Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991: A Pelican Introduction (Pelican Books)

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In 1999 he wrote a six-part educational TV series on the history of Communism under the title Red Chapters. There was a strong puritanical streak in Lenin's character which later manifested itself in the political culture of his dictatorship. He likens it to the place Anglo-Saxon Wessex has in English history – one element, but not the whole story. According to Russian proverbs, a woman was improved by regular beatings, while: ‘For a man that has been beaten you have to offer two unbeaten ones.

Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991 - Penguin Books UK

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. Its tactics, he argued, would destroy socialism and the revolution, which could only succeed under the centralized political leadership of a disciplined vanguard party in the mould of the People's Will. It is to examine the recurring themes and myths that drive Vladimir Putin’s conviction that war with Ukraine and with western Europe is part of Russia’s historical destiny. A People's Tragedy (1996) is a panoramic history of the Revolution from 1891 to the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924.

We Want To Defeat Russia,' Says British Historian Figes, 'But We Don't Want To Push It Into Civil War And Chaos' ".

War and the Russian Revolution : Orlando Figes The Great War and the Russian Revolution : Orlando Figes

Figes uses the letters to explore conditions in the labour camp and to tell the love story, ending in 1955 with Lev's release and marriage to Svetlana. It is difficult to overestimate the psychological impact of this corporal punishment—forty-three years after the serfs had been ‘freed'. The coercive basis of authority was replicated everywhere—in relations between officers and men in the armed services, between employers and workers, between peasant elders and wives and children. With the authority and distinctive style that have marked his magisterial histories, Figes delivers an accessible and paradigm-shifting reconsideration of one of the defining events of the twentieth century.Throughout Russia the impact of modernization—of towns and mass communications, the money economy and above all rural schools—gave rise to a generation of younger and more literate peasants who sought to overturn the patriarchal village world. As Maxim Gorky wrote in 1917, ‘Lenin is a "leader" and a Russian nobleman, not without certain psychological traits of this extinct class, and therefore he considers himself justified in performing with the Russian people a cruel experiment which is doomed to failure beforehand.