History:As a child I had assumed that my mother was English. I learned later that she was born in the independent Baltic republic of Estonia. In Estonia's medieval capital of Tallinn - German Lutheran in detail, Tsarist in imagination - she led a tranquil childhood. But the threat of European war was mounting, writes Ian Thomson.
In 1940, Estonia was invaded by Stalin, and the following year by Hitler; the Red Army returned in 1944, but my mother escaped to England before they could seize the family property. She was 15 and had narrowly avoided the Gulag.
The Whisperers, this magnificent new history of life in the Soviet Union between the Revolution of 1917 and Stalin's death in 1953, tells many such stories of survival, detention and escape. In 1937, as Orlando Figes relates, Stalin's Great Terror had intensified. Close to two million Russian army chiefs, priests, academics and other "enemies of the people" were shot or sent to the Gulag for "crimes against the state". Apprehension of the massacre came slowly to my mother's family. Like most Balts, they were uncertain what to believe: so many dead? Yet Estonia, on the edge of the Slav world, was in danger of Soviet takeover.
In 1988, as the Soviet Union was breaking up, I went to Estonia in search of a long-lost school friend of my mother's. Unlike my mother, Delia had stayed at home on Soviet soil. Indeed, for 11 years this blameless woman had languished in a Soviet labour camp as a "bourgeois recidivist": my mother was sure she was dead. At first, Delia refused to open the door. Once inside, however, black and white photographs of my mother, whom Delia had not seen for almost half a century, were excitedly removed from an old shoe-box. Her father, as the "capitalist" head of Tallinn customs, had been shot, while her mother had died in the Gulag as a "class enemy". Delia was thus left with a "spoilt biography", Soviet-speak for a shameful bourgeois past.
In the course of that extraordinary encounter Delia had spoken to me of the acquaintances she and my mother had lost to the Siberian ice-fields. Among them was the Tallinn lawyer Arnold Susi, a key figure in Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. In 1945, Susi had vanished somewhere in a camp at Krasnoyarsk, a statistic among the millions of Siberia's murdered dead. At the war's end, Delia had returned to Tallinn but, cruelly, Stalin had sent the 17-year-old back to the Gulag for a further six years: her character had not yet undergone a full Soviet "reforging" or perekovka.
IN PAGES OF harrowing detail, Orlando Figes builds a picture of a time in the Soviet Union when the disappearance of innocent citizens was a fact of life. What did people really think and feel in the years of Stalin's rule? What traumas did they endure? In many ways, Figes has continued Catherine Merridale's pioneering investigations into the day-to-day existence of the ordinary Red Army soldier. (Where did he come from? What did he believe in?) The arbitrariness of tsarist authority, according to Merridale, had found its grotesque mirror image in the dictatorship under "the father of the Soviet people" (as Stalin liked to portray himself). Anyone found guilty of threatening the unity of the Russian state by deeds or even thoughts would be "punished", Stalin decreed. In such an atmosphere, a careless word overheard by a neighbour could spell your death.
Much of the book is devoted to the 1951-1953 Jewish Doctors' Plot, when Stalin planned to deport all Jews resident in the Soviet Union's main cities (including, presumably, Tallinn) to Central Asia and Siberia. With his long-held Jew-hatred, Stalin had long seen Jews as a self-regarding, supranational sect inimical to the Russian race and motherland. Thousands of them were to be "purged" (a euphemism for judicial murder which Soviet socialism has added to the language), but fortunately Stalin died just as the plot looked set to send the first victims to the camps and exile.
It was not difficult for Stalin to seek out enemies. By the early 1950s, according to Figes, some 10 million informers were operating within the Soviet Union. Data was gathered on suspect anti-Soviets and "hidden enemies" in the Communist Party - name, address, profession - and set down with lapidary coldness in official communiqués. Fearing guilt by association, children dragged into NKVD (later the KGB) investigations distanced themselves completely from their parents; or else they denounced them to the authorities.
STALIN ALLOWED THE police dossiers to swell and, with Machiavellian adroitness, created a climate of suspicion and corrosive mistrust. Informers (the "whisperers") were set against informers, friends against friends. Families in particular were regarded as inimical to the forward march of the "New Soviet Man", and often a choice had to be made between loyalty to one's children and loyalty to Stalin. (It was a rare Bolshevik who did not employ a nanny to look after his offspring.)
In a fascinating chapter, "The Pursuit of Happiness", Figes chronicles the construction in 1930s Moscow of thousands of communal apartments expressly designed to replace family life with an ideal of communal living. Though perhaps well-intentioned, the kommunalka only exacerbated levels of surveillance and denunciation; conceivably Stalin had planned it that way.
Shockingly, in the 70 years after the 1917 Revolution the Soviet regime was to kill almost 62 million people. It is worth looking at that figure written out: 61,911,000. The statistic is so monstrous - so unimaginable - that it numbs. The Whisperers, by any standard an extraordinary labour of devotion and scholarship, is a commemoration as well as a documentary, in which the emotional and psychological effects of the Stalin years are minutely chronicled. And somehow, by narrating the stories of the legions of Gulag dead, Orlando Figes has brought them back to life. In Tallinn, meanwhile, my mother's classmate lives alone in a Soviet tenement, her best years having been destroyed by Stalin. She has more than served her time.
Ian Thomson's biography of Primo Levi (Vintage) won the Royal Society of Literature WH Heinemann Award 2003
The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia By Orlando Figes Penguin/Allen Lane, 740pp. £25