The lives of others.('The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia')(Book review)

The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia, by Orlando Figes (Metropolitan, 784 pp., $35)

IT has been the worse part of a century since the bloody birth and savage adolescence of the Soviet state, but the events of those years are still obscure--lost in time, muddled by propaganda, and treated, even now, as the stuff of spin. Those terrible decades remain camouflaged, murky and mysterious, glimpsed mainly in shadow or in tantalizing, elusive outline. They have been best illuminated not in nonfiction accounts, but in novels, short stories, and verse--by Solzhenitsyn's zek grateful for his day "without a dark cloud," by the deadpan of Shalamov's spare, unsparing Kolyma Tales, by Ahkmatova's torn, desperate, eloquent laments:

 
   This was when the ones who smiled 
   Were the dead, glad to be at rest. 
   And like a useless appendage, Leningrad 
   Swung from its prisons. 
   And when, senseless from torment, 
   Regiments of convicts marched, 
   And the short songs of farewell 
   Were sung by locomotive whistles. 
   The stars of death stood above us 
   And innocent Russia writhed 
   Under bloody boots 
   And under the tires of the Black Marias. 

That's not, of course, to deny that there have been some excellent histories of that era. One of the most notable in recent times was Orlando Figes's People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924. Professor Figes, a British historian, is now extending that saga deeper into the nightmare that enveloped the Soviet Union with The Whisperers, a massive, sprawling, and unsettling book billed as a description of "private life in Stalin's Russia." In researching it, Figes has made extensive, and extraordinary, use of freshly opened family archives and a large number of personal interviews. As well he might. To understand the founding period of the USSR is tricky enough. To uncover the private lives, and thoughts, of those who lived through it, inhabitants of a society where reticence, conformity, and role-playing could be, even at home, matters of life and death is doubly difficult. Then there is, as Figes writes, this:

 
   People with traumatic memories tend to 
   block out parts of their own past. Their 
   memory becomes fragmentary, organized 
   by a series of disjointed episodes (such as 
   the arrest of a parent or the moment of 
   eviction from their home) rather than by a 
   linear chronology. When they try to reconstruct 
   the story of their life, particularly 
   when their powers of recall are weakened 
   by old age, such people tend to make up for 
   the gaps in their own memory by drawing 
   on what they have read, or what they have 
   heard from others with experiences similar 
   to theirs. 

To accept this logic is to accept that seminal accounts of this period, such as The Gulag Archipelago or Eugenia Ginzburg's Journey into the Whirlwind, have evolved from, respectively, works of collective history and individual recollection into the imagined, or partly imagined, autobiographies of countless victims of the terror. Figes himself claims that "many Gulag survivors insist that they witnessed scenes described in ... Ginzburg, Solzhenitsyn, or Shalamov, that they recognize the guards or NKVD interrogators mentioned in these works ... when documentation clearly shows that this could not be so." Figes never specifies what he means by "many" (the numbers involved are probably, I suspect, less than that adjective implies), but there can be little doubt that the phenomenon is real. Complicating matters further, memories have been distorted not only by trauma and time, but also by wishful thinking:

 
   People who returned from the labor camps 
   ... found consolation in the ... idea that, as 
   Gulag laborers, they too had made a contribution 
   to the Soviet economy. Many of 
   these people later looked back with enormous 
   pride at the factories, dams, and cities 
   they had built. This pride stemmed in part 
   from their continued belief in the Soviet 
   system and its ideology, despite the injustices 
   they had been dealt, and in part, 
   perhaps, from their need to find a larger 
   meaning for their suffering.