The Whisperers cover art

The Whisperers

Private Life in Stalin's Russia

 Preview
Try Premium Plus free
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

The Whisperers

By: Orlando Figes
Narrated by: John Telfer
Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £23.99

Buy Now for £23.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

Drawing on a huge range of sources - letters, memoirs, conversations - Orlando Figes tells the story of how Russians tried to endure life under Stalin. Those who shaped the political system became, very frequently, its victims. Those who were its victims were frequently quite blameless.

The Whisperers re-creates the sort of maze in which Russians found themselves, where an unwitting wrong turn could either destroy a family or, perversely, later save it: a society in which everyone spoke in whispers - whether to protect themselves, their families, neighbours or friends - or to inform on them.

©2018 Orlando Figes (P)2018 Audible, Ltd 20th Century Modern Russia Imperialism Stalin Holocaust

Listeners also enjoyed...

 A People’s Tragedy cover art
Natasha's Dance cover art
Crimea cover art
Gulag cover art
Russia: Myths and Realities cover art
Resistance cover art
Adolf Hitler: The Bigot of the Jews cover art
Collapse cover art
The House of Government cover art
True Believer cover art
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich cover art
The Last Year of the War cover art
Wild Swans cover art
The Paper Daughters of Chinatown cover art
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World cover art
Children of the Night cover art
All stars
Most relevant  
begin to imagine what life was like in Soviet Russia, it's like a cold dark nightmare come true, a humanitarian disaster that lasted for decades.

I can't

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Figes takes you on an incredible and incredibly disturbing, even sickening, tour of Soviet society from before the Russian Revolution, through Lenin’s and Stalin’s purges, to Glasnost and the 1990s. He reveals the horror of totalitarianism and of Stalin’s psychotic paranoia and their effects on ordinary people who were generally innocent of the charges laid against them. Many were murdered, shot as punishment for innocence. Many were denounced by family, friends, neighbours out of spite or jealousy or desire to claim someone else’s property—aspects of the human condition that Marx had completely failed to take into account.

These were the effects of the implementation of Marxism in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, of the initial demands that all thought of family were anti-social, against the good if the state, which was to be the only goal, the only love.

The number of people murdered by the state in the name of the state will never be known because, unlike the Nazis, the Soviets did not keep accurate records, but that number was anything from 20 million to perhaps something like 40 million. (If a person who was sent to a gulag dies of cold, disease, exhaustion, or starvation, is that death to be recorded as ‘natural causes’ or as murder?

People should be encouraged to read ‘The Whisperers’, so that they learn and understand the evils of Soviet-Marxist totalitarianism.

Staggering exposure if psychotic evil

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This book evokes less emotions than A People's Tragedy but the stories of individual people are horrible. Hundreds of thousands of people were ruined by Stalin's system and the survivors suffered for the rest of their lives.

Harrowing stories from Stalin's reign

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A comprehensive social history of the Soviet system, exhaustive in its detail. I found the book to be compelling in places offering a real insight into the effects of Stalin’s terror. Perhaps just a little over long And repetitive in detail, however it would be difficult to edit given the fact that the brutality of this paranoid system of power affected ordinary people with terrible consequences All of which demand our attention.

Fascinating and sobering

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Don't be put off by some of the reviews. They appear to be by people who don't understand that this is a social history of the Soviet Union. It is broader than just the Stalin period and covers parts of the Lenin period and post Stalin. These reviewers are obviously looking for a history of the period. This is a history of how people lived during these tumultuous events and under the tyranny.

This book is particularly relevant today. In one of the chapters, Figes discusses how people in the USSR would wear a mask of self censorship, completely screening what they really thought from all but the most trusted. Those interviewed and quoted say that it was this self censorship that was particularly egregious. Well, we appear to be hell bent on recreating this in the West at the moment! The road to hell is paved by good intentions indeed.

Hugely imporant book.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
well worth a read
an insight imto now vanished USSR and time of Stalin and the terror

Good listen

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Wonderfully narrated amazing book. Thanks Orlando Figes and John Telfer. And ofcourse Audible. Enjoyable experience.

Great book

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This is interesting,because it’s tales from, and about, the regular people of Russia.
The narrator is good, and manage to keep it interesting.

5 stars-for a well written and interesting book.

Very interesting and well read.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This book is proof if proof were needed, socialism never works.
Some comrades are always more equal than others

A window into the past

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The first 20 hours are incredibly repetitive. After that the final 9 hours and 23 minutes aren’t so bad. I don’t know how I didn’t go crazy hearing the same stories told in different ways over those 20 hours.

Skip first 20 hours... yes, really

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews