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

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able to fight under the Red Flag gave the Bolsheviks a decisive advantage. Its symbolic power largely accounts for the fact that the peasants, including hundreds of thousands of deserters, rallied to the Red Army during the Whites’ advance towards Moscow in the autumn of 1919. The peasants believed that a White victory would reverse their own revolution on the land. It was only after the final defeat of the Whites that the peasant revolts against the Bolsheviks assumed mass proportions. This same ‘defence of the revolution’ also helps to explain the fact that many workers, despite their complaints against the Bolsheviks, rallied behind the Sovietregime during Yudenich’s advance towards Petrograd. A People's Tragedy (1996) is a panoramic history of the Revolution from 1891 to the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924. 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. Figes wrote that he had "tried to present the revolution not as a march of abstract social forces and ideologies but as a human event of complicated individual tragedies". [12] 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. [13] Others have situated Figes among the so-called 'revisionist' historians of the Revolution who attempted to explain its political development in terms of social history. [14] In 2008, The Times Literary Supplement listed A People's Tragedy as one of the "hundred most influential books since the war". [15] In 2013 David Bowie named A People's Tragedy one of his 'top 100 books'. [16]

Orlando Figes - Springer Orlando Figes - Springer

Figes published The Story of Russia in September 2022. [10] The book is a general history of Russia from the earliest times to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It focuses on the ideas and myths that have structured the Russians' understanding of their history, and explores what Figes calls the "structural continuities" of Russian history, such as the sacralisation of power and patrimonial autocracy. The Guardian described it as "An indispensable survey of more than 1,000 years of history [which] shows how myth and fact mix dangerously in the tales this crucial country tells about itself" [42] A reviewer in The Spectator called it "a saga of multi-millennial identity politics"; Figes argues that no other country has so often changed its origin story, [43] its "[h]istories continuously reconfigured and repurposed to suit its present needs and reimagine its future". [44] Views on Russian politics [ edit ] His book The Whisperers followed the approach of oral history. In partnership with the Memorial Society, a human rights non-profit organisation, 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. [23] Housed in the Memorial Society in Moscow, St Petersburg and Perm, many of these valuable research materials are available online. [24] 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. Gillinson, Miriam (15 February 2023). "The Oyster Problem review – the struggle to save Flaubert from himself". The Guardian.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. 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". [33] Several reviewers highlighted the book's literary qualities, pointing out that it 'reads like a novel' [34] [35]

The Guardian The peasants are revolting .. | Culture | The Guardian

The Whisperers includes a detailed study of the Soviet writer Konstantin Simonov, who became a leading figure in the Soviet Writers' Union and a propagandist in the "anti-cosmopolitan" campaign during Stalin's final years. Figes drew on the closed sections of Simonov's archive in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art and on the archives of the poet's wife and son to produce his study of this major Soviet establishment figure. [29] Just Send Me Word [ edit ] Antonio Delgado Prize (Spain), The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture [61]Figes has adopted a Tolstoyan convention of telling the stories of a few individuals of middling importance as a means of describing what 'real people' did in the course of the revolution and demonstrating how the views and actions of such people determined the awful disaster. There is something to be said for this idea, but ultimately it does not work well. The individual narratives, though emblematic in some ways, are not as prototypical as Figes would like; no real person ever was, nor could be, Pierre Bezukhov or Andrey Bolkonsky.