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. In one sense, the fall of the Soviet Union proved him wrong. The world of 1917 no longer exists: neither the Donetsk separatists nor Vladimir Putin are Marxist-Leninists, and it is inconceivable that Angela Merkel will emulate the Kaiser and invade eastern Ukraine to rid it of Russian influence. 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.

Figes's knowledge is breath-taking in its range and precision ... A conclusion to draw from The Europeans is that tribalism is stronger than art ... This a melancholy reflection, but it accentuates, rather than reduces, the value of Figes's tumultuously informative and educative work." (John Carey, Sunday Times) The influence of the exiled Marxist theorist Georgi Plekhanov was vital here. It was he who first mapped out the two-stage revolutionary strategy. With it the Russian Marxists at last had an answer to the problem of how to bring about a post-capitalist society in one only now entering the capitalist phase. It gave them grounds for their belief that in forsaking the seizure of power—which, as Plekhanov put it, could only lead to a ‘despotism in Communist form'—they could still advance towards socialism.

Figes in his maturity is a fine, subtle writer with a nice eye for detail and clever with structure. I finished the book entertained, informed and armed with the kinds of insights and questions that will keep me happily going for the rest of the year." (David Aaronovitch The Times) From the 1891 famine, which politicized society and set it on a course of collision with the Tsarist dynasty, to the Revolutions of 1917, the Civil War and the death of Lenin in 1924, Figes thus unfolds a brilliant and novel perspective on the century's most important event. He depicts he revolution as a tragedy - both for the Russians as a people and for so many individuals whose lives became caught up in the storm. to get information on accessing more materials including my responses to exam questions on these themes. More storytelling than analytical. Figes tends to forget his thesis frequently over the course of his work. While working through Revolutionary Russia one can see why Figes had the idea of a continuous revolution, but one gets the impression that there were either numerous revolutions unrelated to the ones that came directly before each new one, or, instead of, and more realistic, one revolution, there was evolution of what not only the events of 1917 meant but what Communism means. Figes could have quite easily divided up the one revolution into more stages than just the three he identifies. Figes is a bestselling historian, and somehow controversial, both the man and his approach to writing history seem to inspire his fellow academics with some professional animosity. Is this merely jalousie de métier and petty criticism?

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. 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. The 1890s were a watershed in this respect. From this decade we can date the emergence of a civil society, a public sphere and ethic, all in opposition to the state.

Lccn 2013042580 Ocr tesseract 5.2.0-1-gc42a Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9811 Ocr_module_version 0.0.18 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA401771 Openlibrary_edition 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. It suggests that the peasants tried to keep their failing farms alive for as long as possible. Young peasant men were sending money earned in mines and factories to their villages, where they themselves returned at harvest time (‘raiding the cash economy' as is common in developing societies). There was a constant to-and-fro between the city and the countryside. We can talk as much about the ‘peasantization' of Russia's towns as we can about the disappearance of the farming peasantry. 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. Like Simon Schama, Orlando Figes is a historian whose popularity has extended beyond academia and into general readership. Perhaps because of this – or possibly for other reasons – Figes has come in for criticism from his fellow academics. He has been described by some as a ‘historical journalist’ and accused by others of taking creative liberties with evidence. One of Figes’ approaches is to focus on the cultural aspects of revolution: words, language, symbols, propaganda, mood and other psychological devices. A revolution may start with political events and ambitions – but Figes’ work is also concerned with understanding how revolutionary ideas reach, affect and motivate ordinary people. His writing style employs a sweeping narrative, striking a balance between describing important events of great significance and examining their impact on individuals. Figes gives less time and attention to political ideology than other historians: his main concern is with ordinary Russians and their motivations and conditions. Because of this, Figes does not rely on the writings and ramblings of Marx and Lenin as a point of reference. 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.

Lenin was particularly influenced by the ‘Jacobinism' of the revolutionary theorist Petr Tkachev (1844–86), who in the 1870s had argued for a seizure of power and the establishment of a dictatorship by a disciplined and highly centralized vanguard on the grounds that a social revolution was impossible to achieve by democratic means: the laws of capitalist development meant that the richer peasants would support the status quo. Tkachev insisted that a coup d'état should be carried out as soon as possible, because as yet there was no real social force prepared to side with the government, and to wait would only let one develop. There are many examples like that. Very very few sources (and the ones that are given only cover quotes that are often times unrelated and are only inserted to prove the author's assumption or a point he is making). Sources provided are unreliable (Trotsky or Khruschev, both of whom had hatreds for Stalin for personal reasons, are not valid sources of information when it comes to Stalin's personality or achievements). Orlando Figes is an award-winning author of nine books on Russian and European history which have been translated into over 30 languages.A primer intended for readers unfamiliar with the territory, it sparkles with ideas, vivid storytelling, poignant anecdotes and pithy phrases... Fresh and dramatic." (Victor Sebestyen, Sunday Times) This section covers Russia during World War 1 (1914-1917). We will be looking at the Russian war campaign and its impact on the outbreak of the revolution in February 1917. We will be asking how the war revolutionized society? Why did the Tsar's mishandling of the war make revolution appear patriotic to so many people in Russia? What was the role of rumours about Rasputin and sexual scandals at the court? The section contains extracts from my books, videos and photographs, including a rare pornographic postcard, as well as my suggestions about what books you should read. Register

He also has a habit of using statistics without context, particularly in relation to the gulags and “great terror”; large numbers sound impressive but without setting them in proper relation they're mere sensationalism. For example, he quotes the gulag population in the 1930s as being around a million, without noting that, as a percentage of the total population, this is significantly lower than the liberal, democratic, “land of the free” United States even in the 2010s. Bolshevism has abolished private life, wrote Walter Benjamin on a visit to Moscow in 1927. “The bureaucracy, political activity, the press are so powerful that no time remains for interests that do not converge with them. Nor any space.” People were obliged in many ways to live completely public lives. The revolution did not tolerate a ‘private life’ free from public scrutiny. There were no party politics but everything people did in private was ‘political’—from what they read and thought to whether they were violent in the family home—and as such was subject to the censure of the collective. The ultimate aim of the revolution was to create a transparent society in which people would police them selves through mutual surveillance and the denunciation of ‘anti-Soviet’ behaviour.

Select a format:

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. 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.