The Whisperers; private life in Stalin´s Russia

Orlando Figes' moving and powerful new book illuminates as never before the hidden histories of the ordinary people who lived under Stalin's tyranny. It reveals a society where everyone spoke in whispers: whether to protect themselves, their families or friends - or to betray them.

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Orlando Figes' moving and powerful new book illuminates as never before the hidden histories of the ordinary people who lived under Stalin's tyranny. It reveals a society where everyone spoke in whispers: whether to protect themselves, their families or friends - or to betray them.

How could Russian citizens preserve their personal identity when the state controlled every aspectof their existence? Was any private life possible when every conversation could be overheard through the walls of cramped communal apartments - and at any moment you could be branded an `enemy of the people'?

Drawing on hundreds of private family archives concealed in secret drawers and under mattresses inhomes across Russia, and on countless interviews with survivors, Orlando Figes recreates the maze in which people found themselves: a world of terrible moral choices and compromises, where an unwitting wrong turn could either destroy a family or, perversely, later save it. Where some kept a bag packed by their bed in order to be ready for a midnight knock on the door. Where a junior worker would inform on their superior to get their job; a husband to get rid of a lover; a neighbour out of petty jealousy. Where living a double life became the norm. Yet where, amid all this, love, creativity and family resilience somehow managed to defy the state's values - and humanity survived.

This history, one of the most important and involving for many years, lets Stalin's silent victimstell their stories for the first time.