The Whisperers

I just finished reading an extremely informative and interesting book entitled The Whisperers by the historian Orlando Figes.  The book describes private life in the Soviet Union during the terrible Stalin years.  Figes has written several other books about Russia. The Whisperers combines his masterful expertise with the oral histories of over 300 individuals who survived perhaps the cruelest and most systematic repression ever encountered on this planet.

I’m pretty familiar with Russian history and have read other books describing this period, but to me this is by far the best, because it describes the personal impact of Stalin’s paranoia and extremely dysfunctional nature of the Soviet regime across a broad cross-section of individual Russian lives and generations.  If you’re unfamiliar with this period in Russian history, you may want to bone up on some of the facts ahead of time, or be ready to do a little research on the internet to fill in some gaps.  Either way, you’ll be amazed and assaulted by story after story of the terror generated by this totalitarian regime.
 

I remember reading a quote attributed to Stalin that “the death of one person is a tragedy, the death of thousands is a statistic.”  The genius of this book is that it translates the horrible statistics of the Stalin years: millions arrested arbitrarily and exiled to work-camps, millions dead due to the extreme conditions at these camps, and hundreds of thousands more executed, into stark, individual tragedies.  And not simply the tragedy of the lives cut short, but also the enduring psychological toll the arbitrary arrests and long years of exile inflicted upon the survivors and their families.  These effects can still be felt as you travel throughout Russia and the former Soviet republics. 
 

Figes and those individuals who labored to collect this data have done a wonderful work in memorializing the personal pain and suffering of an entire nation.  The Whisperers stands as a testament to the suffering of millions of innocents at the hands of a morally bankrupt, autocratic regime.

In Russia, hopefully history will not repeat itself.  Certainly conditions are different now than in the days after the Russian Revoltion and Civil War.  But as the Russian government and state industries are dominated by former and current members of the intelligence services, where the rule of law is weak and those that oppose the Putin regime are arrested or die mysteriously, the future is murky at best.