A People's Tragedy

Figes begins in 1891, arguing that the famine and the state's failure to respond is where the old regime's legitimacy started to go, and runs through 1905, 1917, the civil war and the consolidation of Bolshevik power.

The structure follows several real individuals across the whole period — Prince Lvov, the peasant reformer Semenov, the writer Gorky, General Brusilov — so that the abstractions have people attached.

It starts in 1891, because Figes argues the revolution's causes were visible a quarter-century early.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Figes rejects both the Soviet account of an inevitable proletarian rising and the liberal account of a tragic accident. His case is that the collapse was driven substantially from below, by peasant and soldier action that the Bolsheviks rode rather than directed.

He is correspondingly hard on the intelligentsia, whom he presents as consistently misunderstanding the people they claimed to represent.

It is long — around eight hundred pages — and assumes some willingness to hold Russian names and factions. The narrative is strong enough to carry a reader who accepts that.

Figes has had documented professional controversies, including anonymous reviews of rivals' books that he initially denied. Those episodes concern his conduct rather than this book's scholarship, which has largely held up, but a reader is entitled to know.

The scholarship here has held; the author's later conduct controversies are separate and documented.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Figes deliberately begins decades before the revolution and ends with Lenin's death, arguing that treating 1917 as the event misses the point. The famine and rural crisis of the 1890s, the failures of reform, and the collapse of the old regime's legitimacy are all established at length before a single soviet appears, which is what makes the narrative an explanation rather than a chronicle.

He starts a generation early, because by 1917 most of what mattered had already happened.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The structure follows a small number of individuals across the whole period — a liberal prince, a peasant who rises through the party, a soldier, a writer — and returns to each as the situation changes. The device supplies the book's title and its method: the revolution described through what it did to particular people whose trajectories the reader can follow.

The book's most original emphasis is that the revolution was substantially a peasant revolution, driven by land hunger and by a rural world with its own politics that both the old regime and the Bolsheviks failed to understand. Figes argues the countryside was the decisive arena and is consistently treated as background elsewhere.

His most contested claim is that the repressive apparatus of the Soviet state was established under Lenin rather than invented by Stalin, and that the mechanisms of the 1930s were operational within a few years of 1917. This places him in a long historiographical dispute, and readers should know he is taking a side rather than reporting a consensus.

The title's argument is that the revolution was made by people with genuine grievances and real hopes, and that the outcome betrayed them specifically rather than failing abstractly. Figes is careful not to write the old regime as sympathetic; his case is that its collapse was deserved and its replacement was worse.

It runs to more than eight hundred pages of dense narrative with a very large cast and a great deal of unfamiliar institutional detail. It is not an introduction and does not behave like one: readers without a prior outline of the period will need a chronology beside them, and it rewards being read slowly over weeks.

Figes was subsequently found to have posted anonymous reviews attacking rival historians' books online, which he initially denied and then admitted. It is relevant context for his standing rather than a verdict on this volume, whose scholarship has not been seriously impeached — but readers encountering the episode elsewhere should have it in view.