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

Product Information

As Maxim Gorky wrote in 1917, ‘Lenin is a "leader" and a Russian nobleman, not without certain psychological traits of this extinct class, and therefore he considers himself justified in performing with the Russian people a cruel experiment which is doomed to failure beforehand. 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". The Russian nobility was heavily dependent on military and civil service to the state for its landed wealth and position in society. Thousands of well-meaning citizens joined the relief teams organized by the zemstvos—district councils dominated by the liberal gentry which had done ‘good works' for the rural population (building schools and hospitals, providing agronomic help and credit, gathering statistics about peasant life) since their establishment in 1864. Even then the ban had been opposed by the Ministry of Finance, whose economic policies (raising taxes on consumer goods so that the peasants would be forced to sell more grain) were seen by the public as the main cause of the famine.

Revolutionary Russia :: Home

As late as 1904, they retained the power to have peasants flogged for rowdy drunkenness or trespassing on the landowner's land.However, Figes argues that the revolution was continuous phenomena covering a century of Russian history, and which unfolded in three "movements". The Party rank and file was recruited in the main from peasant boys like these; its modernizing ideology was based on their rejection of the peasant world. Translated into more than twenty languages, [25] The Whisperers was described by Andrey Kurkov as "one of the best literary monuments to the Soviet people" [26] In it Figes underlined the importance of oral testimonies for the recovery of the history of repression in the former Soviet Union.

Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991 : a history : Figes, Orlando Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991 : a history : Figes, Orlando

A primer intended for readers unfamiliar with the territory, it sparkles with ideas, vivid storytelling, poignant anecdotes and pithy phrases. Anybody watching the news on the Ukraine crisis in recent weeks will have seen a black, blue and red tricolour with a double-headed eagle flying above occupied government buildings. Some of the skilled and educated workers were more inclined to improve their lot within the capitalist system than to overthrow it. The tsarist system could not cope with the challenges of urbanization and the development of a modern market-based economy which brought so many democratic changes in the final decades of the nineteenth century. This was the project that initially underpinned Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika, and its failure led to the collapse of the Soviet system.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. For all its pretensions to autocracy, however, the tsarist state was hardly present in the countryside and could not get a grip on many basic aspects of peasant life, as the famine had underlined. There was a revival of the Populist movement, culminating in 1901 with the establishment of the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR).

Historian: Orlando Figes - Alpha History Historian: Orlando Figes - Alpha History

And even this origin story, it turns out, has long been the subject of controversy: was it Slavic peoples who first settled what became known in Russia as Kievan Rus? The Sino-Soviet split took place during this phase of the revolution, with the catalyst being a speech Khruschev made on the 40th anniversary of the October revolution. 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. In the press and periodicals, in universities and learned societies, there were heated debates on the causes of the crisis in which Marx's ideas of capitalist development were generally accepted as the most convincing explanation of the peasantry's impoverishment.There was a pattern in the peasant in-migration to the towns: first came the young men, then the married men, then unmarried girls, then married women and children. The socialist movement, which had been largely dormant in the 1880s, sprang back into life as a result of these debates. Despite the paranoia of Stalin's three-decade-long rule, Figes notes that the dictator is held in high regard by many Russians today. 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. For every 1,000 inhabitants of the Russian Empire there were only four state officials at the end of the nineteenth century, compared with 7.