Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991: A Pelican Introduction (Pelican Books)

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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. The famine crisis undermined that view. Partly caused by the tax squeeze on the peasants to pay for industrialization, the crisis suggested that the peasantry was literally dying out, both as a class and a way of life, under the pressures of capitalist development. Marxism alone seemed able to explain the causes of the famine by showing how a capitalist economy created rural poverty. In the 1890s it fast became a national intelligentsia creed. Socialists who had previously wavered in their Marxism were converted to it by the crisis, as they realized that there was no more hope in the Populist faith in the peasantry. Even liberal thinkers such as Petr Struve found their Marxist passions stirred by the famine: it ‘made much more of a Marxist out of me than the reading of Marx's Capital'.11 The live video conference my students had with Professor Figes was a brilliant experience. The classroom task of formulating the 'big' questions in advance, then having them answered by a leading professional historian, was highly motivational. It resulted in some sparkling insights which students will find invaluable in giving them 'the edge' in the final examinations. My class came away from the experience full of enthusiasm for the way in which Professor Figes brought the subject alive in an accessible but intellectually stimulating manner" And this is the starting point of Orlando Figes’s The Story of Russia: “Russia is a country held together by ideas rooted in its distant past,” he tells us in the introduction. “Histories continuously reconfigured and repurposed to suit its present needs and reimagine its future.”

Here, then, were the roots of the monarchy's collapse, not in peasant discontent or the labour movement, so long the preoccupation of Marxist and social historians, nor in the breakaway of nationalist movements on the empire's periphery, but in the growing conflict between a dynamic public culture and a fossilized autocracy that would not concede or even understand its political demands.Orlando Figes succeeds in presenting a short political history of Russia 1891-1991. He shows the political changes, social upheaval and economic catastrophe but does not flesh out his thesis that Russia was been in a 100 year revolutionary cycle. In that light, his arguments on why a restructuring of public opinion on the Soviet Period in the decades post-1991, especially under Putin; as well as his exposition on why Russia has maintained its authoritarian traditionalism even after the deep-seeded experience of trauma in the previous century, make rather complete sense. While Gorbachev managed to bring the USSR to the brink of tectonic change because of the differences in perspective of his generation - the third, of Soviet-born daughters and sons, the post-1991 failure to do so has been illustrated, in stellar fashion, as a result of a crisis of identity - of a failure to concretely formulate how the legacy of seven and a half decades was to be remembered and judged. Figes brings this out perfectly when he quotes Alexand What were the causes of the Russian Revolution? When and how did it begin? And what was more important in bringing it about - the social grievances of the peasants and the workers, or the political aspirations of the middle class? In this section we will be asking how stable the Tsarist system really was? We will look at the revolutionaries, including Lenin, and ask how much influence they really had? We will also focus on Nicholas II and ask what role he played in his downfall? You will also find some extracts from books, original photographs and videos, and a reading list. Register

The growth of mass-based nationalist movements was contingent on the spread of rural schools and institutions, such as peasant unions and cooperatives, as well as on the opening up of remote country areas by roads and railways, postal services and telegraphs—all of which was happening very rapidly in the decades before 1917. The most successful movements combined the peasants' struggle for the land (where it was owned by foreign landlords, officials and merchants) with the demand for native language rights, enabling the peasants to gain full access to schools, the courts and government.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. Acoperă destul de bine domnia lui Nicolae al II-lea și eșecul țarismului (și șansele ratate de acest sistem) și originile mișcării revoluționare în Rusia, însă revoluția în sine și apoi războiul civil sunt destul de slab și accelerat prezentate. Apoi, perioada lui Stalin este larg prezentată și analizată, de la început până la final, însă toți liderii care urmează sunt prezentați destul de succint, fără prea multă analiză. E o discrepanță destul de mare între momentele-cheie alese de istoric pentru a fi analizate vs cele lăsate mai în „umbră”. Pe de-o parte, înțeleg provocarea de a aborda un secol de istorie în 300-400 pagini, pentru publicul larg, precum și dificultatea de a scrie despre un subiect atât de încărcat ideologic. Totuși, au fost multe informații noi pentru mine, precum și câteva aspecte pe care le cunoșteam, dar care au fost prezentate într-o viziune diferită. 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. The Church retained a powerful hold over rural Russia, in particular. In many villages the priest was one of the few people who could read and write. Through parish schools the Orthodox clergy taught children to show loyalty, deference and obedience, not just to their elders and betters but also to the Tsar and his officials. This year's seminars will cover all the major questions you are likely to be asked in A-level and IB exams on Russian and Soviet history。

Here is a short extract of a 40-minute seminar I had with the students of the International School of Toulouse. He also has a habit of using statistics without context, particularly in relation to the gulags and “great terror”; large numbers sound impressive but without setting them in proper relation they're mere sensationalism. For example, he quotes the gulag population in the 1930s as being around a million, without noting that, as a percentage of the total population, this is significantly lower than the liberal, democratic, “land of the free” United States even in the 2010s.

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More storytelling than analytical. Figes tends to forget his thesis frequently over the course of his work. While working through Revolutionary Russia one can see why Figes had the idea of a continuous revolution, but one gets the impression that there were either numerous revolutions unrelated to the ones that came directly before each new one, or, instead of, and more realistic, one revolution, there was evolution of what not only the events of 1917 meant but what Communism means. Figes could have quite easily divided up the one revolution into more stages than just the three he identifies. Orlando Figes is an award-winning author of nine books on Russian and European history which have been translated into over 30 languages. Bolshevism has abolished private life, wrote Walter Benjamin on a visit to Moscow in 1927. “The bureaucracy, political activity, the press are so powerful that no time remains for interests that do not converge with them. Nor any space.” People were obliged in many ways to live completely public lives. The revolution did not tolerate a ‘private life’ free from public scrutiny. There were no party politics but everything people did in private was ‘political’—from what they read and thought to whether they were violent in the family home—and as such was subject to the censure of the collective. The ultimate aim of the revolution was to create a transparent society in which people would police them selves through mutual surveillance and the denunciation of ‘anti-Soviet’ behaviour.