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

Product Information

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 ] 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] Figes's first three books were on the Russian Revolution and the Civil War. Peasant Russia, Civil War (1989) was a detailed study of the peasantry in the Volga region during the Revolution and the Civil War (1917–21). Using village Soviet archives, Figes emphasised the autonomous nature of the agrarian revolution during 1917–18, showing how it developed according to traditional peasant notions of social justice independently of the Provisional Government, the Bolsheviks or other urban-based parties. [11] He also demonstrated how the function of the rural Soviets was transformed in the course of the Civil War as they were taken over by younger and more literate peasants and migrant townsmen, many of them veterans of the First World War or Red Army soldiers, who became the rural bureaucrats of the emerging Bolshevik regime.

Reviews - JSTOR Reviews - JSTOR

Stanford, Peter (8 October 2017). "Those who complained about War and Peace are 'whingers', says historical advisor Orlando Figes". Telegraph.co.uk . Retrieved 8 October 2017. Figes is known for his works on Russian history, such as A People's Tragedy (1996), Natasha's Dance (2002), The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (2007), Crimea (2010) and Just Send Me Word (2012). A People's Tragedy is a study of the Russian Revolution, and combines social and political history with biographical details in a historical narrative. Figes has also contributed significantly on European history more broadly, notably with his book The Europeans (2019). Figes has been critical of the Vladimir Putin government, in particular alleging that Putin has attempted to rehabilitate Joseph Stalin and impose his own agenda on history-teaching in Russian schools and universities. [45] He is involved in an international summer school for history teachers in Russian universities organised by the European University of St Petersburg. Christiansen, Rupert (15 September 2019). "A ménage a trois that transformed European culture". The Sunday Telegraph. ISSN 0307-1235.

Revolutionary Russia: 1891–1991, is a short introduction to the subject published as part of the relaunch of Pelican Books in the United Kingdom in 2014. [18] In it Figes argues for the need to see the Russian Revolution in a longer time-frame than most historians have allowed. He states that his aim is 'to chart one hundred years of history as a single revolutionary cycle. In this telling the Revolution starts in the nineteenth century (and more specifically in 1891, when the public's reaction to the famine crisis set it for the first time on a collision course with the autocracy) and ends with the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991.' [19] Natasha's Dance and Russian cultural history [ edit ] 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 ] More worryingly, Figes’s errors are often the result of his desire to make a case against the Russian Revolution in general and Lenin in particular. Here, for instance, is a typically dubious piece of research used for polemical purposes. In his Reminiscences of Lenin Maxim Gorky records Lenin saying after listening to Beethoven’s Appassionato: ‘I can’t listen to music often, it affects my nerves, it makes me want to say sweet nothings and pat the heads of people who, living in this filthy hell, can create such beauty. But today we mustn’t pat anyone on the head or we’ll get our hands bitten off; we’ve got to hit them on the heads, hit them without mercy, though in an ideal world we are against doing any violence to people.’ Clearly Lenin is saying that in a dangerous world one is obliged to be hard in spite of one’s instincts. But for Figes this remark proves that ‘Lenin had no place for sentiment in his life,’ and to sustain this interpretation he simply alters the quotation from Gorky so that it reads: ‘It makes me want to say kind, stupid things, and pat the heads of people. But now you have to beat them on the head, beat them without mercy.’ Lenin now looks as if he is simply interested in beating people over the head for the sheer hell of it. Moreover Figes makes this alteration without indicating in the conventional way that he has done so.

Out of the Great Dark Whale · LRB 31 October 1996 Eric Hobsbawm · Out of the Great Dark Whale · LRB 31 October 1996

a b Fox, Killian (3 September 2022). "Orlando Figes: 'Gorbachev was a very sharp and likable person' ". The Guardian (interview) . Retrieved 6 September 2022. Moreover – and this is perhaps one of the most original aspects of the book – Figes argues that the Bolsheviks won, not merely by offering bread, peace and land – until the end of the Civil War, they brought no peace and little enough bread – but because they recognised that the Russian poor also wanted equality and revenge against the burzhooi, a term used as a general form of abuse against anyone who did not look like a peasant, worker or soldier. Social levelling, and not necessarily economic improvement, was what the vast mass of the Russian poor, urban or rural, expected from the Revolution. The very Terror, he argues, which, through the Cheka and its descendants in the Moscow Lubianka, was later to become the regime’s central institution, was not imposed on Russia from the Kremlin. Originally, it ‘erupted from below’.

Figes, Orlando (8 December 2008). "Blog Archive – An open letter to President Medvedev". Index on Censorship. The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia, 2007, ISBN 978-0-8050-7461-1, ISBN 0-8050-7461-9, ISBN 978-0-8050-7461-1, ISBN 0-8050-7461-9 Antonio Delgado Prize (Spain), The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture [61] Crimea: The Last Crusade is a panoramic history of the Crimean War of 1853–56. Drawing extensively from Russian, French and Ottoman as well as British archives, it combines military, diplomatic, political and cultural history, examining how the war left a lasting mark on the national consciousness of Britain, France, Russia and Turkey. Figes sets the war in the context of the Eastern Question, the diplomatic and political problems caused by the decay of the Ottoman Empire. In particular, he emphasises the importance of the religious struggle between Russia as the defender of the Orthodox and France as the protector of the Catholics in the Ottoman Empire. He frames the war within a longer history of religious conflict between Christians and Muslims in the Balkans, southern Russia and the Caucasus that continues to this day. Figes stresses the religious motive of the Tsar Nicholas I in his bold decision to go to war, arguing that Nicholas was swayed by the ideas of the Pan-Slavs to invade Moldavia and Wallachia and encourage Slav revolts against the Ottomans, despite his earlier adherence to the Legitimist principles of the Holy Alliance. He also shows how France and Britain were drawn into the war by popular ideas of Russophobia that swept across Europe in the wake of the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848. As one reviewer wrote, Figes shows "how the cold war of the Soviet era froze over fundamental fault lines that had opened up in the 19th century." [37] The Europeans [ edit ] With Boris Kolonitskii: Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917, 1999, ISBN 0-300-08106-5