Orlando Figes is a British national and a Russian historian who has written a lot of books and has been teaching history as of present. He is the one out of three writers in the Figes household, her mother Eva Figes and sister Kate Figes, being the other two. His books were captivating tales about war, culture, conspiracies and tales about the Soviet Union.
His first book, Peasant Russia Civil War: The Volga Coutryside in Revolution was based on his dissertation in college about the Volga region during the Russian Revolution amidst the Civil War. This book was published in 1989.
A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution was his second book which was released in 1991. This became a worldwide success as it has been translated to more than twenty languages. It details the panoramic chronicle of the revolution due to famine in 1891 until the death of Vladimir Lenin, a Russian Marxist revolutionist and communist politician, in year 1924. A People’s Tragedy is a public narrative telling the social and political history in the eyes of several figures such as the writer Maxim Gorky and anonymous peasants and workers. In this book, he said that he had tried to make up an image of the revolution not just as a movement of abstract social forces and dogmas but as a human event of individual tragedies that brought about complications.
Meanwhile, Orlando Figes’ third book, Natasha’s Dance, was to date, his widest-selling book. He published this book in 2002 and was translated into more than ten languages. This was his first book wherein he wrote about beauty, positivity and how passionate he is about Russia. Natasha’s dance is the cultural history of Russia from the sovereignty of Peter the Great in the 18th Century. This book tackles the definitive line between European folk elements and the Russian culture and how the Russian soul came to be presented by artists, composers and philosophers.
In 2007, he released his fourth book, The Whisperers, which is the case study of Stalin’s private life in Russia. Joseph Stalin was a Bolshevik revolutionary head of the Soviet Union. In the course of writing of this book, he has interviewed more than four hundred people who knew about Stalin’s life and capsized the information he gathered into his historical writing. This included the family archives from Stalin’s homes all over Russia.
Lastly, his most recent book is Crimea: The Last Crusade which is a unique approach and subject compared to his previous books which all centered in Russia. The Crimea is military, diplomatic, political and cultural accounts of the national affected by the Crimean War. Orlando Figes’ narrative was derived from the archives of Russia, France and Turkey.