1959–
A historian who wove revolutionary social history into human experience
He said he tried to present the revolution not as a march of abstract social forces, but as a human event of complicated individual tragedies.
Orlando Figes is a British historian of Russia who interprets revolution and Soviet society through both social history and individual experience. His major work, A People's Tragedy, covers 1891 to 1924 and makes the contingency of 1917, popular action, and the formation of Bolshevik power part of a single narrative. It has been placed between revisionist social history and the totalitarian school, while also being criticised for its bleak reading of revolution and violence. In The Whisperers, he used oral testimony and family archives to reconstruct private life under Stalinism.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1959Born in London
- 1982Graduated in history from the University of Cambridge
- 1987Received a PhD from the University of Cambridge
- 1989Published Peasant Russia, Civil War
- 1996Published A People's Tragedy
- 1999Became professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London
- 2007Published The Whisperers
- 2022Retired from Birkbeck as emeritus professor
Related historical events
The Whisperers and Oral History
Figes based The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (2007) on an oral-history and family-archive project conducted with the Memorial Society. The book examines private life under Stalinism, especially how state repression and social change affected family relationships, emotions, beliefs, moral choices, and memory. The research team interviewed people including survivors and perpetrators and collected family records from homes across Russia. Another account describes more than 250 extensive interviews alongside letters, diaries, memoirs, photographs, and personal papers. The sources thus describe the scale of the interviewing differently, but agree that testimony was combined with private records.
Figes acknowledged that interview testimony, like memory generally, could not simply be taken as reliable, while arguing that it could be tested against other evidence. This approach examined repression not only through institutions and events but also through people’s experience in family and everyday life. During a police raid on Memorial’s St Petersburg office in 2008, materials collected for the book were confiscated with the electronic archive; they were returned in May 2009.