Simon Sebag Montefiore (26 May 2012). "Labour of love". Financial Times. Archived from the original on 11 December 2022 . Retrieved 24 July 2015. These changes also helped the rise of nationalist movements on the periphery of the empire. Until the development of rural schools and networks of communication, nationalism remained an élite urban movement for native language rights in schools and universities, literary publications and official life. Outside the towns its influence was limited. The peasants were barely conscious of their nationality. ‘I myself did not know that I was a Pole till I began to read books and papers,' recalled a farmer after 1917.6 In many areas, such as Ukraine, Belorussia and the Caucasus, there was so much ethnic intermingling that it was difficult for anything more than a localized form of identity to take root in the popular consciousness. ‘Were one to ask the average peasant in the Ukraine his nationality,' observed a British diplomat, ‘he would answer that he is Greek Orthodox; if pressed to say whether he is a Great Russian, a Pole or an Ukrainian, he would probably reply that he is a peasant; and if one insisted on knowing what language he spoke, he would say that he talked "the local tongue".'7 Luke Harding in Moscow (7 December 2008). "Russian police raid human rights group's archive |". The Observer. London . Retrieved 31 August 2011.

Origins of the Russian Revolution : Orlando Figes Origins of the Russian Revolution : Orlando Figes

Whether intended to elevate the subjects to hero status or castigate them as cruel tyrants, these pictures form part of Russia’s collective memory. They are etched into the nation’s psyche, each capturing a moment in Russia’s story about itself. That’s an old story in Russia: Few observers of President Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin today question its predilection for passing off total fiction as official truth, as we see in the fantastical propaganda broadcast to justify his mass murder in Ukraine. However, too little is understood about the central role obfuscation has played from the very beginning of his more than two-decade rule, and how the president has deeply tapped into central tropes of Russia’s traditional political culture to pose as his country’s sole savior. 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]

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All the main components of Lenin's ideology—his stress on the need for a disciplined ‘vanguard'; his belief that action (the ‘subjective factor') could alter the objective course of history (and in particular that the seizure of the state apparatus could bring about a social revolution); his defence of terror and dictatorship; his contempt for liberals and democrats (and indeed for socialists who compromised with them)—stemmed not just from Marx but from Tkachev and the People's Will. He injected a distinctly Russian dose of conspiratorial politics into a Marxist dialectic that would otherwise have remained passive—tied down by a willingness to wait for the revolution to mature through the development of objective conditions rather than bringing it about through political action. It was not Marxism that made Lenin a revolutionary but Lenin who made Marxism revolutionary. Despite the rise of a meritocratic bureaucracy in the 17th century, and other developments manifested in the Westernizing reforms of Peter the Great, Russia never experienced its own version of European feudalism, or a Renaissance or Enlightenment. As Figes makes clear, the empire’s autocratic rule suppressed the kind of civil society that would be crucial for the development of modern European civilization. Figes in his maturity is a fine, subtle writer with a nice eye for detail and clever with structure. I finished the book entertained, informed and armed with the kinds of insights and questions that will keep me happily going for the rest of the year." (David Aaronovitch The Times) A primer intended for readers unfamiliar with the territory, it sparkles with ideas, vivid storytelling, poignant anecdotes and pithy phrases... Fresh and dramatic (Victor Sebestyen, Sunday Times) Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2023-01-14 04:27:30 Autocrop_version 0.0.14_books-20220331-0.2 Bookplateleaf 0003 Boxid IA40814024 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Col_number COL-1064 Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier

Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991 - Orlando Figes - Google Books Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991 - Orlando Figes - Google Books

Wheeler, Sara (3 September 2022). "How Putin manipulated history to help Russians feel good again". The Spectator (review) . Retrieved 6 September 2022. Ukrainians see him as central to their culture and independence from Russian and Soviet rule. Russians, for their part, claim Rus as the birthplace of their own culture, the foundation of a larger Slav civilization with Moscow at its center. “What we have in the conflict over Volodymyr/Vladimir,” Figes writes, “is not a genuine historical dispute, but two incompatible foundation myths.” Here Russia stood in stark contrast to Europe, where these worker types tended to be the least revolutionary and labour parties representing them were entering parliaments. There were few signs of such a ‘labour aristocracy' emerging in Russia and certainly no parliament to which it could aspire. The print workers were the most likely candidates for such a role. Yet even they stood firmly behind the Marxist and other revolutionary socialist parties. Had they been able to develop their own legal trade unions, the workers might have gone down the path of moderate reform taken by the European labour movements. But the Russian political situation pushed them to extremes. They were forced to rely upon the leadership of the revolutionary underground. To a large extent, then, the workers' revolutionary movement was created by the tsarist government.

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]

Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991: A History: Written by Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991: A History: Written by

A primer intended for readers unfamiliar with the territory, it sparkles with ideas, vivid storytelling, poignant anecdotes and pithy phrases... Fresh and dramatic." (Victor Sebestyen, Sunday Times)There are a multitude of fascinating pieces of information to be gleaned from Orlando Figes's magisterial and wide-ranging book The Europeans ... Relevant, trenchant and searching." (William Boyd, The Guardian) Fast forward to the 20th century and note Stalin’s use of religion on the eve of the second world war, replacing Bolshevik slogans with religious iconography and enlisting the support of the Orthodox church to rally support for the motherland against the Nazis. We see the same echoes again today in Putin’s “holy war” against Ukraine.

Historian: Orlando Figes - Alpha History Historian: Orlando Figes - Alpha History

In this section we will be exploring the 1905 revolution - asking why it happened and why it failed? Why was the Tsarist system able to survive the revolutionary challenges of 1905? To what extent did the revolution fail because of its own internal divisions? And what did the revolutionary parties learn from 1905? In this section you will find some answers to these questions. You will aklso find some extracts from books, photographs from 1905, a video film, and my suggestions on what else to read. Register

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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. Forced off the land by poverty, over-population and the growing cost of renting land, millions of peasants came into the towns, or worked in rural factories and mines. In the last half-century of the old regime the empire's urban population grew from 7 million to 28 million people. The 1890s saw the sharpest growth as the effects of the famine crisis coincided with the accelerated programme of industrialization and railway construction pushed through by Count Witte, the Minister of Finance from 1892. The West plays a central role. The early rulers of Muscovy — the medieval state that would become Russia — looked to Europe for models for their court culture soon after they began consolidating power in the 15th century. Emulating Western culture and practices would prompt admiration and antagonism; Russians have defined their culture in imitation and opposition ever since. His book The Whisperers followed the approach of oral history. In partnership with the Memorial Society, a human rights non-profit organisation, Figes 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. [23] Housed in the Memorial Society in Moscow, St Petersburg and Perm, many of these valuable research materials are available online. [24]