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Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991: A History

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Russia had been a relatively stable society until the final decades of the nineteenth century. It was untroubled by the revolutions that shook Europe's other monarchies in 1848–9, when Marx called it ‘the last hope of the despots'. Its huge army crushed the Polish uprisings of 1830 and 1863, the main nationalist challenge to the Tsar's Imperial rule, while its police hampered the activities of the tiny close-knit circles of radicals and revolutionaries, who were mostly driven underground.

Many factory owners treated workers like serfs. They had them searched for stolen goods when they left the factory gates, and fined or even flogged for minor breaches of the rules. This degrading ‘serf regime' was bitterly resented by workers as an affront to their dignity, and ‘respectful treatment' was a prominent demand in strikes and labour protests that broke out after 1905. 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. The famine crisis gave new life to the revolutionary parties, bringing them supporters, not just from the working class, but from a widening range of liberal professionals, students, writers and other members of the intelligentsia—a caste defined by its sense of debt to and commitment to ‘the people'. The key to that commitment was moral: a stance of uncompromising opposition to the autocracy and a willingness to take part in the democratic struggle against it.

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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) I don't quite understand how this won so much praise. This book is incredibly biased, and there are so many sources missing. Oh, the NKVD boiled people's hands? How would that even work? Do you just hold them there or is there a mysterious contraption? And how about statements like "no aid was given to areas affected by famine [of the 30s]", which is just a blatant lie? There are often numbers provided (for example NKVD informers in cities), but no sources on those numbers. The trope directly aforementioned - people's understandings of the microcosmic nature of their own milieus apropos the larger historic forces that played out following the October Revolution - is one that he commits significant wordage to. This establishes in the reader's mind, a genuine commitment to outlining the impact of vicious fluctuations in Soviet policy on the aspirations of entire generations of people; a concern, in that sense, for the primary stakeholders, who under the negligent, megalomania-driven Party leadership, were repeatedly sidelined and deprioritized throughout the regime's existence. In that sense, Figes' insistence on departing from the party-centric approach of prior historiography is a celebration-worthy epistemological break. Some have argued that it was the most urbanized workers, those with the highest levels of skill and literacy, who became the foot soldiers of the Revolution. But others have maintained that the recent immigrants—those who had been ‘snatched from the plough and hurled straight into the factory furnace', as Trotsky once put it10—tended to be the most volatile and violent, often adapting the spontaneous forms of rebellion associated with the countryside to the new and hostile industrial environment in which they found themselves.

If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. And the feeling of "socialism bad capitalism good" is prevalent throughout the whole book. When Figes talks about USSR industrialising and living conditions improving, that is somehow "socialism in retreat". When he analyses overall impact of the era, he claims that "seventy centuries of communism ruined russia", although it's precisely the collapse of communism that ruined it. Evidently, the Russian revolution continues to be a great challenging “case” to historians analyzing what are the driving forces of History. Is this the individual, the great leader or are it the masses? Certain odd events? Or structural processes? Figes does not pin himself down on one explanation, using several historiographical paradigms to make his point: primarly a generational approach, intermingling with a “great man” discourse and Mosca’s conflicting elites approach. Figes focuses on what he calls 3 generations of revolutionaries: the old Bolsheviks (from Lenin to Stalin), the bureaucrats that survived the Stalinist purges (Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov) and then Gorbachev, the last Bolshevik before the Soviet empire collapsed. This is all very interesting, but I wonder if it this analysis is really that new – not that it would be a problem to me if it is not. Again, it adds to its readability, including something for everyone.Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2023-01-14 04:27:30 Autocrop_version 0.0.14_books-20220331-0.2 Bookplateleaf 0003 Boxid IA40814024 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Col_number COL-1064 Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier The last stage of the Revolution comes after Stalin' death, with Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech which he delivered at the the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956. Khrushchev denounced Stalin's purges and cult of personality, seeking to bring the Soviet Union closer to its Leninist principles - and to consolidate control over the party and government in struggle for power with Stalin loyalists. This period became known as the Khrushchev Thaw - and the start of a deliberate policy of de-Stalinization, which lessened censorship and reversed mass repressions, with millions of Soviet political prisoners released from labor camps, along with liberalization of society and opening it to the West. Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalinism loosened the iron grip established by him on the country, which was the first step in Soviet Union's own undoing - with massive demonstrations and revolutions happening in the Soviet sphere of influence almost immediately. Demonstrations for independence in Georgian SSR have been squashed, as was the Hungarian Revolution - but the grip on the population was loosened, and not even the stone-cold Leonid Brezhnev could restore it. Brezhnev ousted Khrushchev from power and introduced a doctrine allowed the Soviet Union to enter and use military force in any country in the former Eastern Bloc, if its socialist system was threatened by capitalist insurgency - which almost happened in Poland during Martial Law, which was imposed precisely because of it. From the author of A People's Tragedy, an original reading of the Russian Revolution, examining it not as a single event but as a hundred-year cycle of violence in pursuit of utopian dreams For those who know Soviet history this is a refresher summary with some insight and items of interest. For instance, I did not know about Stalin's public show of grief (real or show?) over his wife's death, nor was I clear on the sequence of events leading to the dissolution of the union. There is good insight into what Gorbachev and Yeltsin did and did not achieve.

Meticulously detailed, exhaustively researched and written with Figes's characteristic verve, The Europeans is a sweeping tour de force and a monumental work of historical synthesis." (Julian Coman, The Observer) Drawing upon a wide range of first hand sources, Figes expertly utilizes humourous, painful, and illuminating insertions from public discourse to highlight the reception of the furious changes that shook the territories of the Soviet Union in the seven and a half decades of its existence as the world's largest proto-socialist state. 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.Russian workers were the most strike-prone in Europe. Three quarters of the factory workforce went on strike during 1905. Historians have spent a lot of time trying to explain the origins of this labour militancy. Factory size, levels of skill and literacy, the number of years spent living in the city, and the influence of the revolutionary intelligentsia—all these factors have been scrutinized in microscopic detail in countless monographs, each hoping to discover the crucial mix that explained the rise of the ‘workers' revolution' in Russia. The main disagreement concerns the effects of urbanization. This year's seminars will cover all the major questions you are likely to be asked in A-level and IB exams on Russian and Soviet history。 Here, then, were the roots of the monarchy's collapse, not in peasant discontent or the labour movement, so long the preoccupation of Marxist and social historians, nor in the breakaway of nationalist movements on the empire's periphery, but in the growing conflict between a dynamic public culture and a fossilized autocracy that would not concede or even understand its political demands.

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. In college I took a history course by this young professor straight out of professor-school whose specialty, if I remember correctly, was Russian history. He was on loan from the university in town, which is something that happened occasionally at my school because we were small and didn't always have someone to teach certain courses. I do not remember his name (because that's how my stupid brain works), but I do remember we spent an extensive amount of time talking about Tsar Nicholas II and the February Revolution of 1917. It's where my interest in the topic started and I thought, "Wow, someday I hope to know as much as this guy." Orlando Figes reputation as one of the finest social historians of modern Russian/Soviet history is only bolstered by the simple but forceful expositions he makes in Revolutionary Russia. Whether intended to elevate the subjects to hero status or castigate them as cruel tyrants, these pictures form part of Russia’s collective memory. They are etched into the nation’s psyche, each capturing a moment in Russia’s story about itself.

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opportunities to participate in on-line seminars with me on Google Hangout to discuss the major themes of the Russian Revolution and Soviet history, and a video library of previous seminars; This combination was the key to the success of the Ukrainian nationalist movement. 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. The movement organized the peasants in their struggle against foreign (mainly Russian and Polish) landowners and against the ‘foreign influence' of the towns (dominated by the Russians, Jews and Poles). It is no coincidence that peasant uprisings erupted first, in 1902, in those regions around Poltava province where the Ukrainian nationalist movement was also most advanced. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? Here perhaps was the root of Marxism's attraction to the Jews, who played such a conspicuous role in the Social Democratic movement, providing many of its leaders (Trotsky, Martov, Axelrod, Kamenev and Zinoviev, to name just a few). Where Populism had proposed to build on peasant Russia—a land of pogroms and discrimination against the Jews—Marxism offered a modern Western vision of Russia. It promised to assimilate the Jews into a movement of universal human liberation—not just the liberation of the peasantry—based on principles of internationalism. While Revolutionary Russia has to paint many of these issues with broad strokes, it is nonetheless very readable account of contemporary Russian history and a good introduction to more detailed and throughout reading on the subject. Hopefully it'll provoke a deeper interest on the period and issues that it discusses. Recommended!

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