Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991: A History

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Inevitably in a survey of more than 1,000 years of history, much has had to be skirted over or omitted. But this book’s purpose is not to fill in all the blanks. It is to examine the recurring themes and myths that drive Vladimir Putin’s conviction that war with Ukraine and with western Europe is part of Russia’s historical destiny. For those unfamiliar with the past, this is an indispensable manual for making sense of Russia’s present. With aplomb Figes states that ‘the real test of a successful revolution is whether it replaces the political elites’. I humbly think this a rather diffident vision on the essence of what a revolution means (which also implies systemic and idea changes and changes in social structures, not merely a political change in leadership), as Figes rather succeeds in proving that the foremost solicitude of the Bolsheviks after their seizure of power, was to hold on to it with all means, instead of demonstrating the permanent existence of revolutionary momentum. There was a pattern in the peasant in-migration to the towns: first came the young men, then the married men, then unmarried girls, then married women and children. It suggests that the peasants tried to keep their failing farms alive for as long as possible. Young peasant men were sending money earned in mines and factories to their villages, where they themselves returned at harvest time (‘raiding the cash economy' as is common in developing societies). There was a constant to-and-fro between the city and the countryside. We can talk as much about the ‘peasantization' of Russia's towns as we can about the disappearance of the farming peasantry.

Magnificent. Beautifully written, immaculately researched and thoroughly absorbing from start to finish. A tour de force that explains how Europe's cultural life transformed during the course of the 19th century - and so much more." (Peter Frankopan) From the 1891 famine, which politicized society and set it on a course of collision with the Tsarist dynasty, to the Revolutions of 1917, the Civil War and the death of Lenin in 1924, Figes thus unfolds a brilliant and novel perspective on the century's most important event. He depicts he revolution as a tragedy - both for the Russians as a people and for so many individuals whose lives became caught up in the storm. While Revolutionary Russia has to paint many of these issues with broad strokes, it is nonetheless very readable account of contemporary Russian history and a good introduction to more detailed and throughout reading on the subject. Hopefully it'll provoke a deeper interest on the period and issues that it discusses. Recommended! Whether intended to elevate the subjects to hero status or castigate them as cruel tyrants, these pictures form part of Russia’s collective memory. They are etched into the nation’s psyche, each capturing a moment in Russia’s story about itself.Not even as a war historian does Figes warrant overt criticism. His chapters on the Civil war of 1918-20 and the Great Patriotic War provide further evidence of his ability to intertwine the overt visibility and normalization of violence, and the confrontational ethos of the Bolshevik leadership on both internal and external fronts, with the ways in which the masses understood their past, present and future, are of significant appeal. Here is a short extract of a 40-minute seminar I had with the students of the International School of Toulouse. Orlando Figes is an award-winning author of nine books on Russian and European history which have been translated into over 30 languages. urn:oclc:record:889885541 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier revolutionaryrus0000fige Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s2c0qb188jw Invoice 1652 Isbn 9780805091311 This book is not just a history; it is an item of history…Orlando Figes has taken the chance to display the very experience of revolution as it affected millions of ordinary Russians.'

These changes also helped the rise of nationalist movements on the periphery of the empire. Until the development of rural schools and networks of communication, nationalism remained an élite urban movement for native language rights in schools and universities, literary publications and official life. Outside the towns its influence was limited. The peasants were barely conscious of their nationality. ‘I myself did not know that I was a Pole till I began to read books and papers,' recalled a farmer after 1917.6 In many areas, such as Ukraine, Belorussia and the Caucasus, there was so much ethnic intermingling that it was difficult for anything more than a localized form of identity to take root in the popular consciousness. ‘Were one to ask the average peasant in the Ukraine his nationality,' observed a British diplomat, ‘he would answer that he is Greek Orthodox; if pressed to say whether he is a Great Russian, a Pole or an Ukrainian, he would probably reply that he is a peasant; and if one insisted on knowing what language he spoke, he would say that he talked "the local tongue".'7 Orlando Figes's latest book is The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? Some have argued that it was the most urbanized workers, those with the highest levels of skill and literacy, who became the foot soldiers of the Revolution. But others have maintained that the recent immigrants—those who had been ‘snatched from the plough and hurled straight into the factory furnace', as Trotsky once put it10—tended to be the most volatile and violent, often adapting the spontaneous forms of rebellion associated with the countryside to the new and hostile industrial environment in which they found themselves.Another strand, exploited through the centuries by successive rulers to enhance their authority, is the idea of spiritual exceptionalism. It was Ivan the Terrible, no less, who adapted Byzantine rituals to create an imperial myth – that the tsar was anointed by church and god, and that Moscow was the Third Rome, the rightful successor and true capital of Christendom after the fall of Rome and Constantinople. The influence of the exiled Marxist theorist Georgi Plekhanov was vital here. It was he who first mapped out the two-stage revolutionary strategy. With it the Russian Marxists at last had an answer to the problem of how to bring about a post-capitalist society in one only now entering the capitalist phase. It gave them grounds for their belief that in forsaking the seizure of power—which, as Plekhanov put it, could only lead to a ‘despotism in Communist form'—they could still advance towards socialism. On Lenin’s death in 1924, the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote: “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live”, and his words featured on countless propaganda posters. In one sense, the fall of the Soviet Union proved him wrong. The world of 1917 no longer exists: neither the Donetsk separatists nor Vladimir Putin are Marxist-Leninists, and it is inconceivable that Angela Merkel will emulate the Kaiser and invade eastern Ukraine to rid it of Russian influence. But Lenin’s legacy survives nonetheless, and Figes’s introduction will make a major contribution to informed public debate on this crucial episode in world history.

Figes's knowledge is breath-taking in its range and precision ... A conclusion to draw from The Europeans is that tribalism is stronger than art ... This a melancholy reflection, but it accentuates, rather than reduces, the value of Figes's tumultuously informative and educative work." (John Carey, Sunday Times) For all its pretensions to autocracy, however, the tsarist state was hardly present in the countryside and could not get a grip on many basic aspects of peasant life, as the famine had underlined. Contrary to the revolutionaries' mythic image of an all-powerful tsarist regime, the under-government of the localities was in fact the system's main weakness. For every 1,000 inhabitants of the Russian Empire there were only four state officials at the end of the nineteenth century, compared with 7.3 in England and Wales, 12.6 in Germany and 17.6 in France. The regular police, as opposed to the political branch, was extremely small by European standards. For a rural population of 100 million people, Russia in 1900 had no more than 1,852 police sergeants and 6,874 police constables. For most intents and purposes, once the peasants had been liberated from the direct rule of their landowners, with the abolition of serfdom in 1861, they were left to look after themselves. Lenin was made for a fight. He gave himself entirely to the revolutionary struggle. ‘That is my life!' he confessed to the French socialist (and his lover) Inessa Armand in 1916. ‘One fighting campaign after another.'16 There was no ‘private Lenin' behind the professional revolutionary. The odd affair apart, he lived like a middle-aged provincial clerk, with precisely fixed hours for meals, sleep and work. There was a strong puritanical streak in Lenin's character which later manifested itself in the political culture of his dictatorship. He suppressed his emotions to strengthen his resolve and cultivate the ‘hardness' he believed was required by the successful revolutionary: the capacity to spill blood for the revolution's ends. There was no place for sentiment in Lenin's life. ‘I can't listen to music too often,' he once admitted after a performance of Beethoven's Appassionata Sonata. ‘It makes me want to say kind, stupid things, and pat the heads of people. But now you have to beat them on the head, beat them without mercy.'17When does a ‘revolutionary crisis' start? Trotsky answered this by distinguishing between the objective factors (human misery) that make a revolution possible and the subjective factors (human agency) that bring one about. In the Russian case the famine by itself was not enough. There were no peasant uprisings as a consequence of it, and even if there had been, by themselves they would not have been a major threat to the tsarist state. It was the expectations of the upper classes—and the Tsar's refusal to compromise with them—that made the famine crisis revolutionary. Forced off the land by poverty, over-population and the growing cost of renting land, millions of peasants came into the towns, or worked in rural factories and mines. In the last half-century of the old regime the empire's urban population grew from 7 million to 28 million people. The 1890s saw the sharpest growth as the effects of the famine crisis coincided with the accelerated programme of industrialization and railway construction pushed through by Count Witte, the Minister of Finance from 1892. In his remarkable new book Orlando Figes describes and takes apart the story of Russia's century of revolution in the shortest space possible. Starting with the horrific famines of 1891, Figes charts a vast experiment in state-building. The manipulation of many millions of people, first by Tsarist ministers and then by the Communists - on a scale and with a ferocity that their predecessors could not dream of - aimed to totally transform Russian society. Through war and peace Russia's rulers battled to subdue and control their vast state, fighting off a mass of real and imagined enemies until exhaustion, corruption and intellectual bankruptcy brought the whole terrible experiment to an end. In this elegant and incisive account, Orlando Figes offers an illuminating new perspective on the Russian Revolution. While other historians have focused their examinations on the cataclysmic years immediately before and after 1917, Figes shows how the revolution, while it changed in form and character, nevertheless retained the same idealistic goals throughout, from its origins in the famine crisis of 1891 until its end with the collapse of the communist Soviet regime in 1991. Figes is a bestselling historian, and somehow controversial, both the man and his approach to writing history seem to inspire his fellow academics with some professional animosity. Is this merely jalousie de métier and petty criticism?