Figes - A peoples tragedy: the Russian Revolution 1891-1924

Orlando Figes is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. Born in London in 1959, he was previously a Lecturer in History and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. A Peoples Tragedy received the Wolfson Prize, the NCR Book Award, the W.H. Smith Literary Award, the Longman/History Today Book Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He is the author of many other books on Russian history including Natashas Dance: A Cultural History of Russia, The Whisperers: Private life in Stalins Russia, Crimea: the Last Crusade and Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag.

Unrivalled in scope and brimming with human drama, A Peoples Tragedy is the most vivid, moving and comprehensive history of the Russian Revolution available today.

Opening with a panorama of Russian society, from the cloistered world of the Tsar to the brutal life of the peasants, A Peoples Tragedy follows workers, soldiers, intellectuals and villagers as their world is consumed by revolution and then degenerates into violence and dictatorship. Drawing on vast original research, Figes conveys above all the shocking experience of the revolution for those who lived it, while providing the clearest and most cogent account of how and why it unfolded.

Illustrated with over 100 photographs and now including a new introduction that reflects on the revolutions centennial legacy, A Peoples Tragedy is a masterful and definitive record of one of the most important events in modern history.

Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution 191721

Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917

Natashas Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalins Russia

Crimea: The Last Crusade

Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag

Revolutionary Russia 18911991: A Pelican Introduction

Images of Autocracy

St Petersburg illuminated for the Romanov tercentenary in 1913

The procession of the imperial family during the tercentenary

Nicholas II rides in public view during the tercentenary

Nevsky Prospekt decorated for the tercentenary

Guards officers greet the imperial family during the tercentenary

Townspeople and peasants in Kostroma during the tercentenary

The court ball of 1903

The Temple of Christs Resurrection

Trubetskois equestrian statue of Alexander III

Statue of Alexander III outside the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour

The imperial family

Rasputin with his admirers

The Tsarevich Alexis with Derevenko

Everyday Life Under the Tsars

The city mayors of Russia

A group of volost elders

A newspaper kiosk in St Petersburg

A grocery store in St Petersburg

Dinner at a ball given by Countess Shuvalov

A soup kitchen for the unemployed in St Petersburg

Peasants of a northern Russian village

Peasant women threshing wheat

Peasant women hauling a barge

Twin brothers, former serfs, from Chernigov province

A typical Russian peasant household

A meeting of village elders

A religious procession in Smolensk province

The living space of four Moscow factory workers

Inside a Moscow engineering works

Dramatis Personae

General Brusilov

Maxim Gorky

Prince G. E. Lvov

Sergei Semenov

Dmitry Oskin

Alexander Kerensky

Lenin

Trotsky

Alexandra Kollontai

Between Revolutions

Soldiers fire at the demonstrating workers on Bloody Sunday, 1905

Demonstrators confront mounted Cossacks during 1905

The opening of the State Duma in April 1906

The Tauride Palace

Petr Stolypin

Wartime volunteers pack parcels for the Front

A smart dinner party sees in the New Year of 1917

Troops pump out a trench on the Northern Front

Cossacks patrol the streets of Petrograd in February 1917

The arrest of a policeman during the February Days

Moscow workers playing with the stone head of Alexander II

A crowd burns tsarist emblems during the February Days

The crowd outside the Tauride Palace during the February Days

Soldiers receive news of the Tsars abdication

Images of 1917

The First Provisional Government in the Marinsky Palace

The burial of victims of the February Revolution

A meeting of the Soviet of Soldiers Deputies

Waiters and waitresses of Petrograd on strike

The All-Russian Congress of Peasant Deputies

Fedor Linde leads an anti-war demonstration by the Finland Regiment during the April Crisis

Kerensky makes a speech to soldiers at the Front

Patriarch Nikon blesses the Womens Battalion of Death

General Kornilovs triumphant arrival in Moscow during the State Conference

Members of the Womens Battalion of Death in the Winter Palace on 25 October

Some of Kerenskys last defenders in the Winter Palace on 25 October

The Smolny Institute

The Red Guard of the Vulkan Factory

The Civil War

General Alexeev

General Denikin

Admiral Kolchak

Baron Wrangel

Members of the Czech Legion in Vladivostok

A group of White officers during a military parade in Omsk

A strategic meeting of Red partisans

An armoured train

The Latvian Division passing through a village

Two Red Army soldiers take a break

Red Army soldiers reading propaganda leaflets

A Red Army mobile library in the village

Nestor Makhno

The execution of a peasant by the Whites

Jewish victims of a pogrom

Red Army soldiers torture a Polish officer

Everyday Life Under the Bolsheviks

Muscovites dismantle a house for firewood

A priest helps transport timber

Women of the former classes sell their last possessions

A soldier buys a pair of shoes from a group of burzhoois

Haggling over a fur scarf at the Smolensk market in Moscow

Traders at the Smolensk market

Two ex-tsarist officers are made to clear the streets

Cheka soldiers close down traders stalls in Moscow

Requisitioning the peasants grain

Bagmen on the railways

The 1 May subbotnik on Red Square in Moscow, 1920

An open-air cafeteria at the Kiev Station in Moscow

Delegates of the Ninth All-Russian Party Congress

The Agitation and Propaganda Department of the Commissariat for Supply and Distribution in the Northern Region

The Smolny Institute on the anniversary of the October coup

The Revolutionary Inheritance

Red Army troops assault the mutinous Kronstadt Naval Base

Peasant rebels attack a train of requisitioned grain

Bolshevik commissars inspect the harvest failure in the Volga region

Unburied corpses from the famine crisis

Cannibals with their victims

Street orphans in Saratov hunt for food in a rubbish tip

The Secretary of the Tula Komsomol

A juvenile unit of the Red Army in Turkestan

Red Army soldiers confiscate valuables from the Semenov Monastery

A propaganda meeting in Bukhara

Two Bolshevik commissars in the Far East

The dying Lenin in 1923

Photographic Credits

Bakhmeteff Archive, Columbia University: .