THE DELIBERATELY double-edged title refers both to those who whispered so as not to be overheard, and those who whispered to the secret police to denounce neighbours, colleagues and even their own family.

“Today,” Isaak Babel wrote, “a man talks freely with his wife – at night, with the blankets pulled over his head.” Children were constantly reminded that the walls had ears and that their tongues could get them into trouble.

This book is the result of a large-scale research project and its importance cannot be overestimated. We know about the millions who died, with a bullet in the back of the head, or from exhaustion and disease in labour camps, or from the famines that resulted from Stalin’s forced collectivisation of agriculture.

Orlando Figes describes how those victims’ families were shattered by the Terror. He and his team have unearthed diaries and accounts from archives and interviewed hundreds of survivors. From this vast amount of material, he has reconstructed their experiences during the waves of oppression from 1929 up to Stalin’s death in 1953.

The Bolsheviks despised family life. For the selfless revolutionary, nothing should be private: everything was political. Individualism had to be stamped out and even affection for one’s own children was deemed “egotistic love”.

The communist youth movement, the Pioneers, was supposed to replace the family in the loyalties of children. Communal apartments were introduced to destroy “bourgeois domesticity” and undermine the family unit. The home was simply a “living space” that was supposed to be devoid of personal effects or decoration. Only a Lenin or Red corner was approved, the communist version of the family icon.

The early waves of repression were aimed at those of noble and bourgeois origin, then at kulaks (small-farm owners), once Stalin had determined to crush the resistance of the peasantry to collective farms. Several million were dispossessed, usually at random, and sent off to labour camps. To be born of kulak parents was to face humiliation at school and the knowledge that no decent job would be open to you. To possess such a tainted biography encouraged many schoolchildren and students to conceal their past or to renounce their parents. Some families encouraged their children to do this for their own future happiness. Many children of kulaks became devoted Stalinists, and some joined the secret police.

The most famous writer of the Stalinist era, Konstantin Simonov, who plays a central role in the book, was one who decided to reinvent himself, not because he was from kulak stock, but because his mother was a Princess Obolensky. He enrolled in a factory school and worked at nights on an armaments production line to be reclassified as a proletarian. He was still afraid.

Denunciation of “enemies of the people” was becoming a mass weapon of the Soviet state. In 1932, in the Urals, a 15-year-old named Pavlik Morozov was murdered, supposedly because he had denounced his father as a kulak. The Soviet press turned him into a model Pioneer, and children in all schools were told to regard him as a hero. The relentless propaganda had an effect. “Look at what those enemies of the people are like,” Elena Bonner’s younger brother said when their father was arrested. “Some of them even pretend to be fathers.”

In communal apartments, tensions arose over the cramped conditions and the shared kitchens, where food was bound to go missing. Accusations of theft and mutual suspicion led to many false denunciations to the secret police.

This created long-term psychiatric problems. One woman “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”.

When the hammering at the door came in the night, parents usually had a suitcase ready. Everyone knew that you were given no time to pack. Many parents arranged for a relative or friend to take care of their children, but often they were turned away, out of fear of political contagion. Children of “enemies of the people” were sent to orphanages and given new names. The Soviet state was now their parent. Those too young to remember their parents’ names never rediscovered their true identity.

Be warned. This is a heartrending book. The Great Terror of 1937-38 produced a great silence. Hardly anybody dared to talk to anyone else in case the most innocent remark could be twisted into some form of criticism of the regime. Friendship became impossible when you had to denounce others to save yourself.

Even trust within a marriage seemed dangerous. Antonina Golovina, like so many children of kulaks, took the risk of rewriting her biography. For 50 years she never dared to admit the truth even to her husband, only to discover in 1987, just as communism began to collapse, that he had concealed from her that his father had been a tsarist naval officer murdered by the Bolsheviks.

The “universal psychosis” that the Stalinist regime inflicted on the Soviet Union produced what can only be compared to a form of “Stockholm syndrome”. Even innocent prisoners in the labour camps and their children could not bring themselves to see the truth, and felt obliged to support their oppressors in a more determined fashion. Having invested so much belief in a socialist paradise, they simply could not admit the reality of what was happening. What they feared most, wrote Lev Kopelev, was to lose their “unbounded faith”.

When it came to the purges and show trials, the lie was so huge and so outrageous that committed communists could not believe that their leaders could invent such things.

This book should be made compulsory reading in Russia today – yet the refusal to face the truth is understandable. It is hard for them to admit, with so many millions of ruined lives over several generations, that this reign of terror was nothing but a horrific crime against humanity.

Buy The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia by Orlando Figes
Allen Lane, £25; 752pp

Orlando Figes appears at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival on October 5 at 4pm
Call 01242 227979 www.cheltenhamfestivals.com

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