Orlando Figes’ The Whisperers gives voice to families living under the Stalin regime in the Soviet Union, having interviewed intelligentsia, party members, kulaks and peasants, and cover a period ranging from the life before Stalin, during Stalin, and after Stalin.
The book is excellent to provide real examples for the well-known tragedies of the regime, like mass executions, arbitrary prisons, system of gulags using slave work to produce goods and “reeducate enemies of the people”, censorship, fear. Its 600 pages (roughly) presents letters, pictures, and stories of people whose survival techniques included dissimulation, self-deception, conformism, and moral compromise.
Whispers is a good way to describe how people behaved: trust no one, as even your dearest family member (or son/daughter) might denounce you to the NKVD in exchange of rewards. Sometimes, parents asked their offspring to denounce them, hoping that they would have a better life.
The story of Julia Piatnitskaia best summarizes the years of Terror. Like many others, Julia concurred with Stalin, who said that if just 5% of the people who have been arrested turn out to be actual enemies that would be a good result, as some blood is necessary to ensure the Party’s ways. However, her husband was arrested on charges of “enemy of the people”, which made her have a mental breakdown: she knew he was innocent, but the regime could not be wrong. He was shot, after severe torture. She, arrested as wife of the enemy of the people, and sent to ALZhIR - Akmolinskii Camp for Wives of Traitors of the Motherland. Her children, one was arrested as agitator and the others sent to different orphanages, so they would forget their parents (common practice). Julia died in a sheep-pen, sick, ignored by the rest of the Gulag and the guards, and buried where she fell.
Not all stories, however, are from arrested people. The book also explores bureaucrats, like Simonov, the official poet of the regime, who was an ardent Stalinist even when confronted with inaccuracies between reality and the official speech. Although he was one of the few who expressed guilty and real repentance after Khrushchev opened to the world the crimes of Stalin, not like others, for instance prison guards and NKVD members, who were “just following orders for the best of the country”.
The Gulag system was a massive industrial complex fed by prison workers (slave), having 67 complexes with 10,000 camps and 1,700 colonies, where 2.4 million (1949) people worked, around 18% of the industrial workforce. Millions did not return from the camps, and for many relatives, only Glasnost or the dissolution of the Soviet Union brought news about their families.
Despite the obvious impact on the prisoners, who never recovered from the psychological trauma and always felt “persecuted”, their children also suffered: they were afraid of everything, and always tried to merge with the proletarian mas to avoid stigmatization.
