About book A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924 (1998)
I found Orlando Figes' "A People's Tragedy" to be an excellent introduction on the topic of the Russian Revolution. Before proceeding, however, I would like to point out that this massive 800-page masterpiece can only be considered "introductory" by a professional historian or a history buff like myself. Therefore, this book is not really recommended for everyone.I am ashamed to admit, but I had very little knowledge of the Russian Revolution prior to the reading of this book. What is undoubtedly one of the most important events of the 20th century is largely ignored in history books of Eastern European education systems such as the one I grew up under. While it was previously glorified and misrepresented, today it is shunned and unrepresented. The people prefer to cast this period aside and pretend it never happened. I am strongly against such forgetting of history (which, as Walter Benjamin reminds us, is always in danger) and I started reading this book because I wanted to know more about this crucial event.What appealed to me the most about this book is certainly the quality of the narrative. It is emotional, colorful and very engaging. I could spend hours lost in the world of pre-revolutionary Russia that Figes has painted so masterfully. In fact, I had to read it in small doses over the course of a couple of months so as not to let it overwhelm me. If I had read it as much and as passionately as I originally intended, this would've certainly been detrimental for my grades this semester. Figes covers a period from the Great Famine of 1891, which saw the first great social upheaval in Russia caused by the Tsarist government's incompetence. He ends with Lenin's death in 1924, a point at which, he argues, all the crucial elements of the Stalinist regime were already put into place. This does not mean that Figes sides with the dull and reductionist "totalitarian" narrative, which has been dominant in the West for the past 25 years (and is being put to good use politically by equalizing Fascism and Communism). Nevertheless, he does seem to fall into this trap in the concluding chapter, but in many respects, he is not really off the mark in the cases when he equates the two. The more accurate description is that he is standing on the edge, with one foot in the totalitarian narrative, and the other in a more down-to-earth observation. Fortunately, the latter foot seems to hold ground much stronger. Although he shows a significant degree of sympathy towards Lenin by the end of the book (especially his Testament, which was mean to stop Stalin's rise to power), he is nevertheless a vocal opponent of the early authoritarianism of the Bolsheviks. He does recognize the difference between Lenin and Stalin, but he also points out that it was in fact Lenin who abolished democracy, effectively dissolved the Soviets and founded the omnipotent and infamous Cheka (which was completely based on the Tsarist Okhrana and which formed a state within a state). If it hadn't been for these key policies, Stalin's rise to power would've been much less likely. This would mean merely preventing the tragedy of the Soviet gulag state in the 1930s; not the possibility of a true "people's democracy". As Figes demonstrates, the Soviet state would not have been more "democratic" if Trotsky or Bukharin had taken over; it would merely have been less authoritarian. It is a fact that many on the Left to this day would prefer to ignore or outright deny (as was demonstrated by Pravda-style Bolshevik pamphleteers who denounce him as a "liberal" on many of the Marxist websites I have visited).Unlike other liberal authors from the West, he manages to avoid the typically patronizing attitude and stereotypes of the "Asiatic" or "backwards" nature of the Russians as the cause of Bolshevism. Although he does recognize that Russia's backwardness had much to do with the rise of Lenin's autocracy, he does not see it as inherent in the Russian people. His approach is much more Hegelian (although I have a feeling he would dislike the label), as he recognizes that Russia was at a particular stage in development. The country had no democratic culture whatsoever and was still effectively semi-feudal at the time of the Revolution. This of course had much to do with the sheer idiocy of the last two Tsars.Here, Figes arrives at the most interesting and in my opinion most important point of the book: Russia was ripe for socialism. Even though it was feudal, Russia was in fact in a state of class struggle. Needless to say, it was the wealthy landowners waging the war and they were very good at winning for a while. Of course, this was not a conscious process. The social and psychological gap between the rich and the poor in Russia was immense. The behavior of Russian nobility before the Revolution makes Marie Antoinette's statement "Let them eat cake" (which she in fact never said) sound like a genuine expression of concern and social awareness compared to it. Figes is adamant to proclaim that the main cause of the Revolution is the incredible stupidity and incompetence of Tsar Nicholas II and the people surrounding him. "The Red Terror", while legitimized by the Bolsheviks, had already started without their proclamation. Mark Twain, reflecting on the French Revolution, spoke of "the two Reigns of Terror": the brief terror of the Jacobins and the long terror of the corrupt and reactionary monarchy. "What is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break?" Nowhere is this statement more true than in pre-1917 Russia. The peasant's anger over their masters was overwhelming. As soon as they had the opportunity, they started "looting the looters". This violence would've been inevitable, considering the horror the Russian peasant went through. Bolsheviks were only there to put a state stamp on it with the Cheka. It was a true expression of Nietzschean "ressentiment". Every single institution - the Duma, the military, the Orthodox Church, the Tsar - has failed the majority population of peasants. At its best, like the Duma, it was inefficient and impotent. At its worst, like the Tsar, it was destructive and murderous.The tragedy of the Revolution does lie in dogmatic Marxism. However, Figes suggests that it was not Bolsheviks who were the dogmatics. At least in the beginning, it was their pragmatism and the ability to respond to the needs of the greatest number of people that led to their rise to power. Their platform was 'bread and peace'. Although neither were in fact granted (Lenin actually anxiously anticipated the beginning of the civil war), this was all that the people really wanted. The democratic socialist forces - the Mensheviks and the SRs - did not provide this. It was THEIR dogmatic Marxism that was detrimental. They kept the Marxist Hegelian dogma of the need for Russia to go through capitalism and parliamentary democracy. What Marx did not anticipate is what Marxists frequently refer to as the "amelioration of the class conflict" in the West. The Western capitalists essentially realized that the people would turn Jacobin on them if they don't improve the working conditions. In fact, the 20th century social democracy and Keynesianism owe much of their success to the Russian Revolution. This is evident when we observe the post-1989 decline of social democracy and the welfare state in Europe (a process that was intensified by the 2008 Crisis). When the Tsarist censor foolishly approved the publication of Das Kapital in Russia in 1872, they claimed that "very few people in Russia will read it, and even fewer will understand it." Although this was certainly a bad decision, it is true that no one in Russia understood Das Kapital. The capitalists throughout Europe understood very well the message of Karl Marx's theory and potential practice. The Russian nobility and the sad minority which could actually be considered 'bourgeois' did not. Marxist theory only applies to societies where the social inequality is so great and society has deteriorated to such a degree that it truly seems as if an open war between classes was taking place. By 1918, this was not exactly the case in many European countries (or at least many did not see it in such a way), but it was definitely the case in Russia. The Tsar could not even rally the Russian peasants under the idea of nationality (which was very foreign to them, being a pre-modern society), let alone that of loyalty to himself. They really only wanted 'bread and peace'. In more scientific terms, they wanted the redistribution of land and an end to Russia's involvement in the Great War. Bolsheviks were the only ones willing to grant this. The Mensheviks and the SRs had multiple chances to grant all power to the Soviets (yet another slogan that was later hijacked by the Bolsheviks and subsequently betrayed) between February and October of 1917. Nevertheless, they stuck to the dogma of the need for capitalism and thus let down the people who supported them in the ousting of the Tsar. If they had decided to do otherwise, perhaps Russia would've had a much more democratic, self-managing, bottom-up version of socialism, and the history of the 20th century would have been a lot different. Figes goes as far as to suggest that the Civil War would have been much shorter and less bloody if a true Soviet Revolution had taken place. In fact, much of the fighting of the Civil War was between the Bolsheviks and the democratic Left. The Tsarist/proto-fascist White Army, whose ideology (if they had anything other than the longing for "the good old days") was outdated and completely unappealing to the vast majority of the population. The Whites were ousted from Crimea by fall of 1920. The Civil War went on until fall of 1922. This testifies more than anything about the purported "counter-revolutionary" character of the many forces that the Bolsheviks fought in the Civil War.A lot of this had to do with Lenin's impulsiveness and authoritarianism. Gustav Flaubert said that "inside every revolutionary there is a policeman" (a point which will be elaborated and made more scientific by Jacques Lacan in the 1960s). Lenin was the epitome of this statement. Perhaps the only admirable thing about Lenin is the energy and power of a single man to change history. A boring and superficial individual, he dedicated his entire life to the Revolution. He showed little interest in art, other than works of Gorky. He had no career, no passions, no interests, other than being a professional revolutionary. He managed to sway an entire Party and take control of the largest country in the world. When he first suggested that Russia is ready for socialism, the Central Committee thought that he had gone mad. Nevertheless, he managed to persuade them and take power in a matter of weeks. If nothing else, one has to admire his dedication. He is probably one of the rare individuals who managed to have such a profound and comprehensive impact on human history. While most of the 20th century experiments were Marxist in name, they were Leninist in practice. Those that weren't, like Allende's Chile, Catalan anarchists and the Spartacists in Germany, were unfortunately too short-lived to make a real impact.The foremost political lesson we can learn from the story of Lenin and the Bolsheviks is more of a call for caution than inspiration. It teaches us that in times of crisis, it is not those with best intentions that will come to power. Rather, it will be the most organized, and very often, most extreme. The case of Islamist takeovers in Arab countries after the Arab Spring serves as a more recent testimony of this.All in all, as the title suggests, the Russian Revolution was a true people's tragedy. It was a disaster on a gargantuan scale and one of the first truly "modern" tragedies (although it shouldn't be forgotten that the first typically modern atrocities such as mass expulsions and genocide were perpetrated by "pre-modern" empires - the ones of the Romanovs and the Ottomans). 1917 Russia was in a complete state of anomie, frustration, fear and horror that could have only ended in a disaster. Although Russians today (especially those on the Right) like to see themselves as "victims" of Bolshevism, it is an undeniable fact that Bolshevism was an authentic product of the unique situation that Russia found itself in at the time. It was also the best answer to the needs of the majority of the population. Every single aspect of the Russian Revolution is a tragedy. As such, Figes shows little compassion for either Bolsheviks or the Tsarists. Instead his compassion is focused on personal stories of everyday lives affected by the Revolution. He tells their stories with great care. The love he feels for every single one of these characters matches the love a novelist feels for his characters. These people range from ordinary peasants like the progressive socialist Sergey Semenov and his arch-nemesis, the conservative elder Maliutin, to well-known figures such as Maxim Gorky and Aleksei Brusilov. He gathers the people from the Left and the Right side of the spectrum alike, but he gives them an equal treatment. It is only through these personal stories that one can fully understand the Revolution. The constructed and dehumanizing communities of the Reds and the Whites do not suffice. There is no Red or White in humanity.The extraordinary book of Orlando Figes challenges common prejudices regarding the Revolution from both the Left and the Right. I have found it eye-opening in many regards. I have very little objections to this book, and those that I have usually concern particularities rather than the more fundamental points of the book. It is a work of remarkable depth and insight. I suggest to anyone who has actually bothered to read this review all the way up to this point to go and read the book. There are certainly many layers to it that I have failed to cover in this review, and probably some that have escaped my attention altogether.
I'm not so sure he called it "the people's tragedy" because it was a failure "of the people" so much as because it was a tragedy "for the people". The Russian peasants and workers were by and large uneducated and particularly uneducated politically. Many (as shown in the war) didn't ever even identify themselves with a country. They didn't fight for a country but for the Tsar who was to them a sort of a god, at the very least a father who took care of them from high places. Most had little experience of anything but their own villages and what education they had had taught them nothing of government or nationhood. In the US Civil War many soldiers had never left their tiny rural communities before but they'd been taught a sense of nationhood with its attendant benefits and values. That never happened in Russia. Civics for Russian peasants was "the Tsar will take care of you". The makers of the revolution were intellectuals. The Liberals (Kadets, etc.) were mainly upper class (enlightened sons of nobles and government officials) influenced by ideas outside Russia, though most wanted a constitutional monarchy, maybe like Britain. Most didn't want "revolution" in the sense of major upheaveal and violence. The more radical parties, including the Bolsheviks, tended to come from lower classes, but they too were intellectuals, knowledgable about Russia's revolutionary history, steeped in European ideas about how society should be organized (more influenced by Marx and the Paris Commune experience than ideas of constitutional monarchy) who had lived most of the time before WWI in internal or external exile. None of them really represented "the people" and the Bolsheviks who ultimately come to power promised "the people" (both workers and peasants) everything they wanted (redistribution of land, local governments, a share in running factories and farms, etc. etc.) but then took it all back when they'd consolidated power.The people had no chance and I think that's the main message of Figes' book. They rallied to the cause at first because they were promised the world and weren't canny enough to recognize it wasn't possible and certainly not likely that the new regime would relinquish enough power to deliver on promises. Many rebelled--viciously--when they saw the reality and they ended up oppressed from a different end of the political spectrum. They were seen as participating in their own hoodwinking, no question, but given their past not much else was predictable. It seems to me that Marx was probably right about the level of sophistication among the people needed for a revolution in the name of the people. It's true that Figes frequently talks about what might have been done to avert one tragedy or another, but just as often he demonstrates how that was just not in the cards given the nature of the groups involved or the circumstances. The Bolsheviks ruled "in the name of the people" but the "people" who rallied to their cause were converted into apparatchiks who benefited from the power of the state and joined the new oppressors. Everyone else was outmaneuvered from early on by a government that was pretty heartless from the onset.What I found most interesting about this book was that Figes presented Lenin as cold and committed primarily to ideas (never to people) and was perfectly willing to sacrifice any constituency that got in the way. I think there was a generation or two of historians, both Western and Russian, who wanted to think that Lenin was an idealist and that if he had not died, he would have moderated the state (as with The New Economic Policy--NEP) into a more reasonable state that was maybe centrally planned but allowed for a certain amount of economical entrepreneurship, real power to the people, etc. etc. Figes pretty much destroys that illusion by quoting secret directives and writings of Lenin (available only since the fall of the USSR) in the 20ies which shows him as hard, cold, intellectual and wily and NEP as a necessity of the moment to keep power only. That information undermines the notion that (1) Russia might really have developed into a successful government of and for the people had Lenin not died when he did and (2) it was Stalin who was the primary architect of the repressive state which
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Put short, this is the story of how the USSR came to be, of the many missed opportunities where both the Russian Empire and the Russian Provisional Government could have saved themselves, and of the deeds of the Bolsheviks after seizing power.Like all historical studies, it has to be taken with a grain of salt as well as an understanding of the author's own biases. Nevertheless, Orlando Figes manages to weave a grand story of decadent aristocrats, optimistic reformers, fanatical revolutionaries, and of course, the oppressed everyman.
—Andrew Sheng
Много подробна книга за причините, довели до Червената революция. По прекрасен начин се обясняват всички процеси, които са довели до зараждането на тези настроения сред руския народ. Обръща се сериозно внимание на вината, която носи царския режим за идването на болшевиките. Проследени са и няколко чисто житейски история, както и се върля повече светлина върху образа на Распутин. Трудът е впечатляващ откъм обстоятелственост на източниците и съблюдаване на действителните факти от този период. Стилът на моменти става труден и затормозяващ. Трудно за четене, но пък качествено четиво.
—Trayan Sarafov
If you thought the Season 5 finale of Game of Thrones was brutal, Orlando Figes wants to educate you. You don’t pick up a book like A People’s Tragedy with the notion that it’s going to be filled with newborn puppies, ice cream-giveaways, and people finding rolled-up-and-forgotten twenty-dollar bills in their pockets. If you do have that notion – well, you should really reread the title. Even so, the collection of misery in Figes massive history of the Russian Revolution is pretty overwhelming. This is 824 pages of small font despair, as the Russian people move from ruthless and ordered autocracy to ruthless and unordered Revolution, before finally settling on a ruthless Soviet government as dictatorial and arbitrary as anything seen under the Tsars. Contained between these two covers are all the things my wife tells are not appropriate “small talk” for dinner parties: War; war as waged by fools; the attendant slaughter of war as waged by fools; revolution; the attendant slaughter of revolution as waged by fanatics; famine; torture; capriciousness; shortsightedness; disloyalty; backstabbing and betrayal; execution and murder. This is the kind of book from which I had to take several breaks. I just couldn’t push all the way through. The tragedy is so big. The font is so small. Helpfully, the book is broken into manageable parts, allowing me to dip in and out whenever I needed a dose of perspective. (Traffic is bad… But at least my farm hasn’t been taken over by a Bolshevik stooge!). Figes opens his narrative beautifully, with a Barbara Tuchman-like set-piece that describes the 300-year anniversary of Romanov rule over all the Russias. He then circles back to give a brief overview of that spotted reign, before devoting approximately the next 150 pages to the workings of Russia under the Tsar Nicholas II. I read this book as part of my Two-Person Russian Book Club, which includes me and my friend Jamie. As part of our (elite; exclusive) Book Club (I’m the founder, President, treasurer, and drunk; Jamie is the member, Vice-President, and chief enabler), we’ve already read a couple books on Nicholas, Alexandra, and their doomed family. Thus, this first section seemed pretty straightforward and standard. You have Nicholas II, who rose to power far too soon after his father’s early death, inexpertly wielding his prerogatives without the faintest idea that the world had shifted off its axis. Historian Margaret MacMillan is fond of describing Nicholas II as an ideal village postmaster. I love that description because it fits him so well…at least to a point. This is a guy of such strikingly limited abilities that I would hesitate to let him manage my slow pitch softball team. Yet he led one of the great powers on Earth with almost no brakes on his powers. Part of him never seemed to want the job. He loved and doted on his family. He filled his diary with the most insipid banalities. He probably could have lived a long and immeasurably happier life if he’d just retired to a dacha somewhere and let someone, anyone else rule in his place. And yet, at the same time, he fiercely guarded his powers. When his people wanted an inch, he gave them a centimeter. Eventually, his people took a mile. By the time he realized his destiny was to be an average man, a good father, a caring husband, and a somnolent diarist, it was far too late. The second part of the book, covering the years from 1891-1917, covers the gradual erosion of the Tsar. A disastrous war against Japan, a social revolution, and many unforced Tsarist errors served to weaken the monarchy. In 1914, Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, and Russia suddenly found itself the linchpin of history: their choice to mobilize or not, to support Serbia or not, is one of the biggest factors in the July Crisis tipping towards general European war. Nicholas’s choice to go to war kind of feels like the choice of a troubled couple to have a kid (or a second or third or fourth kid) to paper over a bad marriage. Hey, maybe if we go to war, all the people will love me again!. It didn't work that way. The story of Tsar Nicholas’s abdication, his imprisonment in Ekaterinburg’s House of Special Purpose, and his (and his family’s) murder is a familiar story, and Figes does not spend much time on this death pageant. Instead, he takes a deep dive into the workings and failures of the Provisional Government, and the plotting and scheming of the Bolshevik takeover.In telling this, Figes takes pains to present many points of view. There is the obvious focus on the big names – Lenin, Trotsky, Gorky – and rightfully so. But he also finds peasants and workingmen – and peasants who became workingmen – to demonstrate how the Revolution began from the bottom up, and where it got its support. He makes an admirable attempt to follow certain people throughout the entire process, tracing their personal fortunes along with the ebb and flow of the wider historical moments. (Unsurprisingly, many of these people’s stories end dismally). Figes also does not neglect to mention Rasputin’s penis: Rasputin’s assassin and alleged homosexual lover, Felix Yusupov, claimed that his prowess was explained by a large wart strategically situated on his penis, which was of exceptional size. On the other hand, there is evidence to suggest that Rasputin was in fact impotent and that while he lay naked with many women, he had sex with very few of them. In short, he was a great lecher but not a great lover. When Rasputin was medically examined after being stabbed in a failed murder attempt in 1914, his genitals were found to be so small and shriveled that the doctor wondered whether he was capable of the sexual act at all. Rasputin himself had once boasted to the monk Iliodor that he could lie with women without feeling passion because “his penis did not function.”History: It’s in the details!At this point I should mention that I don’t know a ton about Russian history. Once Nicholas II was off the stage, I was in the wilderness. I know, I just made a big deal about my Two-Person Russian Book Club. But really, we’re a lot of talk and some wine. I’m not an expert. I’m at the point in my life where I can still get Kerensky and Kornilov confused, if I’m not paying close attention. I also have little knowledge to draw on when it comes to the ideological underpinnings of the Bolsheviks or the Mensheviks or what it means to be a Marxist. (Fox News tell me it’s bad, but this is not tremendously helpful). That’s why it’s telling that I still enjoyed this book so much. It is unbelievably dense and relatively long (it’s tremendously long when compared to most books; only relatively long when compared to books by Russians or about Russia), but still manageable. Figes is a generous enough writer to lead a relative novice through this thorny, complex, heavily peopled period relatively unscathed. On the other hand, I don’t think this is an entry-level volume. It covers too much ground at too high a level to say that. What kept me grounded – and reading – was Figes’s relentless attention to the human detail. He doesn’t get lost in abstract political theorizing. He focuses on Rasputin’s penis personalities and quirks and circumstances and tough choices. This is an individual-based telling of history, where people’s decisions matter. Tolstoy probably would have disapproved. I, on the other hand, thought it was great. This is a huge book befitting a huge subject, and Figes gives it the treatment it deserves. It is authored by that rare combination, an expert who can also write. It took some patience – and Yellow Tail breaks – to complete, but it was well worth the effort.
—Matt
