For his previous four books on Russia, especially A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, Figes has been highly and rightly praised. Here he looks lower and deeper. His subject is not the great sweep of history, but the lives of ordinary people in Russia under Stalin's terrible tyranny. Figes starts with the revolution of 1917 and traces several generations of its victims. For as he says, "the impact of this long reign of terror continued to be felt by many millions of people for many decades after Stalin's death" in 1953. Arguably, it still does today.

The title comes from an idiom of the Stalin years, when everyone whispered - either for fear of being overheard and denounced, or from the clandestine manner of the denouncing. Drawing on hundreds of "letters, diaries, personal papers, memoirs, photographs and artefacts" that have only recently become available, this book is a huge labour of love in search of learning and recompense for loss. But does Figes master his material, or it him? The former, and fabulously.

Figes takes us all over Russia, and to families high, middle and low. He balances those sentenced to the Akmolinsk Labour Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Motherland, for example, against those serving Stalin. It is the heart-rending stuff of a depravity that all but beggars belief. Germany has a process for coming to terms with the past called vergangenheitsbewältigung. With this seminal work, Russia's goes on.

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