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

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Figes makes it seem as if the statement had been made in 1918, so bolstering his contention that mass support for the October Revolution evaporated almost immediately. As for my use of the quotations by Lenin (on the need to beat people without mercy) and Shliapnikov (on the disappearance of the working class), neither merits the charge of distortion, although in the first I did miss out some dots. 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. On the other hand, guided by Gorky, who had no illusions about the great dark whale of the Russian people from whose belly, like Jonah, he had somehow emerged, Figes has made an extremely important contribution to our understanding of the Russian masses who, in the end, made the Revolution. 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.

Orlando Figes - Wikipedia Orlando Figes - Wikipedia

While conceding that, "like all memory, the testimony given in an interview is unreliable", he said that oral testimony "can be cross-examined and tested against other evidence".

The book documents five illegal trips made by Svetlana to visit Lev by smuggling herself into the labour camp. Concentration on Russia has also led Figes to neglect the almost immediate global impact of the 1917 Revolution, which is, after all, what was to make it, in his own words, ‘one of the biggest events in the history of the world’. 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.

Reviews - JSTOR Reviews - JSTOR

But for Figes this remark proves that ‘Lenin had no place for sentiment in his life,’ and to sustain this interpretation he simply alters the quotation from Gorky so that it reads: ‘It makes me want to say kind, stupid things, and pat the heads of people.Figes condemned the police raid, accusing the Russian authorities of trying to rehabilitate the Stalinist regime. These, and other possible reservations and disagreements, cannot diminish one’s admiration for Figes’s achievement, which unites readers as widely different in their views as the present reviewer and Robert Conquest.

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

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 great revolutions of the modern world never cease to be controversial, inside or outside their countries, as the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution recently demonstrated. Eric Hobsbawm, who died on 1 October 2012 at the age of 95, was one of the foremost historians of the 20th century. Figes has been critical of the Vladimir Putin government, in particular alleging that Putin has attempted to rehabilitate Joseph Stalin and impose his own agenda on history-teaching in Russian schools and universities.It is this nationwide upheaval of the masses which distinguishes the Russian Revolution of 1917 from the French Revolution of 1789. There is no attempt here to tell the King Lear story of Nicholas and Alexandra; this is Coriolanus, unbearable and grotesque. This was the mass base of support for the Revolution, even though the Government had so few supporters by October that very little force was needed for the Soviets to take power.