Orlando Figes' the Whisperers in Historiographical Context

REVIEWS

MIKE WESTRATE and MARIA ROGACHEVA (South Bend, IN, USA)

SUBJECTIVELY STALINIST? ORLANDO FIGES' THE WHISPERERS IN HISTORIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT

If one were to judge by non-academic indicators, Orlando Figes' The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia is an important book. It was on the NYT "Notable Books" list and the TLS "Books of the Year" for 2007. Almost two years after its release, The Whisperers is still number three on Amazon's list of current top sellers for the category His- tory/Europe/Russia - not bad for a book of almost 750 pages. Of course, for scholars the worth of such measures is suspect. The two books that are currently ranked higher on Amazon are Nechama Tec's Defiance: The Bielski Partisans (which features a picture of the actor Daniel Craig on the cover) and Helen Rappaport's The Last Days of the Romanovs: Trag- edy at Ekaterinburg, both of which were released much more recently than the book here under review.' Popularity, it seems, does not necessar- ily point to scholarly significance. And yet, if one judges the significance of a book by how many scholars have reviewed it, The Whisperers is a very important book indeed, confirming the opinions of the wider audience. In all, almost thirty scholars have chosen to review or respond to the book, and many of them are considered world-class experts on the history of the Soviet Union. This is striking, especially when one compares Figes' book to its contemporaries. For example, Robert Gellately's Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of So- cial Catastrophe, which also came out in 2007, received less than half the reviews accorded to The Whisperers.z Furthermore, Figes' book has in- spired some rather unusual academic responses outside of the field of history, including an International Nursing Review editorial in which the au-

1. www.amazon.com. Accessed May 6, 2009. Of course, Amazon's sales rankings are updated hourly, so this was simply a "snapshot" that will most likely change numerous times before this review goes to press. 2. To discover the number of reviews generated by these two books, we used a combi- nation of Academic Search Premier, Expanded Academic ASAP, H-Net, Lexis-Nexis Aca- demic, Amazon, and Google. thor reflected on the relevance of The Whisperer's to medical research.3 One high-school history teacher in Britain even based her dissertation on a systematic, qualitative study of her students' responses to Figes' book. This researcher was particularly interested in the role of The Whisperers in enabling secondary students to learn and engage with historical topics.' There were more traditional reviews of this book by established scholars than for any other recent book on Soviet history - many more, for example, than Anne Applebaum's Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag. From the pages of Nation to National Review, from Moscow Times to Slavic Re- view, scholars from every historiographical "school" have weighed in on The Whisperers. With so many monographs published on the Stalin period in the past few years, why was there such an enormous response to yet another such book? In this article we will answer that question - something previous reviewers have not done - by situating The Whisper- ers in the literature and exploring the reasons for the various academic re- actions to the book.

From Fainsod to Figes Until recently, two main historiographical schools have dominated history-writing on the Stalin period. The so-called "fathers," labeled "totali- tarianists" by their opponents, centered their attention on the politics and ideology of the Soviet polity, emphasizing the role of the state and political elites acting from above .5 This is not to say that such approaches ignored bottom-up politics. In fact, it was Merle Fainsod who first intro- duced a bottom-up approach to Soviet studies - a fact that many later scholars have chosen to ignored. Fainsod's work has been modified, added to, and built on ever since. Regardless of attempts to minimize or ignore Fainsod's work, the scholarly view of life in Stalin's USSR has not changed dramatically from the picture he painted more than fifty years ago.

3. Jane J. A. Robinson, "Taking the Longer View," International Nursing Review 3 (2008): 243. 4. Laura Bellinger, "Cultivating Curiosity about Complexity: What Happens when Year 12 Start to Read Orlando Figes' The Whisperers?" Teaching History 132 (2008): 5-15. 5. Merle Fainsod, Adam Ulam, Richard Pipes, Robert Conquest, Andrzej Walicki and others wrote histories of the Russian Revolution, Stalinism, and the Great Terror mostly from this top-down, totalitarian perspective. The "father" and "son" labels come from Mar- tin Malia, "The Archives of Evil," New Republic 22/23 (2004): 34-41. 6. Fainsod not only described the functioning of the Soviet political system at the local level, but also excelled in capturing "the 'feel' and texture of Soviet life" and "the struggle of ordinary people to survive." Merle Fainsod, Smolensk under Soviet Rule (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), p. 13.