Memory speaks volumes

It’s a dangerous business, oral history, at least when you try it in Russia. Without oral history a complete history of the Soviet Union is almost impossible to write. Archival documents are dry, containing only the official point of view; memoirs, often written years later, are unreliable and frequently slide over important details. In an interview, by contrast, one can pose questions, prompt forgotten memories, or ask an eyewitness about things no one would put in print. It is no accident that many excellent books on Soviet history written in recent years (Catherine Merridale’s Ivan’s War or Simon Sebag-Montefiore’s Court of the Red Czar) have made extensive use of interviews. In some cases, the words of eyewitnesses are the only honest evidence of major historical events that we have. At the same time, oral history in Russia contains a number of traps. One’s sources are beguiling people, with stunningly complex, fantastically tragic lives. Their grandparents fought in the revolution; their mothers were arrested; their fathers died at the front. They grew up in orphanages, and learned their true surnames only as adults, if at all. One can’t bear to listen to them talk any more, one can’t possibly ask them to stop. Later, the temptation to put in every single sentence of their story is strong — how else can one do their generation justice?— but if every sentence goes in, then the resulting book can become confusing and wordy.

The Whisperers, Orlando Figes’s imposing new history of private life under Stalinism, is a work which makes excellent use of oral history, yet at times falls into oral history’s traps. It is based upon a fantastic quantity of research in private and public archives, as well as hundreds of interviews, some conducted by a team of researchers from Memorial, the Moscow historical and human rights society, and some conducted by Figes himself.