Noel Malcolm reviews The Whisperers: Private Life In Stalin's Russia by Orlando Figes.

Here are three stories of ordinary Soviet life in the 1930s.

Aleksandr and Serafima Ozemblovsky, impoverished ex-nobles who farmed with their former peasants in a village in Belarus, were arrested in 1930 and sent into exile 2,000 miles away in the sub-Arctic north. Their crime was being 'kulaks', a term used of any farmers who were hard-working and successful. As people in their penal settlement began to die of hunger, Serafima took her two small daughters and set off back to Belarus, hiding by day and walking at night. When they reached her parents' house, the parents were so terrified that they begged her to give herself up to the police.

She left her daughters and returned to the penal settlement, where she found that her husband had been arrested and taken to a labour camp; she too was arrested, but escaped and rejoined her daughters – after another trek of 2,000 miles.

Ilia and Aleksandra Faivisovich were hairdressers in a small town in the Urals. In 1939 customers reported them to the police for complaining about shortages; they were accused of 'anti-Soviet conspiracy', and sent to labour camps.

Their four-year-old daughter ended up with her maternal grandmother, who told her never to talk about her parents. Every week a letter arrived from the imprisoned Aleksandra to her daughter, and every week the grandmother burnt it without opening it.

A woman called Liza (her family name is unknown), incarcerated on trumped-up charges in 1937, received letters from her beloved daughter, Zoia. One day the letter said: 'Dear Mama, I'm 15 years old now and I'm planning to join the Komsomol [the Communist youth movement: membership was essential for a high-flying career]. I have to know whether you are guilty or not. I keep thinking, how could you have betrayed our Soviet power?'

When she received this, Liza was already on the last page of a letter she was writing to Zoia. She took her pen and wrote: 'Zoia, you are right. I am guilty. Join the Komsomol. This is the last time I am going to write to you. Be happy. Mother.' Then, according to the fellow-prisoner who witnessed this, she gave way to uncontrollable tears and banged her head on the table.

Stories such as these have been told many times in the past; for anyone who wants to learn about human suffering under Stalin, there are classic individual memoirs (Nadezhda Mandelshtam) and authoritative analyses (Robert Conquest on the Great Terror; Anne Applebaum on the Gulags).

But Orlando Figes's new book is not a general history of the Terror. It is both broader than that, covering the whole period between 1917 and the 1950s, and more narrowly focused. Its subject is the nature of ordinary life – above all, the nature of the family under Communist rule.

The early Bolsheviks were not just political revolutionaries: they believed that every aspect of human life would be transformed under Communism, and the traditional family was one of the things that had to go. 'By loving a child, the family turns him into an egotist', complained one Bolshevik theorist; the ABC of Communism (1919) looked forward to a time when parents would no longer use the word 'my' to refer to their children.

To achieve these goals, people were crammed into communal apartments; new blocks were specially designed to enforce communal living, and an old four-bedroom flat might have six families living in it, sharing one kitchen. (There are some fascinating floor-plan diagrams in this book.)

Devoted Communists cared little about creature comforts, and often cared almost as little about their families; the only focus of loyalty was the Party. And a generation of children, in turn, was brought up to idealise the famous Communist boy-martyr, Pavlik Morozov, who denounced his own father to the authorities and was allegedly murdered for doing so.

In the early 1930s, however, the official policy changed, partly because of a worrying fall in the birth-rate, and partly because a new urban middle class was emerging (engineers, technicians, and so on), for which family life still held its old attractions. And in some ways the inefficiency of the Soviet state made family bonds more important: there was so much that could be achieved only through personal favours by friends and relations.

But what proved the fundamental strength of the family, while testing it almost to destruction, was state terror – not just the Great Terror of the late 1930s, but wave after wave of terror against whole sections of the population. 'Kulaks' in the 1920s and 1930s, many ethnic groups in the Second World War, returning PoWs after 1945, and Jews in the anti-Semitic purges of Stalin's final years: all yielded innumerable stories of suffering similar to the three above.

Sometimes, as those stories show, fear of the state trumped family love; sometimes the two worked in a strange kind of synergy, with parents longing to see their children turn into unthinking (and therefore, they hoped, happy) little specimens of homo sovieticus. Those who wanted their children to know something of the truth, meanwhile, were reduced to a lifetime of 'whispering'.

Orlando Figes has performed an astonishing task. He has organised the interviewing of many hundreds of survivors of those years, all over Russia; he has scoured provincial archives, has read a host of published memoirs, and has studied the faded letters and diaries that people have brought out of their hiding-places to show him.

As if that were not enough, he has also woven into the book a larger biographical case-history, of a once-famous writer, Konstantin Simonov, whose own tangled family life and moral compromises with the Soviet regime make him an emblematic figure, a kind of flawed anti-hero, redeemed by his long final years of remorse.

Figes organises his material superbly, and writes with such self-effacing lucidity that these people seem to speak directly to the reader. This is a very important book – authoritative, vivid, precise, and, in places, almost unbearably moving

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