Book Review - Revolutionary Russia by Orlando Figes

Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991 : a History by Orlando Figes

New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2014               ISBN 9780805091311

This book is a great introduction to the political history of the Soviet Union. Orlando Figes has written in depth on the history of Russia and the Soviet Union for many years, and has drawn on that corpus of work to write an up-to-date narrative of the birth, life and death of the Russian revolutionary experiment.

Figes, using apposite quotes, anecdotes and even jokes ("Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Socialism is the opposite."), describes in a series of short chapters the pre-revolutionary ferment in Russia, the 1905 revolution, both revolutions in 1917, the evolution of the Revolution through the Civil War, NEP, Stalinism, The Great Patriotic War, Kruschev and on until the final collapse in 1991.

From the view of the present day, the history of Soviet Russia reads like a tragedy. The ruthlessness of the early revolutionaries, Trotsky in particular, at least had the "excuse" of the Civil War on which to hang their crimes. No such "excuse" can cover the crimes of Stalin, who was little more than a gangster, suspicious of everyone and prepared to kill millions to ensure his power. His paranoia was the source of The Great Terror in the 1930s, and was a major reason Russia was so unprepared for war with Germany when it came. There is no doubt that Stalin ranks highly in the pantheon of monsters of human history.

The ideological problems of the Revolution are sketched out in this book quite well. The Bolsheviks always had a problem with the fact that it was not the urban proletariat that drove the revolution (according to Marx's formula), and they had a problematic relationship with the peasant class. The peasants were always seen as potentially reactionary, and the Bolsheviks feared that classes hold over the agricultural output of the nation. These fears drove the thinking behind the disastrous collectivization policies, which not only destroyed Russian agriculture, but also Russian peasant culture. The failure of collectivization is demonstrated by Figes with the following fact: by the end of the 1970s peasant's own small garden plots, which they were allowed to tend when not working on the collective farm, were producing 40% of the Soviet Union's pork and poultry, 42% of its fruit and over 50% of its potatoes - from only 4% of the country's agricultural land.

Allying the above statistics with one other - that by the early 1980s the Soviet Union was spending 15% of its budget on defence, clearly shows that the country was economically unsustainable. Figes could have written more on the economics of Soviet Communism, but he does show that it was in an effort to improve economic output that Gorbachev loosened the shackles of political expression and opened government archives during the period of perestroika and glasnost. However, once the floodgates were opened. the CPSU was consumed in the deluge that followed.

Revolutionary Russia is a great introductory history of the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. Easy to read, and with a useful further reading section, it's a great place to start exploring this epoch.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell