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The Whisperers
Orlando Figes (Allen Lane)
“Brilliant ... he leaves one awed by the beauty and suffering.” Max Hastings
“One of the most unforgettable books I have ever read ... a celebration of family love in an epoch of hellish cruelty ... now in this book these righteous heroes have their rightful memorial.” Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Young Stalin
The Whisperers illuminates as never before the hidden histories of the ordinary people who lived under Stalin's tyranny. It reveals a society where everyone spoke in whispers: whether to protect themselves, their families or friends - or to betray them.
How could Russian citizens preserve their personal identity when the state controlled every aspect of their existence? Was any private life possible when every conversation could be overheard through the walls of cramped communal apartments - and at any moment you could be branded an ‘enemy of the people’?
Drawing on hundreds of private family archives concealed in secret drawers and under mattresses in homes across Russia, and on countless interviews with survivors, Orlando Figes recreates the maze in which people found themselves: a world of terrible moral choices and compromises, where an unwitting wrong turn could either destroy a family or, perversely, later save it. Where some kept a bag packed by their bed in order to be ready for a midnight knock on the door. Where a junior worker would inform on their superior to get their job; a husband to get rid of a lover; a neighbour out of petty jealousy. Where living a double life became the norm. Yet where, amid all this, love, creativity and family resilience somehow managed to defy the state's values - and humanity survived.
 Orlando Figes is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. He was born in London in 1959 and studied history at Cambridge. Before moving to Birkbeck he was a University Lecturer in History and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He is the author of Peasant Russia, Civil War and A People's Tragedy, which in 1997 won the Wolfson History Prize, the WH Smith Literary Award, the Longman/History Today Book of the Year Award, the NCR Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His last book, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia was published to great acclaim in 2002 and was shortlisted for the BBC FOUR Samuel Johnson Prize.
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