Customer Reviews
Still Whispering - By: The Outsider, 29 Oct 2008 
You will never read a more granular, detailed & moving book about what Stalin did to his own people. The final whispering of the generations persecuted,the sheer number of people's stories might be overwhelming if they were not so individual & peculiar, so consistent & so different. You may goin thinking Stalin less evil than Hitler, but you will not finish this book with that idea. The sheer scale of the madness, the length of time it went on, will take your breath away. Orlando Figes writes plainly, & tells you first, what happened during the chapter (the context), then provides detailed examples, & follows a few family stories all the way from 1917 till today. This is great scholarship & history, valuable to professionals & ordinary readers.
Beautiful and necessary - By: Historian, 07 Sep 2008 A fascinating book about the interior lives of ordinary Russians during the Stalinist period. Based on hundreds of family archives & several thousand interviews with survivors, it tells us more about the Soviet system than any other book I know. Beautifully written, it is a rich & deeply moving history, universalin its themes, which leaves the reader awed, humbled, yet uplifted by the book's humanity. Figes takes us into 'whispered' lives, going again & again to specific people with names & families, to reveal the human suffering, the personal betrayals & moral compromises, the acts of love & kindness, & the sheer resilience that defined private livesin the Stalin period. The opportunity to hear these Russians speak of these things as individuals,in their own voices, is overwhelming, & a gift to all of us. Orlando Figes visits their ordeals with enormous compassion, & he brings their history to life with his superb story-telling skills. I hope he writes forever.
