A People's Tragedy

It is history on an epic yet human scale. Vast in scope,exhaustive in original research, written with passion, narrativeskill, and human sympathy, A People's Tragedy is a profound accountof the Russian Revolution for a new generation. Many consider theRussian Revolution to be the most significant event of thetwentieth century. Distinguished scholar Orlando Figes presents apanorama of Russian society on the eve of that revolution, and thennarrates the story of how these social forces were violentlyerased. Within the broad stokes of war and revolution are miniaturehistories of individuals, in which Figes follows the main players'fortunes as they saw their hopes die and their world crash intoruins. Unlike previous accounts that trace the origins of therevolution to overreaching political forces and ideals, Figesargues that the failure of democracy in 1917 was deeply rooted inRussian culture and social history and that what had started as apeople's revolution contained the seeds of its degeneration intoviolence and dictatorship. A People's Tragedy is a masterful andoriginal synthesis by a mature scholar, presented in a compellingand accessibly human narrative.

A soft focus on Lenin has, for the most part, suffused accountsof the Soviet Union. He has been portrayed as a man drawn intorevolutionary activity by the death of his brother and driven by aselfless desire to improve the lot of working people. As for theundeniable violence of his rule, this was often explained away. . .. Orlando Figes, a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, isproperly skeptical of such excuses. In A People's Tragedy, he hasproduced an engagingly written and well-researched book that willleave few readers with any doubts that the Bolsheviks, andespecially their leader Lenin, were ruthless killers, willing tosacrifice millions of lives for the sake of power and their ownpersonal ambitions. . . . Figes has written a marvelous account ofone of history's greatest tragedies, and his book will stand forsome time as a standard of historical scholarship. -- The New YorkTimes Book Review, Steven Merritt Miner

What explains the terrible trajectory taken by the RussianRevolution of 1917?

This question has tended to divide students of the Russian pastinto two opposing camps. There are those, like the historianRichard Pipes, who find in the Communist dictatorship and thedescent into the gulag a deep impress of the old czarist autocracyand the old patrimonial state. And there are those, like AleksandrSolzhenitsyn, who claim that that same dictatorship representedinstead a fulfillment of the vision of Karl Marx and thus a radicalbreak in Russian history. A British historian, Orlando Figes, hasnow entered the fray with A People's Tragedy, a 900-page history ofthe Russian debacle. It succeeds handsomely as an engrossingaccount of the revolution, but falls short of its implicit goal ofresolving this great historiographical debate.

Figes's particular method is to embark on a social-politicalnarrative that takes us from the Volga famine through the nextdecades, highlighting the upheavals of peasant life, the rise of aclass of liberal gentry and professionals, the subversive roleplayed by radical intellectuals and revolutionaries, and thedebilitating split between reformers and absolutists within theimperial regime itself. It then proceeds through World War I andthe two revolutions of 1917 and brings the story to a close in 1924with Lenin's death, when the fundamental elements of thetotalitarian order that came to be known as Stalinism were all inplace.

A People's Tragedy never does arrive at a convincing interpretiveequilibrium. Still, it has its unmistakable virtues. For one thing,Figes richly conveys the human dimensions of the catastrophe. Foranother, he powerfully brings home the blindness of the imperialauthorities as well as the brutal illiberalism of revolutionaryactivists, and he clarifies the way in which these two forcesconspired together to transform a chaotic social revolution into anunparalleled political calamity. If he has not resolved one of themore long-standing debates about the Bolshevik Revolution, he has,at the very least, helped pave the way for future attempts. --Commentary Magazine, June 1997, Daniel J. Mahoney --This textrefers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.