I have been a long-standing admirer of Orlando Figes's work. I had read just about everything that was available on the Russian revolution during the Soviet era, including underground samizdat (self-published, ie published illegally in the USSR) and tamizdat (published abroad) publications, yet Figes's thorough, meticulous and powerful A People's Tragedy. The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924 was a revelation to me. After that, his Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia offered too many generalisations and contained some noticeable mistakes, but it made one think, consider and compare differently, which was exciting.

But when I saw his latest book, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia and paged through it in a Cape Town book shop, I thought: "Is there anything here that I do not already know? Is there anything that adds to my understanding of the Stalin era?" There wasn't. Any number of my friends and relatives could tell similar stories, and so could I, and actually the part of Russian political reality described in the book suffered less revision in the post-Stalin Soviet era than many other aspects of Soviet life, so I experienced some aspects of that reaity myself. I thought The Whisperers was obviously designed for the non-Russian reader who would have found details of remote Soviet everyday life exotic, and thus interesting. I decided against buying the book, though a friend gave it me as a birthday present, and I did read it.

I believe that my reaction was probably no different from that of many other Russian readers for whom the Russian translation of the book was designed. So while it is a pity that, for the moment at least, this book will not be published in Russia, the notion of a political conspiracy to prevent its publication seems unlikely.

There are much more straightforward reasons why a Russian publisher would hesitate to publish it at the moment. Stalinists (of whom there are many) do not read academic books of that nature. Anti-Stalinists would not buy it for the reasons for which I didn't, particularly under the present harsh economic circumstances, which have hit book-buying and bookshops particularly hard. For, despite our legendary readers in the Moscow Metro, publishers, newspapers and bookshops are among the first to feel the current economic downturn in Russia.

Figes's book, with its large size and the cost of translation would be far too expensive for an ordinary Russian intellectual's pocket – and, let's face it, far less attractive than many other books on the Stalin era that are already on the shelves of the book shops and which are often much more exciting.

There are, for example, publications of documents from the Stalin era, such as Power and the Creative Intelligentsia (1999) which presents first hand archival documents of the Soviet Communist party and the NKVD – the predecessor of the KGB – on Stalin's cultural policy. There are dozens of such publications. If I were to choose, I would prefer to buy as many of those as I could. For Russians they provide volumes on Stalinism, rather than any number of descriptions of private lives under Stalin: don't we already know how we lived then? Even the younger generation that does not remember would rather hear what their own grannies could tell them about that time, than read about the lives of other people whom they know nothing about.

So, in my view Figes's publishers have made a rational commercial decision in deciding against The Whisperers. Of course the government has been reviving Stalinism. Of course school text books have already been "transformed" to accommodate a "balanced" view of the "great chief of all times and peoples". But Stalin is already so popular that the government has had to intervene, directly or indirectly, to prevent Stalin from becoming "the face of Russia": I cannot otherwise explain how, from leading in the popular vote for all-time "great men" he suddenly dropped to third place at the very last moment.

Russia's present leadership does more than enough to compromise itself. Much as I respect and admire Figes's work, it is a pity that he has reverted to the idea that a conspiracy is stopping his book in Russia. Such speculations will, in Russian eyes, damage his credibility, not that of the government. If one is a professional historian writing on Russia one is supposed to know whether the government of that country would be interested in shelving one's book. It is not. Trying to claim foul play in this case is counter-productive.