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A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

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Christiansen, Rupert (15 September 2019). "A ménage a trois that transformed European culture". The Sunday Telegraph. ISSN 0307-1235. Crimea: The Last Crusade is a panoramic history of the Crimean War of 1853–56. 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. Figes sets the war in the context of the Eastern Question, the diplomatic and political problems caused by the decay of the Ottoman Empire. In particular, he emphasises the importance of the religious struggle between Russia as the defender of the Orthodox and France as the protector of the Catholics in the Ottoman Empire. He frames the war within a longer history of religious conflict between Christians and Muslims in the Balkans, southern Russia and the Caucasus that continues to this day. Figes stresses the religious motive of the Tsar Nicholas I in his bold decision to go to war, arguing that Nicholas was swayed by the ideas of the Pan-Slavs to invade Moldavia and Wallachia and encourage Slav revolts against the Ottomans, despite his earlier adherence to the Legitimist principles of the Holy Alliance. He also shows how France and Britain were drawn into the war by popular ideas of Russophobia that swept across Europe in the wake of the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848. As one reviewer wrote, Figes shows "how the cold war of the Soviet era froze over fundamental fault lines that had opened up in the 19th century." [37] The Europeans [ edit ] The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia, 2007, ISBN 978-0-8050-7461-1, ISBN 0-8050-7461-9, ISBN 978-0-8050-7461-1, ISBN 0-8050-7461-9 Harding, Luke (7 December 2008). "Luke Harding, "British scholar rails at police seizure of anti-Stalin archive", The Observer, 7 December 2008". The Guardian. London.

Orlando Figes - Wikipedia Orlando Figes - Wikipedia

Luke Harding (15 October 2009). "Russian historian arrested in clampdown on Stalin era". The Guardian. For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.Scammell, Michael. "Love Against All Odds by Michael Scammell | The New York Review of Books". Nybooks.com . Retrieved 24 July 2015. {{ cite magazine}}: Cite magazine requires |magazine= ( help) Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag, Metropolitan Books, 2012. ISBN 978-0-8050-9522-7 Figes's first three books were on the Russian Revolution and the Civil War. Peasant Russia, Civil War (1989) was a detailed study of the peasantry in the Volga region during the Revolution and the Civil War (1917–21). 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. [11] He also demonstrated how the function of the rural Soviets was transformed in the course of the Civil War as they were taken over by younger and more literate peasants and migrant townsmen, many of them veterans of the First World War or Red Army soldiers, who became the rural bureaucrats of the emerging Bolshevik regime. A People’s Tragedy shows clearly that the Revolution of 1917, contrary to the fashionable histories which treat it as some kind of putsch, was a revolution of the masses, even though its outcome was to be very different from the one they wanted. It is this nationwide upheaval of the masses which distinguishes the Russian Revolution of 1917 from the French Revolution of 1789. Indeed, in its first five years it was one of the few revolutions, in this or any other century, whose course was determined, in the last analysis, by support or opposition at the grassroots. Figes has no trouble understanding the central fact of 1917: that until October, and for some months after taking over, Lenin and the Bolsheviks had no power, except that based on their ability to win mass support by finding words for what the average worker, peasant and soldier wanted.

Out of the Great Dark Whale · LRB 31 October 1996 Eric Hobsbawm · Out of the Great Dark Whale · LRB 31 October 1996

What isn’t clear is how far the analysis applies outside the Great Russian heartland. Nor does Figes consider such problems as those of the pastoralist peoples for whom ‘land’ meant something quite different from what it meant to peasant cultivators (a theme familiar from films about the American Wild West and not irrelevant in some regions of Russia). On the other hand, revolutionary intelligentsias as described here, with all their emotional and intellectual singularities, are not peculiar to Russia, though the extraordinary originality of the Russian intellectual contribution, which is not stressed in this book, sets it apart from the generally very derivative productions of pre-revolutionary Third World intelligentsias.The novelty of his account of Russia before 1917 – and indeed of the Revolutionary years themselves – lies in his treatment, not of tsarism and its crises but of the forces subverting it, and particularly the peasants and their urbanised sons and daughters, who made up the overwhelming bulk of the Russian people. Since the book which earned Figes his deservedly high reputation as a Russian historian was Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution (1917-21), this is not surprising. There is nothing particularly new about his account of the organised and politically conscious revolutionaries – how could there be, when so much has been in print for so long? – although lay readers and even non-specialist historians will discover much they did not know or had not thought of: for instance, that ‘Marxism, as a social science, was fast becoming the national creed’ in the early 1890s. Essentially a social historian, he may have deliberately avoided the narrative history of the small, illegal revolutionary sects and their quarrels, but general readers may find it confusing that such figures as Stalin and Bukharin enter the stage virtually without prior introduction in 1917, or that the Socialist Revolutionaries are casually, and of course correctly, referred to after 1905 as ‘the peasants’ party of choice’, without anything being said about how they achieved this position within four years of their foundation. Timothy Phillips (25 May 2012). "Staying alive with the language of love - Life Style Books - Life & Style - London Evening Standard". The Standard . Retrieved 24 July 2015.

Orlando Figes - Springer Orlando Figes - Springer

In June 2023, he said that Russia "needs to be completely defeated" in the Russo-Ukrainian War, "not just for Ukraine's sake, but for Russia's sake". [50] Plays [ edit ] Dinning, Rachel (30 September 2019). "Orlando Figes on the transformation of Europe". BBC History Extra . Retrieved 2 October 2019. Kendall, Bridget (September 2022). "The Story of Russia by Orlando Figes review – what Putin sees in the past". The Guardian.

Thus, in its first five years the Revolution brought about the triumph of peasant Russia and at the same time created the party/ state dictatorship which, within a decade, was to ‘liquidate’ peasant Russia by a combination of collectivisation, mass exodus and gulags. By the time Lenin died, Figes believes (with a modicum of exaggeration), ‘the basic institutions, if not all the practices of the Stalinist regime were in place.’ But until these institutions were turned against the peasantry under Stalin, the tragedy of the Russian people in this terrible century could not yet be seriously seen as something that came to its victims from outside and above.

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