Individual tragedies

Orlando Figes compellingly tells of lives and families destroyed by Stalin's brutal reign | Marvin Olasky

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It's 220 years since the French Revolution began with the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789. It's 20 years since the Soviet Revolution essentially ended as the Berlin Wall came down. We've long known how these revolutions swallowed their own, leaving a legacy of guillotine and gulag—but what was the effect on ordinary citizens as they tried to maintain their personal lives while surrounded by fear, mistrust, and betrayal?

Robert Conquest's The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties (1968; new edition 2007) gave the big picture. A wonderfully researched and written book, The Whisperers by Orlando Figes (Henry Holt, 2007), now complements it. Figes, a University of London history professor, used a vast array of previously hidden family archives to show how Josef Stalin in particular turned the hearts of children against parents—a reverse Chapter 4 of Malachi—and ­created a land of hatred for his own glory.