Orlando Figes’s history is in its most literal sense an act of collective memory, and the only quibble I have with the author’s tremendous achievement is that his homage to those he rightly calls “the heroes” of his book comes not at the beginning but at the end, in Afterword and Acknowledgements, where he scrupulously describes how The Whisperers came to be written.

The project really began as a series of interviews by Figes when he was a graduate student in Moscow in the mid 1980s. When he began work in earnest on the book in 2002, he had several teams in the former Soviet Union searching through previously closed archives (some of which have now gone back under lock and key) locating notebooks, albums, diaries – assembling the vast cast of characters, over 1,000 of them, who contribute their memories. Masterfully composed and controlled as a narrative by Figes, this is a collective testimony in which you can hear voices through a doorway open at last, recounting the hopes, fears and numberless awful tragedies of the Soviet era. As Figes himself says of the families who gave him his book, “In a real sense this is their book. For us these are stories, for them it is their lives.”

As an overture, we hear from the children of 1917 about their memories of the idealism of those early years. Even then it had a sinisterly prophetic cast. When Sonia Laskina was rejected by the Komsomol – the Communist youth organisation – in 1927 the three girls in this Jewish family formed a reading circle with their cousin Mark and other little friends and would “discuss politics” and hold “show trials” of characters from literature. Once they held a trial of the Old Testament. Even as the children played, the Bolsheviks were methodically destroying the livelihood of Sonia’s father, Samuil, who owned a herring stall on Bolotnaia Square, not far from the Kremlin.

Taking off from the theories of the Montessoris, Soviet educators invented improving games such as “Search and Requisition”, with the boys playing the role of Red Army units looking for hidden grain in the countryside and the girls acting as the “bourgeois speculators” or kulak peasants hiding it. Fantasy melted into reality with horrible speed and Figes soon plunges us into the horrors of forced collectivisation of the Russian peasantry, seen centrally through the experiences of the Golovin family.

We meet them amid pastoral contentment: “On August 2, 1930, the villagers of Obukhovo celebrated Ilin day, an old religious holiday to mark the end of high summer, when Russian peasants held a feast and said their prayers for a good harvest.” The peasants all went off to the house of the Golovins, the biggest family in the village, headed by Nikolai, an excellent farmer. The Golovins were not rich. Their net assets added up to two barns, several pieces of machinery, three horses, seven cows, a few dozen sheep and pigs, iron bedsteads and a samovar. Alas for the Golovins, such simple possessions doomed them as kulaks, a word that was originally used by peasants to designate usurers and wheeler-dealers. The Bolsheviks transmuted it into the absurd designation – a death sentence to millions – of “peasant capitalist”, and ultimately into a term dooming any peasant opposing forced collectivation.

The pleasant supper in Obukhovo notwithstanding, the destruction of rural Russia had already begun. In two months at the start of 1930 half the Soviet peasantry – 60m people in 100,000 villages – were herded into collective farms. The specific ruin of the Golovins commenced, courtesy of Kolia Kuzmin, the loutish 18-year-old son of a failed farmer and local drunk. At the head of a posse of 12 armed teenagers, he became the local agent of the Komsomol. By September Obukhovo, in existence since 1522, was gone, and the “new life” of the collective farm, or kolkhoz, was in its place. The peasants had lost their land. Kuzmin, drunk, violent and incompetent, was chairman of the kolkhoz. The first winter saw half the horses dead and the peasants paid 50g of bread a day each. Nikolai Golovin was in a distant prison, with one son in the Gulag. Nikolai’s wife Yevdokiia and two daughters were still in the kolkhoz, in a hovel with one cow, which Kuzmin a few months later confiscated along with everything else, leaving them one iron bedstead. They were deported on May 4, 1931, given one hour to prepare. Kuzmin confiscated the 8-year-old Antonina’s shawl. “No one hugged us or said a parting word,” Antonina recalls. “They were afraid of the soldiers.”

Figes correctly calls his chapter on forced collectivisation The Great Break, and describes Stalin’s destruction of the kulaks as not only an appalling human tragedy, but “an economic catastrophe” for the Soviet Union, from which Soviet agriculture never recovered. In the ensuing famine of the early 1930s anywhere between 4m and 8m died.

The strength of The Whisperers is the range of the individual testimonies. The family sagas in this vast canvas are of scarcely believable tenacity and endurance. No novelist would dare invent such feats and such coincidences. Take the Ozemblovskys, a family of six in the Minsk region. They were exiled to the north, 3,000km from their home. While Aleksandr stayed to look after the two boys, Serafima and the two girls, 9 and 5, escaped and hiked south through the forest. Serafima had several gold teeth and periodically would pull one of them to buy a lift in a cart. They made it home, where Serafima left her daughters and hiked north again, only to find her husband had been arrested and one of her sons was now a police informer. She herself was arrested, escaped again, returned south, collected her daughters and set up a new home, where the whole family was finally united.

Terror is vivid on page after page, particularly in the dreadful year of 1937. Maria Drozdova, from a strictly religious peasant family, remembers how her mother Anna became demented with terror after her husband, a church warden, was arrested. “She would not leave the house. She became afraid of talking in the room, in case the neighbours overheard. In the evenings she was terrified of switching on the lamp, in case it drew the attention of the police. She was even afraid to go to the toilet, in case she wiped herself with a piece of newspaper which contained an article with Stalin’s name.” From every walk of life, from high party people such as the Stalinist writer Konstantin Simonov, to peasants such as the Golovins, the Soviet tragedy offers itself up, unforgettable in its heroism, villainy, endurances and cowardices large and small. We leave the Golovins, in another village, reunited in a new home. They have their one iron bedstead. Kolia Kuzmin has repented, come to live in their village and make amends. Here is the whole arc of Soviet history. In its amazing testimonies to the strength of the Russian family in the Soviet Union, as well as the awful fissures the system imposed on those families, The Whisperers is like a rainbow over a graveyard.

Hidden histories

‘By loving a child, the family turns him into an egotistical being, encouraging him to see himself as the centre of the universe,’ wrote a Soviet educational thinker in 1924. In the Communist utopia, all love between parents and children, husbands and wives was treacherous. Take Antonina Golovina, whose father was branded a kulak in the 1930s. At school, her teacher dubbed her an enemy of the people. “I hope you are all exterminated here!” At 18, she rewrote her life story, forged new papers, and went to medical school. She told no-one the truth, not even her husband. When, with glasnost, the time for talking finally came, Antonina realised that for more than 20 years she’d been married to a man who, like her, had spent his youth in labour camps and special settlements in Siberia.

Buy THE WHISPERERS: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia by Orlando Figes
Allen Lane £25 pp740

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