Figes is known for his works on Russian history, such as A People's Tragedy (1996), Natasha's Dance (2002), The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (2007), Crimea (2010) and Just Send Me Word (2012).

[4] He attended William Ellis School in north London (1971–78) and studied History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where his teachers were Peter Burke and Norman Stone,[4] graduating with a double-starred first in 1982.

He wrote his undergraduate dissertation under Stone's guidance (with help from Isaiah Berlin[5]) on 'Ludwig Börne and the Formation of a Radical Critique of Judaism' and published it as a journal article in the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book in 1984.

[7] His students at Cambridge included the historians Andrew Roberts and Tristram Hunt, the food writer Bee Wilson, the journalist James Harding, and the film producer Tanya Seghatchian.

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.

It combines social and political history and interweaves through the public narrative the personal stories of several representative figures, including Grigory Rasputin, the writer Maxim Gorky, Prince Georgy Lvov and General Alexei Brusilov, as well as unknown peasants and workers.

[14] 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 this telling the Revolution starts in the nineteenth century (and more specifically in 1891, when the public's reaction to the famine crisis set it for the first time on a collision course with the autocracy) and ends with the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991.

[23] In 2003 he wrote and presented a TV feature documentary for the BBC, The Tsar's Last Picture Show, about the pioneering colour photographer in Tsarist Russia Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky.

In partnership with the Memorial Society, a human rights non-profit organization, Figes gathered several hundred private family archives from homes across Russia and carried out more than a thousand interviews with survivors as well as perpetrators of the Stalinist repressions.

It examines the influence of the Soviet regime and its campaigns of terror on family relationships, emotions and beliefs, moral choices, issues of personal and social identity, and collective memory.

According to Figes, 'the real power and lasting legacy of the Stalinist system were neither in structures of the state, nor in the cult of the leader, but, as the Russian historian Mikhail Gefter once remarked, "in the Stalinism that entered into all of us".

[33] On 4 December 2008, the St Petersburg offices of Memorial were raided by the police and the entire electronic archive, including the materials collected with Figes for The Whisperers, was confiscated by the authorities.

[36][25][37] A second translation project was abandoned by the publisher Corpus [ru] and the rights owner Dynasty Foundation in 2010 after one of Memorial's researchers reported that she found anachronisms, incorrect interpretations and factual errors in the book.

[25] Published in 2012, Just Send Me Word[38] is a true story based on 1,246 letters smuggled in and out of the Pechora labour camp between 1946 and 1955 between Lev Mishchenko (a prisoner) and Svetlana Ivanova (his girlfriend in Moscow).

Writing in the Financial Times, Simon Sebag Montefiore called Just Send Me Word "a unique contribution to Gulag scholarship as well as a study of the universal power of love".

Drawing extensively from Russian, French and Ottoman as well as British archives, it combines military, diplomatic, political and cultural history, examining how the war left a lasting mark on the national consciousness of Britain, France, Russia and Turkey.

The play is about the financial crisis of the writer Gustave Flaubert in the last years of his life and the attempts of his literary friends, George Sand, Emile Zola and Ivan Turgenev, to find him a sinecure.

[53] Everything Theatre described The Oyster Problem as "a remarkable pearl of a play; a patchwork of anecdotes that welcomes us into the private life of Gustave Flaubert and his literary contemporaries" [54] Figes has contributed frequently to radio and television broadcasts in the United Kingdom and around the world.

[55] In 2003 he wrote and presented a TV feature documentary for the BBC, The Tsar's Last Picture Show, about the pioneering colour photographer in Russia Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky.

[24] 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.

[56] Figes was the historical consultant on the film Anna Karenina (2012), directed by Joe Wright, starring Keira Knightley and Jude Law with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard.

[67][68][69][37] In an interview with Andrew Marr in 1997, Figes described himself as "a Labour Party supporter and 'a bit of a Tony Blair man', though he confessed, when it came to the Russian revolution, to being mildly pro-Menshevik.

"[70] In 2018, when asked to comment on the popularity of Marxism among the student supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, he expressed concern that British university textbooks were drawing a "moral equivalence" between the economic achievements of the Soviet Union and the "murder and destruction" of Stalinism.