Bury, Liz (1 October 2013). "David Bowie's top 100 must-read books". Theguardian.com . Retrieved 8 October 2017. 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]

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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. In December 2013, Figes wrote a long piece in the US journal Foreign Affairs on the Euromaidan demonstrations in Kyiv suggesting that a referendum on Ukraine's foreign policy and the country's possible partition might be a preferable alternative to the possibility of civil war and military intervention by Russia. [49] Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag, Metropolitan Books, 2012. ISBN 978-0-8050-9522-7 a b Fox, Killian (3 September 2022). "Orlando Figes: 'Gorbachev was a very sharp and likable person' ". The Guardian (interview) . Retrieved 6 September 2022.

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] Simon Sebag Montefiore (26 May 2012). "Labour of love". Financial Times. Archived from the original on 11 December 2022 . Retrieved 24 July 2015. Shortly before Lenin’s death and two years before his own death in exile, Prince Lvov changed his mind about the Bolshevik Revolution, against which he had supported foreign intervention and the White armies. ‘Russia has changed completely in the past few years,’ he wrote: Quotation from the introduction. Kendall, Bridget (1 September 2022). "The Story of Russia by Orlando Figes review – what Putin sees in the past". The Guardian . Retrieved 6 September 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 significantly on European history more broadly, notably with his book The Europeans (2019).

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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. 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". [12] 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. [13] 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. [14] In 2008, The Times Literary Supplement listed A People's Tragedy as one of the "hundred most influential books since the war". [15] In 2013 David Bowie named A People's Tragedy one of his 'top 100 books'. [16] Scammell, Michael. "Love Against All Odds by Michael Scammell | The New York Review of Books". Nybooks.com . Retrieved 24 July 2015. {{ cite magazine}}: Cite magazine requires |magazine= ( help)

Appleyard, Bryan (3 October 2010). "The Wild Charges He Made". The Sunday Times . Retrieved 5 March 2020. The novelty of his account of Russia before 1917 – and indeed of the Revolutionary years themselves – lies in his treatment, not of tsarism and its crises but of the forces subverting it, and particularly the peasants and their urbanised sons and daughters, who made up the overwhelming bulk of the Russian people. Since the book which earned Figes his deservedly high reputation as a Russian historian was Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution (1917-21), this is not surprising. There is nothing particularly new about his account of the organised and politically conscious revolutionaries – how could there be, when so much has been in print for so long? – although lay readers and even non-specialist historians will discover much they did not know or had not thought of: for instance, that ‘Marxism, as a social science, was fast becoming the national creed’ in the early 1890s. Essentially a social historian, he may have deliberately avoided the narrative history of the small, illegal revolutionary sects and their quarrels, but general readers may find it confusing that such figures as Stalin and Bukharin enter the stage virtually without prior introduction in 1917, or that the Socialist Revolutionaries are casually, and of course correctly, referred to after 1905 as ‘the peasants’ party of choice’, without anything being said about how they achieved this position within four years of their foundation.

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Nor is there enough pleasure here to distract you from that physical pain; this book is draggy and often monotonous, and a wish to extract knowledge from it must carry you across long stretches as unforgiving as any Siberian landscape. Figes is relentlessly enthusiastic about his own investigations, and includes a great deal of material that is irrelevant, distracting, and tedious. He gets high marks for research, but one wishes he had gone for editorial rigour instead. The armature of his arguments is completely obscured by the excess of trivia he has slathered onto it. Red Chapters: Turning Points in the History of Communism (TV Series 1999)". IMDb.com . Retrieved 24 July 2015. 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] The individual-as-signifier strategy is effective in fiction, but the elements of people's lives cannot be constructed with such subtle artistry, and this rich panoply of individuals amounts to neither a coherent theory of humanity nor a perfect description of a complicated period.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 ] Harding, Luke (7 December 2008). "Luke Harding, "British scholar rails at police seizure of anti-Stalin archive", The Observer, 7 December 2008". The Guardian. London.