The Whisperer in the Jungle

A man with money, tenure and an embarrassment of literary and academic prizes, still young and almost good-looking—by the standards of academia—whose books have been translated into more than twenty languages and whose equally accomplished wife is resolutely by his side (she would be ready to take the bullet for him in the second-last act), initiates what should be his own swift downfall. The man’s moral incontinence and the jealousy he feels for his peers (who, if anything, are trailing behind him in this imaginary race that never lets him rest), together with the illusion of safe anonymity that the internet provides for those not inclined to concern themselves with its basic mechanics, provoke him to go on a rampage of sorts. His instruments are blunt; the turns of phrase he uses to savage his peers would be shameful for most, let alone for a man who holds himself in forbiddingly high regard (and no, not without reason) as a writer. In some other time, his self-addressed evocation of intellectual immortality on Amazon.com—‘I hope he writes forever’—would have haunted him for what would feel like forever.

But not in our merciful day and age. Instead the man sends his supercharged lawyer out on a quick reconnaissance mission, and when that fails he puts his wife forward (or let’s say she willingly goes forward, best not to assume too much here), and then when that fails he makes his confession (‘Yes, it was me’) and blames his behaviour on the latent powers of Stalin, the all-powerful antihero of his latest work, diagnosing himself with vicarious trauma by osmosis. Not even six months later, with unspecified damages paid out and a few months of ‘sick leave’ allowing the man to momentarily excuse himself from the spotlight, he hits back with another book, a book that makes enough people in the right places remember he is ‘one of the finest historians of our age’, until the whole humiliating ‘incident’ begins to feel like a slip-up, a regrettable lapse of conduct and judgement, the kind of thing that could, at a stretch, happen to the best of us …

The first and only time I saw British historian Orlando Figes in person was at the Melbourne Writers Festival in 2008. He was in town to promote The Whisperers, his just-released and already much lauded big book on people’s private lives under Stalin. Wisely, the festival organisers paired him with Robert Dessaix, Australia’s most accomplished Russophile. A writer I admired (Dessaix) in conversation with a historian I was intent on liking (Figes): this had to be good. I dragged along a friend of mine, a Russian Jew like me, too familiar with Figes’s subject matter not to be sceptical about the value of going along but prepared to be worn down by my protestations. ‘It will be worth it,’ I promised, basing my certainty on—what? I cannot tell you now. But I must have been sufficiently convincing, or excited, or desperate for her company. Melbourne is a place where you notice well-dressed people, and that afternoon a disproportionate number of them were seated inside the Capitol Theatre on Swanston Street, which was as close to full as I had ever seen it. Not far from us a man in his seventies wore a bow tie, a reminder that it was still possible to feel a sense of occasion at a writers festival, no matter if they are as commonplace now as sales at struggling department stores. And there was, I had to admit, something deeply appealing about the idea of looking at a stage with two men on it—two middle-aged men without dancing shoes, with no swaying back-up singers, with not a baton between them—and feeling yourself ready to be blown away.

Up on that Capitol Theatre stage, too big and well lit for a conversation, the youthful-looking professor of history sat like a man who did not expect to get even remotely uncomfortable, leaning back in his chair with his legs crossed leisurely, well beneath the knees, as if they’d need never go hard and flat on the floor in search of firmer ground. Next to Figes, Dessaix seemed barely to occupy a third of his chair. There was an alertness about Dessaix, an axis of concentration connecting his eyes to his body, as if he knew deep down that every public event, however well groomed, has a kernel of chaos inside it and he was ready for chaos, looking forward to it even. I closed my eyes, not wanting my mind to be distracted by Figes’s maestro pose, wanting only to listen. But the voice—so clearly habituated to hearing itself in a room of awestruck silence—that voice was equally disconcerting.

On a small table beside Orlando Figes was what looked like a glass of white wine. (My memory, most likely unfairly, omits a picture of a similar glass by the side of Robert Dessaix.) Maybe it wasn’t wine, but the glass certainly looked the part, and in the course of that afternoon session Orlando Figes would bring it slowly to his lips, appearing to savour its contents, and I’d feel—virtually every time this happened—a small stabbing in my heart. Figes was talking about a book he’d based on the life stories of five hundred Soviet families who had endured a monster of a century. Yet he had the air of the star guest at a dinner party, and I could see no sign of a man, not on that stage at least, whose soul was aching for the country he had spent decades thinking and writing about or for the people who had let him deep into their hearts and homes, into all that was devastating, heroic and unspoken in their family histories.

After ten minutes I reached out and put my hand on my friend’s hand. I was afraid to look her in the face.

My friend and I, just by virtue of having been born in the Soviet Union, knew that the sweeping statements being hurled with overwhelming certainty from that stage were crude, conveniently mangled and phrased cheaply for effect, but it was something else that made us ill, a question. How could a person write a book about this kind of history and not have his heart even a little bit broken? Dostoyevsky’s ‘the soul of another is a dark forest’ is a warning not to assign any facile transparency to the interior lives of others, and it is a warning I have always taken to heart, but that does not stop me remembering clearly what I saw that afternoon—Orlando Figes talking about the people whose lives he’d described in The Whisperers not as fellow human beings remarkable and heartbreaking for what they had witnessed and endured, but as curious creatures exhibiting fascinating behaviours under freakish socio-historical conditions. The book itself, whatever its flaws, does not have that anthropological tone. Yet the man, more naked on that stage than he imagined himself to be, showed no deep species affinity for his subjects. I struggle for the word to describe this Figesian quality, and if arrogance is indeed the word, then it is the sort of arrogance that extended well beyond the subject matter, well beyond Robert Dessaix (every bit Figes’s equal) and that Capitol Theatre audience. It extended to the practice of history-writing itself.

There was something uncontained about this arrogance, something that could not be kept in check, a compulsion to show off that was adolescent in its thrusting look-at-me-ness quality and decidedly unprofessorial. ‘Zhenya,’ he said, when conversation turned to the much admired writer Evgenia Semyonovna Ginzburg, survivor of eighteen Gulag years, half a century Figes’s senior and dead three decades. In Russian, you use formal first names and patronymics when speaking of adults with whom you do not have a close personal relationship, particularly if they are older or deceased, especially if they happen to be a distinguished public figure such as Evgenia Semyonovna Ginzburg. Yet Figes called her Zhenya—informal, familiar Zhenya—as if he were an intimate of any Soviet intellectual of his choosing, dead or alive. People in the audience were, on the whole, unfamiliar with Russian language conventions. But when I turned to look at my friend, there was a flame in her eyes.

Towards the end of that session, Orlando Figes mentioned the all-night conversations he’d had in Russia—the kind of conversations you never get to have anywhere else. It was a moment of humility and tenderness. He took it back almost instantly, throwing in at the very end: ‘Maybe it’s all the vodka.’

The audience laughed. My friend stared at the floor.

‘Well,’ said Robert Dessaix, ‘I don’t drink. And I have never had conversations like that anywhere else.’

Do you want to know what my problem is?

We have created a monster—and there are many more out there with no shortage of chairs from which to hold forth in public and no shortage of publics ready to drink in every word. The man who had it in him cowardly to attack, bully, threaten and then hide behind others, pushed not by desperation or personal misfortune but by some kind of existential greed, was already there on that Melbourne stage a year and a half before the scandal broke. He was there fully formed, that anonymous reviewer who would haplessly, as if by half a fig leaf, cover his identity with the pseudonym ‘Historian’ and then rip into the books of his peers, or his direct competitors, if you do indeed accept the premise that public intellectuals think of their subjects the way drug dealers think of their street corners:

Robert Service, history professor at the University of Oxford: ‘Awful … curiously dull.’

Rachel Polonsky, who a few years before had unfavourably reviewed one of Figes’s earlier works: ‘The sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever published.’

Kate Summerscale, winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction (for which The Whisperers was short-listed): ‘Oh dear, what on earth were the judges thinking?’

Orlando Figes, history professor at Birkbeck College, University of London: ‘Leaves the reader awed, humbled yet uplifted … A gift to us all.’

Ever since the story (the scandal, the row, the controversy) spilled forth in April 2010, these words have proved irresistible, to the British media in particular. They have been printed and reprinted countless times. I feel no hesitation in repeating them here once more. Let them stand. Let them be read more times still.

I am digging this story up again because to this day it feels large to me, not merely the incongruous straying of an academic at the peak of his powers but more like a sweeping epic befitting the Russian nineteenth-century literary tradition that Figes sought to capture in Natasha’s Dance, the book that preceded The Whisperers. (Was the humourless arrogance of that earlier book’s subtitle—A Cultural History of Russia—a warning of things to come?) I am digging this story up because I think it is a different story to the one that’s been told so far. What happened, after all, is not the intellectual world’s equivalent of screwing someone in a cupboard at a boozy Christmas party. I refuse to think of this as a trivial story about intellectual arrogance and technological ignorance, about a cutthroat world of academic rivalry in which the smaller the stakes—and the stakes, as famously noted, are mightily small—the more frenetic the bloodlust. Nor, it strikes me, is this merely a tale of the internet unleashing the behind-the-back savagery that the print media’s ban on anonymous reviewers has traditionally kept in check, although the laying bare of what Norman Lebrecht calls ‘the shady pseudonymous culture of Amazon reviews’ is surely one indisputable good to come out of this story.

No, my feeling is that in front of us is a much bigger story, one symptomatic of a particular kind of public culture that is able to absorb certain transgressions but not others, a culture that has a bigger problem with the stain on Monica Lewinsky’s dress—such is this culture’s fixation on the thousand variations of sexual impropriety—than with, say, the ostentatious abuse of intellectual power. It is a culture that is forgiving, indeed encouraging in some of its quarters, of a certain intellectual psychopathology notable for its indifference to three key human emotions: empathy, shame and remorse. (In the case of Figes, it was not shame or remorse that paved the way for his post-Amazon rehabilitation but Financial Dynamics, a public relations firm he hired.) In his 2008 article ‘The Disadvantages of an Elite Education’, William Deresiewicz notes an implicit acceptance by universities of the Anglophone world of an equation that says intellectual worth equals moral impeccability—an equation unlikely to have eluded Figes, with his double first-class degree from Cambridge and his diagnosable God-like aspirations.

One of the great errors of an elite education, then, is that it teaches you to think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense. They’re not.

They’re not. Except, somehow, this substitution of ‘intellectual’ for ‘moral’ has become so common as to appear utterly unremarkable. How else could the university professor who didn’t get away with it magically get away with it—and not be compelled to serve time in exile from his readers, his peers, his students? How else could it seem perfectly acceptable for a man to behave shamefully yet to feel no shame?

Sick leave is about ducking and regrouping, not shame.

In an email circulated among colleagues, and written before Figes’s ‘Yes, it was me’ confession, Robert Service observed the bitter irony of someone (he and Rachel Polonsky were pretty sure it was Figes, but in no position to say so explicitly) engaging in the practice of anonymous denunciations when anonymous denunciations were a ubiquitous part of life under Stalin. The Whisperers has quite a lot to say on the culture ‘of mutual surveillance and denunciation’, which, while not entirely a Soviet invention, was certainly at the beating heart of the Stalinist world. Figes describes a ‘mad scramble for denunciations’. ‘In the climate of universal fear,’ he writes, ‘people rushed to denounce others before they were denounced by them.’ For the anonymous denouncer, nothing was at stake; for the denounced, everything. Countless families were destroyed.

Stalin died. People began returning from the camps. They encountered—sometimes deliberately, often by chance—the individuals who’d denounced them. Figes quotes the famous words of the poet Anna Akhmatova: ‘Now those who have been arrested will return, and two Russias will look each other in the eye—the Russia that sent people to the camps, and the Russia that was sent to the camps.’

A remarkable characteristic of these two Russias was the forgiveness many people showed towards those who had denounced or informed on them. Figes recalls the historian Irina Sherbakova’s story of a woman, a survivor of the camps, pointing out in the crowd, with not a hint of hatred or contempt, the informer who’d sent her there. Sherbakova quizzed the woman. The woman replied with a quiet, detailed account of how the man must have become an informer: the sequence of fateful events, the virtual inevitability of it all, the repression of members of his own family, the fear.

Such forgiveness was predicated not on religiosity or some particularly stubborn strand of morality, but on the realisation that what happened in that country was a tragedy shared by all decent, thinking people—not only the repressed but also those who were made into the instruments of repression. One way or another (and no, not all ways are equal) everyone was broken, violated, diminished. This is not an argument for moral equivalence. There is, indeed, no moral equivalence. What there is, though, is a shared, comprehensive tragedy—a moral catastrophe that no-one chose and everyone had to face. Lest one is tempted to moralise, especially from the vantage point of today, here is Nadezhda Mandelstam, and there lived few more uncompromising witnesses of Soviet totalitarianism than she:

If any brave young fellow with no experience of these things feels inclined to laugh at me, I invite him back into the era we lived through, and I guarantee that he will need to taste only a hundredth part of what we endured to wake up in the night in a cold sweat, ready to do anything to save his skin the next morning.

The Soviet experience teaches us that fear—total, long-term (twenty-nine years of Stalin, seventy years of ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’) and institutionalised fear—can indeed create the necessary conditions for a society in which most of the people, at least some of the time, feel compelled to behave as if they are in a jungle. How, then, should we regard the prominent historian of this precise experience who attempts to re-create a version of that jungle in the cosy confines of the British public sphere, ostensibly to sell more of his books? A rhetorical question, you understand.

On a visit to the Moscow branch of the Memorial human rights and historical society a few years ago, I asked about The Whisperers and its author, knowing—and this is something Figes acknowledges readily and with suitable gratitude—that a team of Memorial historians had carried out the bulk of the book’s research. It was a straight question and I got a straight answer: ‘The man is the biggest self-promoter we’ve ever met.’ It made sense that the people at Memorial would think impolite thoughts about the eminent populariser of Soviet history. They come from a research tradition antithetical to the culture of self-promotion. Their work—preserving historical documents, collecting oral-history accounts of Stalinism—does not tend to carry their names. It does little, I imagine, for their sense of professional self-importance. Memorial historians go about their business with the urgency of military field surgeons, knowing all the while that the current Russian government is on a mission to rehabilitate the Soviet regime (which is doing exceedingly well, thank you) and that without their work all truth and memory in their country would be lost, extinguished, vandalised. They know, too, that the last of the eyewitnesses of Stalinism and the Gulags are dying, and that the clock is ticking madly.

A new book by Orlando Figes, Crimea: The Last Crusade, came out in October last year. Considerable enthusiasm greeted its publication. Particularly instructive was the hurried footwork of the book’s reviewers. Clearly the author’s moment of self-promoting madness had to be mentioned, but the sooner it could be put to bed (usually in the first paragraph) the better. Virtually every reference to his ‘foolish errors’ (Figes’s words) had the feeling of an unpleasant chore the reviewer had to take care of. Not one review carried a single original thought on why a conversation about intellectual integrity may be relevant and worthwhile, especially not now that the toad was on its way to becoming the prince again:

Angus Macqueen, in the Guardian: ‘I have no idea what got into Orlando Figes earlier this year when he started posting anonymous reviews attacking fellow historians while praising his own work. I can only report that this fine writer and ambitious historian is back doing what he does best …’

Anne Applebaum, in the Spectator: ‘First, a disclaimer: this review will not touch upon some recent, odd behaviour of this book’s author, Orlando Figes, because I can’t see that it’s relevant.’

Dominic Sandbrook, in the Telegraph: ‘What was lost amid these absurd antics was the fact that Figes is a first-class historian, as his splendid new book, an epic account of the Crimean War of 1853–56, amply demonstrates.’

Oliver Bullough, in the Independent: ‘In the tsunami of bad publicity that has swamped Orlando Figes this year, it has been easy to forget that he is a star: one of the finest historians of his age.’

If such intelligent and diligent reviewers as these have unanimously signed up to the game of disassociation between Figes the Leading Historian (whose books you review in serious broadsheets) and Figes the Flawed Man (whose behaviour you have fun with in tabloids), then where and how can we speak of both Figeses together? Where and how, more to the point, can we address the disjuncture between the integrity of our intellectuals and the power—books, tenure, grants, students, media exposure—we let them amass?

The truth is we have been having this conversation for centuries. Orlando Figes, when considered in the long tradition of intellectuals behaving badly, is actually pretty small fry. If anything, his misdemeanours (unless you happen to be Robert Service or Rachel Polonsky) are borderline farcical. Yet still we are none the wiser. No-one (really) knows what to do with you—and not just you, Professor Figes, but all you celebrated writers, artists, scientists (you know who you are); you bullies, cowards, hypocrites and cynical opportunists; you filmmakers who forced your little selves inside other people’s children; you philosophers who abandoned your own children to orphanages; you eminent scholars who proudly headed university departments in book-burning, people-eating dictatorships.

What are our options? To not read your books? To not watch your films? To unlearn your discoveries and remove your paintings from museums? We are impotent, as you know full well. Do we condemn you, publicly shame you, boycott you, excise you, ignore you, send you to re-education camps, burn you like witches on the metaphorical fires, make you wear ‘Traitor’ signs, engage you in Socratic dialogues? If we know our history (twentieth-century totalitarian societies will do), we know all of that’s been tried before.

And so we are impotent twice over.

I know these things come and go, but at the moment, to my delight, my four-year-old son is particularly fond of the fairytale about the fisherman and the little golden fish. Not the way the Brothers Grimm tell it, mind you (the brothers are so very dry), but a magnificent version by Alexander Pushkin on which generations of Russian-speaking children have been raised. A poor fisherman catches, by chance, a little golden fish. In what is a first for the fisherman, the little fish speaks to him, in a human voice, promising him the fulfilment of any wish if he lets her go. True to his nature—unassuming say some, unenterprising say others—the fisherman asks for nothing. He simply throws the fish back in the water. His wife, on learning what happened, scolds him for such idiocy (they are dirt-poor after all and utterly desperate) and sends him back to the sea to ask for a new washtub to replace their broken one.

The old man goes hesitantly, embarrassed. The little golden fish greets him kindly. She tells him not to worry and to go home with a light heart. At home the new washtub is already waiting, just as the little fish promised. Next to it stands the old woman, sour and agitated, more ready than ever before for some speedy wish fulfilment.

That first modest wish gives way to more and more ostentatious demands, delivered without hint of an apology. The old man is no longer the woman’s husband, not in any real sense, but a lowly messenger between her and the little golden fish. With every new request, the little golden fish grows less and less patient. Finally the old woman, having wished for all she can think of, demands to be made Empress of Land and Sea and for the little golden fish to be at her service. A line is crossed, the sea grows stormy and dark, the old fisherman trembles, my son holds his breath … And it all comes crashing down. The little golden fish does not come out of the sea. The old man returns to the old, broken washtub and to his old, ugly wife, who without the accoutrements of wealth and status granted to her by the little golden fish looks even older, even uglier, more disfigured still. (Pushkin, bless him, leaves the story at that, but the Brothers Grimm insert some improbable ‘be grateful for what you have’ tirade from the old man. I bet he just goes and has a quiet drink, mightily relieved.)

‘Why could not she stop?’ begs my son. ‘Why did she have to ask for more? More, more, more.’ My son runs around the room, mocking the old woman. He demands that I tell him why. I look for words to explain greed, that sense of entitlement that some people grow into so quickly, the incontinence that can afflict a human soul. For some reason (and perhaps this is a developmental thing), of all the many lessons imparted by fairytales—do not eat fruit offered by strangers, check your grandmothers carefully for signs of wolf hair, carry breadcrumbs in your pocket at all times—the lesson of greed is the one my son understands most readily. He realises the utter inevitability of the little golden fish closing the shop on the old woman.

We raise children to see the invisible lines that should not be crossed and for hundreds, thousands of years we have been telling stories about these lines, handing down warnings from generation to generation about what happens when we lose our mind and push too hard, want too much, demand and expect without measure, until the little golden fish, once so patient, so eager to listen, wants nothing to do with us any more.

The story of the man who had everything but wanted more still and was implicitly encouraged by the world around him to think that his sense of entitlement was right and justified is about to be forgotten. It is already hollow and old. To tell it anew feels gossipy and gratuitous and like something in bad taste. Yet the man in the tale is not an aberration. He is a logical conclusion of certain forces in our world: of post-moral meritocracy at our academic institutions, of the disappearance of empathy and remorse from public intellectual life, of the way it has become possible to be a professional historian yet learn nothing from history. It is the kind of story we should find a way to pass on with care and seriousness, the story of how he fooled us all—and how we are fooled no more.

© Maria Tumarkin 2011