Listen to the BBC Radio 4 Archive Hour programmes ‘Stalin’s Silent People’ written and presented by Orlando Figes and first broadcast in October 2007.

Between 2003 and 2006, three teams of researchers from the Memorial Society in St Petersburg, Moscow and Perm recovered several hundred family archives (letters, diaries, personal papers, memoirs, photographs and artefacts) that had been concealed by the survivors of the Stalin Terror in secret drawers and under mattresses in private homes across Russia. In each family extensive interviews were carried out with the oldest relatives, who were able to explain the context of these private documents and relate them to the family’s history. This represents a unique collection of documents and testimony about private life in the Stalin period, reflecting the interior world of ordinary families and individuals.

http://www.orlandofiges.com/soundIndex.php