Orlando Figes - Oral History and The Whisperers

Oral History and The Whisperers

Figes contracted the Memorial Society, a human rights non-profit, to gather several hundred private family archives from homes across Russia. Through the Memorial Society he carried out more than a thousand interviews with survivors as well as perpetrators of the Stalinist repressions for his book The Whisperers. This represents one of the biggest collections of documents about private life in the Stalin era. Housed in the Memorial Society in Moscow, St Petersburg and Perm, many of these valuable research materials are available on line.

Translated into more than twenty languages, The Whisperers was described by Andrey Kurkov as "one of the best literary monuments to the Soviet people, on a par with The Gulag Archipelago and the prose of Varlam Shalamov." In it Figes underlined the importance of oral testimonies for the recovery of the history of repression in the former Soviet Union. Whilst conceding that, 'like all memory, the testimony given in an interview is unreliable,' he has claimed that oral testimonies are, on the whole, 'more reliable than literary memoirs, which have usually been seen as a more authentic record of the past.' The reason he gives is that 'unlike a book, can be cross-examined and tested against other evidence to disentangle true memories from received or imagined ones'.

In contrast to other books that have focused on the external facts of Soviet repression, The Whisperers deals mainly with the impact of repression on internal life. It examines the influence of the Soviet regime and its campaigns of Terror on family relationships, emotions and beliefs, moral choices, issues of personal and social identity, and collective memory. Describing the subject-matter of his book, Figes claims that 'the real power and lasting legacy of the Stalinist system were neither in structures of the state, nor in the cult of the leader, but, as the Russian historian Mikhail Gefter once remarked, "in the Stalinism that entered into all of us".'

Figes has included in The Whisperers a detailed study of the Soviet poet Konstantin Simonov, who became a leading figure in the Soviet Writers' Union and a propagandist in the "anti-cosmopolitan" campaign during Stalin's final years. Figes drew on the closed sections of Simonov's archive in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art and on the archives of the poet's wife and son to produce his study of this major Soviet establishment figure.

The Whisperers came under scrutiny in 2012 when The Guardian reported allegations that the book contained "inaccuracies and factual errors." The charge was made by the Russian publisher, Corpus, which declined to publish the book in Russia out of concern for the individuals interviewed and their families. Figes refuted many of the alleged inaccuracies, pointing out the errors introduced by the Russian translators, whilst expressing his regret for 'the handful of genuine errors' that remained.