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The Europeans
'Magnificent. Beautifully written, immaculately researched and thoroughly absorbing from start to finish. A tour de force that explains how Europe's cultural life transformed during the course of the 19th century - and so much more' Peter Frankopan From the bestselling author of Natasha's Dance, The Europeans is richly enthralling, panoramic cultural history of nineteenth-century Europe, told through the intertwined lives of three remarkable people: a great singer, Pauline Viardot, a great writer, Ivan Turgenev, and a great connoisseur, Pauline's husband Louis. Their passionate, ambitious lives were bound up with an astonishing array of writers, composers and painters all trying to make thei...
A People's Tragedy
Russia under the old regime - The crisis of authority - Russia in revolution (February 1917-March 1918) - The civil war and the making of the Soviet system (1918-24); Lenin - Marx - Stalin - Kerensky - Trotskysk_____________
The Whisperers
Drawing on a huge range of sources - letters, memoirs, conversations - Orlando Figes tells the story of how Russians tried to endure life under Stalin. Those who shaped the political system became, very frequently, its victims. Those who were its victims were frequently quite blameless. The Whisperers recreates the sort of maze in which Russians found themselves, where an unwitting wrong turn could either destroy a family or, perversely, later save it: a society in which everyone spoke in whispers - whether to protect themselves, their families, neighbours or friends - or to inform on them.
Just Send Me Word
Almost everything we know about the terrible experience of the Gulag has been based on survivor memoirs, in many cases written decades later. For obvious reasons there is very little authentic, contemporary material.Just Send Me Word is a uniquely powerful and moving experience. It is the story of the relationship between Lev and Sveta, two young Muscovites separated by the Second World War and then the Gulag, where the Soviet state sent Lev for ten years on absurd and arbitrary charges. Extraordinarily, during Lev's long exile in an Arctic camp they were able to smuggle letters to each other and even meet. Both sides of the entire correspondence have survived and these letters (of which there are some 1,500) form a detailed and agonizing account of life in Stalin's Soviet Union. They are a testament to human constancy under impossible circumstances - a love story like no other.
Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991
AN ORIGINAL READING OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION, EXAMINING IT NOT AS A SINGLE EVENT BUT AS A HUNDRED-YEAR CYCLE OF VIOLENCE IN PURSUIT OF UTOPIAN DREAMS In this elegant and incisive account, Orlando Figes offers an illuminating new perspective on the Russian Revolution. While other historians have focused their examinations on the cataclysmic years immediately before and after 1917, Figes shows how the revolution, while it changed in form and character, nevertheless retained the same idealistic goals throughout, from its origins in the famine crisis of 1891 until its end with the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991. Until the very end of the Soviet system, its leaders believed they were carrying out the revolution Lenin had begun. 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.
A People's Tragedy
Unrivalled in scope and brimming with human drama, A People's Tragedy is the most vivid, moving and comprehensive history of the Russian Revolution available today. 'A modern masterpiece' Andrew Marr 'The most moving account of the Russian Revolution since Doctor Zhivago' Independent Opening with a panorama of Russian society, from the cloistered world of the Tsar to the brutal life of the peasants, A People's Tragedy follows workers, soldiers, intellectuals and villagers as their world is consumed by revolution and then degenerates into violence and dictatorship. Drawing on vast original research, Figes conveys above all the shocking experience of the revolution for those who lived it, while providing the clearest and most cogent account of how and why it unfolded. Illustrated with over 100 photographs and now including a new introduction that reflects on the revolution's centennial legacy, A People's Tragedy is a masterful and definitive record of one of the most important events in modern history.
The Story of Russia
'The history book you need if you want to understand modern Russia' ANNE APPLEBAUM'A magnificent, magisterial thousand year history of Russia . . . by one of the masters of Russian scholarship' SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE'A great historian at the peak of his powers' WILLIAM DALRYMPLE'[An] excellent short study' MAX HASTINGS, SUNDAY TIMES'If you really want to understand Putin's Russia today, anchored in its past of myths, then you simply have to read Figes's superb account' ANTONY BEEVOR'A lucid chronological journey that ably illustrates how narratives from the nation's past have been used to shape its autocratic present' OBSERVER'A valuable, instructive overview' INDEPENDENT -------------------...
Natasha's Dance
From the award-winning author of The Whisperers, Orlando Figes Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia is a dazzling history of Russia's mighty culture. Orlando Figes' enthralling, richly evocative history has been heralded as a literary masterpiece on Russia, the lives of those who have shaped its culture, and the enduring spirit of a people. 'Wonderfully rich ... magnificent and compelling ... a delight to read' Antony Beevor 'A tour de force by the great storyteller of modern Russian historians ... Figes mobilizes a cast of serf harems, dynasties, politburos, libertines, filmmakers, novelists, composers, poets, tsars and tyrants ... superb, flamboyant and masterful' Simon Sebag-Mont...
Peasant Russia, Civil War
From the preface Many historians outside the Soviet Union have sought to explain why the Bolsheviks won the civil war. Some have focused on the military history of 1918-20. Others have connected the victory of the Red Army to the growth of the Soviet State. But none has made a detailed study of the relationship between the Bolsheviks and the peasantry, the overwhelming majority of the Russian population, during the formative years of the Soviet regime. None has seriously investigated the ways in which the Bolshevik victory was made possible by the transformation of the Russian countryside in the years leading up to and during the revolution. That is the purpose of this book.
Trotsky
Revolutionary practitioner, theorist, factional chief, sparkling writer, ‘ladies’ man’ (e.g., his affair with Frieda Kahlo), icon of the Revolution, anti-Jewish Jew, philosopher of everyday life, grand seigneur of his household, father and hunted victim, Trotsky lived a brilliant life in extraordinary times. Robert Service draws on hitherto unexamined archives and on his profound understanding of Russian history to draw a portrait of the man and his legacy, revealing that though his followers have represented Trotsky as a pure revolutionary soul and a powerful intellect unjustly hounded into exile by Stalin and his henchmen. The reality is very different, as this masterful and compelling biography reveals.
