Orlando Guy Figes ( ; born 20 November 1959) is a British and German historian and writer. He was a professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he was made Emeritus Professor on his retirement in 2022.
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 on European history more broadly with his book The Europeans (2019).
Biography Family background and education Born in Islington, London, on 20 November 1959, Figes is the son of John George Figes and the feminist writer Eva Figes, whose Jewish family fled Nazi Germany in 1939. The author and editor Kate Figes was his elder sister. His father left the family when he was three.
He attended William Ellis School in north London (1971–78) and studied history at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where his teachers were Peter Burke and Norman Stone, graduating with a double-starred first in 1982. He wrote his undergraduate dissertation under Stone's guidance (with help from Isaiah Berlin) on 'Ludwig Börne and the Formation of a Radical Critique of Judaism' and published it as a journal article in the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book in 1984. He completed his PhD on 'The political transformation of peasant Russia: peasant Soviets in the Middle Volga, 1917–1920' under Norman Stone's supervision at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1987. It was his supervisor who suggested the shift of topic from German-Jewish philosophy to Russian peasant history. He also claimed to have taken inspiration from the work of Teodor Shanin for his thesis, and received Shanin's recommendation to study with in Moscow. Danilov helped him get "unprecedented" access to the Soviet archives.
Academic career Figes was a Fellow of Trinity College from 1984 to 1999. He was appointed University Lecturer at the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge in 1987. His students at Cambridge included the historians Andrew Roberts and Tristram Hunt, the food writer Bee Wilson, the journalist James Harding, and the film producer Tanya Seghatchian.
He succeeded Richard J. Evans as professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London in 1999. He announced his retirement from the post in 2022.
He has served on the editorial board of the journal Russian History since at least 2011, writes for the international press, broadcasts on television and radio, reviews for The New York Review of Books, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
During his career, he was involved in an international summer school for history teachers in Russian universities organised by the European University of St Petersburg.
Writing Works on the Russian Revolution 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.Figes, Orlando, Peasant Russia, Civil War, p. xxi. 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.
A People's Tragedy (1996) is a panoramic history of the Revolution from 1891 to the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924. It combines social and political history and interweaves through the public narrative the personal stories of several representative figures, including Grigory Rasputin, the writer Maxim Gorky, Prince Georgy Lvov and General Alexei Brusilov, as well as unknown peasants and workers. Figes wrote that he had "tried to present the revolution not as a march of abstract social forces and ideologies but as a human event of complicated individual tragedies".Figes, Orlando, A People's Tragedy, 1996, p. xvii. Left-wing critics have represented Figes as a conservative because of his negative assessment of Lenin and his focus on the individual and "the random succession of chance events" rather than on the collective actions of the masses.Haynes, Michael, and Wolfreys, Jim, History and Revolution, London: Verso, 2007, p. 15. Others have situated Figes among the so-called 'revisionist' historians of the Revolution who attempted to explain its political development in terms of social history.Keep, John, "Great October?" in The Times Literary Supplement, 23 August 1996, p. 5. In 2008, The Times Literary Supplement listed A People's Tragedy as one of the "hundred most influential books since the war".Times Literary Supplement, 30 December 2008. In 2013 David Bowie named A People's Tragedy one of his 'top 100 books'.
Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (1999), co-written with , analyses the political language, revolutionary songs, visual symbols and historical ideas that animated the revolutionary crowds of 1917.Journal of Cold War Studies, Volume 2, Number 2, Spring 2000, pp. 122–25.
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. 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.'
Natasha's Dance and Russian cultural history Published in 2002, Natasha's Dance is a broad cultural history of Russia from the building of St. Petersburg during the reign of Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century. Taking its title from a scene in Tolstoy's War and Peace, where the young countess Natasha Rostova intuitively dances a peasant dance, it explores the tensions between the European and folk elements of Russian culture, and examines how the myth of the "Russian soul" and the idea of "Russianness" itself have been expressed by Russian writers, artists, composers and philosophers.
Figes has also written essays on various Russian cultural figures, including Leo Tolstoy, Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev and Andrei Platonov. In 2003 he wrote and presented a TV feature documentary for the BBC, The Tsar's Last Picture Show, about the pioneering colour photographer in Tsarist Russia Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky.
The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia
His book The Whisperers Figes followed the approach of oral history. In partnership with the Memorial Society, a human rights non-profit organization, Figes gathered several hundred private family archives from homes across Russia and carried out more than a thousand interviews with survivors as well as perpetrators of the Stalinist repressions. The material is stored by Memorial in its Moscow, St Petersburg and Perm offices, and a selection of the documents and interviews is available on Figes's personal website.
Translated into more than twenty languages,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. The Whisperers was described by Andrey Kurkov as "one of the best literary monuments to the Soviet people" 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".The Whisperers (London, 2007), p. 636.
The Whisperers deals mainly with the impact of repression on private life. It examines the influence of the Soviet regime and its campaigns of terror on family relationships, emotions and beliefs, moral choices, issues of personal and social identity, and collective memory. According to Figes, 'the real power and lasting legacy of the Stalinist system were neither in structures of the state, nor in the cult of the leader, but, as the Russian historian Mikhail Gefter once remarked, "in the Stalinism that entered into all of us".'Figes, The Whisperers, p. xxxii.
The book includes a detailed study of the Soviet writer Konstantin Simonov, who became a leading figure in the Union of Soviet Writers and a propagandist in the "anti-cosmopolitan" campaign during Stalin's final years. Figes drew on the closed sections of Simonov's archive in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art and on the archives of the poet's wife and son to produce his study of this major Soviet establishment figure.Times Literary Supplement, 8 February 2008.
On 4 December 2008, the St Petersburg offices of Memorial were raided by the police and the entire electronic archive, including the materials collected with Figes for The Whisperers, was confiscated by the authorities. Figes condemned the police raid, accusing the Russian authorities of trying to rehabilitate the Stalinist regime. He organised an open protest letter to President Dmitry Medvedev and other Russian leaders, which was signed by several hundred leading academics from across the world. After several court hearings, the materials were finally returned to Memorial in May 2009.
Figes saw his first Russian translation contract for The Whisperers cancelled in March 2009 by publisher , who cited commercial reasons. Figes suggested that the book was "inconvenient" to Vladimir Putin's government and that the real explanation for the refusal to publish lay in "political pressure". A second translation project was abandoned by the publisher and the rights owner Dynasty Foundation in 2010 after one of Memorial's researchers reported that she found anachronisms, incorrect interpretations and factual errors in the book. Figes was notified of the decision in April 2011 in a letter which suggested that its publication would cause offence in Russia. Figes offered to revise the book, but his offer was ignored.
Just Send Me Word Published in 2012, Just Send Me WordThe title of the book is taken from the poem "In Dream" by Anna Akhmatova, translated by D.M. Thomas: "Black and enduring separation/I share equally with you/Why weep? Give me your hand/Promise to appear in a dream again./You and I are like two mountains/And in this world we cannot meet./Just send me word/At midnight sometime through the stars." is a true story based on 1,246 letters smuggled in and out of the Pechora labour camp between 1946 and 1955 between Lev Mishchenko (a prisoner) and Svetlana Ivanova (his girlfriend in Moscow). There are 647 letters from Lev to Svetlana, and 599 from her to him. They form part of a family archive discovered by Memorial and delivered in three trunks to their Moscow offices in 2007. The letters are the largest known collection of private correspondence from the Gulag, according to Memorial."A Note From Memorial" in Just Send Me Word, p. 297.