A People's Tragedy

Orlando Figes presents the Russian Revolution not as a single event but as a series of overlapping revolutions that exploded during the First World War and degenerated into dictatorship. His central argument is that the revolution was a "people's tragedy" rooted in Russia's failure to overcome its autocratic past and build a democracy. Figes traces this failure to the weakness of civil institutions, the isolation of the peasantry, and the fanaticism of the radical intelligentsia. To convey the revolution's human cost, he threads the stories of several recurring figures through the narrative, including Prince G. E. Lvov, the writer Maxim Gorky, and General Alexei Brusilov.

The Romanov tercentenary celebrations of 1913 presented a glittering facade, but the dynasty was retreating into an archaic model of seventeenth-century Muscovite rule. Tsar Nicholas II governed through personal, patrimonial principles, distrusting the modernizing bureaucracy. Figes characterizes Nicholas as a "miniaturist," diligent at trivial tasks but incapable of broad leadership. The Empress Alexandra urged her husband to be more autocratic and became dependent on Grigorii Rasputin, a Siberian mystic whose apparent healing power over the hemophiliac heir, Tsarevich Alexis, made him indispensable. His scandalous behavior and political influence poisoned the monarchy's relations with virtually every institution in society.

The imperial bureaucracy was plagued by overlapping jurisdictions and chronic under-governance. The zemstvos, elected local assemblies established in 1864, became centers of liberal reform but faced relentless government persecution. The army suffered from feudal discipline and aristocratic leadership. The Orthodox Church lost its hold on the increasingly secular urban population. Russia remained overwhelmingly a peasant country, with 80 per cent of its population governed by the village commune, or mir. The commune's customs expressed basic notions of justice, including the belief that land belongs to those who till it.

The famine of 1891 galvanized society against the autocracy, and the 1905 Revolution, triggered by "Bloody Sunday" when troops fired on a peaceful workers' march, spread through strikes, uprisings, and mutinies. The October Manifesto granted a legislative Duma, but Nicholas never accepted genuine limits on his power. The revolution failed because the armed forces remained loyal and the opposition split. The Bolsheviks, a radical Marxist faction led by Vladimir Lenin, drew lessons about the peasantry's revolutionary potential. Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin's subsequent reforms were blocked by reactionaries, and his assassination in 1911 left the regime without effective leadership.

The First World War acted as the catalyst. The disaster at Tannenberg in August 1914 and the Great Retreat of 1915 shattered army morale and exposed the regime's incompetence. Nicholas assumed supreme command, leaving the capital to the Empress and Rasputin, whose constant shuffling of ministers created bureaucratic anarchy. Lvov led the Zemstvo Union, a national organization of local assemblies formed to coordinate war relief, which virtually ran the military supply campaign. By late 1916, the army was deeply demoralized, and Rasputin was murdered by aristocratic conspirators.

The February Revolution began on 23 February 1917 with bread riots in Petrograd, the Russian capital. Over four days, strikes spread, soldiers mutinied, and the regime collapsed. Two rival centers of power emerged: the Duma's Temporary Committee and the Petrograd Soviet, a council of workers' and soldiers' deputies. The Soviet leaders refused to take power, citing Marxist doctrine, and negotiated the formation of a Provisional Government under Lvov. Nicholas abdicated on 2 March, ending 300 years of Romanov rule.

Lvov presided over sweeping reforms, but the government lacked a democratic mandate and was paralyzed by the gap between its liberal ideals and the social revolution unfolding across Russia. Peasant communes seized gentry estates. Workers demanded factory control. Lenin returned from exile, presented his April Theses calling for Soviet power, and gradually won over the Bolshevik rank and file. The summer brought cascading crises: War Minister Alexander Kerensky's June offensive collapsed as soldiers refused to fight, the July Days ended in the Bolsheviks' temporary disgrace, and the Kornilov Affair, an attempted coup by the army's commander General Kornilov, fatally weakened the government while rehabilitating the Bolsheviks.

Leon Trotsky, a leading Bolshevik revolutionary, organized the insurrection of 24-25 October through the Military Revolutionary Committee, a nominally Soviet body that the Bolsheviks controlled. At the Second Soviet Congress, the Mensheviks, the moderate Marxist faction, and the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), a non-Marxist party with a large peasant following, walked out in protest. The Bolsheviks consolidated power rapidly: The opposition press was banned, the Cheka (secret police) was established, and the Constituent Assembly, a democratically elected parliament meant to write a new constitution, was dissolved after a single session in January 1918. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed in March 1918, cost Russia a third of its population and vast territories.

The civil war escalated through 1918-20. The Volunteer Army, founded by Generals Alexeev and Kornilov in the Don Cossack region, undertook the legendary 'Ice March,' a brutal winter retreat that became a founding myth for the anti-Bolshevik White movement, from Rostov to the Kuban in February–April 1918; Kornilov was killed at Ekaterinodar, and Denikin took command. The White armies failed to recognize the peasant revolution on the land or accommodate national minorities. The Bolsheviks instituted War Communism, a system of grain requisitioning, nationalization, forced labor, and state rationing that amounted to a war against the peasantry. The Red Terror, formalized after an assassination attempt on Lenin in August 1918, saw the Cheka grow into a vast police state. The imperial family was murdered at Ekaterinburg in July 1918 on orders from Lenin and the Bolshevik leader Yakov Sverdlov. The advance from Siberia by Admiral Kolchak, a leader of the White forces, and Denikin's from the south were both repulsed in 1919. By 1920, the Bolsheviks were reconquering the non-Russian borderlands, though their invasion of Poland ended in defeat at Warsaw.

By late 1920, despite military victory, the Bolsheviks faced revolts of their own making. Peasant uprisings engulfed the countryside. Workers' strikes swept Moscow and Petrograd. The Kronstadt naval mutiny of March 1921, led by many of the same sailors who had supported the Bolsheviks in 1917, demanded free Soviet elections and an end to the party's monopoly of power. The Bolsheviks crushed the rebellion and banned internal party factions, a step that later enabled the rise of Joseph Stalin. Requisitioning was replaced with a tax in kind, launching the New Economic Policy (NEP). The famine of 1921-22, caused by drought compounding years of requisitioning, killed an estimated five million people.

Lenin suffered his first major stroke in May 1922. In his Testament, he warned of a split between Trotsky and Stalin and demanded Stalin's removal as General Secretary. Lenin's third stroke in March 1923 robbed him of speech, and Stalin outmaneuvered Trotsky through the patronage apparatus he controlled. Lenin died on 21 January 1924; Stalin orchestrated the embalming and public display of the body, creating the Lenin Mausoleum as the shrine of a new political religion.

Figes concludes that the revolution came full circle: A new autocracy replaced the old, with commissars in place of governors and party comrades enjoying the former aristocracy's privileges. The Russian people were not merely victims but protagonists in the revolution's tragedy.