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"Figes, Orlando"
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The Crimean War : a history
From \"the great storyteller of modern Russian historians\" comes the definitive account of the Crimean War, a forgotten war that shaped the modern age. Figes reconstructs the first full conflagration of modernity, a global industrialized struggle fought with unusual ferocity and incompetence.
Book
Private Life in Stalin's Russia: Family Narratives, Memory and Oral History
Private Life in Stalin's Russia: Family Narratives, Memory and Oral History For many years, we knew next to nothing about the private lives of ordinary Soviet citizens during Stalin's reign. Until very recently, the social history of the Soviet Union written by Soviet and Western historians alike was limited entirely to the public sphere – politics and ideology, and the collective experience of the ‘Soviet masses.’ The individual (insofar as he or she appeared at all) featured mainly as a letter-writer to the Soviet authorities – as a public actor rather than a private person or member of a family. Sources were the obvious problem. Apart from a few memoirs by great writers, there was practically no reliable evidence about the private sphere of family life. For ordinary people in the Soviet Union, for the tens of millions who suffered from repression, their family history was a forbidden zone of memory – something they would never talk or write about. This article addresses that difficulty by exploring the results of a large-scale project of historical recovery. With three teams of researchers from various towns in Russia, I have been recovering the family archives of ordinary Russians who lived through the years of Stalin's rule. In all, we collected approximately 250 family archives which had been in private homes across Russia, even more than a decade after the collapse of the Soviet regime. In each family extensive interviews were carried out with the oldest relatives, who were able to explain the context of these private documents and place them in the family's unspoken history. The interviews explore how families reacted to the various pressures of the Soviet regime. How did they preserve their traditions and beliefs, and pass them down to children, if they were in conflict with the public values of the Soviet system? How did living in a system ruled by terror affect intimate relationhips? How could human feelings and emotions retain their force in the moral vacuum of the Stalinist regime? What were the strategies for survival, the silences, the lies, the friendships and betrayals, the moral compromises and accommodations that shaped millions of lives?
Journal Article
Natasha's dance : a cultural history of Russia
This text provides a richly evocative exploration of Russia, its culture and people. It ranges from the splendour of 18th-century St Petersburg to the power of Stalinist propaganda, bringing to life an extraordinary cast of serf artists and aristocrats, revolutionaries, priests and exiles.
Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991 : a history
Presenting a new perspective on the Russian Revolution, a noted historian traces three generational phases to show how the revolution, while it changed in form and character, retained the same idealistic goals throughout.
Book
The Russian Revolution of 1917 and Its Language in the Village
A study examines the actions of the leaders of the February Revolution in 1917 in Russia and their impact on the village peasantry. The democratic revolution initiated a public discourse of democracy to break down class distinctions, resolve social conflicts and create a nation of citizens, but they only reinforced social divisions and united the peasantry, who defined their self-identity in their language, against the educated classes of the towns.
Journal Article
The Europeans : three lives and the making of a cosmopolitan culture
\"The nineteenth century in Europe was the first age of cultural globalization-an epoch when mass communications and high-speed rail travel brought Europe together, overcoming national barriers and creating a truly pan-European canon of artistic, musical, and literary works. By 1900, people across the continent were reading the same books, looking at the same art, and attending the same opera performances. Acclaimed historian Orlando Figes moves from Parisian salons to German spa towns to Russian country houses, exploring the interplay of money and art that made this unification possible. At the book's center is an intimate love triangle: the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev; the Spanish prima donna Pauline Viardot; and her husband Louis Viardot, a connoisseur and political activist. Their passionate, ambitious lives caught up an astonishing array of artists and princes, poets, composers, and impresarios-Delacroix, Chopin, the Schumanns, Hugo, Flaubert, Dickens, and Dostoyevsky, among them. As Figes observes, nearly all of civilization's great advances have come when people, ideas, and artistic creations circulate freely between nations. Surprising, beautifully written, spanning a continent and a century, The Europeans offers the first international history of European culture-and a compelling argument for the benefits of cosmopolitanism\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
THE RED ARMY AND MASS MOBILIZATION DURING THE RUSSIAN CIVIL WAR 1918–1920
Conscription of peasants; problems of supply and training; desertions
Journal Article
