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A PEOPLE'S TRAGEDY
By Orlando Figes
the Russian Revolution has long needed its own Shelby Foote, its own Simon Schama -- a great historian with a touch of the novelist, in other words, who could both hammer broad themes and sickle the telling detail. Especially now, with the fall of the Soviet Union and the opening of many once-sealed party archives. Orlando Figes, a mere 38 years old, is the anointed. "A People's Tragedy" is the book. It is luminously, astonishingly good. Figes, a Cambridge historian, begins his story in 1913, with the 300th anniversary celebration of the Romanov dynasty, a fete that was "far beyond the wildest dreams of Hollywood, where guests dressed in the jewel-stippled 17th century costume of their ancestors, and a "lift was installed specially so the royal waltzers need not tire themselves by climbing to the second floor." He ends the narrative in 1924, with Stalin organizing the "Commission for Immortalization," a crack team of embalmers charged with pickling Lenin for Soviet eternity. And the 800-some pages in between? Remarkably, they're well-paced. Some prose steppes are harder to brave than others -- the passages on how areas like Tashkent or Georgia fared in the Civil War, the particulars of various drowsy Bolshevik and Menshevik party meetings -- but you'll mostly be riveted. And that's because Figes makes some very clever chess moves. He selects a handful of rooks and knights amidst his pawns, and advances them strategically. There's Brusilov, for instance, Russia's greatest World War I general and a complex traitor to his czarist background; and Semonov, the doomed peasant-born reformer; and Gorky, the writer who loved Lenin but, as he said, "with wrath." Figes believes the Revolution was not dictated from above (although certainly Lenin & Co. were catalysts) but rose from below, and that it was predicated less on hope for a new world than revenge against the old. Figes strews hundreds of explanations for the boundlessness of proletarian and peasant hatred of the elites. He notes, for example, that public flogging of peasants for misdemeanors (usually pinching firewood from a landowner's property) was legal until 1904. At the turn of the century, only one in three peasants owned a horse -- meaning two-thirds of them pulled their own plows. Trotsky called rural Russia a place of "icons and cockroaches." It was so insular, most people never left their village; you actually needed a "passport" from the village elders if you wanted to travel, and they were seldom given. (If you left, that increased the tax burden on everyone else.) The first Bolshevik primer used to teach the illiterate (some 60 percent of the country) began with this sentence: "We are not slaves, slaves we are not."
"Only blood can change the color of history," wrote Gorky. And that blood sprang from World War I battles, the ensuing mutinies, the Civil War and Terror, and the Revolution itself -- although it wasn't nearly as bad as what came after. Lenin considered the Great War a mere distraction. "The bourgeoisie has to be throttled and for that we need both hands free," as he put it. Figes stresses that the ceaseless brutality of those years, indeed of Russian history as a whole, served to create an atmosphere in which human life became a cheap, expendable commodity. As Trotsky said, blithely: "We must put an end once and for all to the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life." Lenin bettered Trotsky, and Stalin trumped them both. But the people themselves, dehumanized by a millennium of czarist cruelty, were part of that process. Hence a people's tragedy. Begun by them, only to be revisited upon them. It is their story, above all others, that gets its due in this brilliant, compassionate book.
-- Katharine Whittemore
Katharine Whittemore lives in Cambridge, Mass. Her writing has appeared in Lingua Franca and Smithsonian. |
