Lccn 2013042580 Ocr tesseract 5.2.0-1-gc42a Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9811 Ocr_module_version 0.0.18 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA401771 Openlibrary_edition 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 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.

This combination was the key to the success of the Ukrainian nationalist movement. In the Constituent Assembly elections of November 1917, the first democratic elections in the country's history, 71 per cent of the Ukrainian peasants would vote for the nationalists—an astonishing shift in political awareness in only a generation. The movement organized the peasants in their struggle against foreign (mainly Russian and Polish) landowners and against the ‘foreign influence' of the towns (dominated by the Russians, Jews and Poles). It is no coincidence that peasant uprisings erupted first, in 1902, in those regions around Poltava province where the Ukrainian nationalist movement was also most advanced.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. The terminology of the Revolution was a foreign language to most of the peasants (as indeed it was to a large proportion of the uneducated workers) in most parts of Russia. Equally, the new institutions of the state appeared strange and alien to many of the peasants.” Churchill's quote echoes in our minds when we try to understand Russia, a strange country which is both familiarly European and Slavic at one side, but distant and Asiatic on the other. Russia achieved its gargantuan size through conquest and expansionism, which turned the medieval Kievan Rus - already one of the largest and most prosperous states in Europe at the time - into one of the largest empires in history, rivaled only by the British and Mongol empires. At the height of its power the Russian Empire stretched over three continents, from Poland in Europe to Alaska in North America. This imperial expansion gave Russia it multi-national character; although ethnic Russians continue to dominate population statistics, Russia is home to more than 185 ethnic groups with unique history, culture and language, who live in the country's many republics - such as the Tatars in Tatarstan, the Chechens in Chechnya or the Bashkirs in Bashkortostan. Meticulously detailed, exhaustively researched and written with Figes's characteristic verve, The Europeans is a sweeping tour de force and a monumental work of historical synthesis." (Julian Coman, The Observer)

A panoramic history of nineteenth-century European culture told through the entangled lives of the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev, the singer and composer Pauline Viardot and her husband Louis Viardot, a great connoisseur,The Europeans has been published to critical acclaim in the UK and US: Lenin was particularly influenced by the ‘Jacobinism' of the revolutionary theorist Petr Tkachev (1844–86), who in the 1870s had argued for a seizure of power and the establishment of a dictatorship by a disciplined and highly centralized vanguard on the grounds that a social revolution was impossible to achieve by democratic means: the laws of capitalist development meant that the richer peasants would support the status quo. Tkachev insisted that a coup d'état should be carried out as soon as possible, because as yet there was no real social force prepared to side with the government, and to wait would only let one develop.Evidently, the Russian revolution continues to be a great challenging “case” to historians analyzing what are the driving forces of History. Is this the individual, the great leader or are it the masses? Certain odd events? Or structural processes? Figes does not pin himself down on one explanation, using several historiographical paradigms to make his point: primarly a generational approach, intermingling with a “great man” discourse and Mosca’s conflicting elites approach. Figes focuses on what he calls 3 generations of revolutionaries: the old Bolsheviks (from Lenin to Stalin), the bureaucrats that survived the Stalinist purges (Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov) and then Gorbachev, the last Bolshevik before the Soviet empire collapsed. This is all very interesting, but I wonder if it this analysis is really that new – not that it would be a problem to me if it is not. Again, it adds to its readability, including something for everyone. A Bolshevik is explaining to an old woman what Communism will be like. ’There will be plenty of everything’ he said. ‘Food, clothing. Every kind of merchandise. You will be able to travel abroad.’

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 Russia is still making history, for better or worse. With the Olympics in Sochi and their issues with homosexuality and, apparently, dogs, to Putin and Pussy Riot, our eyes are still on Russia, making Figes's book actually quite timely. The Provisional Government was a government of persuasion. Not having been elected by the people, it depended largely on the power of the word to establish its authority. [The members of the Provisional Government] … believed that the primary duty of the February Revolution was to educate the people in their civic rights and duties.”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 Vast in scope, based on exhaustive original, and written with passion, narrative skill and human sympathy, A People's Tragedy is the definitive account of the Russian Revolution for a new generation. Even the young Lenin only became fully converted to the Marxist mainstream in the wake of the famine crisis. Contrary to the Soviet myth, in which Lenin appeared as a fully fledged Marxist theorist in his infancy, the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution came late to politics. In his last school year he was commended by his headmaster (by an irony of fate the father of Kerensky, his arch-rival in 1917) as a model student, ‘moral and religious in his upbringing', and never giving ‘cause for dissatisfaction, by word or deed, to the school authorities'.14 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.'17

The equestrian statue of Peter the Great, known as the Bronze Horseman, St Petersburg. Photograph: Dmitri Lovetsky/AP Figes in his maturity is a fine, subtle writer with a nice eye for detail and clever with structure. I finished the book entertained, informed and armed with the kinds of insights and questions that will keep me happily going for the rest of the year." (David Aaronovitch The Times) 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 popular historical view of the Russian Revolution is the Bolshevik coup of October 1917 launching the world’s first Communist state; however Orlando Figes offers a new perspective on the Revolution not as a single but a continuous event covering a century of Russian history. In relating this new perspective Figes reveals how three generations viewed and lived the Russian Revolution before it and the Soviet Union collapsed. On P. 286 he says "the real test of a successful revolution is whether it replaces the political elites". This is followed by an analysis of who remained in power after the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union showing that this restructuring was not revolutionary. The book's thesis would have been better presented if it such an analysis had followed the successive phases.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. And the feeling of "socialism bad capitalism good" is prevalent throughout the whole book. When Figes talks about USSR industrialising and living conditions improving, that is somehow "socialism in retreat". When he analyses overall impact of the era, he claims that "seventy centuries of communism ruined russia", although it's precisely the collapse of communism that ruined it. Figes’s framework is both insightful and convincing. It allows him to focus not only on the major figures but also on the broader social support mobilised during successive revolutionary cycles. At the same time it helps us to understand some of the mysteries of Soviet history – such as why Gorbachev was willing to go so far in undermining the bureaucracies that held the Soviet system together. Only his roots in the Russian revolutionary tradition can explain his radical, seemingly suicidal policies.