good overview of the russian revolution?

[bekah]

The best book I know of about the Russian Revolution is "A People's 
Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924" by Orlando Figes.  Figes 
makes the point that the Revolution was a complete tragedy for the 
Russian people and he looks at the role of the workers, peasants and 
official through excellent use of primary  source material.  It's not 
short - 824 pages - but it's not hard to read.  He includes excellent 
little mini-biographies of many of the key  players,  some of whom I 
had never heard of before (not surprising,  I guess). 

Anyway, the book rather arbitrarily deals with the time period 
between 1891 (the onset of some serious economic difficulties) and 
1924 (Lenin's death) and that certainly plays into his basic theme of 
how  'the people'  were affected but the focus is far more on the 
revolution and Marxists than the whole history of bloody Tsars. The 
book also uses biographical sketches of people who illustrate Figes' 
points by being close to the peasants and/or workers,  or rejecting 
them.

Literary references are important to Figes probably because of his 
prior work,  Natasha's Dance, which is the cultural history of 
Russia.  These parts are rather interesting because the intellectuals 
always had a love-hate relationship with the reality of the peasants; 
loving the idea them only, it would seem,  and hating the reality.

Bekah
happy reading    :-) 


At 6:10 PM -0400 7/30/06, jd wrote:
>I'm reading The Russian Revolution 1917-1921 by Beryl Williams, which
>seems to be a decent intro to the subject, but it's only 99 pages long
>and seems to gloss over a lot of details, giving a more eagle-eyed
>view of the situation, and I was wondering if any of you could
>reccomend a book that might be better at both giving that view as well
>as more detail to the events leading up to and surrounding the
>revolution.  This book is decent but sort of flies through events in a
>way that makes them sometimes easy to miss.
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