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Orlando Figes (Template:Pron-en; born 20 November 1959) is a multiple-award winning British historian of Russia, and Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London.

Overview

Figes is the son of the feminist writer Eva Figes. His sister is the author and editor Kate Figes. He attended William Ellis School in north London from 1971-78. He read History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, graduating with a rare double-starred First in 1982, and completed his PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was a Fellow from 1984 to 1999. He was a Lecturer in History at the University of Cambridge from 1987 to 1999, before taking the Chair of History at Birkbeck College, University of London.

He is known for his works on Russian history, in particular A People's Tragedy (1996), Natasha's Dance (2002) and The Whisperers (2007). Figes uses a broad range of methodologies, including social, cultural and oral history, and his writing combines literary and academic qualities.

A People's Tragedy, which has been translated into twenty languages, is a study of the Russian Revolution, and combines social and political history with biographical details in a historical narrative. It was awarded the Wolfson History Prize, the WH Smith Literary Award, the NCR Book Award, the Longman-History Today Book Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Natasha's Dance won the Przeglad Wschodni Award for the best foreign book on East European History in Poland in 2009.

Natasha's Dance and The Whisperers were both short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize, making Figes the only writer to have been short-listed twice for the Samuel Johnson Prize. The Whisperers was also short-listed for the Ondaatje Prize and the Prix Médicis. Crimea: The Last Crusade, on the Crimean War of 1853-56, is scheduled for publication in October 2010.

Figes also writes for the international press, broadcasts on television and radio, and reviews books for the New York Review of Books. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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 (1917–1921). Using village Soviet archives, Figes emphasized 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. 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 Lenin in 1924. It combines social and political history and interweaves through the public narrative the personal stories of several representative figures, including 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'. 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. 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.

"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.

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 Tolstoy, Shostakovich, Prokofiev and 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.

Oral history and The Whisperers

Figes has made a significant contribution to the development of oral history in Russia. With the Memorial Society, he 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 for his book The Whisperers. This represents one of the biggest collections of documents about private life in the Stalin era. Housed in the Memorial Society in Moscow, St Petersburg and Perm, many of these valuable research materials are available on line.

Translated into more than twenty languages, The Whisperers has been described by Andrei Kurkov as "one of the best literary monuments to the Soviet people, on a par with The Gulag Archipelago and the prose of Varlam Shalamov." In it Figes underlines the importance of oral testimonies for the recovery of the history of repression in the former Soviet Union. Whilst conceding that, 'like all memory, the testimony given in an interview is unreliable,' he has claimed that oral testimonies are, on the whole, 'more reliable than literary memoirs, which have usually been seen as a more authentic record of the past.' The reason he gives is that 'unlike a book, can be cross-examined and tested against other evidence to disentangle true memories from received or imagined ones'.

In contrast to other books that have focused on the external facts of Soviet repression, "The Whisperers" deals mainly with the impact of repression on internal 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. Describing the subject-matter of his book, Figes claims that '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 has included in The Whisperers a detailed study of the Soviet poet Konstantin Simonov, who became a leading figure in the Soviet Writers' Union 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.

Public activities in Russia

Figes has been critical of the Putin regime, in particular its campaign to rehabilitate Stalin and impose its own agenda on history-teaching in Russian schools and universities. He is actively involved in an international summer school for history teachers in Russian universities organised by the European University of St Petersburg.

On 4 December 2008, the St Petersburg offices of the Memorial Society were raided by the police. The entire electronic archive of Memorial in St Petersburg, 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. Figes organised an open protest letter to President 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.

On 2 March 2009, the contract to publish The Whisperers in Russia was cancelled by the publishing house Atticus, claiming financial reasons. Figes suspects that the decision was partly influenced by the politics surrounding the police raid against Memorial. The book will be published by the charitable organisation Dinastia, which financed the translation from the start.

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".

Controversy over Amazon reviews

In April 2010, as a result of allegations in the press, Figes's solicitor issued a statement claiming that Figes's wife had posted pseudonymous reviews on the UK site of the online bookseller Amazon, and threatened legal action over suggestions that Figes himself had been responsible. A week later, Figes issued a statement in which he admitted responsibility for the Amazon reviews himself, and apologised to Robert Service, Rachel Polonsky, and his solicitor. In July 2010, Figes agreed to pay legal costs and damages and to issue a second apology to Polonsky and Service, who through Carter-Ruck had threatened to sue him for libel and to report him to the police for the reviews.

Prizes

Winner

• 1997 – Wolfson History Prize A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924
• 1997 – WH Smith Literary Award A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924
• 1997 – NCR Book Award A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924
• 1997 – Longman-History Today Book Prize A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924
• 1997 – Los Angeles Times Book Prize A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924
• 2009 - Przeglad Wschodni Award Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

Short-listed

• 2003 – Samuel Johnson Prize Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia
• 2003 – Duff-Cooper Prize Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia
• 2008 – Samuel Johnson Prize The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia
• 2008 – Ondaatje Prize The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia
• 2009 – Prix Médicis Les Chuchoteurs: la vie et la mort sous Staline

Works

• Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917-21, 1989, ISBN 0-19-822169-X
• A People's Tragedy: Russian Revolution 1891-1924, 1996, ISBN 0-7126-7327-X
• With Boris Kolonitskii: Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917, 1999, ISBN 0-300-08106-5
• Natasha's Dance: A cultural History of Russia, 2002, ISBN 0-14-029796-0
• 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

Sources

• http://www.orlandofiges.com
• http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/history/story/0,,2290790,00.html
• http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/07/russian-police-seize-archive-repression
• http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2008/12/08/an-open-letter-to-president-medvedev

References

1. http://www.rhttp:orlandofiges.com/news.php
2. http://www.rslit.org/ondaatje.htm
3. http://livres.fluctuat.net/orlando-figes.html
4. RSL website
5. Figes, Orlando, Peasant Russia, Civil War, etc….p. xxi.
6. Figes, Orlando, A People's Tragedy, Jonathan Cape, London, 1996, p. xvii.
7. Haynes, Michael, and Wolfreys, Jim, History and Revolution, London, Verso, 2007, p. 15.
8. Keep, John, 'Great October?' in Times Literary Supplement, August 23, 1996, p. 5.
9. Journal of Cold War Studies - Volume 2, Number 2, Spring 2000, pp. 122-125.
10. http://www.nybooks.com/contributors/orlando-figes/
11. http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/tsars-show.shtml
12. http://www.orlandofiges.com
13. http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2007/12/stalin-russia-figes-soviet
14. The Whisperers (London 2007)p636
15. Figes, The Whisperers, p. xxxii.
16. Times Literary Supplement, 8 February 2008
17. http://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2007/11/russia-putin-soviet-power
18. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/07/russian-police-seize-archive-repression'
19. http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2008/12/08/an-open-letter-to-president-medvedev
20. http://www.rferl.org/content/Trying_To_Bury_An_Inconvenient_History/1503708.html
21. Russian historian arrested in clampdown on Stalin era, The Guardian, October 15, 2009.
22. Amazon row don admits: 'It was me', The Daily Mail, 23 April 2010
23. [http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/Magazine/Features/article405503.ece#next
24. Historian Orlando Figes agrees to pay damages for fake reviews,The Guardian, Alexandra Topping. 16 July 2010
25. Historian and Wife Will Pay Over Savage Online Reviews, New York Times, Dave Itzkoff, July 19, 2010
26. 2003 Shortlist
28. 2008 Shortlist
29. Ondaatje Prize

External links

• Figes's website with oral history materials, September 2007
• BBC Four presenter interview, May 2003
• Stalin's children, The Economist, October 2007
• Sunday Book Review, New York Times, November 2007
• NPR Interview, December 2007
• The Destruction of Memory, Washington Post, February 2008
• Podcast of Figes speaking at the Samuel Johnson short-listed author event about "Whisperers", London (2008) BookBuffet.com
• Podcast of Figes 'On the Politics of Russian History', April 2009
• Figes author page and article archive from The New York Review of Books

• 1959 births
• Academics of Birkbeck, University of London
• Alumni of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge
• Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge
• NCR Book Award winners
• British anti-communists
• British historians
• Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature
• Historians of Russia
• Academic scandals
• Living people