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

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Podcast of Figes speaking at the Samuel Johnson short-listed author event about "Whisperers", London (2008) BookBuffet.com Guy Dammann (14 July 2008). "Interview: Guy Dammann talks to Orlando Figes". The Guardian. London . Retrieved 31 August 2011. 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

Russia by Orlando Figes review - The Guardian The Story of Russia by Orlando Figes review - The Guardian

Profound social changes were taking place. 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. Men born as peasants, even serfs, rose to establish themselves as merchants, engineers and landowners (like the character Lopakhin who buys the cherry orchard in Chekhov's play). Merchants became noblemen. The sons and daughters of noblemen entered the liberal professions. Social mobility was accelerated by the spread of higher education. Between 1860 and 1914 the number of university students in Russia grew from 5,000 to 69,000 (45 per cent of them women). Public opinion and activity found a widening range of outlets in these years: the number of daily newspapers rose from thirteen to 856; and the number of public institutions from 250 to over 16,000. 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. 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.Timely, brilliant and hugely enjoyable ... A magnificently humane book, written with supple grace but firmly underpinned by meticulous scholarship." (Rupert Christiansen, Sunday Telegraph) A panoramic history of nineteenth-century European culture told through the entangled lives of the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev, the singer and composer Pauline Viardot and her husband Louis Viardot, a great connoisseur,The Europeans has been published to critical acclaim in the UK and US: Makers of their own tragedy". The Independent. 23 October 2011. Archived from the original on 24 May 2022. Figes's first three books were on the Russian Revolution and the Civil War. Peasant Russia, Civil War (1989) was a detailed study of the peasantry in the Volga region during the Revolution and the Civil War (1917–21). Using village Soviet archives, Figes emphasised the autonomous nature of the agrarian revolution during 1917–18, showing how it developed according to traditional peasant notions of social justice independently of the Provisional Government, the Bolsheviks or other urban-based parties. [11] He also demonstrated how the function of the rural Soviets was transformed in the course of the Civil War as they were taken over by younger and more literate peasants and migrant townsmen, many of them veterans of the First World War or Red Army soldiers, who became the rural bureaucrats of the emerging Bolshevik regime. Ukrainians see him as central to their culture and independence from Russian and Soviet rule. Russians, for their part, claim Rus as the birthplace of their own culture, the foundation of a larger Slav civilization with Moscow at its center. “What we have in the conflict over Volodymyr/Vladimir,” Figes writes, “is not a genuine historical dispute, but two incompatible foundation myths.”

Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991 - Penguin Books UK

Lccn 2013042580 Ocr tesseract 5.2.0-1-gc42a Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9811 Ocr_module_version 0.0.18 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA401771 Openlibrary_edition 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. That’s an old story in Russia: Few observers of President Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin today question its predilection for passing off total fiction as official truth, as we see in the fantastical propaganda broadcast to justify his mass murder in Ukraine. However, too little is understood about the central role obfuscation has played from the very beginning of his more than two-decade rule, and how the president has deeply tapped into central tropes of Russia’s traditional political culture to pose as his country’s sole savior. Such invention has been enabled by the dearth of real historical records, including about Vladimir. “Almost nothing about him is known,” Figes says. “There are no contemporary documents, only later chronicles by monks, hagiographic legends of his conversion, which served as the sacred myth legitimizing his descendants.” So goes much of what we think we know about Russian history.When Soviet forensic scientists exhumed the remains of Ivan the Terrible in the early 1960s, they were surprised to find them saturated with mercury. Used as a painkiller in the 16th century, the highly toxic substance was probably administered to relieve symptoms of a debilitating arthritic disease that had fused parts of the czar’s vertebrae. The main significance of the discovery to us now is that most, if not all, stories about Ivan — describing diabolical rages and throwing cats off Kremlin walls — could not have physically been possible. They’re the stuff of myth.