Historian Orlando Figes has written a new book about life in Stalin’s Soviet Union entitled “The Whisperers”, which will be published next month.
Here are a pair of book reviews that offer high praise for the book but also capture the sense of dread and terror that they say infuse the book: a review from Alexander Cockburn at Counterpunch.com, and one from the most recent issue of The Economist. Each review focuses on a different figure featured in the book, and in doing so the pair of reviews do a good job characterizing the scope of the story as it applied to different segments of Soviet society.
Sounds like a worthwhile, if depressing, effort to read. Not for the light reader (700+ pages) by any means.
