A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

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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: After the Red victory in the Civil War it was to be the anti-Bolshevik peasant revolts in the Russian heartland which forced the U-turn of the New Economic Policy on Government and Party. Orlando Figes investido doctor honoris causa por la UIMP: 'Nos hemos equivocado con Rusia durante mucho tiempo' ". www.uimp.es (in Spanish). Archived from the original on 28 August 2023 . Retrieved 16 September 2023. Simon Sebag Montefiore (26 May 2012). "Labour of love". Financial Times. Archived from the original on 11 December 2022 . Retrieved 24 July 2015. Orlando Figes gana el Premio Antonio Delgado a la Divulgación de la Propiedad Intelectual". Sgae.es. 3 December 2018 . Retrieved 13 May 2022.

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The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture, New York: Henry Holt and Co. 2019, ISBN 9781627792141 For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions. With Boris Kolonitskii: Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917, 1999, ISBN 0-300-08106-5 Thus, in its first five years the Revolution brought about the triumph of peasant Russia and at the same time created the party/ state dictatorship which, within a decade, was to ‘liquidate’ peasant Russia by a combination of collectivisation, mass exodus and gulags. By the time Lenin died, Figes believes (with a modicum of exaggeration), ‘the basic institutions, if not all the practices of the Stalinist regime were in place.’ But until these institutions were turned against the peasantry under Stalin, the tragedy of the Russian people in this terrible century could not yet be seriously seen as something that came to its victims from outside and above.

Luke Harding in Moscow (7 December 2008). "Russian police raid human rights group's archive |". The Observer. London . Retrieved 31 August 2011. 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] We Want To Defeat Russia,' Says British Historian Figes, 'But We Don't Want To Push It Into Civil War And Chaos' ". Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. 13 June 2023. 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]

Out of the Great Dark Whale · LRB 31 October 1996 Eric Hobsbawm · Out of the Great Dark Whale · LRB 31 October 1996

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. What isn’t clear is how far the analysis applies outside the Great Russian heartland. Nor does Figes consider such problems as those of the pastoralist peoples for whom ‘land’ meant something quite different from what it meant to peasant cultivators (a theme familiar from films about the American Wild West and not irrelevant in some regions of Russia). On the other hand, revolutionary intelligentsias as described here, with all their emotional and intellectual singularities, are not peculiar to Russia, though the extraordinary originality of the Russian intellectual contribution, which is not stressed in this book, sets it apart from the generally very derivative productions of pre-revolutionary Third World intelligentsias.Figes has been critical of the Vladimir Putin government, in particular alleging that Putin has attempted to rehabilitate Joseph Stalin and impose his own agenda on history-teaching in Russian schools and universities. [45] He is involved in an international summer school for history teachers in Russian universities organised by the European University of St Petersburg. Figes, Orlando (16 December 2013). "Is There One Ukraine?". Foreign Affairs . Retrieved 24 July 2015. More worryingly, Figes’s errors are often the result of his desire to make a case against the Russian Revolution in general and Lenin in particular. Here, for instance, is a typically dubious piece of research used for polemical purposes. In his Reminiscences of Lenin Maxim Gorky records Lenin saying after listening to Beethoven’s Appassionato: ‘I can’t listen to music often, it affects my nerves, it makes me want to say sweet nothings and pat the heads of people who, living in this filthy hell, can create such beauty. But today we mustn’t pat anyone on the head or we’ll get our hands bitten off; we’ve got to hit them on the heads, hit them without mercy, though in an ideal world we are against doing any violence to people.’ Clearly Lenin is saying that in a dangerous world one is obliged to be hard in spite of one’s instincts. But for Figes this remark proves that ‘Lenin had no place for sentiment in his life,’ and to sustain this interpretation he simply alters the quotation from Gorky so that it reads: ‘It makes me want to say kind, stupid things, and pat the heads of people. But now you have to beat them on the head, beat them without mercy.’ Lenin now looks as if he is simply interested in beating people over the head for the sheer hell of it. Moreover Figes makes this alteration without indicating in the conventional way that he has done so. a b "Four Documentaries – The Tsar's Last Picture Show". BBC. 22 November 2007 . Retrieved 31 August 2011.

Orlando Figes - Springer Orlando Figes - Springer

Gillinson, Miriam (15 February 2023). "The Oyster Problem review – the struggle to save Flaubert from himself". The Guardian. 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] Moreover – and this is perhaps one of the most original aspects of the book – Figes argues that the Bolsheviks won, not merely by offering bread, peace and land – until the end of the Civil War, they brought no peace and little enough bread – but because they recognised that the Russian poor also wanted equality and revenge against the burzhooi, a term used as a general form of abuse against anyone who did not look like a peasant, worker or soldier. Social levelling, and not necessarily economic improvement, was what the vast mass of the Russian poor, urban or rural, expected from the Revolution. The very Terror, he argues, which, through the Cheka and its descendants in the Moscow Lubianka, was later to become the regime’s central institution, was not imposed on Russia from the Kremlin. Originally, it ‘erupted from below’. In 2023 Figes was awarded an Honorary Degree by the Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo in Santiago, Spain [4] Personal life and education [ edit ] 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'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 (1917–21). Using village Soviet archives, Figes emphasised 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. [11] 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. Dinning, Rachel (30 September 2019). "Orlando Figes on the transformation of Europe". BBC History Extra . Retrieved 2 October 2019. Podcast of Figes speaking at the Samuel Johnson short-listed author event about "Whisperers", London (2008) BookBuffet.com Revolutionary Russia: 1891–1991, is a short introduction to the subject published as part of the relaunch of Pelican Books in the United Kingdom in 2014. [18] In it Figes argues for the need to see the Russian Revolution in a longer time-frame than most historians have allowed. He states that his aim is 'to chart one hundred years of history as a single revolutionary cycle. In this telling the Revolution starts in the nineteenth century (and more specifically in 1891, when the public's reaction to the famine crisis set it for the first time on a collision course with the autocracy) and ends with the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991.' [19] Natasha's Dance and Russian cultural history [ edit ] Makers of their own tragedy". The Independent. 23 October 2011. Archived from the original on 24 May 2022.

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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] The misery and cruelty of the Russian peasants is also narrated with skill, and one can feel how painfully and rapidly the idealism of the early revolutionaries gave way to chaos and disaster as the idea of a Communist revolution was conflated with a savage and enraged desire for anarchy. Figes spares no detail of the agony of the revolution. You knew it was a tragedy, but you had no idea how vicious a tragedy it was. There is no attempt here to tell the King Lear story of Nicholas and Alexandra; this is Coriolanus, unbearable and grotesque. He quotes me as writing that ‘the October Revolution was a coup, actively supported by a small minority of the population,’ and claims that this contradicts my earlier argument about the swing to the left in several major city Soviets. But in fact I called October an ‘insurrection’ (not a revolution) and made it clear (in a clause Rees hides with dots) that the swing to the left was in response to the Kornilov Affair. It was a rejection of the coalition with the ‘bourgeoisie’, a call for a socialist government by the most militant sections of the Soviet movement, but this hardly made it, as Rees claims, a mass base of support for the Bolshevik seizure of power. Figes has adopted a Tolstoyan convention of telling the stories of a few individuals of middling importance as a means of describing what 'real people' did in the course of the revolution and demonstrating how the views and actions of such people determined the awful disaster. There is something to be said for this idea, but ultimately it does not work well. The individual narratives, though emblematic in some ways, are not as prototypical as Figes would like; no real person ever was, nor could be, Pierre Bezukhov or Andrey Bolkonsky.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) Christiansen, Rupert (15 September 2019). "A ménage a trois that transformed European culture". The Sunday Telegraph. ISSN 0307-1235. Antonio Delgado Prize (Spain), The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture [61] 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. Appleyard, Bryan (3 October 2010). "The Wild Charges He Made". The Sunday Times . Retrieved 5 March 2020.