In his Reminiscences of Lenin Maxim Gorky records Lenin saying after listening to Beethoven’s Appassionato: ‘I can’t listen to music often, it affects my nerves, it makes me want to say sweet nothings and pat the heads of people who, living in this filthy hell, can create such beauty. Using village Soviet archives, Figes emphasised the autonomous nature of the agrarian revolution during 1917–18, showing how it developed according to traditional peasant notions of social justice independently of the Provisional Government, the Bolsheviks or other urban-based parties. His first book, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917–1921, was published in 1989.

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Most people wanted nothing to do with the Civil War: they kept their heads down and tried to remain neutral. Thus, in its first five years the Revolution brought about the triumph of peasant Russia and at the same time created the party/ state dictatorship which, within a decade, was to ‘liquidate’ peasant Russia by a combination of collectivisation, mass exodus and gulags.A People's Tragedy (1996) is a panoramic history of the Revolution from 1891 to the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924.

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Figes drew on the closed sections of Simonov's archive in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art and on the archives of the poet's wife and son to produce his study of this major Soviet establishment figure. He provides much information about them, but the brilliance he might have achieved if he could make us love and hate them is absent. In 2007 he wrote and presented two 60-minute Archive Hour programmes on radio entitled Stalin's Silent People which used recordings from his oral history project with Memorial that formed the basis of his book The Whisperers.

They form part of a family archive discovered by the Memorial Society and delivered in three trunks to their Moscow offices in 2007. Left-wing critics have represented Figes as a conservative because of his negative assessment of Lenin and his focus on the individual and "the random succession of chance events" rather than on the collective actions of the masses. In December 2013, Figes wrote a long piece in the US journal Foreign Affairs on the Euromaidan demonstrations in Kyiv suggesting that a referendum on Ukraine's foreign policy and the country's possible partition might be a preferable alternative to the possibility of civil war and military intervention by Russia. H. Smith Literary Award, the Longman/ History Today Book of the Year Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

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In its absence, the Civil War was fought between armies ‘which could count neither on the loyalty of their mostly conscript troops nor on the support of the civilian population within the territories they claimed to control.The village adapted to authority’s existence by setting up ‘a dual structure of administration: a formal one with its face to the state, which remained inactive and inefficient; and an informal one, with its face to the peasants, which was quite the opposite’. From 1917 to the present, nobody has had any trouble judging it; indeed, it has been impossible not to do so. The Russian Revolution, with all its brutality and excess, will not be wished away by retrospective (or prospective) denunciation. Until they are a few mental light-years away from them, the major temptation of historians confronted with such events is either to denounce or to defend them, to deprive them of historical options or to wish them away.