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. The Europeans is a massively impressive work, as enjoyable as it is knowledgeable, full of insights into the mechanisms of history and in the people who make it. It is a book about the making of Europe, and this description, wonderful as it is, has now, in these days, sadly, also almost a utopian quality to it. Orlando Figes is an outstanding historian and writer, he brings distant history so close that you could feel its heartbeat. He did it with the Russian Revolution in A People's Tragedy, and he does it again in The Europeans." (Karl Ove, Knausgaard) The power of the Tsar was only weakly counter-balanced by a landed aristocracy. The Russian nobility was heavily dependent on military and civil service to the state for its landed wealth and position in society. Nor were there real public bodies to challenge the autocracy: most institutions (organs of self-government, professional, scientific and artistic societies) were in fact creations of the state. Even the senior leaders of the Orthodox Church were appointed by the Tsar. All the main components of Lenin's ideology—his stress on the need for a disciplined ‘vanguard'; his belief that action (the ‘subjective factor') could alter the objective course of history (and in particular that the seizure of the state apparatus could bring about a social revolution); his defence of terror and dictatorship; his contempt for liberals and democrats (and indeed for socialists who compromised with them)—stemmed not just from Marx but from Tkachev and the People's Will. He injected a distinctly Russian dose of conspiratorial politics into a Marxist dialectic that would otherwise have remained passive—tied down by a willingness to wait for the revolution to mature through the development of objective conditions rather than bringing it about through political action. It was not Marxism that made Lenin a revolutionary but Lenin who made Marxism revolutionary.

The Russian Revolution was long expected but came as a surprise in February 1917. None of its 'leaders' expected it to happen how and when it did. Most revolutions are like that. That's what makes them revolutionary. As with any history of Russia, there are statistics documenting the scale and size of the purges, the imprisonments and the overall suffering. There are illustrations of how Russian literature forms the foundation of social movements and some very funny Russian jokes. In his polemics against the Economists Lenin came out with a pamphlet that would become the primer for the Bolsheviks through the revolution of 1917 and the founding text of international Communism. The implications of What Is to Be Done?—that the Party's rank and file should be forced to obey, in military fashion, the leadership's commands—were not fully realized when it first appeared in 1902. ‘None of us could imagine,' recalled one of the SDs, ‘that there could be a party that might arrest its own members.'18 In his remarkable new book Orlando Figes describes and takes apart the story of Russia's century of revolution in the shortest space possible. Starting with the horrific famines of 1891, Figes charts a vast experiment in state-building. The manipulation of many millions of people, first by Tsarist ministers and then by the Communists - on a scale and with a ferocity that their predecessors could not dream of - aimed to totally transform Russian society. Through war and peace Russia's rulers battled to subdue and control their vast state, fighting off a mass of real and imagined enemies until exhaustion, corruption and intellectual bankruptcy brought the whole terrible experiment to an end.That only began to emerge at the Second Party Congress, which met in London (at the Communist Club at 107 Charlotte Street)* from August 1903. The result was a split in the Party and the formation of two distinct SD factions. The cause of the split was seemingly trivial: the definition of Party membership. Lenin wanted all members to be activists in the Party's organization, whereas Martov thought that anyone who agreed with the Party's manifesto should be admitted as a member. Beneath the surface of this dispute lay two opposing views of what the Party ought to be: a military-revolutionary vanguard (tightly controlled by a leader such as Lenin) or a broad-based party in the Western parliamentary style (with a looser style of leadership). Lenin won a slender majority in the vote on this issue, enabling his faction to call themselves the ‘Bolsheviks' (‘Majoritarians') and their opponents the ‘Mensheviks' (‘Minoritarians'). With hindsight it was foolish of the Mensheviks to allow the adoption of these names. It saddled them with the permanent image of a minority party, which was to be an important disadvantage in their rivalry with the Bolsheviks. 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.

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. 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. There are a multitude of fascinating pieces of information to be gleaned from Orlando Figes's magisterial and wide-ranging book The Europeans ... Relevant, trenchant and searching." (William Boyd, The Guardian) 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.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

Russian workers were the most strike-prone in Europe. Three quarters of the factory workforce went on strike during 1905. Historians have spent a lot of time trying to explain the origins of this labour militancy. Factory size, levels of skill and literacy, the number of years spent living in the city, and the influence of the revolutionary intelligentsia—all these factors have been scrutinized in microscopic detail in countless monographs, each hoping to discover the crucial mix that explained the rise of the ‘workers' revolution' in Russia. The main disagreement concerns the effects of urbanization.The best insight is on the generational changes in values. Figes shows how the generation that toppled the monarchy and fought World War I was better educated than its parents; how it responded to the incompetence of the noble leaders, saw better living conditions in Europe and was motivated by and willing to sacrifice for the ideal of a better Russia. The next generation was career oriented and was motivated by perks and the next by fear. 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. Beginning with the famine of 1891, Figes describes how the catastrophe brought about the call for social change without a political outlet due to the autocratic rule of the Tsarist regime. In this climate revolutionaries abounded without a moderate counterweight that not even the political changes of 1905 could alleviate. These conditions resulted in the rise of the Lenin and the Bolsheviks espousing the vanguard party theory. Figes recounts the breakdown of the Tsarist regime allowing first the Revolution of February 1917 and the following political chaos that allowed for the October Revolution. And then how the Soviet system was created in the ensuing Civil War. The trope directly aforementioned - people's understandings of the microcosmic nature of their own milieus apropos the larger historic forces that played out following the October Revolution - is one that he commits significant wordage to. This establishes in the reader's mind, a genuine commitment to outlining the impact of vicious fluctuations in Soviet policy on the aspirations of entire generations of people; a concern, in that sense, for the primary stakeholders, who under the negligent, megalomania-driven Party leadership, were repeatedly sidelined and deprioritized throughout the regime's existence. In that sense, Figes' insistence on departing from the party-centric approach of prior historiography is a celebration-worthy epistemological break.