Orlando Figes: The Whisperers

It has been the worse part of a century since the bloody birth and savage adolescence of the Soviet state, but the events of those years are still obscure — lost in time, muddled by propaganda, and treated, even now, as the stuff of spin. Those terrible decades remain camouflaged, murky and mysterious, glimpsed mainly in shadow or in tantalizing, elusive outline. They have been best illuminated not in nonfiction accounts, but in novels, short stories, and verse — by Solzhenitsyn’s zek grateful for his day “without a dark cloud,” by the deadpan of Shalamov’s spare, unsparing Kolyma Tales, by Ahkmatova’s torn, desperate, eloquent laments:

This was when the ones who smiled

Were the dead, glad to be at rest.

And like a useless appendage,

Leningrad Swung from its prisons.

And when, senseless from torment,

Regiments of convicts marched,

And the short songs of farewell

Were sung by locomotive whistles.

The stars of death stood above us

And innocent Russia writhed Under bloody boots

And under the tires of the Black Marias.

 

That’s not, of course, to deny that there have been some excellent histories of that era. One of the most notable in recent times was Orlando Figes’sPeople’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924. Professor Figes, a British historian, is now extending that saga deeper into the nightmare that enveloped the Soviet Union with The Whisperers, a massive, sprawling, and unsettling book billed as a description of “private life in Stalin’s Russia.” In researching it, Figes has made extensive, and extraordinary, use of freshly opened family archives and a large number of personal interviews. As well he might. To understand the founding period of the USSR is tricky enough. To uncover the private lives, and thoughts, of those who lived through it, inhabitants of a society where reticence, conformity, and role-playing could be, even at home, matters of life and death is doubly difficult. Then there is, as Figes writes, this:

People with traumatic memories tend to block out parts of their own past. Their memory becomes fragmentary, organized by a series of disjointed episodes (such as the arrest of a parent or the moment of eviction from their home) rather than by a linear chronology. When they try to reconstruct the story of their life, particularly when their powers of recall are weakened by old age, such people tend to make up for the gaps in their own memory by drawing on what they have read, or what they have heard from others with experiences similar to theirs.

To accept this logic is to accept that seminal accounts of this period, such as The Gulag Archipelago or Eugenia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind, have evolved from, respectively, works of collective history and individual recollection into the imagined, or partly imagined, autobiographies of countless victims of the terror. Figes himself claims that “many Gulag survivors insist that they witnessed scenes described in . . . Ginzburg, Solzhenitsyn, or Shalamov, that they recognize the guards or NKVD interrogators mentioned in these works . . . when documentation clearly shows that this could not be so.” Figes never specifies what he means by “many” (the numbers involved are probably, I suspect, less than that adjective implies), but there can be little doubt that the phenomenon is real. Complicating matters further, memories have been distorted not only by trauma and time, but also by wishful thinking:

People who returned from the labor camps . . . found consolation in the . . . idea that, as Gulag laborers, they too had made a contribution to the Soviet economy. Many of these people later looked back with enormous pride at the factories, dams, and cities they had built. This pride stemmed in part from their continued belief in the Soviet system and its ideology, despite the injustices they had been dealt, and in part, perhaps, from their need to find a larger meaning for their suffering.

Additionally, as Figes reminds us, it’s a viewpoint that finds an echo and reinforcement in the widely held opinion that victory in the “Great Patriotic War” can be seen as some sort of justification for the horrors of Stalinist rule.

These ideas are bizarre, but for large numbers of Russians they beat the alternative: facing up to just how much was lost, thrown away, or destroyed in pursuit of a delusion and in the name of a tyrant. This recourse to the comfort of denial and the ease of evasion is of more than academic interest. It helps explain the Putin government’s approach to the Communist past. A definitive reckoning with history, that long-overdue Soviet Nuremberg, is too daunting to contemplate, too potentially demoralizing for the nation as a whole, too incriminating for a still-compromised Kremlin establishment. Speaking last year in support of a new manual designed to help the teaching of Russian history in the country’s schools, Vladimir Putin conceded that aspects of the former dictatorship were “problematic.” Nevertheless, he went on to say that Russia could not allow “other states” to “impose a sense of guilt” upon it. The words he used reveal both unease about the past and, implicitly, a desire to reshape it.

If Figes’s analysis casts doubt on the reliability of some accounts of the Stalin years, those he has unearthed for the purposes of this book add fascinating detail to what we know, or think we know, of that epoch. Nevertheless, to view The Whisperers as a comprehensive survey of “private life in Stalin’s Russia” would be a mistake. For example, there is not a great deal about how it was to experience, and, where possible, endure, the camps and prisons that have come to symbolize the Stalinist order, an aspect of “private life” that Figes appears to believe lies mainly outside the scope of his chosen topic; I’m not so sure.

Meanwhile, at the other end of official approval there is, with one critical exception (the writer Konstantin Simonov, a man who was both too tough and too weak to avoid aligning himself with the system), less than might be expected about those who actively supported the regime or who, in one way or another, flourished under it. As for those “ordinary” Russians who managed, so far as they could, to keep out of the way of history, they feature relatively rarely. Readers looking for more on their lives would do better to turn to the evidence collected in Sheila Fitzpatrick’s Everyday Stalinism, and Stalinism as a Way of Life, edited by Lewis Siegelbaum and Andrei Sokolov.

What Figes offers is something less all-embracing. It is, primarily, a look at lives spent on the edge, neither at the heart of darkness nor untouched by it. The stories he recounts could not, by definition, fail to be interesting, but however skillfully he tries to weave them together (and Figes is a highly accomplished storyteller), the final picture is not as coherent as it might be. It’s difficult to avoid the suspicion that on this occasion this talented author’s reach was greater than his grasp.

As a result, the principal value to be derived from The Whisperers is almost incidental to what is supposed to be its main theme. In particular, the book’s earlier sections are a remarkable evocation of the sheer scale of the Bolshevik project. This was, in reality, nothing less than an attempt to remake man according to the dictates of what was, for all practical purposes, a millennial cult run by a lethal combination of fanatics, sadists, and opportunists. Nothing could be allowed to stand in the way of this task, and, with the resources of the state behind it, nothing was. In such a climate, the family, the most redoubtable bastion against totalitarianism, was bound to be a key target of the regime. And, as the narratives selected by Figes underline, that is what it became. The conflict, persecution, and occasional moments of stubborn resistance that ensued make up the grim, gripping, and horrific drama around which this book revolves.

But if the Bolsheviks proved effective at sweeping away much of what had preceded them, the ramshackle utopia with which they replaced it was a broken-backed wreck. Another striking aspect of the oral histories contained in this book is how often they share a subtext of astonishing material deprivation and hardship. If the Soviet Union was, as its supporters abroad liked to claim, a “new civilization,” it was one with large elements of the pre-modern about it.

And the physical squalor was, as Figes repeatedly demonstrates, matched by the moral; this, indeed, inspired the book’s title. The Stalin years, he writes, left the Russian language with “two words for a whisperer — one for somebody who whispers out of fear for being overheard . . . another for the person who informs or whispers behind people’s backs to the authorities.”

Mr. Putin, I think, would approve.