Should we be bothered by a publishing spat in a far away country? In the case of Orlando Figes's book The Whisperers, emphatically yes. It's subtitle is "private life in Stalin's Russia'' and it tells – in numbing detail – what happened to the Russian people under the Great Terror, a tale of barely imaginable horror.
As the writer reports on the Guardian's front page this morning, Russian publication of The Whisperers has just been cancelled, not long after part of the archive from which it is drawn was seized by state prosecutors in St Petersburg. It's bound to cause a fuss – with cudgels drawn on both sides.
Figes interprets these developments, almost certainly correctly, as a further sign that Stalin is being rehabilitated as a great national(ist) leader under what we must still call Vladimir Putin's Russia. As Tom Parfitt reported yesterday, the global financial crisis is putting great strain on the delicate power balance within the Kremlin.
It reflects the wider reinstatement of the "glorious Soviet past" in Russian textbooks: the victory over Hitler promoted, the Terror and the gulag diminished or airbrushed out. Russians who insist that the negative aspects of Soviet history must be acknowledged are accused of collaborating with foreign foes.
I happened to have read The Whisperers over my new year break. Some 740 pages long in my Penguin edition (£10.99), it is very bleak, but hard to put down, the cumulative effect of so many individual stories – families wilfully wrecked, lives brutalised in forced labour camps and destroyed – horribly compelling.
Figes and his army of Russian researchers have been through the archives: totalitarian states can often make good bureaucracies, as if to compensate for the fundamental chaos they unleash. Using oral history techniques, they also spoke to old survivors of the Stalin era, many now dead, many opening their hearts for the first time or learning that really happened to their long-sought parents (shot within weeks). It's that kind of data – stored on CDs – that was confiscated in St Petersburg; about one third of the total, Figes says.
All nations tweak their own history, promoting the positive at the expense of the bad stuff; we do it too, though the strong thread of anti-imperial interpretation of British history in recent decades – an understandable reaction to the jingoistic narrative of the Raj – sometimes goes too far.
The empire's trumpeter Rudyard Kipling may have been, as George Orwell once put it, a "good bad poet" and a defender of many indefensible things. But the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm – in the news this week over his MI5 file — is more respectfully treated on the BBC than his recurring defence of Stalin's record would warrant, as yesterday's Mail was overeager to point out.
To my way of thinking it's not that Tony Blair gave Professor Hobsbawm (now 91) a posh gong, a Companion of Honour, no less, on our behalf in 1998, but that the old boy accepted such a bauble. At least Kipling had the good sense to turn this stuff down, despite many offers. Do we hear the sound of someone having his dialectical cake and eating it?
The point surely is to see the past in the round, warts and all, as Cromwell said. It's never easy. We all have dirty secrets. In our lifetime the postwar west Germans probably cleansed themselves better than anyone. In electing Barack Obama, the Americans have gone some way to expunge their own great stain of slavery.
This is what is at stake in Russia. The fact that so much of what happened after 1917 turned out to be wrong, ruinously wrong on the economy after the abandonment of the NEP (New Economic Policy) mixed economy, for example, is unfortunate. Russia has a deep and wonderful culture (Figes wrote about that too, in Natasha's Dance ), but an unusually tragic history, largely a function of geography with all those open plains.
What was special about Stalin's paranoid reign was that he sought to destroy private life and private feelings – family life – in ways that Hitler never did. I once heard the writer Robert Harris say – after studying both unwholesome rivals – that it was quite safe to have dinner with Hitler, very dangerous to do so with Stalin. You could end up dead.
"You traitor, I'm going to kill you," he would whisper to old colleagues at Kremlin receptions. He meant it. They lived in such terror of him that when he suffered his stroke in 1953 he was left to die over several days because doctors were very suspect at that moment. That'll teach you, Joe.
Worse than that, it wasn't enough to kill enemies, real or (usually) imagined; Stalin's apparatus went after their families. This is the fearsome import of The Whisperers, secrets which millions held close throughout the Terror and long after – rightly fearful that periodic thaws would not last.
Thus a wife who had not denounced her husband as an enemy of the people must therefore be one too. And the children? Send them to orphanages, but never let them forget their "spoiled biographies" as children of such enemies or as aristocrats or kulaks, both pretty elastic definitions.
Such was the climate of fear that men and women married and stayed married (or didn't) without confessing to each other they had "spoiled biographies". Best not to compromise one's spouse or children, who might otherwise never be allowed to go to university once it became known.
A lot of people led comfy enough lives under Stalin (hence the lingering nostaligia), especially the party elite, some of whom lived immensely pampered lives – dachas, chauffeured cars, vast apartments, foreign food and even travel.
One figure who crops up repeatedly in Figes's narrative is the novelist Konstantin Simonov – author of the famous wartime poem Wait for Me – who wept when Stalin died and took 20 years to start coming to terms with his own complicity.
But most people didn't, even though some were grateful and most knew they must ignore whatever they suspected was happening to others, notably to old Bolsheviks who still believed in the ideals of the Revolution. A joke of the period had the secret police knocking on an apartment door at night only to be told: "You've got the wrong door; the communists live upstairs." It is amazing how many people managed to stay sane and decent, albeit at a price.
You get my drift. But it's not just about Russia. Attitudes towards Stalin are also ambiguous in the west. During the war his face on flickering newsreel films prompted cheers in cinemas in working-class areas; "Joe for King" was chalked on British battle tanks, so Stan Orme, a working-class Labour cabinet minister in the 70s, once told me.
That was understandable then, harder to sustain as the only-suspected truth emerged, reinforced in Warsaw, East Berlin, Prague and Budapest over the years when the real iron curtain – not the financial one invoked at last weekend's EU summit – lay across Europe.
"Well, at least Stalin wasn't as bad as Hitler." How many times have we all heard that said – or said it ourselves? For a variety of complicated reasons I still half-believe it. "At least he didn't butcher the Jews." Hey, no, Joe butchered or enslaved everyone, Jews included. Read The Whisperers, now that Russians can't.
Remember, it's nationalism, not nationalisation, that we have to worry about in the economic crisis.
