A People's Tragedy

The topic is ambitious and the revolution’s early intellectuals generated enough material to entice any historian into a bog of trivia. Figes tells the story with both alluring passion and magisterial grasp. By the end, you gain a sense that Dostoyevsky merits a back seat to Lenin in authoring a profound Russian tragedy.

A sprawling epic tragedy.

My initial impression after having read this is that, despite its somewhat disjointed nature (the author can go on some tangents, some chapters feel like they contain information better suited for a different chapter, sometimes there is too much information which drowns out the narrative a bit, and overall it could have been a tighter book), the amount of crucial information and analysis were very effective. After all, when covering the complicated messiness of these events, is it possible to not have a bit of a complicated mess of a book if one is simply following the events?

The author drives home two messages in this book: that the baffling stupidity of the tsarist regime to not make any concessions to the peasantry was its own downfall, and that because Russia was so behind the West in terms of modernity (specifically the peasantry, filled with old world villages still living as if it were the Middle Ages, believing in witchcraft, etc.), the people of Russia were contributors to their own revolutionary failures. Lenin's brand of Bolshevism was to reject Marxism's understanding of a necessary stage of capitalism, to properly educate the peasantry so that they would be “ready” to participate in a socialist revolution and to instead “jump over” this key contingency and force the revolution upon them instead. Imagine that: ideologues claiming to know what's best for the peasantry that they actually despise and that ending up in disaster.

In Lenin's dying years, he understood that this turned out to be wrong and that there should have been a capitalist stage after all, since the peasantry was so provincial in the way they lived and simply would not tolerate having their grain requisitioned for a higher abstract ideal such as socialism. This was the role the NEP (New Economic Policy) served when another peasant revolt in 1921 terrified Lenin into actually giving concessions and introducing some capitalistic organs into society to fast-track the peasantry to the ideas of socialism.

Something truly amazing read through this book is the number of times tragically bad decisions were made that kept this going. It feels like the “Idiot Plot” trope in literature, only real (for those who don't know the term, an idiot plot is when a plot is only able to move forward if everyone in the story is an idiot with their decisions and awareness). From Tsar Nicholas absolutely refusing any concessions to the rioting peasantry and writing in his journal about the weather and playing dominoes after having civilians violently repressed in the capitol, to the tsarist censors allowing Marx's writing into Russian society because it was too statistical and dense for people to want to read and therefore harmless, to politicians and governing bodies seeming to have a contest over who could do the least and make the worst decisions to give the public a stable and trusted authority after February 1917, (which allowed the Bolsheviks to fill that void), tragedy is truly the right word for all of it.

In tandem with the above, there were also some tragedies of figures who did everything they could to prevent Russia from being destroyed. The most tragic case is Gorky, who had a very strange and interesting relationship with Lenin - both his great friend and aggressive intellectual and political rival. Lenin had a soft spot for Gorky and seemed to enjoy indulging in granting Gorky's requests to loosen his terror, free innocent prisoners, not persecute writers and artists who were valuable to Russian society, etc. The most notable thing he did was beg Lenin to accept famine aid from the United States. Lenin was very reluctant and hated granting this request but he eventually did and because of Gorky's insistence, tens and tens of millions of Russians were fed, clothed, and given medicine, and the famine was able to take a positive turn as a result.

Figes has done an excellent service by writing this book - it feels exhaustive, as the history of the Russian Revolution can only be. From the opening of the first chapter, the reader is convincingly immersed in the Romanov tercentenary parade. By the time we finish up events around Lenin's death, that parade, along with Tsarist society, seems to have been a dream, as if it had never really happened.