'Revolutionary Russia' by the British historian Orlando Figes could be a nice introduction to the history of the Russian Revolution. Unfortunately, Figes doesn't seem to have spent much time on his research.
British Russia expert and historian Orlando Figes was up to date when he published the Dutch translation of his latest book Revolutionary Russia 1891-1991 in the Balie in Amsterdam on 22 September. A history came to present. Shortly before that, the crisis in Ukraine and the Russian involvement in it were almost daily world news. Did President Putin want to invade and annex areas that once belonged to the Soviet Union? Does the Ukraine crisis mean the end of the post-Cold War world order? What about the Soviet Union exactly and why is this heirloom full of loaded history so important to those in power in the Kremlin?
Figes has already written eight books on the history of Russia, including Tragedy of a People, Whisperers. Life under Stalin and the acclaimed cultural history Natasha's dance. Despite his success as an author, Figes is a controversial historian. For example, in his book Whisperers, which was largely based on conversations with survivors from the Gulag who were accused of 'broddelwork'. He allegedly manipulated the conversations for profit. The Russian organization Memorial, which stands up for the rights of victims of the Soviet regime, subsequently no longer wanted to be associated with Figes. Figes also had to admit in 2010 that he promoted his own books on the commercial book website amazon.com under a pseudonym and criticized the work of fellow historians.
Far-fetched century cycle
Of course, both affairs do not necessarily have to stand in the way of Figes to deliver a good book about the Russian Revolution. Revolutionary Russia was praised in the Dutch press (5 stars in both Trouw as De Volkskrant ) and director Yoeri Albrecht van de Balie, who interviewed Figes (see video), was also full of praise for the work of the British historian. But Figes may be a successful author who can write about Russian history in a smooth style, 'Revolutionary Russia' nevertheless contains a number of disturbing errors and inaccuracies.
Figes attempts to provide an "original vision" of the history of the Russian revolution. He views the 1917 revolution not as an isolated event but as a hundred-year cycle, a century-long attempt to fulfill utopian dreams. The revolutionary atmosphere, according to Figes, started in 1891, when a great famine ravaged the Russian countryside. The reign of Tsar Alexander III did very little to help the peasantry. This gave rise to Marxism among intellectuals and strengthened the will among more and more peasants to break with their poverty-stricken existence in the rural villages.
1891 is certainly an important year in the dynamic Russian nineteenth century, which was full of (failed) revolutionary attempts by all kinds of groups. But as the starting point of Figes's revolutionary cycle, 1825 (the Decembrist uprising) or 1881 (the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by the Democratic-Socialist movement Narodnaya Volya) would have sufficed just as well. But a cycle of a century is of course so beautiful and manageable.
Figes further introduces his readers to three generations of revolutionaries. The old Bolsheviks of 1917 (including Lenin and Stalin), the bureaucrats who still owed their careers to Stalin (Khrushchev, Brezhev, Andropov, Chernenko) and the "last Bolshevik" Gorbachev, who was still partly involved in Stalin's crimes. Figes seems to have borrowed the insight that the revolution did not stop after 1917 but continued as long as the Soviet Union existed from thinkers such as Hannah Arendt and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who already pointed out the need for constant revolutionary dynamics in totalitarianism in the 1950s and 1960s. states.
Propagandistic image
More grievous is Figes's misrepresentation of events during the 1905 revolution, referred to by Lenin as the "dress rehearsal" for the communist revolution of 1917. In June 1905, the crew of the battleship Potemkin mutinied against its officers. When the ship was docked in the harbor of Odessa, the Tsar sent his soldiers after the mutinous crew and the civilians sympathizing with them. According to Figes, this happened on the wide marble "Potemkin Steps" in Odessa and the soldiers walked down the stairs, firing randomly at the civilians below.
But that was only the case in the impressive propaganda film that the brilliant filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein (to the glory of the revolution) made about the incident in 1925. In reality, the slaughter was on a smaller scale and took place in the streets around the stairs.
The October Revolution of 1917, when the Bolsheviks led by Lenin seized power, Figes describes as an almost entirely Russian affair. But the international context is indispensable for a proper understanding of the revolution. Lenin's return from his exile Switzerland during World War I (via German, Swedish and Finnish territory), his propaganda capabilities and the arming of his Bolsheviks were almost entirely financed by the German Empire. The German goal was nothing less than to get Lenin to bring about a revolution in Russia so that the country would withdraw from the war, which in the end succeeded. This fact has always been cleverly covered up in Soviet propaganda, and Figes seems to have no problem going along with it.
Something similar happens when Figes states about the famine of 1932-33 in large parts of the Soviet Union (particularly Ukraine, known there as the 'Holodomor' (Ukrainian for 'to cause death by starvation') that hard evidence that the Soviet regime with premeditated plan that left thousands of people to starvation never found. The last word on this sensitive issue may not have been said, but at least more consideration and nuance is in order. points towards Stalin and his confidants Vyacheslav Molotov and Vasilii Blokhin.
Exaggerated
Figes' factual claims are also often flawed, such as in his gross exaggeration of human losses on the part of the Soviet Union during World War II. “97% of 18-year-olds from 1941 were no longer alive in 1945,” Figes said in an interview with Buitenhof (September 21). He states something similar in his book. The Red Army's losses were indeed immense, but the figures Figes gives are not correct. The influential historian Michael Ellman maintains that (in the most pessimistic estimates) 63% of young Soviet soldiers (15-19 years) survived the war. Since Figes hardly provides source and literature references (only for quotations), it is difficult to determine how he arrived at his claims.
All in all, 'Revolutionary Russia' is a pleasant and smoothly written book, but it seems too much like rush work. Figes's research has been careless to say the least. Even for the non-academic audience – which Figes always likes to focus on – the Briton's missteps are dangerously misleading and give a wrong picture of the Russian twentieth century. It makes the book as a whole unconvincing. And that is a shame, because it is a missed opportunity to better understand Russia and its history in the current situation.