A People's Tragedy

A single-volume history of the Russian Revolution written from below rather than from the Kremlin. Figes starts at the 1891 famine and runs to Lenin’s death in 1924, threading the narrative through a handful of individual lives — the liberal prince Georgy Lvov, the peasant-turned-Bolshevik Semyon Kanatchikov, the writer Maxim Gorky, the officer Dmitry Os’kin — so that the collapse is shown happening to particular people. Its central argument is that the authoritarian outcome was not a later Stalinist deformation of a democratic revolution but was present in the Bolshevik state’s first year, in its methods and in the peasant society it was imposed on.

Why it’s on the list: It sits in the curriculum’s Marxism and collective psychology section, supplying the case history the section’s theoretical entries are about — what happened when the doctrine actually took a state.

Where I saw it: Brendan McCord’s Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List, in the section on Marxism and Collective Psychology. The full 211-entry transcription is on The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List.

Connections

• Russia — the country the book is about.
• Socialism — the doctrine that took power in it.
• Totalitarianism — the outcome Figes traces to the revolution’s first year.
• The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List — the curriculum this came from.