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

Vast in scope, exhaustive in original research, and written with passion, narrative skill, and human sympathy, <i>A People's Tragedy</i> is a profound account of the Russian Revolution for a new generation. <br /><br />It is a history on a truly epic and yet human scale. Figes lays out a panorama of Russian society on the eve of the revolution, and then narrates the story of how these social forces were erased so violently. The huge canvas of war and revolution is supplemented by miniature histories of individuals, pieced together from their private writings, in which Figes follows the fortunes of people like the patriotic general Brusilov, the progressive peasant Semenov and the critical socialist Maxim Gorky as they saw their hopes die and their world crash into ruins.<br /><br />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. Yet he also shows that the major social forces - the peasantry, the workers, the soldiers, and the subject peoples of the empire - were not just the victims of the Bolsheviks but were also actors in their own complex revolutionary tragedies. Figes argues that the failure of democracy in 1917 was deeply rooted in Russian culture and social history and that what had started as a people's revolution contained the seeds of its own degeneration into violence and dictatorship.