The Red Year 100 Years On: Book Review

Red Guards defend the revolution

Almost a century ago, Bolshevik workers, soldiers and sailors wrested control of Petrograd from the shaky grip of a fractious coalition of liberals, moderate socialists and Marxists, and right-wing conservatives. Over the next six years, Russia was plunged into economic chaos, civil war, and famine...

I've become a slow reader, and it has taken until now to finish a book I was given for Christmas, Orlando Figes' A People's Tragedy: the Russian Revolution 1891-1924. But this hefty study of the collapse of the Romanov autocracy and the brutal failure of progressive forces to establish any kind of European democracy has been worth persevering with.

Figes is clear from his very sub-title that the roots of the chaos lay in the brutal - and usually brutally-stupid - Tsarist system. Peasants treated like cattle even though serfdom had been formally abolished decades earlier, a new industrial working class eager to forge a new life in the cities. And the dull-witted conduct of the Great War's eastern front, throwing thousands into unwinnable offensives, finally broke the back of the dying monarchy.

A People's Tragedy is careful to give an account of the months between the overthrow of the Tsar and the seizure of power by the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democrats, the leadership whipped to the coup almost against their will by Lenin and Trotsky. But Figes' concentration is fierce: what's key in the story of this period is the evidence it provides of the roots of revolutionary and post-revolutionary barbarism in the decisions and personalities involved.

Smolny - the former school for young ladies that became home to the Petrograd the soviet

The withdrawal of the young Bolshevik regime (soon to be renamed 'Communist') from WWI after Brest-Litovsk did not bring peace. In fact, Russia and her imperial possessions - the Baltic states and Ukraine in particular - were convulsed by waves of civil war and terrorism by the regime and its 'White' opponents. Hundreds of thousands were killed in battle, executed as hostages, or starved in a countryside that could no longer feed itself let alone the freezing cities.

Figes's narrative of these war years is gripping, and chilling. Just as gripping is the narrative of the internal Bolshevik party struggles to secure the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' - in practice, a mushrooming bureaucracy staffed not by proletarians but by the peasant-born and petit-bourgeois. The tale of Stalin's painstaking mainpulation of the party machinery, versus Trotsky's hamfisted resistance.

Strangely moving, the account of Lenin's decline and death lead Figes to his close. Not even a centruy ago, the events seem medieval - if not primeval. But in a world where authoritarians and extremists of the right are in power or close to it in some of the west's democracies - and in Russia itself - there is no better time to revisit the story of democracy's old failure.

The stricken, dying Lenin

A People's Tragedy is available from Amazon. The images in this review are reproduced, as fair use, from the book.