Orlando Guy Figes is a British historian and writer.
28 Facts About Orlando Figes
2.
Orlando Figes has constributed significantly on European history more broadly, notably with his book The Europeans.
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Orlando Figes serves on the editorial board of the journal Russian History, writes for the international press, broadcasts on television and radio, reviews for The New York Review of Books, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
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Orlando Figes's books have been translated into over thirty languages.
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The author and editor Kate Orlando Figes was his elder sister.
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Orlando Figes attended William Ellis School in north London and studied History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, graduating with a double-starred first in 1982.
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Orlando Figes is married to human rights lawyer Stephanie Palmer, a senior lecturer in law at Cambridge University and barrister at Blackstone Chambers London.
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Orlando Figes was a fellow and lecturer in history at Gonville and Caius College from 1984 to 1999.
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Orlando Figes then succeeded Richard J Evans as professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London.
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Orlando Figes demonstrated how the function of the rural Soviets was transformed in the course of the Civil War as they were taken over by younger and more literate peasants and migrant townsmen, many of them veterans of the First World War or Red Army soldiers, who became the rural bureaucrats of the emerging Bolshevik regime.
11.
Orlando Figes is credited as the historical consultant on the 2012 film Anna Karenina.
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Orlando Figes has written essays on various Russian cultural figures, including Leo Tolstoy, Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev and Andrei Platonov.
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In partnership with the Memorial Society, a human rights non-profit, Orlando 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.
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Orlando Figes drew on the closed sections of Simonov's archive in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art and on the archives of the poet's wife and son to produce his study of this major Soviet establishment figure.
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Orlando Figes was given exclusive access to the letters and other parts of the archive, which is based on interviews with the couple when they were in their nineties, and the archives of the labour camp itself.
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Orlando Figes raised the finance for the transcription of the letters, which are housed in the Memorial Society in Moscow and will become available to researchers in 2013.
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Orlando 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.
18.
Orlando Figes stresses the religious motive of the Tsar Nicholas I in his bold decision to go to war, arguing that Nicholas was swayed by the ideas of the Pan-Slavs to invade Moldavia and Wallachia and encourage Slav revolts against the Ottomans, despite his earlier adherence to the Legitimist principles of the Holy Alliance.
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Orlando Figes argues that a pan-European culture formed through new technologies, mass foreign travel, market forces, and the development of international copyright, enabling writers, artists and composers as well as their publishers to enter foreign markets through the growth of literary translations, touring companies and international publishing.
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Orlando 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.
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Orlando Figes is involved in an international summer school for history teachers in Russian universities organised by the European University of St Petersburg.
22.
Orlando Figes condemned the police raid, accusing the Russian authorities of trying to rehabilitate the Stalinist regime.
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Orlando Figes organised an open protest letter to President Dmitry Medvedev and other Russian leaders, which was signed by several hundred leading academics from across the world.
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Orlando Figes has condemned the arrest by the FSB of historian Mikhail Suprun as part of a "Putinite campaign against freedom of historical research and expression".
25.
In December 2013, Orlando Figes wrote a long piece in the US journal Foreign Affairs on the Euromaidan demonstrations in Kyiv suggesting that a referendum on Ukraine's foreign policy and the country's possible partition might be a preferable alternative to the possibility of civil war and military intervention by Russia.
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Orlando Figes has contributed frequently to radio and television broadcasts in the United Kingdom and around the world.
27.
Orlando Figes was the historical consultant on the film Anna Karenina, directed by Joe Wright, starring Keira Knightley and Jude Law with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard.
28.
In 2010, Orlando Figes posted several pseudonymous reviews on the UK site of the online bookseller Amazon where he criticised books by two other British historians of Russia, Robert Service and Rachel Polonsky, whilst praising his books, among others.