The whisperers :private life in Stalin's Russia

Autor: Figes Orlando
Rok: 2007
ISBN: 9780805074611
OKCZID: 110152802
Vydání: 1st edition

Citace (dle ČSN ISO 690):
FIGES, Orlando. The whisperers: private life in Stalin's Russia. 1st ed. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007. xxxviii, 739, [1] s.

Hodnocení: 4.5 / 5 (6 hlasů)

Anotace

From the award-winning author of A People’s Tragedy and Natasha’s Dance, a landmark account of what private life was like for Russians in the worst years of Soviet repression There have been many accounts of the public aspects of Stalin’s dictatorship: the arrests and trials, the enslavement and killing in the gulags. No previous book, however, has explored the regime’s effect on people’s personal lives, what one historian called “the Stalinism that entered into all of us.” Now, drawing on a huge collection of newly discovered documents, The Whisperers reveals for the first time the inner world of ordinary Soviet citizens as they struggled to survive amidst the mistrust, fear, compromises, and betrayals that pervaded their existence. Moving from the Revolution of 1917 to the death of Stalin and beyond, Orlando Figes re-creates the moral maze in which Russians found themselves, where one wrong turn could destroy a family or, perversely, end up saving it. He brings us inside cramped communal apartments, where minor squabbles could lead to fatal denunciations; he examines the Communist faithful, who often rationalized even their own arrest as a case of mistaken identity; and he casts a humanizing light on informers, demonstrating how, in a repressive system, anyone could easily become a collaborator.A vast panoramic portrait of a society in which everyone spoke in whispers—whether to protect their families and friends, or to inform upon them—The Whisperers is a gripping account of lives lived in impossible times. Orlando Figes is the author of Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia and A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924, which received the Wolfson Prize for History and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A frequent contributor to The New York Times and The New York Review of Books, among other publications, Figes is a professor of history at Birbeck College, University of London. A New York Times Notable Book of the YearShortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction There have been many accounts of the public aspects of Stalin’s dictatorship: the arrests and trials, the enslavement and killing in the gulags. No previous book, however, has explored the regime’s effect on people’s personal lives, what one historian called “the Stalinism that entered into all of us.” Now, drawing on a collection of newly discovered documents, The Whisperers reveals for the first time the inner world of ordinary Soviet citizens as they struggled to survive amidst the mistrust, fear, compromises, and betrayals that pervaded their existence. Moving from the Revolution of 1917 to the death of Stalin and beyond, Orlando Figes re-creates the moral maze in which Russians found themselves, where one wrong turn could destroy a family or, perversely, end up saving it. He brings us inside cramped communal apartments, where minor squabbles could lead to fatal denunciations; he examines the Communist faithful, who often rationalized even their own arrest as a case of mistaken identity; and he casts a humanizing light on informers, demonstrating how, in a repressive system, anyone could easily become a collaborator. "The everyday lives of Russians between the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the death of Josef Stalin in 1953 is the subject of Orlando Figes' illuminating and profoundly moving new book. Filled with the stories of hundreds of survivors, many of which make for desperately painful reading, The Whisperers offers the most thorough account so far of what it meant to live under Soviet totalitarianism."—Douglas Smith, The Seattle Times "As Figes, a leading historian of the Soviet period, concludes in The Whisperers, his extraordinary book about the impact of the gulag on 'the inner world of ordinary citizens,' a great many victims 'silently accepted and internalized the system’s basic values' and 'conformed to its public rules.' Behind highly documented episodes of persecution, famine and war lie quieter, desperate stories of individuals and families who did what they could to survive, to find one another and to come to terms with the burden of being physically and psychologically broken. But it was not only repression that tore families apart. The regime’s reliance on 'mutual surveillance' complicated their moral burden, instilling feelings of shame and guilt that endured long after years of imprisonment and exile . . . Figes provides disheartening public letters of denunciation, 'formulaic notices printed in their thousands in the Soviet press.' One read: 'I, Nikolai Ivanov, renounce my father, an ex-priest, because for many years he deceived the people by telling them that God exists, and that is the reason I am severing all my relations with him.' Young people felt the need to break with their past, often claiming that their parents were dead or had run away as a way of avoiding 'the stigma of their origins.' There were parents who implored their children to submit such letters in order to ensure access to higher education or professional advancement . . . The Whisperers comes at an opportune moment, when the generation of survivors—people born between 1917 and 1925—is dying out and a post-Soviet government is trying to burnish the history of Stalinism. It is the stories of these ordinary people that constitute the ultimate rebuke to Vladimir Putin’s efforts to reimpose moral amnesia on Russia. With the assistance of the Memorial Society, one of the few liberal institutions that emerged during the period of Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika and continues to exist today, Figes enlisted teams of researchers, who conducted thousands of interviews with gulag survivors and their families and collected letters, memoirs and other documents. Victims do not always make good witnesses. But thanks to Figes, these survivors overcame their silence and have lifted their voices above a whisper."—Joshua Rubenstein, The New York Times"In this extraordinary study of a generation, Figes details the consequences of Stalin's ideological campaign to reorganize the self as rigidly as he reorganized the streets of Moscow. Using intimate oral histories gathered from hundreds of ex-Soviets, Figes explores the ways that Stalinism conflated individualism with deviance and campaigned against imagination, faith, and family ties. Mother and father became abstract, almost mythic notions, as parents were displaced by the state as the cynosure of the young. Ultimately, though, such primal relationships proved indissoluble. Figes provides lucid but minimal analysis of the testimonies, allowing them to reveal all the more vividly a people whose entire existence was defined by the taboo against private life, as well as the resilience, and resistance, of the human soul in the face of forcible reorientation."—The New Yorker"Orlando Figes, perhaps the preeminent Russian historian in the English language, has made it his life's work to preserve and understand the nightmarish Soviet century, and in doing so has been forced to acknowledge the historian's conundrum regarding that era: In a time when the state sought to control every aspect of its citizens' lives, from birth to death, what remained of private life? Most previous histories of the era have concentrated on Stalin himself, or the machinations of government functionaries, with the abundance of documentation allowing for the smooth unfolding of those narratives. The experience of average Soviets under Stalin, being mostly bereft of written material, remains far murkier, but Figes has done his utmost to capture the essence of what it was like to be alive in that dark time, and The Whisperers is the remarkable, deeply moving result . . . Figes is wise enough to allow his subjects room to tell their own stories, and perhaps the most affecting aspect of this compendium of sadness and horror, drizzled with tears and blood on nearly every page, is the remarkable plainspokenness of its survivors. Taking a cue from them, Figes carefully strips his narrative of false sentimentality, leaving only the harsh contours of truth . . . The book is crammed full of humanity, like a Dostoevsky novel brought to terrible life. It seems impossible for a book of this size to contain as much human suffering as this does. While it is a scholarly work of history, reading it was one of the most emotionally draining literary experiences I can remember. 'There are no petty things in politics,' a dedicated Stalinist said in her defense after denouncing her mentor to the authorities over a minor offense. Figes understands that there is nothing at all petty about private life, and The Whisperers is his heroic attempt to save what remains of the lives of the forgotten."—Saul Austerlitz, The Boston Globe "Western visitors to the Soviet Union at the height of Stalin's terror often saw what they wanted to see in the masses: a happy, bustling people confident they were the wave of the future. George Bernard Shaw wrote of the 'glowing admiration the people have for Stalin.' Henry Wallace, after a wartime tour of a kulak village, saw 'human brotherhood that was accomplishing what Christ wanted.' Had these authors chosen to gaze closer, they may have notices the smiles has a twitchy quality to them. A society that turns its citizenry into whisperers, both in the form of those who fear being overheard (shepchushchii) and 'the person who informs or whispers beh...

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