In an interview on Russia

Tell me about A People’s Tragedy.

Well, I’ve chosen this because, from what I remember, it’s the book I most admired while I was writing about Russia because it gives the tremendous overall sweep of the entire catastrophe up to the end of the civil war in 1922 and the famine. Figes has the capacity to focus on people you’ve never heard of and show them as representatives of ideologies competing for control of the Russian state, and he looks at it on an individual basis. He shows the human brutality and zeros in on the intimate experience of people in the civil war on both sides, everyone trying to requisition rations because there was nothing to eat. I think Figes is an academic who is liberated by his writing. He’s a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and he went to all the archives, to the original sources – the extent of his knowledge is very profound and this gives his writing great ease. If he wanted to face a slide in his income he could be a good novelist with his observations of people.

There is this idea of people struggling towards the light, which is what they were doing in the Revolution of 1917, a light that was very soon snuffed out. It’s a very human story but, like most Russian stories, also very tragic. Russia is not known for its stand-up comedy, but, on the other hand, this book is not like The Brothers Karamazov for oppressive Russianness. It’s too fast a river for that.

In an interview on Revolutionary Russia

Let’s move onto your next choice by Orlando Figes, who caused an uproar after confessing that he anonymously posted reviews on Amazon trashing his rivals.

If one is talking of him as a man rather than as an author, Figes possibly the least popular historian walking the earth today, because of the disgrace that he brought on himself so publicly over the Amazon debacle. At one point he actually got his wife to say she did it. Having said that, I think he’s a brilliant historian and it’s a great shame that these personal spats, which became so poisonous, have so tarnished his reputation. I think that A People’s Tragedy is the most readable and illuminating history of the Russian revolution to be written, using material that only became available to historians following the Soviet Union’s collapse. Its scope is immense.

He says the revolution actually began in 1891 and ended in 1924.

That’s right, though he wasn’t the first. According to Figes it starts with the great famine of 1891, which led to a lot of popular dissatisfaction and reforms, and ends in 1924 with the death of Lenin and the start of Stalin’s reign.

Figes is basically a social historian. He’s interested in how historical events of the magnitude of the Russian revolution developed out of a number of different social trends. One of the great things about this book is that he combines a number of general theses about the revolution with personal narratives. He chooses five very different characters: Prince Lvov, who was the prime minister in the provisional government that was formed after the February revolution in 1917; General Brusilov, the tsar’s most gifted general who later joined the Red Army; Dmitri Oskin, a peasant soldier; the author Maxim Gorky; and Sergei Semenov, a reforming peasant leader. These personal narratives allow him to look at this period from all points of view – the grand political perspective, the grassroots perspective, a literary perspective, a military perspective.

Figes is fantastically good at synthesising huge amounts of information without getting bogged down, and because his understanding of the revolution is sociological he doesn’t really blame anybody – or rather, he doesn’t ally himself with a particular political cause. He obviously intensely dislikes Lenin and the Bolsheviks, but he’s equally sceptical of the monarchists. He’s excellent on the almost incredible delusions of the tsar and his household, chiefly Rasputin. When it comes to assessing a character like [Alexander] Kerensky – who championed the middle way between Lvov’s and Lenin’s governments – he’s very good at using him as a way of focusing on the all-embracing disaster that hit the country. Kerensky, the revolution’s second prime minister, was crushed by the impossibility of appeasing a starving, terrified population while continuing to prosecute a war. Only Lenin, who took power in November, had either the courage or ruthlessness to grasp the opportunity that presented itself. He won the people over with three simple ideas – land, peace and bread.

It’s a substantial book. Does he have an engaging writing style?

I think one of the reasons why Figes has made many enemies is that he has the egotism and sensitivity of a Trotsky. He’s a very good dramatic writer and has a terrific ear for a story, though in my view some of his later work lays the story on a bit thick.