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A review by andrew_russell
The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia by Orlando Figes
4.0
The first thing that is worth saying here is that this book is lengthy. And I don't just mean it has a high page length. No, what I mean is that the pages cannot be whizzed through at speed; rather they need to be digested at best at a moderate pace, slowly cogitated upon and considered at length. Consequently, don't expect to finish this book super-quick.
But the 'lengthiness' of The Whisperers by Orlando Figes is in many senses, it's strongpoint. It demonstrates the meticulously detailed research of the author; research that yields a tide of mostly highly moving personal stories, together with a comprehensive history of a dark period in Russia's recent history. So dark is the subject matter at hand in fact, that it is almost beyond the comprehension of someone such as myself, brought up in a Western democracy, the tenets of which form the mainstay of my understanding of the world around me.
And yet a sense of the dark conditions under which Russians were forced to live for close to thirty years is exactly what Figes conveys so well in this text. The effect on families, whose children were actively encouraged to report to the authorities the conversations they overheard between their parents. Couples whose unquestionable love was torn asunder by forced separation, as one...or both, were sentenced and deported to the gulag, often to be executed shortly thereafter. The sense of distrust felt by the populace, as they questioned who was likely to betray them next. The communal apartments, or kommunalka, with their wafer-thin walls that allowed informers, deliberately placed by the Party, to eavesdrop and report on 'traitors'. The divisions....deeply rent divisions between communities and families, caused by deeply held political viewpoints that were irreconcilable...Figes gives us a sense of all this and so much more in this text.
If you can persevere to the end, this is a book well worth reading. It isn't warm and fuzzy. It's not this years feel-good summer read. But nonetheless, it's a story that had to be told. And it's one that deserves to be read.
But the 'lengthiness' of The Whisperers by Orlando Figes is in many senses, it's strongpoint. It demonstrates the meticulously detailed research of the author; research that yields a tide of mostly highly moving personal stories, together with a comprehensive history of a dark period in Russia's recent history. So dark is the subject matter at hand in fact, that it is almost beyond the comprehension of someone such as myself, brought up in a Western democracy, the tenets of which form the mainstay of my understanding of the world around me.
And yet a sense of the dark conditions under which Russians were forced to live for close to thirty years is exactly what Figes conveys so well in this text. The effect on families, whose children were actively encouraged to report to the authorities the conversations they overheard between their parents. Couples whose unquestionable love was torn asunder by forced separation, as one...or both, were sentenced and deported to the gulag, often to be executed shortly thereafter. The sense of distrust felt by the populace, as they questioned who was likely to betray them next. The communal apartments, or kommunalka, with their wafer-thin walls that allowed informers, deliberately placed by the Party, to eavesdrop and report on 'traitors'. The divisions....deeply rent divisions between communities and families, caused by deeply held political viewpoints that were irreconcilable...Figes gives us a sense of all this and so much more in this text.
If you can persevere to the end, this is a book well worth reading. It isn't warm and fuzzy. It's not this years feel-good summer read. But nonetheless, it's a story that had to be told. And it's one that deserves to be read.