Orlando Figes - Eurasia Baike
Author

Orlando Figes

Orlando Figes (born 1959) is a prominent British historian and author, widely regarded as one of the most compelling—and at times, controversial—chroniclers of Russian history. He is a Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London, and is celebrated for his "narrative history" style, which blends rigorous academic research with the storytelling pacing of a novelist.

Published in 2002, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia is arguably Figes’s most famous work. The title is a reference to a scene in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, where the young Countess Natasha Rostova instinctively knows how to dance a traditional folk dance despite her aristocratic, French-influenced upbringing.

Figes typically focuses on the "human" element of history—how grand political movements like the Russian Revolution or Stalinism affected the daily lives and psyches of ordinary people.

  • A People’s Tragedy (1996): A massive, award-winning study of the Russian Revolution. It argues that the revolution was a tragedy not just of politics, but of the Russian people’s own internal social weaknesses.
  • The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (2007): An intimate look at how Soviet citizens navigated a world of surveillance, where people spoke in "whispers" to avoid the secret police.
  • The Europeans (2019): A broader look at 19th-century internationalism, focusing on how the railway and new technologies created a unified European culture through the lives of figures like Ivan Turgenev.

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2002