Even if one takes nothing else away from this elegant, tightly focused survey of Russian culture, it's impossible to forget the telling little anecdotes that University of London history professor ...

London Re Peter Reddaway and Stephen F. Cohen’s June 11 “Dishonoring Stalin’s Victims,” about my 2007 book The Whisperers: in a book as large and complex as The Whisperers unintended errors are not ...

Orlando Figes’s Just Send Me Word is the unique and moving story of a true life love affair via letters between a Gulag prisoner and his girlfriend. Owen Matthews on what documents like these ...

Drawing on more than 1,200 letters between Lev and Svetlana “Sveta” Mishchenko, and interviews with the couple, veteran historian Figes (The Crimean War) tells their remarkable tale of love and ...

I’m speaking to Figes at Trojka, a Russian café in north London. I had thought it might be an old haunt of his but the 51-year-old, who exudes a boyish energy, has never been there. His new book, Just ...

Sign up for the best picks from our travel, fashion and lifestyle writers. Next month sees the publication of Orlando Figes's history of the Crimean war, Crimea: The ...

For a good three decades, the British historian Orlando Figes has been one of the West’s premier historians of the Soviet era, receiving considerable acclaim for 1996’s “A People’s Tragedy” and 2002’s ...

A leading historian who wrote anonymous reviews on the Amazon website praising his own work and criticising rivals is to pay libel damages and costs. Orlando Figes, a professor at London's Birkbeck ...

For decades Russians old enough to remember Stalinism despaired whenever a foreigner asked: How was life in those times? The best way to respond was to roll one's eyes and spread one's arms. Where to ...

When the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace on the night of 25 October 1917, they discovered one of the largest wine cellars ever known to the world. During the following days, crowds went on a ...