Allen Lane, £30
Orlando Figes is the master of a new genre. Instead of historical novels, he writes novelistic histories. The Whisperers is a tragedy on the scale of Life and Fate and War and Peace, with a cast of characters to match. Take the story of the arrest of Ilia Slavin, as recalled by his daughter. "The NKVD men led papa to the door. I followed him. Suddenly he turned round to look at me once more. He could see the chaos of enormous emotions inside me. Choked by tears, I threw myself at him. He whispered in my ear: 'Little one, my beloved daughter, there are mistakes in history, but remember we started something great. Be good young communists.'" Those parting words sum up both the moral challenge and the subtle beauty of this book.
Slavin was a Jewish lawyer who helped write the Soviet criminal code in 1926. An enthusiastic Bolshevik, he'd once justified an antisemitic pogrom on the grounds that it was a class war against factory managers. He was rewarded for his loyalty, and in 1933 was commissioned by the party to provide a legal justification for the gulag. After a few field trips, Slavin found himself unable to say anything good about this system of slavery. He failed to hand in a manuscript, telling colleagues: "I am politically bankrupt." On the evening of his arrest, he had been celebrating his daughter's 16th birthday. The NKVD arrived at 1am.
Until recently, historians put it down to the police state, which meant a simple choice: blind obedience or the camps. But Figes largely rejects this explanation. Instead he tries to demonstrate the stake that many had in the regime—such as the Jewish herring dealer who bore his gulag sentence with equanimity because he was grateful to communism for establishing Jewish equality and giving his three daughters an education. Others looked in awe at the industrial landscapes around them and the marvels of the Moscow metro, and thought it was worth the slavery. In other words, they put up with it because they'd had so little before.
This book is full of sad beauty. The story is told largely through the eyes of children. All human life is here—Jewish fish traders, gulag bureaucrats, sycophantic Soviet writers, pious grandmothers, filmstars, geologists—but it is the children's stories that stand out. Scores of them renounce their parents to become good young communists. One youth forges a career as a Soviet poet, while his father and brothers are sent to the gulag. When his father escapes and travels to Moscow to ask his 21-year-old son for help, he responds coldly that he will help him return to where he came from, free of charge, and then reports him to the secret police.
Like any great history book, The Whisperers is also a manifesto about how history should be written. This is neither a political history nor a conventional social history—it is, largely, a history of emotions. Much of the material comes from oral testimonies, recorded by a team of researchers from Memorial, an independent institute for gulag studies—a remarkable organisation working in the face of opposition from Putin. The point of this, as Figes says, is to uncover stories about Stalin's Russia that were not told by the educated, but come from the kind of people who don't usually write about their experiences.
Yet those familiar with the historiography of Stalinism may question how much new light Figes brings to his subject. The field of Stalin studies is well ploughed, and many will be familiar with both the historical episodes Figes describes and the emotions and moral dilemmas of gulag survivors, camp guards and literary figures. The book doesn't offer, for example, the sort of revelations contained in Vladimir Kozlov's Mass Uprisings in the USSR, an anatomy of protests under Khrushchev that gave minute-by-minute accounts of riots and strikes by drunks and disgruntled workers often nostalgic for Stalin.
Still, it is for his grasp of narrative and interpretation that Figes is known—and in these areas The Whisperers excels. Its page-turning narrative builds towards the apocalypse of the great terror, via the Sovietisation of children through the education system, the collectivisation campaign of 1929-32, the brief moment of bourgeoisificaiton of the Soviet elite before the descent into a cannabalistic hell in which the monster consumed its own. Figes intelligently shows how the "terror" was not merely a type of law enforcement but an intrinsic part of the Soviet economy and ideology. The need for speedy industrialisation and the belief that kulaks and other bourgeois remnants should be purged of their old ways came together in the form of a system of industrial slavery.
Above all, this is a revisionist work that questions the assumption of most existing Stalinist historiography that the population was ruled by brute force. Where once there was indignation, Figes brings compassion. Time after time, he shows us people who took part in the Soviet experiment partly out of faith in the communist dream and partly because they had no other way of advancing their lives.
On a recent visit to Moscow, I visited the offices of Memorial. The institute's head, Sacha Daniel (the son of dissident Yuri Daniel), waved a new book in my face which had rough annual numbers for the people arrested under Stalin. "There are 3m files in the court and KGB archives from the Stalin era," he said, "and no one has had time to look at them yet." Another 20 years of work by dedicated historians, and we may be able to say whether overwhelming fear or misguided dreams were more important components of the Stalinist system.
