Orlando Figes
Encyclopedia
Orlando Figes is a British historian of Russia, and Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London
.
. 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
, the Prix Médicis
, and the Premio Roma
. Crimea: The Last Crusade, on the Crimean War
of 1853-56, was published in 2010.
Figes serves on the editorial board of the journal Russian History.
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.
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
.
. 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 Vladimir 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.
, 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
. 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.
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 Andrey 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, [oral testimony] 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.
of 1853-56. Drawing extensively from Russian, French and Ottoman as well as British archives, it combines military, diplomatic, political and cultural history, examining how the war left a lasting mark on the national consciousness of Britain, France, Russia and Turkey. Figes sets the war in the context of the Eastern Question
, the diplomatic and political problems caused by the decay of the Ottoman Empire
. In particular, he emphasizes the importance of the religious struggle between Russia as the defender of the Orthodox
and France as the protector of the Catholics in the Ottoman Empire. He frames the war within a longer history of religious conflict between Christians and Muslims in the Balkans
, southern Russia and the Caucasus
that continues to this day. Figes stresses the religious motive of the Tsar Nicholas I
in his bold decision to go to war, arguing that Nicholas was swayed by the ideas of the Pan-Slavs to invade Moldavia
and Wallachia
and encourage Slav revolts against the Ottomans, despite his earlier adherence to the Legitimist principles of the Holy Alliance
. He also shows how France and Britain were drawn into the war by popular ideas of Russophobia
that swept across Europe in the wake of the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848. According to one reviewer, Figes shows "how the cold war of the Soviet era froze over fundamental fault lines that had opened up in the 19th century."
labour camp from 1946, interviews with the couple, Lev and Sveta Mishchenko, who had met in the 1930s as students at the Physics Faculty of Moscow University, and the archives of the labour camp itself. 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."
government, in particular allegations that Putin has attempted to rehabilitate Joseph Stalin
and impose his 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 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.
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".
At the Edinburgh International Book Festival
in August 2011 Figes revealed that he had made some charitable donations in Russia from the proceeds of his book "The Whisperers".
, the play was performed in the National Theatre
in London followed by a season of performances at the Unicorn Theatre
in London.
. His sister is the author and editor Kate Figes. He is married to the human-rights lawyer Stephanie Palmer, a Senior Lecturer in Law at Cambridge University and Barrister at Blackstone Chambers
London. They have two daughters, Lydia and Alice. He lives in Cambridge and London and is a supporter of Chelsea Football Club.
, including some where he criticized books by two other British historians of Russia, Robert Service
and Rachel Polonsky, whilst praising his own book. Initially denying responsibility for the reviews, and threatening legal action against those who suggested he was the author, Figes later issued an apology and agreed to pay legal costs and damages to Polonsky and Service, who had threatened to sue him for libel. In an interview with the Sunday Times on 3 October 2010, Figes said that the two historians had threatened to sue him for libel and to report him to the police. In response, Polonsky stated that Figes had engaged in a distortion of facts in his interview with the paper in his account of legal negotiations over the controversy. In December 2010 Figes told the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant
that Polonsky and Service had used the threat of libel proceedings and made threats against his wife through Carter Ruck (although Polonsky had previously written her an email telling her how much her 'heart went out to her') in an attempt to force him to admit to new legal claims that were untrue. In August 2011 De Volkskrant published Polonsky's letter of response. This stated that nothing in the draft apology proposed by her and Service during the legal correspondence was untrue. The letter further stated that Figes's wife had been included in the correspondence because legal costs had been incurred in the week during which she falsely claimed to be the author of the Amazon reviews.
Birkbeck, University of London
Birkbeck, University of London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and a constituent college of the federal University of London. It offers many Master's and Bachelor's degree programmes that can be studied either part-time or full-time, though nearly all teaching is...
.
Overview
Figes is the son of the feminist writer Eva FigesEva Figes
Eva Figes is an English author.Figes has written novels, literary criticism, studies of feminism, and vivid memoirs relating to her Berlin childhood and later experiences as a Jewish refugee from Hitler's Germany. She arrived in Britain in 1939 with her parents and a younger brother...
. His sister is the author and editor Kate Figes. He attended William Ellis School
William Ellis School
William Ellis School is a United Kingdom secondary comprehensive school for boys in Highgate, London.-Admissions:It is a specialist Language College. The School's motto is 'Rather Use Than Fame'. The school is over-subscribed, usually an indicator of a popular school. It is situated just west of...
in north London from 1971-78. He read History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge
Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge
Gonville and Caius College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England. The college is often referred to simply as "Caius" , after its second founder, John Keys, who fashionably latinised the spelling of his name after studying in Italy.- Outline :Gonville and...
, graduating with a rare double-starred First
British undergraduate degree classification
The British undergraduate degree classification system is a grading scheme for undergraduate degrees in the United Kingdom...
in 1982, and completed his PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Trinity has more members than any other college in Cambridge or Oxford, with around 700 undergraduates, 430 graduates, and over 170 Fellows...
, where he was a Fellow from 1984 to 1999. He was a Lecturer in History at the University of Cambridge
University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...
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
A People's Tragedy
A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924 is an award-winning book written by British historian Orlando Figes. First published in 1996, it chronicles Russian history from the Famine of 1891-1892, the response to which, Figes argues, severely weakened the Russian Empire, to the death of...
(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
Wolfson History Prize
The Wolfson History Prizes are literary awards given annually in the United Kingdom to promote and encourage standards of excellence in the writing of history for the general public...
, the WH Smith Literary Award
WH Smith Literary Award
The WH Smith Literary Award was an award founded in 1959 by British high street retailer W H Smith. Its founding aim was stated to be to "encourage and bring international esteem to authors of the British Commonwealth"; originally open to all residents of the UK, the Commonwealth and the Republic...
, the NCR Book Award
NCR Book Award
The NCR Book Award, established in 1987 and sponsored by NCR, was the UK's major award to non-fiction It ended in 1998 and has been replaced by the Samuel Johnson Prize.-Winners:* 1988 David Thomson, Nairn in Darkness and Light...
, 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
Samuel Johnson Prize
The Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction is one of the most prestigious prizes for non-fiction writing. It was founded in 1999 following the demise of the NCR Book Award and based on an anonymous donation. The prize is named after Samuel Johnson...
. The Whisperers was also short-listed for the Ondaatje Prize
Ondaatje Prize
The Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize is an annual literary award given by the Royal Society of Literature. The £10,000 award is given for a work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry which evokes the "spirit of a place", and which is written by someone who is a citizen of or who has been...
, the Prix Médicis
Prix Médicis
The Prix Médicis is a French literary award given each year in November. It was founded in 1958 by Gala Barbisan and Jean-Pierre Giraudoux. It is awarded to an author whose "fame does not yet match his talent."...
, and the Premio Roma
Premio Roma
The Premio Roma is a Group 1 flat horse race in Italy which is open to thoroughbreds aged three years or older. It is run at Capannelle, Rome, over a distance 2,000 metres , and it is scheduled to take place each year in November....
. Crimea: The Last Crusade, on the Crimean War
Crimean War
The Crimean War was a conflict fought between the Russian Empire and an alliance of the French Empire, the British Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Sardinia. The war was part of a long-running contest between the major European powers for influence over territories of the declining...
of 1853-56, was published in 2010.
Figes serves on the editorial board of the journal Russian History.
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.
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
Royal Society of Literature
The Royal Society of Literature is the "senior literary organisation in Britain". It was founded in 1820 by George IV, in order to "reward literary merit and excite literary talent". The Society's first president was Thomas Burgess, who later became the Bishop of Salisbury...
.
Works on the Russian Revolution
Figes's first three books were on the Russian Revolution and the Civil WarRussian Civil War
The Russian Civil War was a multi-party war that occurred within the former Russian Empire after the Russian provisional government collapsed to the Soviets, under the domination of the Bolshevik party. Soviet forces first assumed power in Petrograd The Russian Civil War (1917–1923) was a...
. 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
Provisional government
A provisional government is an emergency or interim government set up when a political void has been created by the collapse of a very large government. The early provisional governments were created to prepare for the return of royal rule...
, 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
A People's Tragedy
A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924 is an award-winning book written by British historian Orlando Figes. First published in 1996, it chronicles Russian history from the Famine of 1891-1892, the response to which, Figes argues, severely weakened the Russian Empire, to the death of...
(1996) is a panoramic history of the Revolution from 1891 to the death of Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and communist politician who led the October Revolution of 1917. As leader of the Bolsheviks, he headed the Soviet state during its initial years , as it fought to establish control of Russia in the Russian Civil War and worked to create a...
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
Maxim Gorky
Alexei Maximovich Peshkov , primarily known as Maxim Gorky , was a Russian and Soviet author, a founder of the Socialist Realism literary method and a political activist.-Early years:...
, 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 PeaceWar and Peace
War and Peace is a novel by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy, first published in 1869. The work is epic in scale and is regarded as one of the most important works of world literature...
, 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
Leo Tolstoy
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...
, Dmitri Shostakovich
Dmitri Shostakovich
Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was a Soviet Russian composer and one of the most celebrated composers of the 20th century....
, Sergei Prokofiev
Sergei Prokofiev
Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor who mastered numerous musical genres and is regarded as one of the major composers of the 20th century...
. 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 historyOral history
Oral history is the collection and study of historical information about individuals, families, important events, or everyday life using audiotapes, videotapes, or transcriptions of planned interviews...
in Russia. With the Memorial Society
Memorial society
A memorial society can be:*A society established in memory of someone or something, e.g.:**Memorial , an international historical and civil rights society that operates in a number of post-USSR states**Sardar Amir Azam 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
Memorial society
A memorial society can be:*A society established in memory of someone or something, e.g.:**Memorial , an international historical and civil rights society that operates in a number of post-USSR states**Sardar Amir Azam 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 Andrey Kurkov
Andrey Kurkov
Andrey Yuryevich Kurkov is a Ukrainian novelist who writes in Russian. He is the author of 13 novels and 5 books for children. His work is currently translated into 25 languages, including English, Japanese, French, Chinese, Swedish and Hebrew...
as "one of the best literary monuments to the Soviet people
Soviet people
Soviet people or Soviet nation was an umbrella demonym for the population of the Soviet Union. Initially used as a nonspecific reference to the Soviet population, it was eventually declared to be a "new historical, social and international unity of people".-Nationality politics in early Soviet...
, on a par with The Gulag Archipelago
The Gulag Archipelago
The Gulag Archipelago is a book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn based on the Soviet forced labor and concentration camp system. The three-volume book is a narrative relying on eyewitness testimony and primary research material, as well as the author's own experiences as a prisoner in a gulag labor camp...
and the prose of Varlam Shalamov
Varlam Shalamov
Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov , baptized as Varlaam, was a Russian writer, journalist, poet and Gulag survivor.-Early life:Varlam Shalamov was born in Vologda, Vologda Governorate, a Russian city with a rich culture famous for its wooden architecture, to a family of a hereditary Russian Orthodox...
." 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, [oral testimony] 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
Stalinism
Stalinism refers to the ideology that Joseph Stalin conceived and implemented in the Soviet Union, and is generally considered a branch of Marxist–Leninist ideology but considered by some historians to be a significant deviation from this philosophy...
that entered into all of us".'
Figes has included in The Whisperers a detailed study of the Soviet poet Konstantin Simonov
Konstantin Simonov
Konstantin Mikhailovich Simonov was a Russian/Soviet author, known especially as a war poet.-Early years:He was born in Petrograd. His mother was born Princess Obolenskaya, of a Rurikid family. His father, an officer in the Tsar's army, left Russia after the Revolution in 1917. He died in Poland...
, 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
Russian State Archive of Literature and Art
-External links:* * *...
and on the archives of the poet's wife and son to produce his study of this major Soviet establishment figure.
Crimea
Crimea: The Last Crusade is a panoramic history of the Crimean WarCrimean War
The Crimean War was a conflict fought between the Russian Empire and an alliance of the French Empire, the British Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Sardinia. The war was part of a long-running contest between the major European powers for influence over territories of the declining...
of 1853-56. Drawing extensively from Russian, French and Ottoman as well as British archives, it combines military, diplomatic, political and cultural history, examining how the war left a lasting mark on the national consciousness of Britain, France, Russia and Turkey. Figes sets the war in the context of the Eastern Question
Eastern Question
The "Eastern Question", in European history, encompasses the diplomatic and political problems posed by the decay of the Ottoman Empire. The expression does not apply to any one particular problem, but instead includes a variety of issues raised during the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, including...
, the diplomatic and political problems caused by the decay of the Ottoman Empire
Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries...
. In particular, he emphasizes the importance of the religious struggle between Russia as the defender of the Orthodox
Eastern Orthodox Church
The Orthodox Church, officially called the Orthodox Catholic Church and commonly referred to as the Eastern Orthodox Church, is the second largest Christian denomination in the world, with an estimated 300 million adherents mainly in the countries of Belarus, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Georgia, Greece,...
and France as the protector of the Catholics in the Ottoman Empire. He frames the war within a longer history of religious conflict between Christians and Muslims in the Balkans
Balkans
The Balkans is a geopolitical and cultural region of southeastern Europe...
, southern Russia and the Caucasus
Caucasus
The Caucasus, also Caucas or Caucasia , is a geopolitical region at the border of Europe and Asia, and situated between the Black and the Caspian sea...
that continues to this day. Figes stresses the religious motive of the Tsar Nicholas I
Nicholas I of Russia
Nicholas I , was the Emperor of Russia from 1825 until 1855, known as one of the most reactionary of the Russian monarchs. On the eve of his death, the Russian Empire reached its historical zenith spanning over 20 million square kilometers...
in his bold decision to go to war, arguing that Nicholas was swayed by the ideas of the Pan-Slavs to invade Moldavia
Moldavia
Moldavia is a geographic and historical region and former principality in Eastern Europe, corresponding to the territory between the Eastern Carpathians and the Dniester river...
and Wallachia
Wallachia
Wallachia or Walachia is a historical and geographical region of Romania. It is situated north of the Danube and south of the Southern Carpathians...
and encourage Slav revolts against the Ottomans, despite his earlier adherence to the Legitimist principles of the Holy Alliance
Holy Alliance
The Holy Alliance was a coalition of Russia, Austria and Prussia created in 1815 at the behest of Czar Alexander I of Russia, signed by the three powers in Paris on September 26, 1815, in the Congress of Vienna after the defeat of Napoleon.Ostensibly it was to instill the Christian values of...
. He also shows how France and Britain were drawn into the war by popular ideas of Russophobia
Russophobia
Russophobia refers to a diverse spectrum of prejudices, dislikes or fears of Russia, Russians, or Russian culture. Its opposite is Russophilia....
that swept across Europe in the wake of the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848. According to one reviewer, Figes shows "how the cold war of the Soviet era froze over fundamental fault lines that had opened up in the 19th century."
Gulag Love Story
In 2011 Figes revealed that his next book will be a love story set in the Gulag based on 1,500 uncensored letters smuggled in and out of the PechoraPechora
Pechora is a town in the Komi Republic, Russia, situated on the Pechora River, near the northern Ural Mountains. Population: It is served by Pechora Airport and is affiliated with the nearby Pechora Kamenka military air base....
labour camp from 1946, interviews with the couple, Lev and Sveta Mishchenko, who had met in the 1930s as students at the Physics Faculty of Moscow University, and the archives of the labour camp itself. 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."
Public activities in Russia
Figes has been critical of the Vladimir PutinVladimir Putin
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin served as the second President of the Russian Federation and is the current Prime Minister of Russia, as well as chairman of United Russia and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Union of Russia and Belarus. He became acting President on 31 December 1999, when...
government, in particular allegations that Putin has attempted to rehabilitate Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
and impose his 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
Memorial society
A memorial society can be:*A society established in memory of someone or something, e.g.:**Memorial , an international historical and civil rights society that operates in a number of post-USSR states**Sardar Amir Azam 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
Neo-Stalinism
Neo-Stalinism is a political term referring to attempts at rehabilitating the role of Joseph Stalin in history and re-establishing the political course of Stalin, at least partially. The term is also used to designate the modern political regimes in some states, political and social life of which...
. Figes organised an open protest letter to President Dmitry Medvedev
Dmitry Medvedev
Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev is the third President of the Russian Federation.Born to a family of academics, Medvedev graduated from the Law Department of Leningrad State University in 1987. He defended his dissertation in 1990 and worked as a docent at his alma mater, now renamed to Saint...
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
Mikhail Suprun
Mikhail Suprun Михаил Николаевич Супрун – Russian historian, professor of the Pomor State University named after M. V. Lomonosov....
as part of a "Putinite campaign against freedom of historical research and expression".
At the Edinburgh International Book Festival
Edinburgh International Book Festival
The Edinburgh International Book Festival, is a book festival that takes place in the last three weeks of August every year in Charlotte Square, in the centre of Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital...
in August 2011 Figes revealed that he had made some charitable donations in Russia from the proceeds of his book "The Whisperers".
Broadcasts
Figes has contributed frequently to radio and television broadcasts in the United Kingdom and around the world. In 1999 he wrote a six-part educational TV series on the history of Communism under the title "Red Chapters". Produced by Opus Television and broadcast in the UK, the 25-minute films featured turning-points in the history of Soviet Russia, China, and Cuba. 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. In 2007 he wrote and presented two 60-minute Archive Hour programmes on radio entitled Stalin's Silent People which used recordings from his oral history project with Memorial that formed the basis of his book The Whisperers. The programmes are available on Figes's website.Theatrical Adaptations of Figes' Books
Figes' The Whisperers was adapted and performed by Rupert Wickham as "Stalin's Favourite". Based on Figes' portrayal of the writer Konstantin SimonovKonstantin Simonov
Konstantin Mikhailovich Simonov was a Russian/Soviet author, known especially as a war poet.-Early years:He was born in Petrograd. His mother was born Princess Obolenskaya, of a Rurikid family. His father, an officer in the Tsar's army, left Russia after the Revolution in 1917. He died in Poland...
, the play was performed in the National Theatre
National Theatre
National Theatre may refer to: -in Africa:*Kenya National Theatre in Nairobi, Kenya*National Theatre in Accra, Ghana-in Asia:*National Theater and Concert Hall, Republic of China in Taipei, Taiwan*National Theatre of Japan in Tokyo, Japan...
in London followed by a season of performances at the Unicorn Theatre
Unicorn Theatre
The Unicorn Theatre is a producer of professional theatre for children in Britain. It is based in a RIBA Award–winning centre in Tooley Street, in the London Borough of Southwark, opened in 2005...
in London.
Personal Life
Figes is the son of the feminist writer Eva FigesEva Figes
Eva Figes is an English author.Figes has written novels, literary criticism, studies of feminism, and vivid memoirs relating to her Berlin childhood and later experiences as a Jewish refugee from Hitler's Germany. She arrived in Britain in 1939 with her parents and a younger brother...
. His sister is the author and editor Kate Figes. He is married to the human-rights lawyer Stephanie Palmer, a Senior Lecturer in Law at Cambridge University and Barrister at Blackstone Chambers
Blackstone Chambers
Blackstone Chambers is a leading set of barristers chambers in the Temple district of central London. Established in the 1950s, it has 85 tenants, of whom 34 are Silks...
London. They have two daughters, Lydia and Alice. He lives in Cambridge and London and is a supporter of Chelsea Football Club.
Controversy over Amazon reviews
In 2010, Figes posted several pseudonymous reviews on the UK site of the online bookseller AmazonAmazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...
, including some where he criticized books by two other British historians of Russia, Robert Service
Robert Service (historian)
Robert John Service is a British historian, academic, and author who has written extensively on the history of Soviet Russia, particularly the era from the October Revolution to Stalin's death...
and Rachel Polonsky, whilst praising his own book. Initially denying responsibility for the reviews, and threatening legal action against those who suggested he was the author, Figes later issued an apology and agreed to pay legal costs and damages to Polonsky and Service, who had threatened to sue him for libel. In an interview with the Sunday Times on 3 October 2010, Figes said that the two historians had threatened to sue him for libel and to report him to the police. In response, Polonsky stated that Figes had engaged in a distortion of facts in his interview with the paper in his account of legal negotiations over the controversy. In December 2010 Figes told the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant
De Volkskrant
de Volkskrant is a national daily Dutch morning newspaper, the leading centre-left broadsheet, although now in tabloid size.-History:...
that Polonsky and Service had used the threat of libel proceedings and made threats against his wife through Carter Ruck (although Polonsky had previously written her an email telling her how much her 'heart went out to her') in an attempt to force him to admit to new legal claims that were untrue. In August 2011 De Volkskrant published Polonsky's letter of response. This stated that nothing in the draft apology proposed by her and Service during the legal correspondence was untrue. The letter further stated that Figes's wife had been included in the correspondence because legal costs had been incurred in the week during which she falsely claimed to be the author of the Amazon reviews.
Winner
- 1997 – Wolfson History PrizeWolfson History PrizeThe Wolfson History Prizes are literary awards given annually in the United Kingdom to promote and encourage standards of excellence in the writing of history for the general public...
A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924 - 1997 – WH Smith Literary AwardWH Smith Literary AwardThe WH Smith Literary Award was an award founded in 1959 by British high street retailer W H Smith. Its founding aim was stated to be to "encourage and bring international esteem to authors of the British Commonwealth"; originally open to all residents of the UK, the Commonwealth and the Republic...
A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924 - 1997 – NCR Book AwardNCR Book AwardThe NCR Book Award, established in 1987 and sponsored by NCR, was the UK's major award to non-fiction It ended in 1998 and has been replaced by the Samuel Johnson Prize.-Winners:* 1988 David Thomson, Nairn in Darkness and Light...
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
- 2010 – Premio Roma "Sospetto e Silenzio"
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
- Crimea: The Last Crusade, 2010, Allen Lane. ISBN 978-0-713-99704-0
External links
- Figes's website with oral history materials, September 2007
- new Figes website, September 2011
- BBC Four presenter interview, May 2003
- PBS filmed interviews with Figes
- Figes on 20 years since the fall of Communism, 2011
- 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 BooksThe New York Review of BooksThe New York Review of Books is a fortnightly magazine with articles on literature, culture and current affairs. Published in New York City, it takes as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity...