The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (review)
- The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia
Society was viewed by Soviet authorities as one big Family under the guidance of one wise, caring father. Using vast private archives and personal interviews, Figes is now able to show how the Family destroyed millions of families, provoking mistrust and suspicion between husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, parents [End Page 506] and children. Kommunalka, the communal apartment—with its atmosphere of squabble and mutual denunciation among families who used the same kitchen and bathroom—turned out to be the best approximation, and simultaneously a hysterical parody, of a communist society. There is no better way to define the nature of family, personhood, and privacy than via the history of their most systematic destruction. Though this book is the result of painstaking historical and documentary research, it also offers an “apophatic” description of those quintessential moral ideas and qualities that had been severely tested by Stalin and eventually triumphed over Stalinism.
Mikhail Epstein, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University, is the author of fifteen books, including After the Future, Transcultural Experiments, and Cries in the New Wilderness: From the Files of the Moscow Institute of Atheism. He is a recipient of the Andrei Belyi Prize of St. Petersburg and received the International Essay Prize of Weimar for “Chronocide,” an article published in Common Knowledge.
