162) O Gulag ordinario, para o povinho miudo...

THE WHISPERERS
Private Life in Stalin’s Russia
Orlando Figes.
Illustrated. 740 pp.
Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company. $35.

Stalin’s Children
By JOSHUA RUBENSTEIN
The New York Times Review of Books, November 25, 2007

For many years, Orlando Figes observes, the memoirs of intellectual dissidents, like Eugenia Ginzburg and Nadezhda Mandelstam, and the work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “were widely greeted as the ‘authentic voice’ of ‘the silenced,’” telling us “what it had ‘been like’ to live through the Stalin Terror as an ordinary citizen.” Their books did indeed reflect the experience of people like themselves, who were “strongly committed to ideals of freedom and individualism.” But they did not represent what happened to millions of other people who were not opponents of the regime and did not engage in any kind of substantial dissent, but were still dispatched to labor camps, to exile in remote settlements or to summary execution. As Figes, a leading historian of the Soviet period, concludes in “The Whisperers,” his extraordinary book about the impact of the gulag on “the inner world of ordinary citizens,” a great many victims “silently accepted and internalized the system’s basic values” and “conformed to its public rules.” Behind highly documented episodes of persecution, famine and war lie quieter, desperate stories of individuals and families who did what they could to survive, to find one another and to come to terms with the burden of being physically and psychologically broken. But it was not only repression that tore families apart. The regime’s reliance on “mutual surveillance” complicated their moral burden, instilling feelings of shame and guilt that endured long after years of imprisonment and exile.

The widespread use of communal apartments facilitated government oppression. Initially designed to address a severe housing crisis, the apartments turned into “a means of extending the state’s powers of surveillance into the private spaces of the family home.” Families could monitor one another, reporting any hint of disloyalty. Spouses and children could be sent away after an arrest or an execution. The age of criminal responsibility was lowered to 12 in order to reinforce pressure on adults to cooperate with interrogators and spare their children. A wife was expected to divorce her arrested husband.

Figes provides disheartening public letters of denunciation, “formulaic notices printed in their thousands in the Soviet press.” One read: “I, Nikolai Ivanov, renounce my father, an ex-priest, because for many years he deceived the people by telling them that God exists, and that is the reason I am severing all my relations with him.” Young people felt the need to break with their past, often claiming that their parents were dead or had run away as a way of avoiding “the stigma of their origins.” There were parents who implored their children to submit such letters in order to ensure access to higher education or professional advancement.

Each story had its own disheartening logic. Stalin’s campaign to intimidate the population had no moral limits. Figes tells of Pavlik Morozov, a teenager said to have been killed by older family members because he had denounced his father for selling false papers to kulaks living in nearby “special settlements.” (The kulaks were a category of so-called richer peasants who were regarded as the principal obstacle to collectivization.) The father was sentenced to a labor camp and later shot. After the boy’s death, the Soviet press created “a propaganda cult” around his case. Maxim Gorky called for a monument to be erected because the boy had “understood that a relative by blood may also be an enemy of the spirit, and that such a person is not to be spared.”

The case of Aleksandr Tvardovsky exemplified the way families could be torn apart by moral degradation. Tvardovsky is remembered for being an accomplished poet and the courageous editor of Novy Mir (New World), a literary journal that, during the Khrushchev period in the late 1950s and early ’60s, published outspoken material about the Stalin years, including work by Solzhenitsyn and the memoirs of Ilya Ehrenburg.

But Tvardovsky had his own troubling background. His father and brothers had been arrested on political grounds in 1931, and Aleksandr, wanting to pursue a literary career, refused to maintain contact. As he wrote to them: “I am neither a barbarian nor an animal. I ask you to fortify yourselves, to be patient and to work. The liquidation of the kulaks as a class does not mean the liquidation of people, even less the liquidation of children.” He concluded by insisting they not communicate with him. Two months later, his father fled his place of exile to find his estranged son. Tvardovsky betrayed him to the police. Compelled “to choose between one’s family and the Revolution,” Tvardovsky, like many others, refused to give in to “abstract humanitarianism.”

Antonina Golovina was the daughter of a kulak. As a child she was rounded up with her parents and sent to a “special settlement,” where they all endured three years of severe cold, desperate poverty and isolation. Upon her return from exile, Golovina became the target of bullying and other abusive treatment by teachers and classmates because of her “‘kulak’ origins.” She eventually married twice, each time to a man who had also suffered exile. Though she lived with each husband for two decades, none of them ever spoke about their pasts. A combination of shame, suspicion and a lingering sense of inferiority compelled their silence about the single most important fact in their lives. They could not simultaneously trust “the people they loved” and believe in “the government they feared.” Golovina even joined the Communist Party to help protect her family and her career as a doctor. Other prisoners married camp guards or administrators, in part as a means to survive and assure a place for themselves in Soviet society.

The tragic hero of the book could well be the prominent writer Konstantin Simonov, who had a successful career under Stalin as a poet, novelist and journalist. Simonov, whom Figes calls the “central figure” of his book, was taken in by the Kremlin’s propaganda. His awe of Stalin outweighed the arrest of beloved aunts and the disappearance of colleagues and friends. Simonov even engaged in anti-Semitic baiting during Stalin’s anti-cosmopolitan campaign in the late 1940s and continued to conform as a loyal Stalinist after the dictator’s death in 1953 when other writers began to challenge the regime. But Simonov slowly grew remorseful over his cowardly, self-serving behavior and near the end of his life took it upon himself to produce a candid and startling memoir about his career, a decision vividly described by Figes.

“The Whisperers” comes at an opportune moment, when the generation of survivors — people born between 1917 and 1925 — is dying out and a post-Soviet government is trying to burnish the history of Stalinism. It is the stories of these ordinary people that constitute the ultimate rebuke to Vladimir Putin’s efforts to reimpose moral amnesia on Russia. With the assistance of the Memorial Society, one of the few liberal institutions that emerged during the period of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and continues to exist today, Figes enlisted teams of researchers, who conducted thousands of interviews with gulag survivors and their families and collected letters, memoirs and other documents. Victims do not always make good witnesses. But thanks to Figes, these survivors overcame their silence and have lifted their voices above a whisper.

Joshua Rubenstein, the Northeast regional director of Amnesty International USA, is the author of “Tangled Loyalties,” a biography of the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg.