Reviews for A people's tragedy

The average rating for A people's tragedy based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-05-11 00:00:00 Ann Rose “The Russian Revolution launched a vast experiment in social engineering – perhaps the grandest in the history of mankind. It was arguably an experiment which the human race was bound to make at some point in its evolution, the logical conclusion of humanity’s historic striving for social justice and comradeship. Yet born as it was of the First World War, when Europe had been brought to the brink of self-destruction, it was also one that many people believed was essential at the time…The experiment went horribly wrong, not so much because of the malice of its leaders, most of whom had started out with the highest ideals, but because their ideals were themselves impossible…” - Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 As one of the epochal moments in history, the story of the Russian Revolution has been told in many places, in many different ways. Like other great revolutions in history, it was messy, bloody, and complex, and its full meaning has been debated ever since. The title of Orlando Figes’s A People’s Tragedy gives you a pretty good indication of his angle of approach to this huge subject. You don’t pick up a book like this 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. More specifically, you are not going to find any moral shrugging at the cost of the Russian Revolution, or any glib notions that you can’t effect massive societal change without a bit of slaughter. 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 me are not appropriate “small talk” for dinner parties: War as waged by balmy idealists, fools, and crypto-dictators; the attendant butchery of that war as waged by the same; revolution and upheaval and the attendant carnage, as idealism turns to fanaticism. There is 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 tiny. Helpfully, the book is broken into manageable parts, allowing me to dip in and out whenever I needed a dose of perspective. 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 (fondly and aptly described by historian Margaret MacMillan as the ideal village postmaster). From there, we follow the revolution that caused the fall of Nicholas; the rise of the Provisional Government; the revolution that toppled that interim authority; and finally the slide into civil war. Of all the characters of this saga, I found Nicholas II to be among the most fascinating, simply because he was so manifestly unsuited to being an autocrat in charge of one of the hugest, most powerful empires on earth. Part of him never seemed to want the job, and to learn about Nicholas is to learn of a man who loved and doted on his family, filled his diary with the most insipid banalities imaginable, and probably could’ve lived a long and immeasurably happier life by retiring to a faraway dacha. Frankly, I wouldn’t trust him to manage my slow-pitch softball team. Despite his equivocations, however, 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, is devoted to the Tsar’s gradual erosion in authority. A disastrous war against Japan, a social revolution, and many unforced 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 a troubled couple deciding to have a child to save 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, in the book’s third section, 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! While the third part of A People’s Tragedy is a rollercoaster, the fourth and final quarter is simply a downward plunge into brutal, unimaginably bloody civil war, followed by the initial formation of the Soviet system, which was to cause so much misery going forward. When I first read this book, I did not know a ton about Russian history. Once Nicholas II was off the stage, I was in the wilderness, with many hundreds of pages left to go. Nevertheless, I never got lost, as Figes does a fantastic job of structuring this material. As I mentioned at the top, this is an extremely ambitious volume, striving for a certain level of comprehensiveness, and only ends in 1924, with Lenin dying, and the baton about to be passed to Georgian poet and former seminary student. While this is eminently readable, it is still complex, and Figes is not dumbing anything down. He is more than talented enough as a writer to lead a relative novice through this thorny, convoluted, heavily-peopled period relatively unscathed. With that said, 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 glued to the page was Figes’s relentless focus on humanity. He doesn’t get lost in abstract political theorizing. Instead, he dwells on personalities and quirks and circumstances and tough choices and Rasputin’s penis, making this very human-oriented. One of the things that makes studying the Russian Revolution, Bolshevism, and Communism so difficult is the impenetrable Marxist terminology that serves the double purpose of providing a patina of intellectualism, while also obscuring the basic truths about what is happening. Figes strips that layer away. 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, making this both an academic and literary masterpiece. It took some patience – and Yellow Tail wine breaks – to complete, but it was well worth the effort.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-10-07 00:00:00 Kathryn Patterson While I was halfway through this, an ‘inspirational quote’ from Lenin happened to come up on my reddit feed. Something from one of those early speeches, about equality for all. I left a comment to suggest – I thought quite mildly – that it was, perhaps, ethically questionable to be quoting with approbation someone responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people – only to be downvoted into oblivion by other users. ‘You're probably thinking about Stalin,’ said one. ‘Fuck off,’ clarified another. ‘Lenin was actually very socially liberal, and kept his word about democracy for the people.’ This would be the same Lenin who shut down Russia's constituent assembly, who sidelined trade unions and had striking workers shot for desertion, who turned the country into a police state, built a chain of concentration camps and institutionalised terrorism as a matter of deliberate policy. Painful to see him held up as a beacon of humanitarianism by people who apparently haven't even understood Animal Farm. It's interesting, though, because even when I was growing up the far left was always quite cool in a way that the far right never was; its unelectability made it harmless, and it gained a certain cachet from its opposition to a string of unpopular Tory governments and by association with various cult figures like Morrissey or Alexi Sayle. It was always kind of a joke. People referred to each other with smiles as ‘fellow travellers’, ‘old Trots’ – and still do. There was a feeling I had when I was reading this book; an uncomfortable, itchy feeling which made me fidget while I was reading, shift in my seat and scratch my nose or my neck every few minutes as I turned the pages. Eventually I realised what this sensation was: hatred. I just loathed the people responsible for prosecuting this grotesque experiment. Now I realise this is, of course, a pathetically inadequate response, but partly it came from a kind of surprise. A feeling that they had somehow got away with it, that their reputations are nowhere near as dismal as they should be. At one point, Orlando Figes offers in passing a suggestion as to why this might be so: The Bolshevik programme was based on the ideals of the Enlightenment – it stemmed from Kant as much as from Marx – which makes Western liberals, even in this age of post-modernism, sympathise with it, or at least obliges us to try and understand it, even if we do not share its political goals; whereas the Nazi efforts to ‘improve mankind’, whether through eugenics or genocide, spat in the face of the Enlightenment and can only fill us with revulsion. And perhaps there's something in this: inasmuch as reality has (in Stephen Colbert's words) a liberal bias; inasmuch as we are living, historically speaking, in a leftist world, there is a sense in which the Communist experiment seems like something that went wrong, not something that was wrong inherently. But the enormities of Lenin's politics were built-in ab initio; terror, Figes writes, was ‘implicit in the regime from the start…the resort to rule by terror was bound to follow from Lenin's violent seizure of power and his rejection of democracy’. And despite all the slogans of equality and democracy, the turnaround was much faster than I had ever realised. None of the democratic organisations established before October 1917 survived more than a few years of Bolshevik rule, at least not in their democratic form. By 1921, if not earlier, the revolution had come full circle, and a new autocracy had been imposed on Russia which in many ways resembled the old one. The thousand pages of Figes's history give plenty of scope for examining in detail what this meant for Russian citizens. It isn't pretty but it is instructive. There was the Civil War, with widespread terror on both sides; famine, exacerbated by shitty agricultural policy; and eventually the tightening grip of a one-party state. There are moments of acute revulsion and misery, alongside a recurring sense of absurdity: at one point, currency depreciation becomes so severe that it costs more to print the rouble than the rouble is actually worth; the post and telegraph service have to be made free because the state is losing money by printing and charging rouble notes for them. ‘The situation was surreal – but then this was Russia,’ Figes remarks, showing a grasp of the irony which this story demands. Whole books have been written, of course, about the failure of the left outside Russia to accept the reality of what was happening there under Communism, or to blame it on a perversion of noble principles. What's so rewarding, and upsetting, and moving about this book is that it illustrates how naturally the consequences followed from the initial conditions, and how unimportant the political debate is compared with its effects on real people. There, as the title of the book suggests, Figes's summary is blunt. Instead of being a constructive cultural force the revolution had virtually destroyed the whole of Russian civilisation; instead of human liberation it had merely brought human enslavement; and instead of the spiritual improvement of humanity it had led to degradation. What makes it worse is that this whole catalogue of misery is in some sense being positioned only as a prelude. Looming up over the narrative is the lengthening shadow of the Georgian, Ioseb Jughashvili, alias Stalin, and where this book ends his story is just beginning. Although this was written twenty years ago, in some ways it's become more relevant than ever, and not just because next year marks the revolution's centenary. In an impassioned final chapter, Figes calls for urgent reevaluation of the political capitalism of the West, pointing out that extremist rhetoric of the sort that fuelled the Bolshevik party is periodically going to prove popular ‘as long as the mass of the ordinary people remain alienated from the political system and feel themselves excluded from the benefits of the emergent capitalism. Perhaps even more worrying,’ he adds, ‘authoritarian nationalism has begun to fill the void…’ Is this sounding familiar to anybody?