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Private Life in Stalin's Russia
Metropolitan Books
November 2007
On Sale: November 13, 2007
740 pages
ISBN: 0805074619
EAN: 9780805074611
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
From the award-winning author of A People's Tragedy and
Natasha's Dance, a landmark account of what private life was
like for Russians in the worst years of Soviet repression
There have been many accounts of the public aspects of
Stalin's dictatorship: the arrests and trials, the
enslavement and killing in the gulags. No previous book,
however, has explored the regime's effect on people's
personal lives, what one historian called 'the Stalinism
that entered into all of us.' Now, drawing on a huge
collection of newly discovered documents, The Whisperers
reveals for the first time the inner world of ordinary
Soviet citizens as they struggled to survive amidst the
mistrust, fear, compromises, and betrayals that pervaded
their existence. Moving from the Revolution of 1917 to the
death of Stalin and beyond, Orlando Figes re-creates the
moral maze in which Russians found themselves, where one
wrong turn could destroy a family or, perversely, end up
saving it. He brings us inside cramped communal apartments,
where minor squabbles could lead to fatal denunciations; he
examines the Communist faithful, who often rationalized even
their own arrest as a case of mistaken identity; and he
casts a humanizing light on informers, demonstrating how, in
a repressive system, anyone could easily become a
collaborator.A vast panoramic portrait of a society in which
everyone spoke in whispers-whether to protect their families
and friends, or to inform upon them-The Whisperers is a
gripping account of lives lived in impossible times.
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