good overview of the russian revolution?

[jd]

Thanks bekah, that sounds like exactly what I'm looking for!

On 7/31/06, bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>
>
> 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.
>
>
>