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

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There was a revival of the Populist movement, culminating in 1901 with the establishment of the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR). Contrary to expectations, Marx's critique of the capitalist system would lead to revolution earlier in Russia than in any of the Western societies to which it had been addressed. The members of the Provisional Government] … believed that the primary duty of the February Revolution was to educate the people in their civic rights and duties.

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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. 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. It was to prove a historic moment, for it opened the door to a powerful new wave of public activity and debate which the government could not control and which quickly turned from the philanthropic to the political.

He was mild-mannered and had an excellent memory and a perfect sense of decorum, which made him ideal for the ceremonial tasks of a constitutional monarch. Orlando Figes finished this Pelican introduction before the Ukraine crisis but the importance of 1917 in the politics of the region today bears out his thesis: the Russian Revolution should not be seen as an event confined to the revolutionary years alone; rather, 1917 dominated Russian politics until the fall of the USSR in 1991, and its after-effects are with us still. As late as 1904, they retained the power to have peasants flogged for rowdy drunkenness or trespassing on the landowner's land. There are contrasting portraits of Ivan the Terrible, one proud and mistrustful, the other of a deranged monarch cradling the son he killed.

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

Initially denying responsibility for the reviews, he threatened legal action against those who suggested he was their author. According to Russian proverbs, a woman was improved by regular beatings, while: ‘For a man that has been beaten you have to offer two unbeaten ones.Orlando Figes teaches history at Birkbeck, University of London, and is the author of many acclaimed books on Russian history, including A People's Tragedy, which The Times Literary Supplementnamed as one of the '100 most influential books since the war', Natasha's Dance, The Whisperers, Crimeaand Just Send Me Word. This was a major difference between Russia and Western Europe, where since feudal days the landowning nobles had limited the power of the monarchy. 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.

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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. In the Constituent Assembly elections of November 1917, the first democratic elections in the country's history, 71 per cent of the Ukrainian peasants would vote for the nationalists—an astonishing shift in political awareness in only a generation.

There were few signs of such a ‘labour aristocracy' emerging in Russia and certainly no parliament to which it could aspire. The two most important factory laws—one in 1885 prohibiting the night-time employment of women and children, and the other in 1897 restricting the working day to eleven and a half hours—had to be wrenched from the government. There are a multitude of fascinating pieces of information to be gleaned from Orlando Figes's magisterial and wide-ranging book The Europeans . Despite the paranoia of Stalin's three-decade-long rule, Figes notes that the dictator is held in high regard by many Russians today. Orlando Figes's books have been translated into 20 languages - they include Crimea, Just Send Me Word, Natasha's Dance, A People's Tragedy and The Whisperers.