A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

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Makers of their own tragedy". The Independent. 23 October 2011. Archived from the original on 24 May 2022. Gillinson, Miriam (15 February 2023). "The Oyster Problem review – the struggle to save Flaubert from himself". The Guardian. Guy Dammann (14 July 2008). "Interview: Guy Dammann talks to Orlando Figes". The Guardian. London . Retrieved 31 August 2011. In June 2023, he said that Russia "needs to be completely defeated" in the Russo-Ukrainian War, "not just for Ukraine's sake, but for Russia's sake". [50] Plays [ edit ] Bury, Liz (1 October 2013). "David Bowie's top 100 must-read books". Theguardian.com . Retrieved 8 October 2017.

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The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture, New York: Henry Holt and Co. 2019, ISBN 9781627792141 His books have been translated into French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Russian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Estonian, Latvian, Slovenian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Greek, Turkish, Hebrew, Georgian, Korean, Japanese and Chinese.[ "Orlando Figes [Author and Professor of Russian History]". Orlandofiges.com . Retrieved 19 November 2013. ]Just Send Me Word has been translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Polish, Swedish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Finnish, Danish, Japanese, Korean and Chinese. [36] Crimea [ edit ]

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Figes, Orlando (July–August 2011). "Don't Go There: Chasing the dying memories of Soviet trauma". Foreign Policy. Archived from the original on 4 July 2011. Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (1999), co-written with Boris Kolonitskii, analyses the political language, revolutionary songs, visual symbols and historical ideas that animated the revolutionary crowds of 1917. [17] Thus, in its first five years the Revolution brought about the triumph of peasant Russia and at the same time created the party/ state dictatorship which, within a decade, was to ‘liquidate’ peasant Russia by a combination of collectivisation, mass exodus and gulags. By the time Lenin died, Figes believes (with a modicum of exaggeration), ‘the basic institutions, if not all the practices of the Stalinist regime were in place.’ But until these institutions were turned against the peasantry under Stalin, the tragedy of the Russian people in this terrible century could not yet be seriously seen as something that came to its victims from outside and above. a b c "Orlando Figes [Author and Professor of Russian History]". Orlandofiges.com . Retrieved 31 August 2011. The primary weakness of this book is simply arrogance. Figes's accomplishment is enormous, but his apparent delight in that accomplishment outstrips it. He is officious and patronising and often self-aggrandising, and he presents the book's banalities with the air of magnificence that only its real insights deserve. He writes as though his book were definitive.Antonio Delgado Prize (Spain), The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture [61] Luke Harding (15 October 2009). "Russian historian arrested in clampdown on Stalin era". The Guardian.

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Luke Harding in Moscow (7 December 2008). "Russian police raid human rights group's archive |". The Observer. London . Retrieved 31 August 2011. Figes, Orlando (16 December 2013). "Is There One Ukraine?". Foreign Affairs . Retrieved 24 July 2015. Concentration on Russia has also led Figes to neglect the almost immediate global impact of the 1917 Revolution, which is, after all, what was to make it, in his own words, ‘one of the biggest events in the history of the world’. As such it had two faces. The revolution which looked inward transformed Russia. It may well be called the tragedy of a people. The revolution which looked outward became, for better or worse, the central event of 20th-century history. But except perhaps during the Second World War, the tragedy of the Russian people had little to do with the global impact of the October Revolution and the USSR. From 1917 to the present, this has been the bitter paradox of the Russians, the victim-people of our century.

Simon Sebag Montefiore (26 May 2012). "Labour of love". Financial Times. Archived from the original on 11 December 2022 . Retrieved 24 July 2015. Boyd, William (7 September 2019). "The Europeans by Orlando Figes review – the importance of a shared culture". The Guardian . Retrieved 1 October 2019. Figes was given exclusive access to the letters and other parts of the archive, which is also based on interviews with the couple when they were in their nineties, and the archives of the labour camp itself. Figes raised the finance for the transcription of the letters, which are housed in the Memorial Society in Moscow and will become available to researchers in 2013. According to Figes, "Lev's letters are the only major real-time record of daily life in the Gulag that has ever come to light." [32] The misery and cruelty of the Russian peasants is also narrated with skill, and one can feel how painfully and rapidly the idealism of the early revolutionaries gave way to chaos and disaster as the idea of a Communist revolution was conflated with a savage and enraged desire for anarchy. Figes spares no detail of the agony of the revolution. You knew it was a tragedy, but you had no idea how vicious a tragedy it was. There is no attempt here to tell the King Lear story of Nicholas and Alexandra; this is Coriolanus, unbearable and grotesque. Figes has also condemned the arrest by the FSB of historian Mikhail Suprun as part of a "Putinite campaign against freedom of historical research and expression". [48]

Orlando Figes - Springer Orlando Figes - Springer

Translated into more than twenty languages, [25] The Whisperers was described by Andrey Kurkov as "one of the best literary monuments to the Soviet people" [26] In it Figes underlined the importance of oral testimonies for the recovery of the history of repression in the former Soviet Union. While conceding that, "like all memory, the testimony given in an interview is unreliable", he said that oral testimony "can be cross-examined and tested against other evidence". [27] Figes was the historical consultant on the film Anna Karenina (2012), directed by Joe Wright, starring Keira Knightley and Jude Law with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard. [20] He was also credited as the historical consultant on the 2016 BBC War & Peace television series directed by Tom Harper with a screenplay by Andrew Davies. Interviewed by the Sunday Telegraph, Figes defended the series against criticism that it was "too Jane Austen" and "too English". [54] Theatrical adaptations [ edit ] Current RSL Fellows". Royal Society of Literature. Archived from the original on 2 October 2012 . Retrieved 18 March 2014.Russian History". Brill Publishers. Archived from the original on 6 October 2014 . Retrieved 31 August 2011. Timothy Phillips (25 May 2012). "Staying alive with the language of love - Life Style Books - Life & Style - London Evening Standard". The Standard . Retrieved 24 July 2015. A People’s Tragedy shows clearly that the Revolution of 1917, contrary to the fashionable histories which treat it as some kind of putsch, was a revolution of the masses, even though its outcome was to be very different from the one they wanted. It is this nationwide upheaval of the masses which distinguishes the Russian Revolution of 1917 from the French Revolution of 1789. Indeed, in its first five years it was one of the few revolutions, in this or any other century, whose course was determined, in the last analysis, by support or opposition at the grassroots. Figes has no trouble understanding the central fact of 1917: that until October, and for some months after taking over, Lenin and the Bolsheviks had no power, except that based on their ability to win mass support by finding words for what the average worker, peasant and soldier wanted.