The whisperers : private life in Stalin's Russia / Orlando Figes

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Children of 1917 (1917-28) -- The great break (1928-32) -- The pursuit of happiness (1932-6) -- The great fear (1937-8) -- Remnants of terror (1938-41) -- "Wait for me" (1941-5) -- Ordinary Stalinists (1945-53) -- Return (1953-6) -- Memory (1956-2006).

"The public aspects of Stalin's dictatorship - the arrests and trials, the enslavement and killing in the gulags - have been well documented. No previous book, however, has explored the regime's effect on people's personal lives, what one historian called "the Stalinism that entered into all of us." Drawing on a huge collection of family archives previously concealed in private homes across Russia, The Whisperers reveals for the first time the inner world of ordinary Soviet citizens as they struggled to survive amid the mistrust, fear, compromises, and betrayals that pervaded their existence." "Moving from the Revolution of 1917 to the death of Stalin and beyond, Orlando Figes re-creates the moral maze in which Russians found themselves, where one wrong turn could destroy a family or, perversely, end up saving it. He brings us inside cramped communal apartments, where minor squabbles could lead to fatal denunciations; he examines the Communist faithful, who often rationalized even their own arrests as a case of mistaken identity; and he casts a humanizing light on informers, demonstrating how, in a repressive system, anyone could easily become a collaborator."--BOOK JACKET.