Estates Quotes by Orlando Figes

On the news that the Tsar had sent the troops icons to boost their morals, General Dragomirov quipped: 'The Japanese are beating us with…

— Orlando Figes

“For the Romanov regime fell under the weight of its own internal contradictions. It was not overthrown.”

— Orlando Figes

“The only way, they argued, to prevent a revolution was to rule Russia with an iron hand. This meant defending the autocratic principle, the…

— Orlando Figes

“This was a cruelty made by history. Long after serfdom had been abolished the land captains exercised their right to flog the peasants for…

— Orlando Figes

“Whereas in Europe new ideas were forced to compete against other doctrines and attitudes, with the results that people tended towards healthy skepticism about…

— Orlando Figes

Time and time again, the obstinate refusal of the tsarist regime to concede reforms turned what should have been a political problem into a…

— Orlando Figes

The link between literacy and revolutions is a well-known historical phenomenon. The three great revolutions of modern European history -- the English, the French…

— Orlando Figes

“For all too many of these high-born revolutionaries, the main attraction of 'the cause' lay not so much in the satisfaction which they might…

— Orlando Figes

Their notion of training was to march the men up and down in parades and reviews: these were nice to look at and gave…

— Orlando Figes

“Gorky called for the building of a monument to the young martyr, who, the writer said, had ‘understood that a relative by blood may…

— Orlando Figes

“As in 1917, the drift towards authoritarian government under Putin was enabled by the weakness of the middle classes and public institutions in post-Soviet…

— Orlando Figes

It was ironic but somehow fitting that the 1905 Revolution should have been started by an organisation dreamed up by the tsarist regime itself.…

— Orlando Figes