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

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Angus Macqueen (10 October 2010). "Crimea: The Last Crusade by Orlando Figes – review". The Observer. London . Retrieved 31 August 2011. Fundamental to this, naturally, is its founding legend. And even this origin story, it turns out, has long been the subject of controversy: was it Slavic peoples who first settled what became known in Russia as Kievan Rus? Or was it Scandinavian, Baltic or even Germanic tribes who provided the first rulers? Was ancient Russia, in other words, created by Russians or foreigners? The historical facts are, inevitably, more complex still. Figes concludes: “It is absurd to claim that Kievan Rus was the birthplace of the modern Russian state or nation.” He likens it to the place Anglo-Saxon Wessex has in English history – one element, but not the whole story.

Orlando Figes [Revolutionary Russia] Orlando Figes [Revolutionary Russia]

The live video conference my students had with Professor Figes was a brilliant experience. The classroom task of formulating the 'big' questions in advance, then having them answered by a leading professional historian, was highly motivational. It resulted in some sparkling insights which students will find invaluable in giving them 'the edge' in the final examinations. My class came away from the experience full of enthusiasm for the way in which Professor Figes brought the subject alive in an accessible but intellectually stimulating manner" Magnificent. Beautifully written, immaculately researched and thoroughly absorbing from start to finish. A tour de force that explains how Europe's cultural life transformed during the course of the 19th century - and so much more." (Peter Frankopan)

Wheeler, Sara (3 September 2022). "How Putin manipulated history to help Russians feel good again". The Spectator (review) . Retrieved 6 September 2022. The power of the Tsar was only weakly counter-balanced by a landed aristocracy. The Russian nobility was heavily dependent on military and civil service to the state for its landed wealth and position in society. Nor were there real public bodies to challenge the autocracy: most institutions (organs of self-government, professional, scientific and artistic societies) were in fact creations of the state. Even the senior leaders of the Orthodox Church were appointed by the Tsar. Orlando Figes investido doctor honoris causa por la UIMP: 'Nos hemos equivocado con Rusia durante mucho tiempo' ". www.uimp.es (in Spanish). Archived from the original on 28 August 2023 . Retrieved 16 September 2023. Luke Harding (15 October 2009). "Russian historian arrested in clampdown on Stalin era". The Guardian. His books have been translated into French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Russian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Estonian, Latvian, Slovenian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Greek, Turkish, Hebrew, Georgian, Korean, Japanese and Chinese.[ "Orlando Figes [Author and Professor of Russian History]". Orlandofiges.com . Retrieved 19 November 2013. ]

Was Nicholas II fit to rule? : Origins of the Russian Was Nicholas II fit to rule? : Origins of the Russian

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. The terminology of the Revolution was a foreign language to most of the peasants (as indeed it was to a large proportion of the uneducated workers) in most parts of Russia. Equally, the new institutions of the state appeared strange and alien to many of the peasants.”There are a multitude of fascinating pieces of information to be gleaned from Orlando Figes's magisterial and wide-ranging book The Europeans ... Relevant, trenchant and searching." (William Boyd, The Guardian) 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. 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)

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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) Like Simon Schama, Orlando Figes is a historian whose popularity has extended beyond academia and into general readership. Perhaps because of this – or possibly for other reasons – Figes has come in for criticism from his fellow academics. He has been described by some as a ‘historical journalist’ and accused by others of taking creative liberties with evidence. One of Figes’ approaches is to focus on the cultural aspects of revolution: words, language, symbols, propaganda, mood and other psychological devices. A revolution may start with political events and ambitions – but Figes’ work is also concerned with understanding how revolutionary ideas reach, affect and motivate ordinary people. His writing style employs a sweeping narrative, striking a balance between describing important events of great significance and examining their impact on individuals. Figes gives less time and attention to political ideology than other historians: his main concern is with ordinary Russians and their motivations and conditions. Because of this, Figes does not rely on the writings and ramblings of Marx and Lenin as a point of reference. a b c "Orlando Figes [Author and Professor of Russian History]". Orlandofiges.com . Retrieved 31 August 2011.

That only began to emerge at the Second Party Congress, which met in London (at the Communist Club at 107 Charlotte Street)* from August 1903. The result was a split in the Party and the formation of two distinct SD factions. The cause of the split was seemingly trivial: the definition of Party membership. Lenin wanted all members to be activists in the Party's organization, whereas Martov thought that anyone who agreed with the Party's manifesto should be admitted as a member. Beneath the surface of this dispute lay two opposing views of what the Party ought to be: a military-revolutionary vanguard (tightly controlled by a leader such as Lenin) or a broad-based party in the Western parliamentary style (with a looser style of leadership). Lenin won a slender majority in the vote on this issue, enabling his faction to call themselves the ‘Bolsheviks' (‘Majoritarians') and their opponents the ‘Mensheviks' (‘Minoritarians'). With hindsight it was foolish of the Mensheviks to allow the adoption of these names. It saddled them with the permanent image of a minority party, which was to be an important disadvantage in their rivalry with the Bolsheviks.

Origins of the Russian Revolution : Orlando Figes Origins of the Russian Revolution : Orlando Figes

Orlando Figes's latest book is The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture. There was a revival of the Populist movement, culminating in 1901 with the establishment of the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR). Populism had its roots in the intelligentsia's mission to improve the peasants' lot and to involve them in a democratic movement against the autocracy following the serf emancipation in 1861. The Populists idealized the peasant way of life. From the 1870s, they had gone into the countryside to educate and organize the peasantry, some of them (they called themselves the People's Will) increasingly resorting to violence and terror as they became frustrated by the failure of the peasants to respond to their revolutionary call. The Populists believed that the village commune could become the basis of a socialist society, thus enabling Russia to take a separate path to socialism from that of the West, where capitalist development was destroying the peasantry and Marxist hopes of revolution rested on the industrial working class. In contrast to the Marxists, the Populists believed that peasant Russia could advance directly to a socialist society without passing first through the capitalist stage of history. Anyone who has wandered through Russia’s national museums, leafed through books of Russian art or watched some of Eisenstein’s cinematic masterpieces will know that prominent among the country’s iconography are arresting portraits of its princes and tsars. After his arrival in the capital, St Petersburg, in 1893, Lenin moved much closer to the standard Marxist view—that Russia was only at the start of its capitalist stage and that a democratic movement by the workers in alliance with the bourgeoisie was needed to defeat autocracy before a socialist revolution could commence. No more talk of a coup d'état or terror. It was only after the establishment of a ‘bourgeois democracy', granting freedoms of speech and association to the workers, that the second and socialist phase of the revolution could begin.Demonstration St Petersburg, 23 February 1917, Origins of the Russian Revolution, February Revolution, 1917 Fast forward to the 20th century and note Stalin’s use of religion on the eve of the second world war, replacing Bolshevik slogans with religious iconography and enlisting the support of the Orthodox church to rally support for the motherland against the Nazis. We see the same echoes again today in Putin’s “holy war” against Ukraine. The famine crisis undermined that view. Partly caused by the tax squeeze on the peasants to pay for industrialization, the crisis suggested that the peasantry was literally dying out, both as a class and a way of life, under the pressures of capitalist development. Marxism alone seemed able to explain the causes of the famine by showing how a capitalist economy created rural poverty. In the 1890s it fast became a national intelligentsia creed. Socialists who had previously wavered in their Marxism were converted to it by the crisis, as they realized that there was no more hope in the Populist faith in the peasantry. Even liberal thinkers such as Petr Struve found their Marxist passions stirred by the famine: it ‘made much more of a Marxist out of me than the reading of Marx's Capital'.11

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