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] Like Simon Schama, Orlando Figes is a historian whose popularity has extended beyond academia and into general readership. Perhaps because of this – or possibly for other reasons – Figes has come in for criticism from his fellow academics. He has been described by some as a ‘historical journalist’ and accused by others of taking creative liberties with evidence. One of Figes’ approaches is to focus on the cultural aspects of revolution: words, language, symbols, propaganda, mood and other psychological devices. A revolution may start with political events and ambitions – but Figes’ work is also concerned with understanding how revolutionary ideas reach, affect and motivate ordinary people. His writing style employs a sweeping narrative, striking a balance between describing important events of great significance and examining their impact on individuals. Figes gives less time and attention to political ideology than other historians: his main concern is with ordinary Russians and their motivations and conditions. Because of this, Figes does not rely on the writings and ramblings of Marx and Lenin as a point of reference. The Russian Revolution was long expected but came as a surprise in February 1917. None of its 'leaders' expected it to happen how and when it did. Most revolutions are like that. That's what makes them revolutionary.

Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991 - Penguin Books UK

Wheeler, Sara (3 September 2022). "How Putin manipulated history to help Russians feel good again". The Spectator (review) . Retrieved 6 September 2022. Luke Harding in Moscow (7 December 2008). "Russian police raid human rights group's archive |". The Observer. London . Retrieved 31 August 2011. Christiansen, Rupert (15 September 2019). "A ménage a trois that transformed European culture". The Sunday Telegraph. ISSN 0307-1235. The terminology of the Revolution was a foreign language to most of the peasants (as indeed it was to a large proportion of the uneducated workers) in most parts of Russia. Equally, the new institutions of the state appeared strange and alien to many of the peasants.”

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Orlando Figes is an award-winning author of nine books on Russian and European history which have been translated into over 30 languages.

Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991 - Macmillan

Magnificent and utterly gripping: European identity, culture and commerce through the lives of three remarkable individuals, the book for our times." (Philippe Sands) Boyd, William (7 September 2019). "The Europeans by Orlando Figes review – the importance of a shared culture". The Guardian . Retrieved 1 October 2019. 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]

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EXTRACT: Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924 (Pimlico, 1997), p. 19. There are a multitude of fascinating pieces of information to be gleaned from Orlando Figes's magisterial and wide-ranging book The Europeans ... Relevant, trenchant and searching." (William Boyd, The Guardian) Russia had been a relatively stable society until the final decades of the nineteenth century. It was untroubled by the revolutions that shook Europe's other monarchies in 1848–9, when Marx called it ‘the last hope of the despots'. Its huge army crushed the Polish uprisings of 1830 and 1863, the main nationalist challenge to the Tsar's Imperial rule, while its police hampered the activities of the tiny close-knit circles of radicals and revolutionaries, who were mostly driven underground.

Revolutionary Russia :: Home

In this section we will be exploring the 1905 revolution - asking why it happened and why it failed? Why was the Tsarist system able to survive the revolutionary challenges of 1905? To what extent did the revolution fail because of its own internal divisions? And what did the revolutionary parties learn from 1905? In this section you will find some answers to these questions. You will aklso find some extracts from books, photographs from 1905, a video film, and my suggestions on what else to read. Register to get information on accessing more materials including my responses to exam questions on these themes. The Imperial Family: Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, Tsarevich Alexis, Romanov Family, Olga, Maria, Anastasia The famine crisis undermined that view. Partly caused by the tax squeeze on the peasants to pay for industrialization, the crisis suggested that the peasantry was literally dying out, both as a class and a way of life, under the pressures of capitalist development. Marxism alone seemed able to explain the causes of the famine by showing how a capitalist economy created rural poverty. In the 1890s it fast became a national intelligentsia creed. Socialists who had previously wavered in their Marxism were converted to it by the crisis, as they realized that there was no more hope in the Populist faith in the peasantry. Even liberal thinkers such as Petr Struve found their Marxist passions stirred by the famine: it ‘made much more of a Marxist out of me than the reading of Marx's Capital'.11 Orlando Figes's latest book is Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991 (Pelican, 2014), which draws from which draws from several of his previous books on the Russian Revolution and Soviet history. It argues that - although it changed in form and character - the Russian Revolution should be understood as a single cycle of 100 years, from the famine crisis of 1891 until the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991.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.