A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution

“I think that A People’s Tragedy is the most readable and illuminating history of the Russian revolution to be written, using material that only became available to historians following the Soviet Union’s collapse. Its scope is immense….Figes is basically a social historian. He’s interested in how historical events of the magnitude of the Russian revolution developed out of a number of different social trends. One of the great things about this book is that he combines a number of general theses about the revolution with personal narratives. He chooses five very different characters: Prince Lvov, who was the prime minister in the provisional government that was formed after the February revolution in 1917; General Brusilov, the tsar’s most gifted general who later joined the Red Army; Dmitri Oskin, a peasant soldier; the author Maxim Gorky; and Sergei Semenov, a reforming peasant leader. These personal narratives allow him to look at this period from all points of view – the grand political perspective, the grassroots perspective, a literary perspective, a military perspective.” Read more...

The best books on The Russian Revolution

Roland Chambers, Biographer

“It’s the book I most admired while I was writing about Russia because it gives the tremendous overall sweep of the entire catastrophe up to the end of the civil war in 1922 and the famine. Figes has the capacity to focus on people you’ve never heard of and show them as representatives of ideologies competing for control of the Russian state, and he looks at it on an individual basis. He shows the human brutality and zeroes in on the intimate experience of people in the civil war on both sides, everyone trying to requisition rations because there was nothing to eat. I think Figes is an academic who is liberated by his writing. He was a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and he went to all the archives, to the original sources – the extent of his knowledge is very profound and this gives his writing great ease. If he wanted to face a slide in his income he could be a good novelist with his observations of people.” Read more...

The best books on Revolutionary Russia

Thomas Keneally, Novelist