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

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Quotation from the introduction. Kendall, Bridget (1 September 2022). "The Story of Russia by Orlando Figes review – what Putin sees in the past". The Guardian . Retrieved 6 September 2022. Orlando Figes is an award-winning author of nine books on Russian and European history which have been translated into over 30 languages.

Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991 - Orlando Figes - Google Books Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991 - Orlando Figes - Google Books

The live video conference my students had with Professor Figes was a brilliant experience. The classroom task of formulating the 'big' questions in advance, then having them answered by a leading professional historian, was highly motivational. It resulted in some sparkling insights which students will find invaluable in giving them 'the edge' in the final examinations. My class came away from the experience full of enthusiasm for the way in which Professor Figes brought the subject alive in an accessible but intellectually stimulating manner"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 Here perhaps was the root of Marxism's attraction to the Jews, who played such a conspicuous role in the Social Democratic movement, providing many of its leaders (Trotsky, Martov, Axelrod, Kamenev and Zinoviev, to name just a few). Where Populism had proposed to build on peasant Russia—a land of pogroms and discrimination against the Jews—Marxism offered a modern Western vision of Russia. It promised to assimilate the Jews into a movement of universal human liberation—not just the liberation of the peasantry—based on principles of internationalism. Figes has been critical of the Vladimir Putin government, in particular alleging that Putin has attempted to rehabilitate Joseph Stalin and impose his own agenda on history-teaching in Russian schools and universities. [45] He is involved in an international summer school for history teachers in Russian universities organised by the European University of St Petersburg.

Revolutionary Russia, 1891–1991: A History | Foreign Affairs Revolutionary Russia, 1891–1991: A History | Foreign Affairs

Profound social changes were taking place. The old hierarchy of estates ( sosloviia), which the autocracy had created to organize society around its needs, was breaking down as a new and more dynamic system—too complicated to be described in terms of ‘class'—began to take shape. Men born as peasants, even serfs, rose to establish themselves as merchants, engineers and landowners (like the character Lopakhin who buys the cherry orchard in Chekhov's play). Merchants became noblemen. The sons and daughters of noblemen entered the liberal professions. Social mobility was accelerated by the spread of higher education. Between 1860 and 1914 the number of university students in Russia grew from 5,000 to 69,000 (45 per cent of them women). Public opinion and activity found a widening range of outlets in these years: the number of daily newspapers rose from thirteen to 856; and the number of public institutions from 250 to over 16,000. a b "Four Documentaries – The Tsar's Last Picture Show". BBC. 22 November 2007 . Retrieved 31 August 2011. Leningrad (St Petersburg) during the siege in the second world war, December 1942: a searing emblem of Russia’s capacity for heroism and sacrifice. Photograph: Sputnik/AlamyMany 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. opportunities to participate in on-line seminars with me on Google Hangout to discuss the major themes of the Russian Revolution and Soviet history, and a video library of previous seminars; urn:lcp:revolutionaryrus0000fige:lcpdf:0d4d1e53-7a0c-44d3-aedc-98ed7a2e76b2 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier revolutionaryrus0000fige Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s2c0qb188jw Invoice 1652 Isbn 9780805091311 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 by Orlando Figes - Waterstones

Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991 (Pelican, 2014) draws from several of Figes’ previous books on the Russian Revolution and Soviet history. It argues that - although it changed in form and character - the Russian Revolution should be understood as a single cycle of 100 years, from the famine crisis of 1891 until the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991.

Stanford, Peter (8 October 2017). "Those who complained about War and Peace are 'whingers', says historical advisor Orlando Figes". Telegraph.co.uk . Retrieved 8 October 2017. 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.”

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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. Appleyard, Bryan (3 October 2010). "The Wild Charges He Made". The Sunday Times . Retrieved 5 March 2020. Orlando Figes's latest book is The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture. 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 equestrian statue of Peter the Great, known as the Bronze Horseman, St Petersburg. Photograph: Dmitri Lovetsky/AP

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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.