Orlando Figes

Orlando Guy Figes is a British historian and writer.

Until his retirement, he was Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he was made Emeritus Professor on his retirement.

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

Born in Islington, London in 1959, Figes is the son of John George Figes and the feminist writer Eva Figes, whose Jewish family fled Nazi Germany in 1939.

The author and editor Kate Figes was his elder sister.

He attended William Ellis School in north London (1971–78) and studied History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, graduating with a double-starred first in 1982.

He completed his PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Figes is married to human rights lawyer Stephanie Palmer, a senior lecturer in law at Cambridge University and barrister at Blackstone Chambers London.

They have two daughters.

He divides his time between his homes in London and Umbria in Italy.

Figes was a fellow and lecturer in history at Gonville and Caius College from 1984 to 1999.

He then succeeded Richard J. Evans as professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London.

He announced his retirement in 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).

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.

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".

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.

In an interview with Andrew Marr in 1997, Figes described himself as "a Labour Party supporter and 'a bit of a Tony Blair man', though he confessed, when it came to the Russian revolution, to being mildly pro-Menshevik."

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 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 2008, The Times Literary Supplement listed A People's Tragedy as one of the "hundred most influential books since the war".

Figes is credited as the historical consultant on the 2012 film Anna Karenina.

Figes has also written essays on various Russian cultural figures, including Leo Tolstoy, Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev and Andrei Platonov.

In 2013 David Bowie named A People's Tragedy one of his 'top 100 books'.

On 13 February 2017, Figes announced on Twitter that he had become a German citizen "bec [sic] I don't want to be a Brexit Brit."

Figes has also contributed significantly on European history more broadly, notably with his book The Europeans (2019).

He serves on the editorial board of the journal Russian History, writes for the international press, broadcasts on television and radio, reviews for The New York Review of Books, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

In 2023, Figes was awarded an Honorary Degree by the Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo in Santiago, Spain.