1. Orlando Guy Figes is a British and German historian and writer.
36 Facts About Orlando Figes
1. 2.
Orlando Figes was a professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he was made Emeritus Professor on his retirement in 2022.
3.
Orlando Figes has contributed on European history more broadly with his book The Europeans.
4.
The author and editor Kate Orlando Figes was his elder sister.
5.
Orlando Figes's father left the family when he was three.
6.
Orlando Figes attended William Ellis School in north London and studied History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where his teachers were Peter Burke and Norman Stone, graduating with a double-starred first in 1982.
7.
Orlando Figes wrote his undergraduate dissertation under Stone's guidance on 'Ludwig Borne and the Formation of a Radical Critique of Judaism' and published it as a journal article in the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book in 1984.
8.
Orlando Figes was a Fellow of Trinity College from 1984 to 1999.
9.
Orlando Figes was appointed University Lecturer at the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge in 1987.
10.
Orlando Figes succeeded Richard J Evans as Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London in 1999.
11.
Orlando Figes announced his retirement from the post in 2022.
12.
Orlando Figes has served on the editorial board of the journal Russian History since at least 2011, 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.
13.
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.
14.
Orlando Figes has written essays on various Russian cultural figures, including Leo Tolstoy, Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev and Andrei Platonov.
15.
In partnership with the Memorial Society, a human rights non-profit organization, 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.
16.
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.
17.
Orlando Figes condemned the police raid, accusing the Russian authorities of trying to rehabilitate the Stalinist regime.
18.
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.
19.
Orlando Figes saw his first Russian translation contract for The Whisperers cancelled in March 2009 by publisher Attikus, who cited commercial reasons.
20.
Orlando Figes suggested that the book was "inconvenient" to Vladimir Putin's government and that the real explanation for the refusal to publish lay in "political pressure".
21.
Orlando Figes was notified of the decision in April 2011 in a letter which suggested that its publication would cause offence in Russia.
22.
Orlando Figes offered to revise the book, but his offer was ignored.
23.
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.
24.
Orlando Figes raised the finance for the transcription of the letters, which are housed in Memorial's offices in Moscow and will become available to researchers in 2013.
25.
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.
26.
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.
27.
Orlando Figes argues that the 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.
28.
Orlando Figes has contributed frequently to radio and television broadcasts in the United Kingdom and around the world.
29.
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.
30.
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.
31.
Orlando Figes condemned the arrest by the FSB of historian Mikhail Suprun as part of a "Putinite campaign against freedom of historical research and expression".
32.
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.
33.
In February 2024, Orlando Figes was sanctioned with denial of entry into Russia by Vladimir Putin's government, together with other British academics and experts, for criticizing the war in Ukraine and allegedly demonizing Russia.
34.
In 2010, Figes posted several pseudonymous reviews under the moniker "orlando-birkbeck" on the UK site of the online bookseller Amazon.
35.
In 1990, Orlando Figes married Stephanie Palmer, a senior lecturer in law at Cambridge University and barrister at Blackstone Chambers.
36.
In 2023, Orlando Figes was awarded an honorary degree by the Menendez Pelayo International University in Santander, Spain.