Whisperers (pp. 215-17, 292-93), “it is inconceivable” that Mikhail Stroikov could have completed his dissertation while in prison “without the support of the political police. He had two uncles in the OGPU” (the political police). However, there is no evidence that Stroikov had any uncles, nor is there any reason to allege that he had the support of the secret police. Figes also claims that for helping Stroikov’s family, a friend then in exile was “rearrested, imprisoned and later shot.” In reality, this friend was not rearrested, imprisoned or executed, but lived almost to the age of 90.§ Figes’s distortion of the fate of Dina Ielson-Grodzianskaia (pp. 361-62), who survived eight years in the Gulag, is grievous in a different respect. After placing her in the wrong concentration camp, he alleges that she was “one of the many ‘trusties’” whose collaboration earned them “those small advantages which…could make the difference between life and death.” There is no evidence in the interviews used by Figes that Ielson-Grodzianskaia was ever a “trusty” or received any special privileges. As a leading Memorial researcher commented, Figes’s account is “a direct insult to the memory of a prisoner.”The Whisperers may be consistent with Figes’s other practices, but for us, longtime students (and friends) of victims of Stalinist and other Soviet-era repressions, the book’s defects are especially grave. For many Russians, particularly surviving family members, Stalin’s millions of victims are a “sacred memory.” Figes has not, to say the least, been faithful to that memory—nor to the truth-telling mission of the often politically embattled Memorial, which, despite the effort expended, honorably agreed with the decision against publishing the Russian edition. Still more, a great many Russians have suffered, even died, for, as Service put it, the “freedom to speak the truth.” Figes has not honored that martyrdom either.* * *Unfortunately, The Whisperers is still regarded by many Western readers, including scholars, as an exemplary study of Soviet history. These new revelations show, however, that Figes’s work cannot be read without considerable caution. Historians are obliged to be especially meticulous in using generally inaccessible archive materials, but Figes cannot be fully trusted even with open sources. Thus, in The Whisperers he also maligns the memory of the late Soviet poet and longtime editor of Novyi Mir, Aleksandr Tvardovsky, a bold forerunner of Mikhail Gorbachev’s anti-Stalinist thinking, by stating that Tvardovsky “betrayed” his own father to the police during the terror (p. 134). Figes’s allegation has been convincingly refuted in the Russian press.We hope that in his latest book, Just Send Me Word, published in May, Figes has treated his unique sources with more care. This book tells the saga of a deeply moving, secret, more than eight-year correspondence between an inmate in Stalin’s remote Gulag and a devoted woman in Moscow, who later became his wife. Regrettably, the book conveys the impression that Figes retains the full support of Memorial, through, for example, the insertion at the end of the volume of “A Note from Memorial” (an analysis of the correspondence by a Memorial researcher that was apparently designed for another purpose).In truth, Memorial has come to a different decision regarding Figes. In a letter, one of its leading figures recently wrote about Figes, “Many of us have formed an impression of him as being…a very mediocre researcher and an incompetent handler of sources who is poorly oriented in his chosen topic, but an energetic and talented businessman.” As a result, the writer continued, “In the future, we do not want to link his name with that of Memorial.”Response From Orlando FigesI have seventy-five words to respond to an article I’ve not been allowed to read. The first cancellation (Atticus, 2009) cited commercial reasons, though I speculated that politics was involved. The second (Dynastia, 2011) cited about a dozen “factual inaccuracies” and “misrepresentations.” I responded: some were in Memorial’s sources, others debatable, or mistranslated by Dynastia—leaving a few genuine errors in a book based on thousands of interviews and archival documents. These I regret.It is longstanding Nation policy not to share the full text of an article with the subject of that article before publication. Our Letters page remains open to Figes. —The Editors
The Whisperers’ uplifting ending is worth the wait. This compelling tome took me a long time to read, but not in a negative way. Orlando Figes’ oral history of Stalin’s Russia is largely based on several hundred interviews, from which several dozen ordinary family histories emerge at various points in time. The flip side was that, on many occasions, I forgot who was who and kept having to refer to the index, which then directed me to a point two hundred pages earlier. I ended up reading large parts of the book several times. If you have a humanities degree, or the ability to do one, then you won’t have this problem.But taking so long to read this was no bad thing – the book became a big part of my life for a few months. The stories bring to life the lot of the Russian people between 1917 and 1956, when Khrushchev publicly exposed the truth of Stalin’s dictatorship.The book is structured in several chapters, each of which covers a different era: each era was largely defined by Stalin’s enemy of the time. Stalin’s first enemies were, as you may well remember from school, the so-called “kulaks”, or rich peasants. What emerges from the individual interviews is that most of them were not that rich, and in some cases they were identified simply to meet government targets: these are my words and I use them deliberately but they reflect the reality - the secret police had to identify a set number of “kulaks” in each village. This "target-gaming" does not make the mass arrests any worse of course: everyone was innocent from the perspective of a Western liberal democracy. Early on, and throughout the book, we learn about the gulags. I spent a lot of time looking at maps: it is striking that nearly half the Russian land is north of the Arctic Circle. Use your imagination. But the book concentrates not so much on what happened at the gulags, but its effect on families. Fathers disappeared in the middle of the night. Children were left to fend for themselves because there was so little money. Sentences were often for ten years or more, so when families were finally reunited entire childhoods had been lost. Time and again, interviews described how young children remember their families being torn apart: if you are a parent yourself then you won’t be able to avoid considering the events through the eyes of your own children. The enemies continue to stack up: next in line were the bourgeois “NEP Men” who were given the freedom to run businesses during the New Economic Policy of the 1920’s, before being turned upon. By the 1930’s most city dwellers were forced into communal apartments, and everyone was encouraged to spy on everyone else. The Kafkaesque nightmares then really began: if you didn’t report on your neighbours enough, then you weren’t being “vigilant”. Associates of those arrested were targeted. With exponential effects, more and more people were sent to the gulags. Then something very odd emerges: gulag work was highly productive to the Soviet economy – huge infrastructure, manufacturing and mining programmes were fulfilled largely on the basis of slave labour in these places - and many prisoners started to take pride in their work. Indeed significant numbers stayed on at the gulags in a voluntary capacity, believing they were helping to build a communist utopia. In the late 1930’s the enemy changed again. A joke of the time went something like this: a door knocks in the middle of the night and the occupant shouts, “you’ve got the wrong address – the communists are upstairs”. Led by Stalin, the Communist Party membership was purged. Unlike the “kulaks” and “NEP Men”, many of the Communist Party members arrested at this time were simply shot. As a reader, you might expect to have less sympathy with these latest victims. But because, again, many of the stories are personalised, the tragedy continues. By this time many Communist Party Members were second generation, children at the time of the revolution in 1917, and their membership of the Communist Party was less of a political statement and more of a cultural one. Often the wives of those arrested were also sent to ALZhIR: the Akmolinsk Labour Camp for the Wives of Traitors of the Motherland - had George Orwell invented this term, it would have been considered too far-fetched. During the war, a new enemy emerged, and not the obvious one. It was the Russian soldiers, from generals to infantry, who Stalin feared might lead a revolution post-victory. A despicable image emerges: the secret police followed the Russian Army into battle, at a safe distance. On the orders of Stalin, their job was to ensure that no-one retreated, even temporarily. Many Russian officers bravely disobeyed, retreating tactically, while advancing strategically. But like the gulag prisoners, soldiers never turned against their regime, seeing a greater cause: in this case the defeat of the Nazis. The post war era brought new enemies including, inevitably, the Jews. Chapter 8 is entitled simply “Return” and it describes the return from the gulags of millions of Russians during the 1950’s, both before and after Stalin’s death. It takes much longer for them to be pardoned as Khrushchev was wary of a backlash. He need not have worried. The rest of the book is about reconciliation, not revenge, and this left me feeling quite uplifted – the human race has this amazing ability to forgive the most heinous crimes. This was well-documented in South Africa, but quite undocumented in Russia. Until now.
What do You think about The Whisperers: Private Life In Stalin's Russia (2007)?
656 pages later, I finally finished. I rated this book as amazing because not only has it been painstakingly researched over a period of many years, but it is very readable and fascinating all the way through. The author set out to explore how the extreme dictatorship and terror tactics of Stalin affected ordinary people and their everyday lives during his long grip on Russia, from the early 1930s to his death in 1956 and beyond. He starts in 1917 with the Bolshevik Revolution and especially children born in and around that year, who would have been young adults in the 1930s, and follows a number of people and families through the whole era. He also gives a vivid picture of living conditions in the cities, even including floor plans of some of the communal apartments where multiple large families often lived together, curtaining off corners in some cases to provide some sense of privacy. The title "The Whisperers" comes from the need to be extremely cautious in talking to family members in this kind of setting, where neighbours could denounce you for a careless phrase that could imply disapproval of the government. For this you could be sent to a labour camp for 10 years, or simply shot on your arrival there. The book is a disturbing description of how such dictatorships can develop and how they can be nurtured by a population under the right conditions. A long book but well worth reading!
—Carol Harrison
Znany historyk i pisarz brytyjski podjął się gigantycznej i mozolnej pracy zgromadzenia i analizy materiałów na temat stalinowskiej Rosji. Jednak nie jej struktur, chociaż są istotne, nie polityki i gospodarki, a zwykłych ludzi, którym reżim odebrał osobowość, pozbawił sumienia i zdrowego rozsądku, wymazał tożsamość i zamienił w gromadę martwych, poplątanych sznurkami wskazówek i fałszywej ideologii, marionetek. W tym złowrogim teatrze brat denuncjował brata, śmierć wymazywała kolejne istnienia, a strach weryfikował każdy dzień, każdą chwilę. Historie przejmujące i niesamowite, jakby z innej równoległej rzeczywistości, jednak przecież wydarzyły się naprawdę. Książka wydana w chwili, gdy siłą rzeczy, żyje coraz mniej świadków tamtego okresu, tym bardziej cenna. Jak fotografia z wymazaną atramentem twarzą, czy to ze strachu, wstydu, czy innych tajemniczych okoliczności. Symboliczna plama na świetlanej przeszłości sowieckiego imperium (okładka z wydania polskiego, Warszawa - Wydawnictwo Magnum, 2008 rok).
—Margolcia
A Million Tragedies If you’ve seen the David Lean film version of Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago you may recall the scene where Lara, hearing wolves howl in the snowy distance, turns to Yuri in fright, saying that this is a terrible time to be alive. This is in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War that followed; history in action, a process that overwhelmed so many individual lives, consumed by fear, uncertainty and terror.But Lara did not know then how bad things were to become, that the wolves would not stay in the distance or outside the door. In the end she herself was to be the victim of the greatest fear of all – Stalin’s all-consuming Purge of the late 1930s which reached its murderous height in 1937, the Yezhovchina, named after Nikolai Yezhov, then head of the NKVD security apparatus. In his novel Pasternak writes of his character;One day Lara went out and did not come back. She must have been arrested in the street, as so often happened in those days, and she died or vanished somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list that was later mislaid, in one of the innumerable mixed or women’s concentration camps in the north.She was a nameless number, that’s all, drawn into the maelstrom like so many others. As Stalin is reputed to have said, a million deaths is not a tragedy, merely a statistic. The victims of his regime are gone beyond recall, just a meaningless list of meaningless names, voices that can no longer be heard. The rest is silence.But it’s not. The silence has been broken with whispers. It has been broken by The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia by Orlando Figes, a British specialist in Russian history. It isn’t a new work; it was published as long ago as 2007. The subject certainly interests me, having read and reviewed other books on this phase in Russian history, on GoodReads, on my blog and elsewhere. I would have tackled it eventually though I finally came to it as the dust settled after one of the little sandstorms that overtake publishing and the academic world now and then, inevitably obscuring the horizonI’ll come to this in a bit. Let me begin by saying that I consider Figes to be one of the best historians in his particular field. I hugely enjoyed his account of the Crimean War and I think A People’s Tragedy: the Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 is the single best account of the whole period. I do not think The Whisperers has surpassed this achievement, but it is still an important forward step in historical research. Its achievement lies in what I would call ‘a panorama from below.’ This is the voice of the voiceless, of people who experienced the Great Terror at first hand, not the politicians, the ideologues and the apparatchiks but the ordinary people of Russia. Working with a team of researchers, Figes has recovered so much personal testimony on the threshold of an even greater silence. For that alone he is to be commended. He also draws on family archives, letters, diaries, personal memoirs and so on, testimony that would have otherwise have been forgotten, unread and turning yellow with age. In Stalin’s Russia Big Brother, in the shape of the secret police, was constantly keeping the private citizen under observation, ready to pounce, like a wolf, on the least sign of deviation. I write ‘private citizen’ but there really was no privacy and no retreat. Stalinism fed on moral corruption, and moral corruption begins at the level of the individual. Yes, the state was ever watchful but it depended most particularly on those who were prepared to denounce others, either for base motives of personal gain – apartment space was at a premium - , or because they wanted to wash out some ‘stain’ in their personal biography by proving themselves more orthodox than the orthodox. One published notice serves here: “I, Nikolai Ivanov, renounce my father, an ex-priest, because for many years he deceived the people by telling them God exists, and for that reason I am severing my relations with him.” Deception and self-deception, lies and half truths, all were absorbed into a jungle-like struggle for survival. Commenting on one journal from 1937 Figes notes that “…people were becoming so adept at concealing meaning in their speech that they were in danger of losing the capacity to speak the truth altogether.” In a way personal life turned into a bizarre Greek tragedy, all emotion hidden behind masks. Those desperate to speak the truth turned in on themselves, like Winston Smith in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, confining their thoughts to diaries, a release carrying its own particular danger. The title has a double meaning that becomes increasingly obvious the further one reads. Whisperer in Russian has two senses: those who speak quietly for fear of being overheard, and those who inform on others, even friends and family, for fear of being suspected. Denounce, in other words, before you are denounced. Figes writes that “The distinction has its origins in the idiom of the Stalin years, when the whole of society was made up of whisperers of one sort or another.” Personal and moral corruption came through fear and intimidation. There is, however, another form of corruption, one which begins not with baseness but with idealism. The key example here is one Konstantin Siminov, whom Figes singles out as the ‘central figure’ of The Whisperers. He was a journalist, novelist and poet who enjoyed a particularly successful career under Stalin, demonstrating his loyalty time and again. There was no opportunism here; he was a genuine believer. Even the arrest and disappearance of family, friends and colleagues did nothing to dent his enthusiasm. It was this enthusiasm that allowed him to embrace every ideological perversion, including Stalin’s late anti-Semitism. He was loyal even after the end. As the truth began to come out after the dictator’s death, Siminov held to his early course. The alternative was just too awful: the alternative was to admit that his whole life had been based on a fraud. In the end he did. This was to be his particular tragedy.The Whisperers is an important book, I would go so far as to say a crucial one, a necessary testimony coming at just the right point in time, coming as a new fog of lies and misinformation about the past and about Stalin descends on Putin’s Russia. Even so it’s not a perfect book; there are flaws. As I hinted above, I read it in the aftermath of a controversy earlier this year. Russian publishers scrapped a projected translation because of alleged ‘inaccuracies.’ The story was picked up by Peter Reddaway and Stephen Cohen, two American academics, who published their findings in The Nation. Errors of fact are always a concern, particularly when those errors concern people who are still alive. But it seems to me that given the scale and scope of The Whisperers, given the mountain of primary material, such a thing while not excusable is at least understandable. Many of the errors, though, seem to have been introduced by the Russian translators or were present in the source documents. Once this had been taken into account the author wrote that it left “…a few genuine errors in a book based on thousands of interviews and archival documents. These I regret.”I do not regret this book, perhaps one of the most ambitions and worthwhile exercises in oral history ever undertaken. The flaws notwithstanding, it is a commendable achievement. It is, if you like, the story of a million tragedies.
—Anastasia Fitzgerald-Beaumont
