* Orlando Figes - The Story of Russia and other works (10 books)

ORLANDO FIGES (b. 1959) is a British historian known for his writings on Russian political, social, and cultural history.  Until his retirement, he was Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Figes's first three books were on the Russian Revolution and the Civil War.  PEASANT RUSSIA, CIVIL WAR (1989) is a detailed study of the peasantry in the Volga region during the Revolution and the Civil War (1917–21).  INTERPRETING THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION (1999), co-written with Boris Kolonitskii, analyses the political language, revolutionary songs, visual symbols and historical ideas that animated the revolutionary crowds of 1917.

A PEOPLE'S TRAGEDY (1996; 2nd edition, 2017) is a panoramic history of the Revolution from the 1891-92 famine to the death of Lenin in 1924, when "the basic elements of the Stalinist regime – the one-party state, the system of terror and the cult of the personality – were all in place."  It combines social and political history and interweaves through the public narrative the personal stories of several representative figures as well as unknown peasants and workers.  According to Figes, "the whole of 1917 could be seen as a political battle between those who saw the revolution as a means of bringing the war to an end and those who saw the war as a means of bringing the revolution to an end."

NATASHA'S DANCE (2002) is a broad cultural history of Russia from the building of St. Petersburg during the reign of Peter the Great.  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.

THE WHISPERERS: PRIVATE LIFE IN STALIN'S RUSSIA (2007) is based on an in-depth oral history and archival research project.  Together with a team of Russian researchers from Memorial, Figes collected over 250 extensive interviews, along with letters, personal papers, memoirs, diaries, photographs, and physical artifacts "illuminating the inner world of ordinary Soviet citizens living under Stalin's tyranny."  It has been described by Andrey Kurkov as "one of the best literary monuments to the Soviet people."

Drawing extensively from Russian, French and Ottoman as well as British archives, CRIMEA: THE LAST CRUSADE (2010; published in the U.S. as THE CRIMEAN WAR: A HISTORY) combines military, diplomatic, political and cultural history, examining how the Crimean War of 1853–56 left a lasting mark on the national consciousness of Britain, France, Russia and Turkey.  Figes has also constributed significantly on European history more broadly, notably with THE EUROPEANS: THREE LIVES AND THE MAKING OF A COSMOPOLITAN CULTURE (2019).

His most recent book, THE STORY OF RUSSIA (published September 2022), is a fresh approach to the thousand years of Russia’s history, concerned as much with the ideas that have shaped how Russians think about their past as it is with the events and personalities comprising it.  From the founding of Kievan Rus in the first millennium to Putin’s war against Ukraine, Figes explores the ideas that have guided Russia’s actions throughout its long and troubled existence.  He reveals the impulses, often unappreciated or misunderstood by foreigners, that have driven Russian history: the medieval myth of Mother Russia’s holy mission to the world; the imperial tendency toward autocratic rule; the popular belief in a paternal tsar dispensing truth and justice; the cult of sacrifice rooted in the idea of the “Russian soul”; and always, the nationalist myth of Russia’s unjust treatment by the West.


The following books are in ePUB format unless otherwise noted:

* A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924 (Vintage UK, 2017)
* Crimea: The Last Crusade ["The Crimean War" in U.S.] (Allen Lane, 2010)
* The Europeans (Metropolitan, 2019)
* Interpreting the Russian Revolution [with B. Kolonitskii] (Yale, 1999) – PDF
* Just Send Me Word (Metropolitan, 2012) – ePUB + PDF
* Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (Picador, 2002)
* Peasant Russia, Civil War: Volga in Revolution, 1917-1921 (Oxford, 1989) – PDF
* Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991 (Metropolitan / Pelican, 2014)
* The Story of Russia (Bloomsbury / Metropolitan, 2022)
* The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (Penguin/Metropolitan, 2007)


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