Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991: A Pelican Introduction (Pelican Books)

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Figes has contributed frequently to radio and television broadcasts in the United Kingdom and around the world. In the continent as a whole, the arts thus became "a unifying force between nations" leading to the emergence of a modern European 'canon' so that, by 1900, "the same books were being read across the Continent, the same paintings reproduced, the same music played at home or heard in concert halls, and the same operas performed in all the major theatres of Europe". However, Figes argues that the revolution was continuous phenomena covering a century of Russian history, and which unfolded in three "movements".

Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991’, by Orlando Figes ‘Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991’, by Orlando Figes

As late as 1904, they retained the power to have peasants flogged for rowdy drunkenness or trespassing on the landowner's land.

The letters are the largest known collection of private correspondence from the Gulag, according to Memorial.

Orlando Figes [Home] Orlando Figes [Home]

Lenin wanted all members to be activists in the Party's organization, whereas Martov thought that anyone who agreed with the Party's manifesto should be admitted as a member.

A constant battle was fought between the state's written law, framed to defend the property rights of the landowners, and the customary law of the peasants, used by them to defend their own transgressions of those rights—poaching and grazing cattle on the squire's land, taking wood from his forest, fishing in his ponds, and so on. The entire electronic archive of Memorial in St Petersburg, including the materials collected with Figes for The Whisperers, was confiscated by the authorities.

Russia’ by Orlando Figes - The New Book Review: ‘The Story of Russia’ by Orlando Figes - The New

The terminology of the Revolution was a foreign language to most of the peasants (as indeed it was to a large proportion of the uneducated workers) in most parts of Russia.Interviewed by the Sunday Telegraph, Figes defended the series against criticism that it was "too Jane Austen" and "too English". Socialists who had previously wavered in their Marxism were converted to it by the crisis, as they realized that there was no more hope in the Populist faith in the peasantry. It was only after the establishment of a ‘bourgeois democracy', granting freedoms of speech and association to the workers, that the second and socialist phase of the revolution could begin.

Russian Revolution : Orlando Figes 1905 The First Russian Revolution : Orlando Figes

Russian society was politicized by the famine, and from 1891 it became more organized in opposition to the government. Like Simon Schama, Orlando Figes is a historian whose popularity has extended beyond academia and into general readership.Some of the skilled and educated workers were more inclined to improve their lot within the capitalist system than to overthrow it. He is the author of Peasant Russia, Civil War, A People's Tragedy, Natasha's Dance, The Whisperers and Just Send Me Word. Nevertheless, it is going too far to suggest that such ‘primitive' actions, or the raw recruits behind them, were the crucial factor in the rise of labour militancy. And with the siege of Leningrad in the second world war, it became a searing emblem of Russia’s capacity for heroism and sacrifice. Figes drew on the closed sections of Simonov's archive in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art and on the archives of the poet's wife and son to produce his study of this major Soviet establishment figure.