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

Product Information

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

War and the Russian Revolution : Orlando Figes The Great War and the Russian Revolution : Orlando Figes

After his arrival in the capital, St Petersburg, in 1893, Lenin moved much closer to the standard Marxist view—that Russia was only at the start of its capitalist stage and that a democratic movement by the workers in alliance with the bourgeoisie was needed to defeat autocracy before a socialist revolution could commence. No more talk of a coup d'état or terror. It was only after the establishment of a ‘bourgeois democracy', granting freedoms of speech and association to the workers, that the second and socialist phase of the revolution could begin. Published in 2002, Natasha's Dance is a broad cultural history of Russia from the building of St. Petersburg during the reign of Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century. Taking its title from a scene in Tolstoy's War and Peace, where the young countess Natasha Rostova intuitively dances a peasant dance, it explores the tensions between the European and folk elements of Russian culture, and examines how the myth of the "Russian soul" and the idea of "Russianness" itself have been expressed by Russian writers, artists, composers and philosophers. 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 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.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. Kendall, Bridget (September 2022). "The Story of Russia by Orlando Figes review – what Putin sees in the past". The Guardian. Just Send Me Word has been translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Polish, Swedish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Finnish, Danish, Japanese, Korean and Chinese. [36] Crimea [ edit ] In 2023 Figes' debut play, The Oyster Problem, was produced by the Jermyn Street Theatre in London. The play is about the financial crisis of the writer Gustave Flaubert in the last years of his life and the attempts of his literary friends, George Sand, Emile Zola and Ivan Turgenev, to find him a sinecure. Bob Barrett played the part of Flaubert and Philip Wilson directed. [51] Everything Theatre described The Oyster Problem as "a remarkable pearl of a play; a patchwork of anecdotes that welcomes us into the private life of Gustave Flaubert and his literary contemporaries" [52] Film and television work [ edit ]

Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991: A History: Written by Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991: A History: Written by

The second generation came of age during Stalin’s “revolution from above” of 1928-32. Enthused by the promise of socialist modernity, they pushed through collectivisation of agriculture and forced industrialisation, while benefiting from the regime’s expansion of education and white-collar jobs. They then matured into the conservative “Brezhnev generation” who became so resistant to change after the 1960s. 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. 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. A People's Tragedy (1996) is a panoramic history of the Revolution from 1891 to the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924. It combines social and political history and interweaves through the public narrative the personal stories of several representative figures, including Grigory Rasputin, the writer Maxim Gorky, Prince Georgy Lvov and General Alexei Brusilov, as well as unknown peasants and workers. Figes wrote that he had "tried to present the revolution not as a march of abstract social forces and ideologies but as a human event of complicated individual tragedies". [12] Left-wing critics have represented Figes as a conservative because of his negative assessment of Lenin and his focus on the individual and "the random succession of chance events" rather than on the collective actions of the masses. [13] Others have situated Figes among the so-called 'revisionist' historians of the Revolution who attempted to explain its political development in terms of social history. [14] In 2008, The Times Literary Supplement listed A People's Tragedy as one of the "hundred most influential books since the war". [15] In 2013 David Bowie named A People's Tragedy one of his 'top 100 books'. [16] Many factory owners treated workers like serfs. They had them searched for stolen goods when they left the factory gates, and fined or even flogged for minor breaches of the rules. This degrading ‘serf regime' was bitterly resented by workers as an affront to their dignity, and ‘respectful treatment' was a prominent demand in strikes and labour protests that broke out after 1905.Figes published The Story of Russia in September 2022. [10] The book is a general history of Russia from the earliest times to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It focuses on the ideas and myths that have structured the Russians' understanding of their history, and explores what Figes calls the "structural continuities" of Russian history, such as the sacralisation of power and patrimonial autocracy. The Guardian described it as "An indispensable survey of more than 1,000 years of history [which] shows how myth and fact mix dangerously in the tales this crucial country tells about itself" [42] A reviewer in The Spectator called it "a saga of multi-millennial identity politics"; Figes argues that no other country has so often changed its origin story, [43] its "[h]istories continuously reconfigured and repurposed to suit its present needs and reimagine its future". [44] Views on Russian politics [ edit ]