A long overdue review

I finished The whisperers by Orlando Figes more than two months ago, started writing a post about it, but never got around to finish it. At first I had to let this book sink in, I kept thinking about it, I couldn’t let it go. I considered leaving this book unreviewed, but I really don’t want to. Why? Because chances are very high that this book will be among my favorite reads of 2008 and because I do want to bring attention to this book. Besides, I wanted to count this towards the Russian Reading Challenge and towards the Chunkster Challenge.

I hadn’t even read ten pages when I had already fallen for Figes’ writing. He writes very accessible, but at the same time the book is not an easy or a fast read. But then again, I didn’t even want to read it fast, though on the other hand I realized that I was reading the book faster than I wanted to, simply because it is so well written and informative. I even didn’t mark all the passages that I wanted to mark and share. I wanted to savor the stories, the details and all the people. There are many stories to be told and a lot of people to make an appearance. At first I tried to keep track of everyone, but I gave up on that and started to just go with the flow, except for the families whose life stories make up the core of the book. Fortunately, small family trees of these families are included. I can imagine though, that for some readers all these people making big or small appearances are confusing and a drawback.

From my words you might think that this book is a fun book to read. It isn’t: It is about human tragedy, about the cruelty of human beings, about a period of illogical violence and persecution, the Stalin-era in the Soviet-Union. The book’s subtitle is “Private Life in Stalin’s Russia” and that is precisely what the book is about: how the Stalinist regime affected the private lives of ordinary people in Soviet-Russia.

With the help of Memorial, a well-known Russian organization dedicated to preserving the memory of victims of the Soviet repression, Figes recorded hundreds of interviews with people who grew up in and lived through the Stalin era. He also collected many private, never before published diaries and letters. Many of the interviews and transcripts are online on the author’s website www.orlandofiges.com, which is really worth a visit.

The book follows a chronological path, starting in the Revolutionary year 1917 which saw the Bolshevik takeover. The first chapter introduces all the families whose life stories run as a red thread through the book. It basically sets the stage for what is to come. It describes how the regime wanted to create a new kind of person who didn’t distinguish between private and public and how it aimed to eventually destroy the family as a unit.

Increasingly, there was nothing private in the life of the Bolshevik that was not subject to the gaze and censure of the Party leadership.This public culture, where every member was expected to reveal his inner self to the collective, was unique to the Bolsheviks – there was nothing like it in the Nazi or the Fascist movement, where the individual Nazi or Fascist was allowed to have a private life, so long as he adhered to the Party’s rules and ideology – until the Cultural Revolution in China. Any distinction between private and public life was explicitly rejected by the Bolsheviks. ‘When a comrade says: “What I am doing now concerns my private life and not society,” we say that cannot be correct,’ wrote one Bolshevik in 1924. Everything in the Pary member’s private life was social and political; everything he did had a direct impact on the Party’s interests.(p.37)

This did not have the wished for effect: people instead started to present themselves differently in private and in public. In public they would “present themselves as conforming to Soviet ideals whilst concealing their true selves in a secret private sphere” (p.37). Only a few years later, the regime had to abolish this idea and returned to admitting more of a private life and to promoting much more conservative values regarding the family (abortion was made illegal again), marriage (divorce was made more difficult and considerably more expensive), the role of women (a good Party wife was no longer supposed to work and give her time to the Party, but to stay home, take care of the house and the children and support her husband’s carrier in the party from the kitchen). The very austere life Party-members were initially encouraged to lead, was abolished in favor of access to better living circumstances, better food and more luxurious food from special shops only for Party-ranks, cars with drivers, dachas, etc. This was a complete turnaround from the early years after the revolution. In this way a division was created between the mass (who was still living fairly poorly) and the elite of the Party.

Something of this idea of a mix of private and public life was retained, though, and used in the establishment of kommunalkas, a way of living where several families would live in one apartment or on one floor and share the kitchen, toilet and bathroom (if there was one). Especially in Moscow and Leningrad this was the most common form of living in the 1930s. Originally these kommunalkas where used as a solution to the existing housing problem, but in the 1930s it became more and more a way for the state to control its subjects. The walls where usually very thin, social control was big and in each building there lived informers of the secret police or people who were willing to turn their neighbors in because they wanted to add that living space to their own. You can imagine how people would only whisper even in their own rooms, how there was hardly any privacy.

The early chapters of the book also show how the older generations tried to keep the old traditions and religion alive, while the younger generation was being indoctrinated with the new ideas at school, in the Pioneers and the Komsomol. This division between the older generations who still had remnants of or believed in the old value system and the young generations who only had the new post-revolutionary value system of the communist regime to shape their views, this division comes up again in full force during the Great Terror in 1937-38: When (one of) their parents was arrested for being an ‘enemy of the people’, very many children believed that this was somehow true, that there must be some sort of truth in it and they started hating the arrested parent for being an ‘enemy’ and for ruining their chances as a good member of the Komsomol.

About the years of the Great Terror in 1937-38:

People waited for their turn. Many packed a bag and kept it by their bed in order to be ready when the NKVD knocked on their door. This passivity is one of the most striking features of the Great Terror. There were many ways to avoid arrest – moving out of town and taking on a new identity by buying papers on the black market being the most simple and effective, for the NKVD was not good at tracking down people on the move. The Russian people had a long tradition of fleeing persecution by the State – from the Old Believers to runaways from serfdom – and this tactic was adopted by millions of peasant who ran away from the collective farms and ’special settlements’. But the urban population by and large remained in place, without any sign of resistance, and waited for the Terror to take them.(p.242)

The book describes how the central families fared in the Stalin years, how children grew up in orphanages because their parents had been shot or exiled, how others cooperated with the regime and made a career in it, how again others were sent to the Gulag-camps for years. Because of what? Because of nothing really. How some people tried to hide their ‘bourgeois’ or ‘kulak‘ origins in order to get accepted at university. And how this hiding of parts of one’s life or lying about one’s past didn’t stop when Stalin died, but how this fear and secrecy lasted in some cases until even after the Soviet-Union fell apart in 1989-1991. The story of Antonina Golovina is very telling in this respect. In the early 1930s, when she was only a child, she and her mother and siblings were exiled to Siberia after her father was convicted to labor camp for being a ‘kulak’. She married twice in her life, living with each husband for over twenty years. Antonina hid her ‘undesirable’ origins and her exile from both husbands, only telling them about this in the late 1980s, early 1990s (her first husband was still alive then and they had stayed friends after their divorce). Only then did she find out, that both her husbands also had a history of exile or ‘undesirable’ origins.

An unexpected pleasure for me was coming across Elena Bonner. Her memoir and memories are quoted more than once in the course of the book. She is a human rights activist and widow of the late Andrey Sakharov. I have had a lot of respect for her for many years, since I learned more about her while writing a paper on her during my studies. I would love to reread her memoir Alone Together.

I wish the book would deal more with people living in the other, non-Russian Soviet republics as well, though I can also see that that would have made the project too large and complicated in part since all these republics are now independent states. I’d be interested if and in what ways private life in other republics would have been different. For example, I am living in one of these now independent republics, Armenia. From what I know (but I don’t know how accurate this is), during Soviet times in some ways the regime was not so strict (though I am not sure that was the case also during Stalin’s time) because it was a bit of a far away corner of the empire. In later years, long after Stalin’s death, apparently Soviet Jews migrated to Armenia from elsewhere in the Soviet-Union, because they were less repressed here and had more chances to enter universities etc. Again, I might not be entirely correct, but this is what I heard. On the other hand, Stalin’s repression hit the republic of Georgia relatively harder than other republics, possibly because Stalin was Georgian. Again: I would have loved to read more about life under Stalin in other parts of the Soviet-Union, but I realize that would make the project too enormous and too complicated (logistically as well). This is not so much a flaw of the book, but more something I’d be interested in.

I am not doing this book nearly enough justice with this review written so long after finishing the book and by leaving out so much. But I have to. The Whisperers is so rich in information and quotable passages, that I could write three more posts about it. But I won’t.

This book is a must read for anyone interested in Russian history and in how ‘big history’ affects ordinary people.

Orlando Figes’ website is here.