Bertrand M. Patenade
Stalin’s Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky
Faber and Faber, 2009
352 Pages
£20.00
ISBN 978-0571228751

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On the night of the October Revolution of 1917, Russia’s moderate socialists stormed out of the Second Congress of Soviets in Petrograd to protest the radical Bolshevik coup d’état underway across the city. Before the moderates managed to leave the chamber, however, an agitated Bolshevik delegate with a moustache, beady eyes, and sparkling pince-nez rose to hammer a final, icy nail in their coffin. “You are pitiful, isolated individuals”, Leon Trotsky roared. “You are bankrupts. Your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on—into the dustbin of history!”

Having joined the Bolshevik Party just a few months earlier, Trotsky, a former moderate, narrowly escaped the dustbin himself. As the October Revolution progressed into a full-blown civil war, he became the mastermind of the Red Army’s campaign, solidifying his place in history as Vladimir Lenin’s ruthless and obstreperous War Commissar. By 1922, the Bolsheviks had won the war, and when Lenin died two years later (the result of a stroke, syphilis, poisoning, or some combination of the three), the question of who would lead the world’s first avowedly socialist state became, for Trotsky, one of life and death.

Josef Stalin was determined to sweep Trotsky into the dustbin. Afflicted by perpetual fevers and poor health, a sickly Trotsky was on his way to the Black Sea in 1924 when he received news of Lenin’s death via telegram from Stalin. The telegram misstated the date of the funeral, making it seem impossible for Trotsky’s train to return to Moscow in time for the ceremony. When the country’s revolutionary heroes paraded onto the Kremlin balustrade at Lenin’s funeral, Trotsky was nowhere to be found.

After years of political infighting, the ruling Stalinist clique voted Trotsky out of the government in 1927. A year and a half later, they exiled him from the country for good. By banishing Trotsky and later orchestrating his murder in Mexico, Stalin removed the only other person with a compelling claim to Lenin’s mantle. But he did not stop there. Over the course of the 1930s, Stalin gradually invented, in the likeness of Trotsky, the Soviet folk devil par excellence. He whittled Trotsky into the ultimate traitor, excised his legacy from the history books, and executed thousands in the name of fabricated Trotskyite sympathies. Having morphed from revolutionary war hero to public enemy number one, Trotsky spent most of his days in exile trying to clear his name, writing books and press releases to set the historical record straight, and mourning friends and relatives executed by Stalin.

This sunset period of Trotsky’s life forms the basis of Bertrand M. Patenaude’s book, Stalin’s Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky. Despite its title, the book covers only Trotsky’s exile in Mexico, from 1937 to 1940, and largely overlooks the time he spent exiled in Turkey, France, and Norway beforehand. The reason is clear: it is Mexico where the spiciest titbits of Trotsky’s life took place—where the old man liaised with Frida Kahlo, and later met his death in the form of a pickaxe to the skull—and Patenaude has written a book concerned more with narrative spice than with staid, analytical savour.

An academic by training, Patenaude has forayed into the realm of popular history in the footsteps of Simon Sebag Montefiore, whose successful biographies of Stalin and Catherine the Great have presented Russian history in the style of a dramatic novel. But where Montefiore shines in his use of slick and speedy prose, Patenaude disappoints, striking an unbalanced tone that oscillates between sensational gossip and hurried historical analysis. This deficiency, combined with the book’s schizophrenic timeline and repetitiveness, causes Stalin’s Nemesis to fall short of the robust novelistic recreation it might have been.

Yet the book does not fail completely. Patenaude unwittingly reveals the chief merit of his book when describing Trotsky’s biography of Stalin: “Like all historical research”, he says, “Trotsky’s job was one of excavation.” This is clearly how Patenaude interprets the biographer’s brief, for despite its shortcomings, Stalin’s Nemesis succeeds at the task of excavation. Patenaude airs even the most obscure and irrelevant dustbunnies of history, combing through archival and secondary-source materials on Trotsky’s later life in a way that leaves no sensational stone unturned.

The dustbunnies that Patenaude brings to light range the gamut, from real bunnies—Trotsky kept them on his Mexican patio as pets and tended to them just before his murder—to oral sex, a frank discussion of which appears in a letter that Trotsky wrote to his wife Natalia during the liaison with Frida. Why Patenaude believes that readers want to know about Trotsky’s erections, or rather lack thereof, is anyone’s guess. But blinded by the temptations of salaciousness, Patenaude forges ahead into the biographical depths, right down to the revolutionary’s anus: apparently, certain species of Mexican bacteria aggravated Trotsky’s colon, which was already irritated by colitis.

The book’s effusive details, some fascinating and others wholly unnecessary, hardly end there. For example, we learn that Trotsky briefly lived in the Bronx before returning to launch the revolution in 1917; the surrealist André Breton offended Trotsky by stealing Mexican figurines from a church the two visited together; the writer Saul Bellow sat in the hospital waiting room as Trotsky died; and the artist Diego Rivera—Frida’s husband and the guarantor of the old man’s asylum in Mexico—first appeared on Trotsky’s radar when he inserted Lenin’s face into a mural he painted at Radio City Music Hall. Ramon Mercader, the Spanish-born NKVD agent who infiltrated Trotsky’s inner circle and killed him, apparently worked as a chef at the Ritz in Barcelona.

Mercader played the lead role in “Operation Duck”, the intricate plot to murder Trotsky, which comprises a large part of the book. Patenaude describes how the NKVD recruited Mercader during the Spanish Civil War and planned for him to infiltrate Trotsky’s circle by romancing Sylvia Ageloff, a Brooklyn social worker who had become involved in the American Trotskyist movement. Using Ageloff as a conduit, Mercader ingratiated himself to the members of Trotsky’s domestic staff in Mexico and eventually met his target. On 20 August 1940, the day he bludgeoned Trotsky in the head, Mercader entered the Mexican home straight through the front door, greeted by a cordial welcome from the guards. After 20 years in jail, Mercader was released and awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union medal for his service to the USSR.

While Patenaude treats the story surrounding Trotsky’s murder with particular rigour and care, the second-most memorable moment of Trotsky’s Mexican exile, his liaison with the painter Frida Kahlo, receives relatively scant attention, a mere ten pages in total. This is partly because the documents are few: Trotsky reportedly asked Frida to return the letters they exchanged out of fear that Stalinist agents would find them, and after Frida complied, the letters were destroyed.

The book gives very little sense of Frida’s personal rapport with Trotsky, aside from the detail that Frida apparently called him piochitas, or “little goatee”. Again, Patenaude concentrates on the dustbunnies: on the sexual symbolism of a monkey in one of Frida’s self-portraits, on Frida’s former Japanese-American lover and Rivera’s violent tendencies. These details come at the expense of a deeper look into the substance of the pair’s relationship. Moreover, the book’s depiction of Frida desperately lacks nuance, not least because it manages to render a feminist cult icon as something of a promiscuous flirt. According to Trotsky’s secretary, Frida described her life philosophy as “make love, take a bath, make love again”—a problematic portrayal of the painter, which Patenaude unflinchingly reproduces and reifies. To make matters worse, the book floats three possible reasons behind Frida’s decision to enter the affair: promiscuity, revenge for Rivera’s infidelities (he slept with her sister), and infatuation with a great man. One has the sneaking suspicion that women can be something other than wanton, jealous, or obsessed.

Some 60 years after the end of Operation Duck, it is worth asking whether Trotsky, and more notably the communist project he envisioned, in fact escaped the dustbin of history. In a speech to the British Parliament in 1982, Ronald Reagan turned Trotsky’s dramatic words against him, declaring that the march of freedom and democracy would leave Marxism-Leninism on the “ash heap of history”.

Reagan’s Cold War rhetoric presaged an era when communism would no longer define the world, and when the once-famous Leon Trotsky would be remembered primarily for his lover or for his nemesis. Patenaude could have corrected this by making a case for interpreting Trotsky’s legacy in some other way. Instead, he mistakes the forest for the trees, the dustbin for the dustbunnies, magnifying the minutiae of a sensational story rather than advancing a more complex argument about Trotsky’s historical bequest.

The mere publication of Patenaude’s book confirms readers’ continued interest in the life of Leon Trotsky. Yet the book’s title suggests a legacy in demise, a personage who now needs the name of his more famous enemy to enjoy historical significance in the popular eye. Trotsky, it seems, has yet to be relegated to history’s dustbin, but nonetheless has been consigned to its subtitle.

Paul Sonne is reading for an MPhil in Russian and East European Studies at New College, Oxford. He is a senior editor of the Oxonian Review.

I

In Isaac Babel’s story, ‘How It Was Done in Odessa’, a bookish young Jewish boy asks an old man how the local mob boss achieved his greatness. For a boy like you to understand a boss like him, the old man replies, you must imagine you are a different sort of person:

Forget for a while that you have spectacles on your nose and autumn in your heart. Quit raising hell on your writing desk and stuttering in public. Imagine for a moment that you raise hell out on the street, and you stutter on paper. You’re a tiger, a lion, a cat. If you spend the night with a Russian woman, you’ll leave her satisfied.

Keith Gessen’s debut book is about all the sad young literary men with spectacles on their noses and autumn in their hearts. It is about young men who want to be told how things are done, who cannot tear themselves away from raising hell on their writing desks any more than they can tear themselves away from who they are. They long to leave women satisfied—and they fail, more often than not.

Gessen, the founding editor of n+1 magazine, melds memoir and fiction by folding elements of his own life into three fictional twenty-something selves: Keith, a Harvard-educated political journalist and the son of Russian immigrants; Sam, an Israel-infatuated temp worker bent on writing the great Zionist novel; and Mark, a divorced doctoral student of history composing and decomposing in Syracuse. Marooned in early adulthood, the three anxious bachelors of arts subsist somewhere between becoming ‘great’ men and becoming nothing at all. Theirs are not portraits of artists as young men, for these young men do not produce art. Rather, the book is comprised of the portraits of non-artists, of wannabe artists and enthusiasts, of a species of voracious, intellectual parasite on the rump of society’s laureates: a breed known as literary men.

Though All the Sad Young Literary Men may be a novel in a formal sense, it is not traditionally novelistic. Keith, Sam, and Mark never meet. Their three stories appear autonomously and coalesce into what Gessen calls ‘a fiction’—codeword for a triptych of portraits that stands in for a novel. The three protagonists emerge in remarkable full-colour, while the supporting actors around them shed light as appropriate, but ultimately remain out-of-reach. Because Gessen’s three ‘hi-def’ characters never meet, the key interactions of the book pit convincing characters against ephemeral side-puppets, a chiaroscuro treatment that makes Gessen’s portraits glow but does little for the book’s overall effect.

The result is something like eating three appetizers for dinner in place of a single main course, a risky trade-off accepted knowingly by its instigator. In the case of All the Sad Young Literary Men, it is a trade-off well executed, but nonetheless a trade-off: Gessen deliberately forsakes the kind of character interaction and cohesiveness of plot that we expect in exchange for eulogising a particular type of person in the throes of a particular moment. He is not after the plight of one man, but rather that of an entire time-lapsed species of young men, a stuttering, un-amassed collective of spectacled young noses and autumn-filled hearts. And like any brilliant eulogist, he interlaces sadness and hilarity to deliver a sparkling homage.

Gessen flags this intent from page one. The title proclaims to be about all the sad young literary men, when in fact the book is about three, young literary men who all happen to resemble Gessen. In light of Gessen’s purpose, however, the disparity makes sense. Though they never meet, Keith, Sam, and Mark bleed into one another as time progresses because there is an element of universality to their predicaments. For the young literary readers among us, their stories become a playful riff on an all too familiar life—Gessen strikes close to home by reinventing his story in the image and likeness of the sad young literary everyman. Twisting intellectual snobbery and pop-culture savvy (the very breed of prose that appeals to sad, young, literary comrades in arms), he writes something uncommon into a book of common despairs.

II

The most striking feature of All the Sad Young Literary Men is a vicious anxiety that consumes Keith, Sam, and Mark. These young men may not stutter in reality like Babel’s young boy, but they certainly stutter metaphorically, anxiously stammering through their twenty-something lives.

This pervasive anxiety seeps into Gessen’s prose style. Fretful dialogue propels the narrative at a panicky clip. Gessen’s remarkable feel for cadence allows the narrative, pockmarked by side-comments of all persuasions, to meander and then sprint, often descending from Babel to babble to psychobabble in one anxious exhale. Paragraph-long sentences funnel themselves into single-word exclamations:

He did not love rum, but he didn’t mind it, and then, standing in the kitchen, under the bare fluorescent light, after a very bad week, a week during which his hopes of Celeste evaporated, during which his dissertation, while not stalling exactly, certainly did not progress, and in fact began to seem slightly ridiculous—during which the entire project, the sometimes utopian project, of Mark’s life began to look like it was going simply to fail—well, Mark made a kind of decision. He said to Leslie: ‘Shot?’

Gessen peppers the prose heavily with jeering, American pop-culture references—‘with the collapse of the discipline of history into Antiques Roadshow, history of social trends, history of the spoon, these department potlucks were pretty much all they had’—and his capacity to extrapolate the commonplace into academic metaphor makes for witty quips: ‘she had such control of tone, in her text messages, she was the Edith Wharton of text-messaging.’ He even uses J.Crew as a verb. But for all his beautiful sarcasm and side commenting, Gessen seldom lets go of his tight grip on the story to step back as a narrator, rarely going beyond casual lexicon or delving into meditation. His voice keeps with the voices of his characters, which limits the sophistication of the prose, but also charms us with its honesty.

Gessen’s young men experience anxieties of varying sorts—first and foremost an anxiety of a certain age, but also a corresponding anxiety of action. Keith, Sam, and Mark share an intense uneasiness borne out by the ominous creep of their twenties. Their lives circulate around disappointment and self-doubt, and yet they operate under a fleeting inkling of a future that could be different. The young men enjoy life like it is a gap year, all the while worrying that their gap year could evolve unknowingly and without warning into the dreaded gap life. ‘He was getting to be a certain age, he thought,’ the narrator says of Sam. ‘It was the age when his never to be written masterpieces had begun to outweigh the masterpieces he was still going to write.’

The ‘literary’ element of Gessen’s ‘literary men’ indicates a certain bystander status: these young men know how to think, but when is the thinking to stop and the action to begin? A graduate student in Russian history at Syracuse, Mark studies the Russian Revolution, focusing on the Mensheviks, whom Lenin called ‘professors of revolution’ instead of revolutionaries. ‘The Mensheviks were wonderful intellectual people, but they didn’t make it,’ Mark says. Instead, Lenin and the Bolsheviks made it, and Mark comes to respect Lenin for his ability to act. After all, Lenin did not share the destiny of Karl Liebknecht, the German who tried to launch a revolution in 1919, but wound up tortured and shot. A line attributed by Gessen to Leon Trotsky sums it up: ‘Sometimes you end up like Lenin, and other times you end up like Liebknecht.’

The space between the doers and the done for, between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, Lenin and Liebknecht, speaks to the conundrum of action that afflicts each character in this book. They may become epic like Lenin, die trying like Liebknecht, or even fail to get started like the Mensheviks. That is to say, Keith, Sam, and Mark repeatedly face the question: are you a tiger, a lion, a cat, a creature with nine lives that pounces on opportunity with carnal ambition? Or are you busy raising hell on your writing desk—thinking, reading, pontificating, and paralysed by the autumn in your heart?

Like Liebknecht, Isaac Babel was killed before he could finish his ‘life’s work’. In 1940 the NKVD arrested Babel, one of the most brilliant writers of the early twentieth century, took him to the basement of Lubyanka in Moscow, and shot him. ‘They didn’t let me finish’ were his last words to his wife. In ‘Isaac Babel’, Gessen’s best chapter, a college-age Keith memorialises Babel’s unjust execution in a drunken speech, which he delivers to other inebriated college students: ‘They didn’t let him finish!’ ‘Don’t let them not let you finish! Finish! Finish while you can!’ Keith yells. ‘My speech made no sense. Everyone cheered.’ In the context of the book’s pervasive ‘anxiety of expiration’, however, the speech makes perfect sense. Each of the young men in the book feels that his freshness could spoil any moment, without warning, long before his idealised future has come to pass. Unlike most young men their age, Keith, Sam, and Mark spend their twenties grasping for an epic—for epic lives, novels, careers, loves—but as they grow older, the potential for realising those romantic epics begins to expire, or so it seems. Unlike Babel, ‘No one would ever arrest me at my house, take me to the basement of Lubyanka, and shoot me in the back of the head,’ Keith knows, and yet he also realises that he may very well expire of his own accord. That, it seems, is an equally terrifying thought. For Babel expiration means real death, but for Keith, it means living death—a life spoiled, curdled, and soured like expired milk.

For Gessen, e-death also symbolises this anxiety about living expiration, albeit in a more light-hearted timbre. Sam realises his Google is shrinking while working a temp job at Fidelity. He understands that the dwindling number of Google hits to his name speaks to ‘a larger failing’, but ‘to see it quantified… to see it numerically confirmed… it was cruel’. Sam had once been able to reconfirm his virile existence through his Google, back in the heady days when he had a book deal to write the great Zionist novel (despite speaking no Hebrew, which to him looks like ‘Tetris pieces’). Having plunged from 300 to 22 hits, Sam’s disappearing Google sends him into a panic. He calls headquarters and lowers his voice: ‘Look,’ he says, ‘My Google is shrinking.’

‘I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do about that, sir. Maybe, if you don’t mind my saying, you need to do something notable. Write something. Start a blog.’

‘Look, I tried that. Don’t you think I tried that? I’m calling because I thought maybe you could shift the algorithm a little.’

‘Oh, no, we couldn’t do that.’

‘You couldn’t just up my count a little until I get back on my feet?’

The man laughed an uneasy laugh. You couldn’t do anything in this country anymore, thought Sam, without someone thinking you were a creep. When the man spoke again it was with a forbidding formality.

‘Sir, there’s nothing we can do. I can only suggest writing more. Distinguishing yourself somehow. Google is a fair search engine.’

‘It’s a search engine run by Jews!’ Sam suddenly cried, a little louder than he’d meant to.

Sam’s phallic Google, Keith’s drunken speech about Babel, and Mark’s ruminations on the difference between Lenin and Liebknecht all speak to an anxiety about the moment when the young literary man faces the prospect of either distinguishing himself or extinguishing himself. In order to achieve the former and avoid the latter, the young literary man must act: the world, after all, will not ‘shift the algorithm’ exclusively for him.

Midway through the book, Keith deems himself as neither ‘a mediocrity’ nor ‘a genius’, explaining that if he tries hard enough, he will be fine, but if not, he will fall through the cracks. It is this ‘above-averageness’ that attracts all three young men to the literary world, a place where even the most qualified aspirants risk drowning—somewhere in the deep end between mediocrity and genius.

III

The title of the book, a play on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s All the Sad Young Men, suggests that Gessen’s book addresses dilemmas similar to those Fitzgerald found compelling, albeit focusing on a different type of young man. We find clear connections between Gessen and Fitzgerald: they both strike something of an ironic tone, they both model stories on themselves, they both concentrate on smart, young men growing up and struggling to get women, and they both effuse a certain undeniable Americana. But for sure, Keith, Sam, and Mark are no Gatsby. Their pretentiousness and pretensions to greatness come not from where or how they summer, not from their rich or powerful parents, not from their success with women, but rather from their intellectual prowess and engagement—from the spectacles on their noses and the autumn in their hearts. They are literary men: they are overeducated and overambitious; they drop Heidegger and Foucault; they are Jewish, secular; and they masturbate, watch pornography, and poke fun at Zionism. That is to say, if Gessen’s characters come from a lineage in literary history, they hardly descend from the Jay Gatsbys of American fiction, despite the referential title. They come, more probably, from the Nathan Zuckermans.

Philip Roth once said that Zuckerman, like Babel’s young protagonist, had ‘spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart’ but also ‘blood in his penis’. The same goes for Gessen’s young men. While Keith, Mark, and Sam pump autumn through their hearts, they also pump a trademark Rothian ‘blood in the penis’: much like Zuckerman, they exhibit a sexualised young man’s hysteria, a preoccupation with sex and self-satisfaction of many kinds, and, it almost goes without saying, pervasive angst that knows itself to be overblown—anxiety of influence, of action, of age. We find Roth’s trademark low-comedy hysterics and anxious use of autobiography deeply ingrained in Gessen’s prose.

Like many young authors who have come out from under Roth’s defiled hanky, Gessen charms his reader with a capacity to navigate handily between Google and Hegel, Lewinsky and Kerensky, fellatio and Holocaust revisionism, all without missing a beat. This ‘low-comedy, highbrow’ humour may be part of ‘a real bourgeois genre’, as one of Gessen’s characters says of her sex column writing, but it is also an inappropriateness appropriate to convey much of modern Americana. The humorous mix of the ‘literary’ and the ‘low-brow’, perfected by Gessen and his contemporaries, seems the logical extension of Roth, the man who brought masturbation to the American canon with Portnoy’s Complaint.

But this raises a pressing question that hovers over Gessen’s debut. Will this sort of book—couched in cultural specificities and highbrow gutter humour, and bedecked with photos of Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton—last? Gessen’s profile suggests that, much like his characters, he hopes to produce something lasting and meaningful (after all, he invokes Babel and Fitzgerald, contributes to The New Yorker, and edits a promising new intellectual journal). But one would be right to suggest that despite Gessen’s pedigree, his undeniable talent as a author, and his book’s serious value, his references to The Antiques Roadshow and Britney (no surname required) might expire just like his characters’ ambitions, requiring lengthy footnotes for our children to understand. Where Gessen ultimately will fall on the scatter gram between mediocrity and genius will depend very much on his next book—a bona fide novel, we can hope—which given the talent established in All the Sad Young Literary Men, seems poised to strike a higher pitch. If, in fact, that is what Gessen wants.

This is not to say that Gessen’s method of humour and culture-specific context strip All the Sad Young Literary Men entirely of durable literary merit. His blending of desperation and comedy, his reworking of the traditional Bildungsroman’s themes, his flouting of the archetypes of novelistic form, and his sometimes-shrieking, sometimes-saddening candour make this a book to read and remember. Most striking, perhaps, is Gessen’s autobiographical refashioning. He narrates Keith in the first person (they hardly share a forename by coincidence), and Sam and Mark appear in third person, though often through a similar memoirist’s voice. This makes for the book’s coup de grace: Gessen applies the accoutrements of a time-specific, self-reflexive memoir to the timeless phenomenon of spectacled, autumn-hearted young men.

A critic once called Fitzgerald’s writing ‘a continuous exercise of the autobiographical impulse’, designed to depict ‘a social character, a national type that fascinated and repelled him’. So too did Roth use his autobiography as an aestheticised, all-access pass to a national ‘type’. And readers consistently equate the bespectacled young boy with Babel himself, because like his epigones, Babel manipulated his autobiography in the name of a marginalised everyman (or ‘everyboy’ as it were). Gessen, who like Roth combines autobiographical refashioning with humour and hysteria, keenly picks up on this tradition, and though he is hardly a Roth, Babel, or Fitzgerald yet, he commands us to wait and see. Such expectations will reify for Gessen the pressure experienced by his characters, imploring him to find a way to re-don his spectacles, and raise even more impressive hell on his auspicious writing desk for next time.

Paul Sonne is reading for an MPhil in Russian and East European studies at New College, Oxford. He is editor-in-chief of The Oxonian Review of Books.

Paul Sonne

Orlando Figes
The Whisperers: Private Life of Stalin’s Russia
Allen Lane, 2007
740 pages
£25
ISBN 978-0713997026

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Nikita Khrushchev’s shocking ‘secret speech’, delivered to the Twentieth Party Congress of the Soviet Union in 1956, denounced the cult of personality surrounding Josef Stalin and the terror that defined Stalin’s reign.  Though Khrushchev had participated in the terrors of the Stalin era with enthusiasm, he sought to make a break with the past.  Local officials soon bludgeoned statues of Stalin across Russia, because in the eyes of Khrushchev, Stalin was no longer to be revered.

That same year, the Soviet writer Konstantin Simonov, an ardent communist who had become the darling of Stalin’s court, composed a poem:

The editor can ask to cut away
The name of Stalin from my verse,
But he cannot help me
With the Stalin who is left within my soul.

Though Khrushchev removed Stalin’s corpse from display on Red Square, he could hardly exhume the Stalin that had violently wormed its way into the psyche of Soviet citizens. Orlando Figes’s The Whisperers, a book that synthesises thousands of personal stories from the Stalin era, does just that: it exhumes Stalin from the dirt of his subjects’ memories, and in doing so, constructs an agonising ‘history from below’ of Stalin’s fierce ‘revolution from above’.

The subtitle of The Whisperers—‘private life in Stalin’s Russia’—is deceiving.  The Whisperers implicitly questions the existence of private life under a regime that invaded the private lives of its citizens with a manipulative ferocity unprecedented in modern history.  Through a vast patchwork of personal diaries and oral histories, the book deftly crawls through the lives of those who toiled at once helplessly and opportunistically under Stalin, and it depicts hopeless attempts to maintain private lives in a place where the private had become the strict domain of the state.  The story that results is harrowing.  Families grope their way to their own demise; desperate men betray others to save themselves.  The morally-upright struggle to keep their heads down, while the morally-compromised mark the heads of their compatriots for attack.

From 1924 to 1953, Stalin’s ‘revolution from above’ overturned Russian society with the goal of extracting the Soviet Union’s enemy elements in order to build the socialist future.  Stalin waged an unbridled campaign to convert a largely illiterate and war-ravaged Russia into an industrialised and communised Soviet society.  Terror, coercion and illogical idealism greased the wheels of progress at every juncture.

The facts of the Stalin era astonish and stupefy.  In order to eradicate the peasant elite (known as kulaks) and create collective farms, Stalin deported or killed almost 2 million peasants between 1929 and 1932.  Though estimates vary, roughly 14.5 million peasants died between 1930 and 1937 as a result of Stalin’s collectivisation-dekulakisation campaigns and the resulting famine.  The 1937-38 Great Terror, Stalin’s purge of enemies of the people and high-powered Communist Party members, claimed the lives of about 1 million people, and hundreds of thousands more were sent to the Gulag.  Three years after the Great Terror, in 1941, the Nazis invaded Russia and the USSR entered World War II.  Between civilian and military deaths, the Soviet Union lost about 13 per cent of its population, with an estimated 24 million dead.  In the years after the war, between 1949 and 1953, Stalin launched a rampage against so-called rootless cosmopolitans, a euphemism for Soviet Jews.  Only after Stalin’s death in 1953 and Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ in 1956 did the despotism begin to recede.

The numbers convey the plot, but they hardly tell the story.  The story, as it were, germinates in the memories of those who lived under Stalin’s regime.  During the Soviet era these memories were frozen, with individuals locking away their personal histories for years, refusing to re-traumatise themselves or fearing a return of despotism whereby a spoilt biography could cause serious danger.  With the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, those memories re-emerged in a new time, and stories that Stalin’s subjects had internalised began to thaw, trickling out of storage as the Cold War unfroze.  As Figes himself says, the early 1990s became the ‘heyday of oral history’, and The Whisperers is the product of that heyday.  With newly available documents and oral histories as his tools, Figes functions as a careful ‘contextualiser’, weaving his way in and out of an array of lives, using some as one-time examples of a particular phenomenon and others as reappearing narratives that illustrate a chronological transformation through the years.  By clumping together hundreds of stories en masse, Figes runs the risk of making them as dispassionate as statistics.  Despite this risk, he still manages to formulate an aesthetic masterwork of memoir synthesis.  What emerges is just what he had wanted: stories that ‘read as variations of a common history—of the Stalinism that marked the life of every family.’

I

In his 1840 novel Hero of Our Time, Mikhail Lermontov wrote the story of Pechorin, a Russian anti-hero sufficiently void of moral conscience, who uses his bravado and cunning to conquer the hearts of women and wiggle his way to ephemeral triumph.  Pechorin is hardly a noble hero, but neither is he expressly a villain either.  Lermontov’s readership expressed dismay about Pechorin’s amoral anti-heroism, and Lermontov responded in his Author’s Introduction:

A Hero of Our Time, gentlemen, is indeed a portrait, but not of a single individual; it is a portrait composed of all the vices of our generation in the fullness of their development. … If you have admired fictions far more frightful and hideous, why does this character, even as fiction, find no quarter with you? Is it not, perchance, because there is more truth in this character than you would desire there to be?

In short, Lermontov asks his nineteenth-century Russian readership: is there not perhaps a little bit of Pechorin in each of you?  Is Pechorin not the symptom of Russia’s universal societal disease?

In The Whisperers, the writer Konstantin Simonov plays the ‘red’ Pechorin.  By following Simonov’s life from start to finish, Figes offers the portrait of an everyday anti-hero who manipulates his own morality to succeed in making a career for himself under Stalin.  Indeed, Simonov ascended to great heights of literary fame, first as a correspondent on the front during World War II, then as secretary of the Soviet Writers’ Union, and later as an influential editor.  Interspersed among the pages of The Whisperers, Simonov’s nasty Soviet künstlerroman details one man’s lust for professional success in a political and ideological climate that asked him to make serious moral compromises.  The systematic unfeeling aggressiveness with which Simonov pursues his career indicts the Soviet system but simultaneously suggests that perhaps there was, indeed, a little bit of Simonov in every Soviet subject who wished to succeed.  As Simonov struggles to make a name for himself under Stalinism, he hews close to a prototype of the ‘successful’ Homo Sovieticus—and the emergence of Simonov’s professional advancement calls into question what exactly ‘success’ meant in the Stalin years.  More importantly, Simonov’s coming-of-age story brings to life the machinations of a particular species: the hero of Stalin’s time.

With a Western literature dominated by the voices of courageous dissidents and heroes alike, Figes’s choice to assign a leading role to Simonov—a man fundamentally lacking in courage—is to be commended.  Simonov was not a daring dissident like Andrei Sakharov, nor was he an unabashed monster like NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov or like Stalin himself. Like thousands of opportunistic and talented young Soviets during the Stalin era, Simonov operated in an obfuscated grey area that tempted him to reconfigure good and bad, always looking out for himself while claiming to be looking out for the Soviet system.  He is a properly tainted lens through which to view a morally amorphous time, and like Pechorin, he represents aspects of a species not uncommon during his age.

Simonov was exactly what an emerging writer had to be in order to succeed as an artist in the Stalin era: not too good, not too bad, but most of all, willing to compromise.  With aristocratic roots, Simonov was born with a classic ‘spoiled biography’, the kind that should have ensured him a miserable life of constant persecution as a class enemy.  But Simonov undertook great efforts to conceal his biography, enrolling in a school for factory workers to cultivate a ‘proletarian background’, joining the Komsomol and indoctrinating himself in Stalinist Marxism-Leninism.  He exercised what Figes calls ‘a cold and rational capacity to cut people out of his life’ when they threatened his professional advancement, abandoning his wives and children when he felt it necessary to do so.  During the Great Terror, he stepped aside as the authorities denounced his mother’s formerly aristocratic sisters as ‘enemies of the people’.  While reporting on the war, ‘He lost himself in the Stalinist system,’ says Figes, allegedly having sex on a Nazi flag during his years as a war correspondent so as to feel the sensual power of Soviet victory.  After the war, he became an editor.  Though he had married a Jewish woman and fathered a child by her, he readily transformed himself into an anti-Semite on command during Stalin’s post-war campaign against ‘rootless cosmopolitans’.  He denounced Jewish writers, rationalising that he could renege and help the Jews once he attained the power to do so.

Though his conscience periodically troubled him, Simonov never managed to resist the allure of the Stalinist elite, and a system that encouraged his actions constantly provided him with the tools to rationalise his choices.  To listen to his conscience would have been to risk a personal and professional downfall.  Moreover, like much of his generation, he believed in Stalinism through and through.  After Stalin died, Simonov gradually changed—conveniently at the same time as popular sentiment about Stalin shifted—and he came to serious realisations about his own past.  Out of feelings of self-loathing and contrition, he cultivated what Figes calls a ‘late repentant liberalism’ and professed remorse about his Stalin years before his death in 1979.  He became more despondent.  ‘He could not deny Stalin any more than he could deny himself,’ Figes says.

Figes befriended Simonov’s son Alexei in the 1990s, and Alexei helped Figes excavate Simonov’s life and those of his relations.  Despite Figes’s friendship with Alexei, the revelations made in The Whisperers provoked Simonov’s family members to seal Simonov’s archive in Russia until 2025.  In the eyes of many descendants and survivors of the Stalin Era, some memories are better left frozen, particularly when they might defrost a chilling complicity.  To be sure, today most Russians know nothing of Simonov’s compromises beyond his celebrated Stalin-era success.  A street that bears his name still exists in Moscow.

II

In a 2005 poll, forty-two per cent of Russians said they would welcome the return of a ‘leader like Stalin,’ and sixty per cent of respondents over the age of sixty wanted a ‘new Stalin’ to lead Russia, the All-Russia Public Opinion Research Centre reported.  Certainly Russian victory in World War II and Stalin’s cult of personality contribute to these responses.  Equally influential, however, is the older generation’s desire to return to an age when ‘their lives were organised and given meaning,’ Figes says.  Yes, they suffered under Stalin, but it was hopeful suffering endured stoically in the name of building the communist future.  For some, life in the 1990s was as bad as it had been under Stalin, however, there was no messianic hopefulness to justify the suffering.

The Soviet regime propagated the general idea that proletarians were to build and perfect Socialism, which would eventually give way to Communism, a heaven-like state of being that would emerge out of hard work and fanatic dedication.  ‘The bright future,’ or svetloe budushchee, to some extent, became a promised payoff much like heaven, but with one marked difference: it was tangible and attainable in the here and now.  The dream became a metaphysics for the masses.

The lingering respect for Stalin today hinges on the way that people rationalized suffering during his reign.  Given that the dream would necessitate immediate suffering and hard work in the short term, people operated under a mentality encapsulated in the expression, ‘One cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs.’  Indeed, this truism echoes throughout the many memoirs in The Whisperers.  People felt as if they were hurtling toward the future.  The government undertook colossal industrial projects like Magnitogorsk and the Belomorkanal, relying on the invisible hand of the secret police rather than the invisible hand of capitalism to drive industrialization.  The idea of the bright future intoxicated Soviet citizens, and it allowed both Stalinists and their victims to justify the unjustifiable.  Everyone was to be on board.  ‘A man who knew that you cannot build the present out of the bricks of the future was bound to resign himself beforehand to his inevitable doom and the prospect of the firing squad,’ wrote Nadezhda Mandelstam.

A fierce hypnotised illogic reigned.  A girl named Marksena—named in memory of Marx and Engels—watched her loyal Bolshevik parents carted off and shot by the regime.  An artist whose husband died in the purges specialised in portraits of Stalin, painting the image of her husband’s murderer over and over again.  Parents deemed class enemies would convince their children to denounce them publicly so as to avoid prejudice.  Figes brings these everyday paradoxes of Stalin’s rule to light.  Pervasive asymmetric information and a bogus press allowed people to construe the tragedies occurring around them as isolated incidents.  It was nearly impossible for a person to know that the arrest of his neighbour in Lvov was connected to a whole string of arrests, including that of another person’s neighbour eleven time zones away in Vladivostok.  The lack of information persisted.  Some realised that their parents had been shot during the purges only after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.  A Soviet breed of stoicism became a method of coping.  As one woman said, ‘To this day I cannot weep.  In Stalin’s time people did not cry’.

Reading the memoirs collected by Figes, one gradually realises the extent to which the simple ‘breaking of eggs’ engendered a massive breaking at the very roots of Soviet society that shaped the popular psyche for generations after Stalin’s death.  Stalin created a whole nation of dutiful tattletales, and this induced people to break ties with anyone considered a potential informant—by the end of World War II, everyone was broken.  Even complicit conspirators in the Stalinist enterprise could consider themselves victims of the epoch, because indeed, almost everyone was victimised.

As Stalin crushed society, different pieces shattered in different ways.  Contemporary Western historians have taken up the study of ‘Soviet subjectivity’, which theorises the ways that Soviet subjects reacted to the psychological stimuli of the Soviet enterprise.  Stalin’s Kremlin was not simply a strong-willed military junta with a thirst for power: his regime propagated a particular ideology with the expectation of mass epiphany.  The ‘revolution from above’ sought to overturn people’s inner selves, to recalibrate their moral compasses, to empower them through a new set of beliefs that could justify everyday toils and seeming ethical compromises.  It was a strict re-education camp.  The Soviet subject was ‘produced by power rather than repressed by it,’ write historians Christina Kiaer and Eric Naiman.  The Soviet agenda, particularly under Stalin, did not simply overturn the system, it overturned the individual psyche, and each Soviet citizen internalised Stalin’s ‘revolution from above’ by cultivating or rejecting a personal revolution within.  Where one person became a defector, another became an ardent Stalinist, another a dispassionate camp guard at Kolyma, and still another a closet non-believer who still registered for Party membership just to reap rewards.  This is why Figes says, ‘The Whisperers is not about Stalin, although his presence is felt on every page.’  The individual subject’s Sovietisation was subjective, and Figes’s book carves out the story of this ‘Soviet subjectivity’ in relief.

III

Dating back to the time of the tsars, a current in Russian thought has attached great importance to the idea that Russians are ‘destined’ for a different path.  Under Stalin, this feeling of specialness and otherness—the idea that the Soviet Union was blazing a never-before realised path toward a new egalitarian world order—fuelled unthinkable capacities for evil and misjudgement.  Stalinism indeed achieved what history had never achieved before, but not in the way that the young intoxicated idealists of the era had expected.

In order to help answer a fundamental question that looms large throughout The Whisperers—namely, how this all happened—highlighting the exceptionality of Stalinism seems crucial. Granted, the instruments of Stalin’s terror were not altogether new, nor were the types of evils perpetrated.  The crimes of Stalinism grew out of the unfortunately common human propensity to succumb to what Hannah Arendt calls the ‘banality of evil’.  Nevertheless, the Soviet Union under Stalin was not simply a variation on a theme.

In Power of the Powerless, the Czech dissident and former president Vaclav Havel likens communist ideology to a ‘low-rent home’, a metaphysics that allowed people to eradicate all ‘mysteries, unanswered questions’ and ‘anxiety’.  ‘One pays dearly for this low-rent home: the price is abdication of one’s own reason, conscience, and responsibility, for an essential aspect of this ideology is the consignment of reason to a higher authority,’ he says.  The power of the bright future dulled the sharpness of evil.  The Soviet social contract was one in which citizens agreed to let the regime do the thinking for them.  As a result, the phenomenon of Stalinism resulted not simply from the confluence of circumstantial forces, but also from a never-before realised capacity for systematic psychological exploitation.  The system rewarded a man for bringing about the ruin of his neighbour, and many were forced to do so to save their own lives.  In Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt argues that it is ‘the development of this device to its farthest and most fantastic extremes’ that makes the Bolshevik system something ‘which we have never seen before and which events or catastrophes alone would hardly have brought about.’  In this sense, to confine Stalinism to the realm of ‘variations on the theme of dictatorship’ would be to refute, as it were, the striking preternatural nature of the stories relived in Figes’s book.

People living under Stalin knew they were not living ‘normal’ lives, says historian Sheila Fitzpatrick.  While every generation in every epoch and locale conceives of itself as living the crucially diverging present of a textbook linear past, the generation that lived under Stalin perhaps could levy the most rightful claim to that distinction.  Yet, for as anomalous as the Stalin period was, people somehow adapted.  The question, then, is how one of the most ‘historically divergent’ epochs in modern history becomes ‘life as you know it’, that is, how people come to accept Stalinism as their everyday existence.  The Whisperers does not answer this question explicitly, but it does reveal the psychology of a nation under the duress of that transformation.  In the process, many people lost a proper basis of comparison for what was normal, and this corrupted the entire societal model.

The Stalin era, or perhaps the whole Soviet era, might best be viewed as a rupture, particularly when thinking about how to cope with its legacy.  The Stalinist system violently reconfigured normal horizontal relationships into a forced vertical relationship.  Experts continue to explore how a combination of time and new governmental systems might recalibrate Russia in a way that will lead to a healthier relationship between state and subject.  Some believe it is impossible; others believe it is unnecessary; still others believe Stalin got it right.  Regardless of today’s prescriptions for the ailments of Stalinism’s lasting disease, what the stories of The Whisperers make clear is that Stalin’s time is a time worth remembering.  It is worth remembering not only as an era of catastrophic loss or sordid power politics, but also as a tragedy of human psychology.  Figes’s compilation of memories gives a voice to that tragedy.

Paul Sonne is an MPhil student in Russian and East European studies at New College, Oxford. He is the Senior Non-Fiction Editor of the Oxonian Review of Books.