Books with great historical details and heart wrenching details are hard to come by. There might be surplus of history books in the market but not every one of them is written by a scholar and expert in the subject like Orlando Figes. A detailed look at few of his books would help in revealing how powerful his writing is considered.
Peasant Russia, Civil War was released in 1989. It performs a detailed analysis on peasantry in the region of Volga at the time of Civil war and Revolution that spanned for period of 4 years between 1917 and 1921. Orlando Figes makes use of Soviet archives of village to focus on how the agrarian revolution that spanned between 1917 and 1918 was autonomous in nature. The book also shows how its developments was based on notions of social injustice upheld by traditional peasants and how it was independent of political parties that are urban bases, Provisional Government as well as the Bolsheviks. The book beautifully demonstrates how the operations of the rural Soviets altered during the time of Civil War and how they came into the hands of migrant town people, literate peasants who were young. Most of these people were part of Red Army soldiers during the First World War and later became rural bureaucrats due to the Bolshevik regime that emerged.
Another masterpiece by Orlando Figes is A People’s Tragedy. It gives a panoramic account of Russian revolution from the year of 1891 to the year of 1924 when Valdmir Lenin died. It beautifully combines the political and social aspects of the society along with personal accounts of many eminent personalities like General Alexei Brusilov, Geory Lvov and Maxim Gorky. According to Orlando Figes, he “tried to present the revolution not as a march of abstract social forces and ideologies but as a human event of complicated individual tragedies”.
Due to the negative analysis Orlando Figes has provided on Lenin, the left wing critics are of opinion that he is a conservative. This decision is also the result of Figes’ emphasis on individuals rather than the works of collective masses. There are several others who consider Figes a revisionist who explains politics in simple language of social history.
These two books are among the most famous of Figes. He has written several books in the subjects of history, socialism and politics. He is a writer whose work would be remembered for a long time even after his period.