Author(s): Orlando Figes

History | Russia

'Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past', George Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

In this glorious work of history, Orlando Figes argues that the maxim is truer for Russia than for any other country in the world. The Story of Russia begins in the first millennium, when Russia's lands were first settled by the Slavs, and ends with Putin in the third. From Boris and Gleb, the first saints of the Russian Church, to the crowning of sixteen-year-old Ivan the Terrible in a candlelit cathedral; and from Catherine the Great, riding out in a green uniform to arrest her husband at his palace, to the bitter last days of the Romanovs, Orlando Figes takes us on an intimate and enthralling journey through the stories that have shaped Russia. How the Russians came to tell their story and to reinvent it as they went along is not only a vital aspect of their history, but is also the best means we have of understanding the country today. The Story of Russia is quintessential Figes- sweeping, suspenseful, masterful.

Review: A magnificent, magisterial thousand year history of Russia . . . its tsars and tyrants, wars and massacres, ideas and dreams vividly drawn, its analysis of Russian power and empire essential reading today -- Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of THE ROMANOVS and STALIN: THE COURT OF THE RED TSAR
An expert on Russia delivers a crucially relevant study . . . A lucid, astute text that unpacks the myths of Russian history to help explain present-day motivations and actions * Kirkus (starred review) *
If you really want to understand Putin's Russia today, anchored in its past of myths, then you simply have to read Figes's superb account in The Story of Russia -- Antony Beevor
Urgent and revelatory and brilliantly told, it's all the things you pray a book will be when you first pick it up -- Peter Morgan
Excellent short study -- Max Hastings * Sunday Times *
The historian's latest work on Russia is a lucid chronological journey that ably illustrates how narratives from the nation's past have been used to shape its autocratic present -- Angus Macqueen * Observer *
Orlando Figes is an outstanding historian and writer, he brings distant history so close that you could feel its heartbeat -- Karl Ove Knausgaard on THE EUROPEANS
There are a multitude of fascinating pieces of information to be gleaned from Orlando Figes's magisterial and wide-ranging book The Europeans . . . Relevant, trenchant and searching -- William Boyd on THE EUROPEANS
Meticulously detailed, exhaustively researched and written with Figes's characteristic verve . . . A sweeping tour de force and a monumental work -- Observer on THE EUROPEANS
Magnificent. Beautifully written, immaculately researched and thoroughly absorbing . . . A tour de force -- Peter Frankopan on THE EUROPEANS

Author Biography: Orlando Figes is an award-winning author and historian, who has held teaching posts at Birkbeck College, University of London and Trinity College, University of Cambridge. He was born in London in 1959 and studied History at the University of Cambridge. Figes is the bestselling author of nine books on Russian and European history, including Natasha's Dance and A People's Tragedy. His books have been translated into over 30 languages.