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.

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

National Theatre announce new Season to Jan 2012". London Theatre. 8 June 2016 . Retrieved 6 September 2022.

Christiansen, Rupert (15 September 2019). "A ménage a trois that transformed European culture". The Sunday Telegraph. ISSN 0307-1235. Simon Sebag Montefiore (26 May 2012). "Labour of love". Financial Times. Archived from the original on 11 December 2022 . Retrieved 24 July 2015. 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] Published in 2002, Natasha's Dance is a broad cultural history of Russia from the building of St. Petersburg during the reign of Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century. Taking its title from a scene in Tolstoy's War and Peace, where the young countess Natasha Rostova intuitively dances a peasant dance, it explores the tensions between the European and folk elements of Russian culture, and examines how the myth of the "Russian soul" and the idea of "Russianness" itself have been expressed by Russian writers, artists, composers and philosophers.

Orlando Figes - Springer Orlando Figes - Springer

Podcast of Figes speaking at the Samuel Johnson short-listed author event about "Whisperers", London (2008) BookBuffet.com Red Chapters: Turning Points in the History of Communism (TV Series 1999)". IMDb.com . Retrieved 24 July 2015. Wheeler, Sara (3 September 2022). "How Putin manipulated history to help Russians feel good again". The Spectator (review) . Retrieved 6 September 2022.

To be sure the Government is hostile to the people ... it deceives the people and turns them into slaves, but nonetheless ... the people support Soviet power. That does not mean they are happy with it. But at the same time as they feel their oppression they also see that their own type of people are entering into the apparatus, and this makes them feel that the regime is ‘their own’. 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]