Exploring Uncharted Territory

...Nikita S. Khrushchev’s anti-Stalin speech to the 20th Communist Party Congress in 1956 was a shock to Simonov, as it was to many other worshipers...

...But Figes criticizes the enterprise...

...In the early 1950s, while researching my doctoral dissertation at Columbia University on the role of professional theater and drama for children in the Soviet education system, I found a speech he made as vice-chairman of the all-powerful Union of Soviet Writers...

...A friend is quoted as saying he did not smoke the pipe but adopted it as a “way of life...

...When I was in Moscow in 1959, a preteen schoolgirl explained to me in front of Pavlik’s statue in the park named for him that “love for one’s homeland is stronger than love for one’s father...

...Especially during Stalin’s rule (1928- 53), parents were careful to whisper their true feelings out of their children’s earshot or warn them to keep their mouths shut...

...Education was “the key to the creation of a new society...

...Konstantin Simonov is the “central figure” and perhaps “tragic hero” of The Whisperers...

...the persecution and exile to Siberia of millions of “kulaks” (moderately wealthier peasants) and the “Great Terror” of the 1930s, which included the execution of some of Stalin’s Party comrades...

...occupied West Germany...

...Impulsively, Shub proposed that they trade pipes, and Simonov unhesitatingly agreed to the “cultural exchange...

...Mama used to say that every other person was an informer,” said one woman whose father was arrested in 1936...

...There was a sense of urgency about the undertaking because the average age of the interviewees was 80...

...The Russian idiom of the Stalin years, we learn, had two (fittingly onomatopoeic) words to distinguish the types: shepchushchii was “somebody who whispers out of fear of being overheard,” while sheptun was “a person who informs or whispers behind people’s backs to the authorities...

...Doubts about the authenticity of the story persist, but the official propaganda machine made Pavlik a long-lasting role model...

...the crowded communal housing of the urban proletariat...

...After the USSR collapsed in 1991, Figes thought again about exploring “this uncharted territory...

...That Said, Figes nevertheless deserves kudos for his penetrating narrative...

...Figes observes that he “identified with the Party, and in particular with its leader, even to the point of growing a mustache, brushing back his hair in the ‘Stalin style,’ and posing with a pipe...

...The majority of Figes’ interviewees also loved their homeland, despite the devastation wrought by its totalitarian leaders...

...Scores of family album photographs, reproduced throughout the book, add to our empathy...

...the War and postwar years...

...One hopes at least some of them will be curious enough to click on his historical cyberspace trove that vividly illustrates how power corrupts...

...The regime encouraged youngsters to snitch on their parents...

...She may ev en be one of the 42 per cent of Russians who told public opinion researchers in January 2005 that they favored a “leader like Stalin...

...Some were also provided by the Memorial Society, a Moscow-based human rights organization...

...As a member of the Harvard Project in Munich (along with my wife, Gloria, and other Russian-speaking Americans) I disagree with his contention that the interviews did not truly reflect the attitudes of the average citizen in the motherland...

...Vladimir Putin, who apparently will become Russia’s prime minister in March, pays lip service to democracy, but his lips seem to be secretly smiling as he anticipates tightening his authoritarian grip...

...The author considers The Whisperers unique in that it probes the interior world of families and individuals during seven decades of the Soviet system...

...Even before Stalin consolidated his power, the Bolshevik Party began to implement its concept of a “collective personality,” which demanded “blowing up the shell of private life” by putting it under the state’s control...

...He realized then the importance of producing a “counterweight to the official narrative of Soviet history...

...The views of the respondents, he maintains, “were colored by the experience of living in the West, were consciously anti-Soviet in a way that was not representative of the Soviet population as a whole...

...Defining the goals of children’s literature, he declared that its first task was “educating an active builder of Communism...

...When Simonov visited New York a few years after Stalin’s death in 1953, a small group of Americans that included my colleague Boris Shub, a director of Radio Liberty’s shortwave broadcasts to the Soviet Union, and myself, met him in a Manhattan hotel...

...A professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London, he has written two equally weighty studies: Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia, and the multiprize-winner, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924...

...The dedicated Soviet preteenager I met in Moscow in 1959 is probably 60 now...

...He notes, too, that “the first major oral history” was the 1950-51 Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System...

...She may be one of the individuals Figes cites in his final chapter, “Memory,” who still feel pride in having contributed to the Soviet mystique...

...Figes calls Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago (1973) the great oral history of the labor camps...

...Simonov could not have described himself better...

...Figes traces Simonov’s “gradual transition from a convinced Stalinist to a moderate conservative,” and finally to repudiating his long-held beliefs in the years before his death in 1979...

...Their most valuable source was the testimony of more than 400 oral interviews that usually lasted for hours and often stretched to several days...

...I doubt that he realized his gift from Stalin was now in the possession of one of the most effective ideological adversaries of the Kremlin...

...To me it had the impact of The Lives of Others, a disquieting film portraying the East German Communist regime’s surveillance of individuals and its traumatic consequences...

...Over 300 interviews were conducted with former Soviet citizens (displaced persons), mainly in U.S...

...Figes himself conducted many of them...

...As a graduate researcher in Moscow during the 1980s, Figes explains, he made a first attempt at an oral history of the early Soviet period by interviewing Russian friends and their families, but they seemed “too nervous to speak in depth...

...Reviewed by Gene Sosin Author, “Sparks of Liberty: An Insider’s Memoir of Radio Liberty” “MAGISTERIAL” may be an overworked adjective in book reviews, but it accurately describes Orlando Figes’ latest volume...

...But his remorse led him to undertake liberal causes, such as championing avant-garde artists and arranging for the publication of Mikhail Bulgakov’s subversive The Master and Margarita...

...Indeed he quotes from some of the books written by Harvard scholars who cite passages from their Munich - interviews...

...He held a briar pipe in his hand, as did Shub, who admired the shape of Simonov’s and was informed that it had been a present from Stalin...

...But even our limited findings, carefully vetted for suspiciously exaggerated proAmerican responses, were to a great extent remarkably similar to the prodigious amount of evidence assembled by Figes...

...The main family archives, transcripts and sound extracts from the interviews are also available online at www.orlandofiges.com...

...Children were weaned from their parents and inculcated with Communist values and discipline...

...The book vividly shows how “the whole of Soviet society was made up of whisperers of one sort or another...

...Not until 2002, though, when he completed Natasha’s Dance, did he undertake the task, assisted by teams of researchers who gained access to the public archives of Moscow, St...

...The various methods employed and the tensions they caused within the families are described in detail...

...Along the way he had joined, though reluctantly, the “anti-cosmopolitan” campaign against Jewish writers, and later he attacked Boris Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, and others...

...Previous histories focused more on external events in particular periods: the Civil War of the 1920s...

...Admittedly, this was an atypical group, given their decision to remain abroad...

...Sixty per cent of those over 60 years old opted for a “new Stalin...

...Figes recounts the experience of individuals from diverse social backgrounds who were born shortly after the revolution...

...Figes found that “the younger generation in Russia has little interest in the Soviet past...

...Born to a noble family, he morphed into a proletarian writer in Stalin’s time, achieving fame as a poet, novelist, playwright, and war correspondent...

...In The Whisperers he reconstructs “private life in Stalin’s Russia” through interviews with representative samples of Russian citizens at all levels of society who survived decades of oppression by the ruthless dictator and his successors...

...A famous example was Pavlik Morozov, who denounced his father as a hoarder of grain during the collectivization of agriculture in the 1930s and was supposedly murdered by angry relatives...

...Petersburg and other Russian cities, and to over a dozen private family archives...