Professional online assasin and part-time historian Orlando Figes.Amazon’s comments section is quickly becoming known as a place where grudges get settled. There are the angry Kindle users who downgrade books they haven’t read simply because publishers don’t make e-versions available at the same time as hardbacks. And there are more prominent figures, like British historian Orlando Figes, who recently admitted to anonymously savaging the work of some competitors.The literary scandal began when a Russian history expert noticed that an Amazon commenter going by the handle “Historian” had trashed her book online. “Historian” had brutal opinions of nearly every recent work of Russian history, except, tellingly, for Figes’s “The Whisperers,” which he described as “beautiful and necessary.” Added “Historian” of Figes: “I hope he writes for ever.”Figes did everything short of stick the secret police on his accusers. First threatening a lawsuit, then outing his wife as the culprit before finally allowing that he was the one behind the online attacks. (An admission that was slightly watered down by Figes’s blaming of the venomous attacks on unspecified “health problems.”)Amazon has since taken down the offending comments. Figes, meanwhile, is on leave, presumably to tend to those health problems.