Shliapnikov made the statement in 1921, after the Civil War, the international blockade, military intervention by more than a dozen foreign armies and famine had decimated the Russian working class. He is involved in an international summer school for history teachers in Russian universities organised by the European University of St Petersburg. 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 Russia Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky. Bolshevism, as Figes shows, appealed to young countrymen who, having experienced life in the city or the Army, ‘came to reject the “dark” and “backward” ways of the old peasant Russia’. The armature of his arguments is completely obscured by the excess of trivia he has slathered onto it.

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

Please improve this article by removing excessive or inappropriate external links, and converting useful links where appropriate into footnote references. The effect of this amalgamation of material is that parts of the book are dull for the specialist, and others are dull for the layperson. Some of the book seems to be directed at the general reader, and explains matters that anyone remotely familiar with this territory would know; in other places, he indulges in the most arcane arguments, settling picayune details by quoting pages of obscure statistics and wordy official edicts. In 2007 he wrote and presented two 60-minute Archive Hour programmes on radio entitled Stalin's Silent People which used recordings from his oral history project with Memorial that formed the basis of his book The Whisperers.Even if you care nothing for the Napoleonic wars, you cannot stop rushing through War and Peace; if the events in A People's Tragedy had not actually taken place, neither the writing nor the drive of universal insight would compel you through 924 pages (not including the wonderful photographs). The individual-as-signifier strategy is effective in fiction, but the elements of people's lives cannot be constructed with such subtle artistry, and this rich panoply of individuals amounts to neither a coherent theory of humanity nor a perfect description of a complicated period. The entire electronic archive of Memorial in St Petersburg, including the materials collected with Figes for The Whisperers, was confiscated by the authorities.

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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).

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. Figes' The Whisperers was adapted and performed by Rupert Wickham as a one-man play, Stalin's Favourite.