The Contribution of Orlando Figes to the Oral History
Orlando Figes played a major role in the advancement of oral history of Russia. Oral history is the anthology and examination of historical information regarding individuals, important events, families or daily lives with the use of videotapes, audio tapes and dictation of planned meeting. It strives to see different point of view which are not found on most written sources. The interviews are performed with the people who experienced and participated in certain important events and these are safeguarded for the utilization of future generation.
The Memorial Society is an international civil rights and historical group that functions in several post-Soviet States also known as Former Soviet Union, focuses on the documentation and exposing the Soviet Union’s dictatorial past. Orlando Figes collaborated with this society and collected copious amount of personal family archives from Russian homes. These are diaries, memoirs, photographs, personal papers and work of arts that they found under the mattresses and secret drawers of private homes in Russia. The survivors hide it from the Stalin Terror. All of these documentations and precious research data are kept in the Memorial Society St. Petersburg, Perm and Moscow. He also performed thousands of interviews with the perpetrators and the survivors of Stalinist domination in order to complete the book The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia. This book stands for the major collection of records regarding the private life in the period of Stalin. It highlights the significance of oral testimonies so as to recuperate the chronicles of tyranny in the former Soviet Union. It deals with the internal impact of the said repression unlike other books that have their main focus on the external detail of it. Through The Whisperers he relay the terror that the family experienced, their beliefs and sentiments, moral issues, social identity crisis, and combined recollection. It scrutinizes the effect of the Soviet administration as well. He promotes oral history for the reason that although testimonies are sometimes unreliable, unlike a book, it can be tested and cross examined in contrast to other verification so as to separate genuine memories to make up or imagined ones.
The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia was the important contribution of Orlando Figes in Oral History. Through this book, he relayed the voices of Stalin’s victims with the intention of sharing them to the present and upcoming generation. It will enable them to understand and visualize the past events that shape their history. All in all, this book was full of emotional agony from different families that go through the era of Stalin. According to the book review of the New York Times, his work is an extraordinary one. Through this book, the survivors conquer their long silence and uplift their voices above a whisper.
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