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

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a b "Four Documentaries – The Tsar's Last Picture Show". BBC. 22 November 2007 . Retrieved 31 August 2011.

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Writing in the Financial Times, Simon Sebag Montefiore called Just Send Me Word "a unique contribution to Gulag scholarship as well as a study of the universal power of love". [33] Several reviewers highlighted the book's literary qualities, pointing out that it 'reads like a novel' [34] [35]In 2023 Figes' debut play, The Oyster Problem, was produced by the Jermyn Street Theatre in London. The play is about the financial crisis of the writer Gustave Flaubert in the last years of his life and the attempts of his literary friends, George Sand, Emile Zola and Ivan Turgenev, to find him a sinecure. Bob Barrett played the part of Flaubert and Philip Wilson directed. [51] Everything Theatre described The Oyster Problem as "a remarkable pearl of a play; a patchwork of anecdotes that welcomes us into the private life of Gustave Flaubert and his literary contemporaries" [52] Film and television work [ edit ] Timothy Phillips (25 May 2012). "Staying alive with the language of love - Life Style Books - Life & Style - London Evening Standard". The Standard . Retrieved 24 July 2015. 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. 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. Christiansen, Rupert (15 September 2019). "A ménage a trois that transformed European culture". The Sunday Telegraph. ISSN 0307-1235.

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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: 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. Stanford, Peter (8 October 2017). "Those who complained about War and Peace are 'whingers', says historical advisor Orlando Figes". Telegraph.co.uk . Retrieved 8 October 2017. Antonio Delgado Prize (Spain), The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture [61] John Rees ( Letters, 28 November) is irritated by my less than flattering portrait of his hero Lenin in A People’s Tragedy. But this does not justify his underhand attempt to portray my book as full of factual errors and distortions. There is nothing wrong with my book’s dating of Shostakovich’s Second Symphony (1927) or the publication of Zamyatin’s We (1924), four years after it was written. What is wrong (even dishonest) is Rees’s claim that I discussed the first as part of the music of the civil war, and the second in the context of the New Economic Policy. As for my use of the quotations by Lenin (on the need to beat people without mercy) and Shliapnikov (on the disappearance of the working class), neither merits the charge of distortion, although in the first I did miss out some dots. But then, even in the space of his short letter Rees has shown how easily one can misquote.

Guy Dammann (14 July 2008). "Interview: Guy Dammann talks to Orlando Figes". The Guardian. London . Retrieved 31 August 2011.

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a b c "Orlando Figes [Author and Professor of Russian History]". Orlandofiges.com . Retrieved 31 August 2011. Figes, Orlando (8 December 2008). "Blog Archive – An open letter to President Medvedev". Index on Censorship. 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. [5] [6] 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. Makers of their own tragedy". The Independent. 23 October 2011. Archived from the original on 24 May 2022.

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] 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. 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.[ "Orlando Figes [Author and Professor of Russian History]". Orlandofiges.com . Retrieved 19 November 2013. ] 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’.