Figes got to know the key archives when they first began to open to outsiders in the late Eighties, and sat among the journalistic scavengers who came and went looking for spy stories. Unlike them, he befriended the underpaid Russian archivists and emerged with a grisly but fascinating treasure trove.Out of that trove, he has made a book which can change the way we think about Russia and what is happening there today. It is a history studded with gleaming, vivid personal stories and vignettes. First intended to help general readers through the book, they became essential.Though this is grim stuff, there are hilarious and poignant moments. For instance, there is a glorious account of the Bolsheviks going to open talks with the invading Germans in 1917. They decide to bring representatives of the Russian workers, soldiers, sailors, peasants and women with them for propaganda purposes.

On the way to Petrograd’s Warsaw railway station, they realise they have forgotten to bring a peasant.What to do? As their car speeds through the city, they pass a bearded old man trudging home, pretend to give him a lift, and drag him off to Brest-Litovsk to make peace with the Germans. So the peasant, who was only trying to get home to his village, finds himself sitting drinking claret in Brest-Litovsk with Prince Ernst von Hohenlohe and discussing the future of mankind.Throughout, Figes uses key observers who act as a kind of Greek chorus. There is Sergei Semenov, the idealistic and radical peasant leader, who migrates to the city under the Tsar, endures abuse and hardship trying to improve his village’s lot, and ends up murdered by jealous rivals in 1922. Above all, there is Gorky, who had a love-hate relationship with Lenin, courageously abusing him for his murders and repression, surviving the horrors of starving Petrograd, fleeing abroad – and who eventually returned to be exploited, and perhaps murdered, by Stalin.

Gorky’s hopes and disillusion haunt the book.All of that would have been remarkable enough. But this is also a history that goes beyond the conventional accounts of the revolution. We have grown used to the leftist version, in which Lenin is the betrayed, Christ- like hero and Stalin the bitter nemesis; and to rival histories from right- wingers which emphasise the reforms being carried on under the last Tsar – implying that, but for the Bolsheviks and some misfortunes in the First World War, Russia would have evolved into a benign, Western-style democracy.Figes’ thesis is bolder and less comfortable His political angle is hard to discern from the book It is certainly not right wing. No sentimental supporter of Tsar Nicholas could survive Figes’ account of the old regime’s anti-Semitism, brutality and bone-headed stupidity. The democrats and liberals were better people but awful politicians, who, as Figes told me, saw the revolution as if it was France in 1789, and made every wrong turning. Kerensky comes across as a Napoleonic buffoon; the White generals as hopeless; and Lenin, whom Figes clearly loathes, as a cruel if brilliant monster.Figes doesn’t think Lenin will ever regain his pre-Eighties reputation among leftish intellectuals, as the full story of his role and savage views spills out of the Moscow and St Petersburg archives.

Nor does Trotsky emerge as his Western admirers would wish; the gourmandising and dandyish orator was not as important in the civil war, or in the Bolshevik party, as was thought.So where is Figes coming from? When I met him yesterday he described himself to me as a Labour Party supporter and ”a bit of a Tony Blair man”, though he confessed, when it came to the revolution, to being mildly pro-Menshevik. But his main intention was to overturn old perceptions of how the revolution happened and what it meant, he insists.Perhaps the most radical departure is that he portrays the Russian people themselves as a main protagonist in their own tragedy: the creators of anti-Jewish pogroms, of massacres, of civil war atrocities; enthusiastic participants in the Red terror, even – as famine stalked Russia – cannibals who ate children. The ordinary level of peasant village cruelty, the peasants’ thirst for rough justice and their enthusiasm for authoritarian, Tsar- like leadership are constant themes in the 800-page book.This has been misunderstood by some reviewers, Figes says, as anti-Russian bigotry. ”I am trying to grapple with the problem of violence, which was central to the revolution.” The Russians thought of democracy as being synonymous with the victory of the labouring people. Once that was established, the problem of what to do with the rest, the bourgeoisie, was inescapable.