What’s more, the owner of the Russian rights to the book, Anna Piotrovskaya of Dynastia, sent a letter to Figes’s literary agent, Stephen Edwards, saying the Russian publication “would definitely provoke a scandal and result in numerous objections, either to the factual inaccuracies contained in the book or to the misrepresentatation of the original transcripts of the interviews, especially taking into consideration the complexity and the sensitivity of the topic to the Russian society.” She said that to “fix the text” would have taken up to a year, and would have resulted in a different book. “These were factual errors, and if we didn’t fix them, it could bring about serious displeasure because many of the relatives of these people are alive some of the people themselves are still alive.” “When they started to do the fact-check, there were a huge number of inaccuracies and factual errors,” said Gornostaeva. Varvara Gornostaeva, head of the Corpus publishing house, told the Guardian the problems came to light after her company sent the Russian translation of Figes’s book for a pre-publication check to Memorial, the human rights organisation Figes had contracted to carry out the interviews with the family members of gulag prisoners. But the Moscow-based publishers, and a historian who conducted some of the interviews, claim some of the material was misrepresented. According to the Guardian‘s Robert Booth and Miriam Elder,įiges had commissioned hundreds of interviews with the relatives of victims of the gulag labour camps to produce a 700-page chronicle of “private life in Stalin’s Russia”, published in 2007. Meanwhile, out of the public eye, Figes’ Russian publisher was in the process of double-checking and subsequently cancelling the translation of The Whisperers.

The newest trouble began while Figes was embroiled in the Amazon controversy - he threatened to sue historians including Robert Service and Rachel Polonskyfor accusing him of writing negative reviews of their work on Amazon, until it was proven that Figes had indeed written the reviews and he was sued in turn by Service and Polonsky. Figes, who was last in the spotlight when he admitted writing flattering reviews of his own books on Amazon and bad reviews of books by rivals (after first saying it was his wife’s doing - see the earlier MobyLives story), now finds himself “embroiled in a fresh controversy over academic practices after Russian publishers scrapped a translation of his history of the Stalin era, The Whisperers, saying the book contained numerous inaccuracies and factual errors,” a report in the Guardian reveals. Historian Orlando Figes is in trouble again. Orlando Figes in trouble again for gross “inaccuracies” and “misrepresentations” Orlando Figes in trouble again for gross 'inaccuracies' and 'misrepresentations' » MobyLives

Natasha's Dance by Orlando Figes