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The Whisperers

Private Life in Stalin's Russia

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The Whisperers

By: Orlando Figes
Narrated by: John Telfer
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About this listen

Drawing on a huge range of sources - letters, memoirs, conversations - Orlando Figes tells the story of how Russians tried to endure life under Stalin. Those who shaped the political system became, very frequently, its victims. Those who were its victims were frequently quite blameless.

The Whisperers re-creates the sort of maze in which Russians found themselves, where an unwitting wrong turn could either destroy a family or, perversely, later save it: a society in which everyone spoke in whispers - whether to protect themselves, their families, neighbours or friends - or to inform on them.

©2018 Orlando Figes (P)2018 Audible, Ltd 20th Century Modern Russia Socialism Imperialism Stalin Capitalism Soviet Union Liberalism Holocaust

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All stars
Most relevant
well worth a read
an insight imto now vanished USSR and time of Stalin and the terror

Good listen

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Figes takes you on an incredible and incredibly disturbing, even sickening, tour of Soviet society from before the Russian Revolution, through Lenin’s and Stalin’s purges, to Glasnost and the 1990s. He reveals the horror of totalitarianism and of Stalin’s psychotic paranoia and their effects on ordinary people who were generally innocent of the charges laid against them. Many were murdered, shot as punishment for innocence. Many were denounced by family, friends, neighbours out of spite or jealousy or desire to claim someone else’s property—aspects of the human condition that Marx had completely failed to take into account.

These were the effects of the implementation of Marxism in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, of the initial demands that all thought of family were anti-social, against the good if the state, which was to be the only goal, the only love.

The number of people murdered by the state in the name of the state will never be known because, unlike the Nazis, the Soviets did not keep accurate records, but that number was anything from 20 million to perhaps something like 40 million. (If a person who was sent to a gulag dies of cold, disease, exhaustion, or starvation, is that death to be recorded as ‘natural causes’ or as murder?

People should be encouraged to read ‘The Whisperers’, so that they learn and understand the evils of Soviet-Marxist totalitarianism.

Staggering exposure if psychotic evil

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Wonderfully narrated amazing book. Thanks Orlando Figes and John Telfer. And ofcourse Audible. Enjoyable experience.

Great book

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Don't be put off by some of the reviews. They appear to be by people who don't understand that this is a social history of the Soviet Union. It is broader than just the Stalin period and covers parts of the Lenin period and post Stalin. These reviewers are obviously looking for a history of the period. This is a history of how people lived during these tumultuous events and under the tyranny.

This book is particularly relevant today. In one of the chapters, Figes discusses how people in the USSR would wear a mask of self censorship, completely screening what they really thought from all but the most trusted. Those interviewed and quoted say that it was this self censorship that was particularly egregious. Well, we appear to be hell bent on recreating this in the West at the moment! The road to hell is paved by good intentions indeed.

Hugely imporant book.

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begin to imagine what life was like in Soviet Russia, it's like a cold dark nightmare come true, a humanitarian disaster that lasted for decades.

I can't

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