Contents

PART ONE RUSSIA UNDER THE OLD REGIME

PART TWO THE CRISIS OF AUTHORITY (1891–1917)

PART THREE RUSSIA IN REVOLUTION (FEBRUARY 1917–MARCH 1918)

PART FOUR THE CIVIL WAR AND THE MAKING OF THE SOVIET SYSTEM (1918–24)

About the Author

Orlando Figes is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. Born in London in 1959, he was previously a Lecturer in History and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. A People’s Tragedy received the Wolfson Prize, the NCR Book Award, the W.H. Smith Literary Award, the Longman/History Today Book Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He is the author of many other books on Russian history including Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia, The Whisperers: Private life in Stalin’s Russia, Crimea: the Last Crusade and Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag.

About the Book

Unrivalled in scope and brimming with human drama, A People’s Tragedy is the most vivid, moving and comprehensive history of the Russian Revolution available today.

Opening with a panorama of Russian society, from the cloistered world of the Tsar to the brutal life of the peasants, A People’s Tragedy follows workers, soldiers, intellectuals and villagers as their world is consumed by revolution and then degenerates into violence and dictatorship. Drawing on vast original research, Figes conveys above all the shocking experience of the revolution for those who lived it, while providing the clearest and most cogent account of how and why it unfolded.

Illustrated with over 100 photographs and now including a new introduction that reflects on the revolution’s centennial legacy, A People’s Tragedy is a masterful and definitive record of one of the most important events in modern history.

ALSO BY ORLANDO FIGES

Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution 1917–21

Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917

Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia

Crimea: The Last Crusade

Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag

Revolutionary Russia 1891–1991: A Pelican Introduction

Illustrations

Images of Autocracy

Everyday Life Under the Tsars

Dramatis Personae

Between Revolutions

Images of 1917

The Civil War

Everyday Life Under the Bolsheviks

The Revolutionary Inheritance

Photographic Credits

Bakhmeteff Archive, Columbia University: 58; California Museum of Photography, University of California, Riverside: 20. Hoover Institution of War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford, California: 82–4; Life on the Russian Country Estate. A Social and Cultural history, by Priscilla Roosevelt (Yale University Press, 1995): 26; Museum of the Revolution, Moscow: 7, 15, 36, 52, 61–2, 77–8, 90; Photokhronika Tass, Moscow: 107; private collections: 10, 32, 97; Russian in Original Photographs 1860–1920, by Marvin Lyons (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1977): 25, 47; Russie, 1904–1924: La Révolution est là, (Baschet, Paris, 1978): 80; Russian Century, The, by Brian Moynahan (Chatto & Windus, London, 1994): 13, 28 (courtesy of Slava Katamidze Collection/Endeavour Group, London), 46 (Courtesy of the Endeavour Group, London); Russian State Archive of Film and Photographic Documents, Krasnogorsk: 18–19, 21–3, 35, 37–8, 40, 45, 48, 51, 59–60, 65–71, 73–6, 79, 81, 85–93, 98–106; Russian State Military History Archive, Moscow: 29; Saltykov-Shchedrin Library, St Petersburg: 12; State Archive of Film and Photographic Documents, St Petersburg: 1–6, 8–9, 11, 14, 16–17, 24, 27, 30–1, 34, 39, 41–4, 49–50, 53–7, 63–4, 72, 94–6; Tula District Museum: 33.

Note on Dates

Until February 1918 Russia adhered to the Julian (Old Style) calendar, which ran thirteen days behind the Gregorian (New Style) calendar in use in Western Europe. The Soviet government switched to the New Style calendar at midnight on 31 January 1918: the next day was declared 14 February. Dates relating to domestic events are given in the Old Style up until 31 January 1918; and in the New Style after that. Dates relating to international events (e.g. diplomatic negotiations and military battles in the First World War) are given in the New Style throughout the book.

NB The term ‘the Ukraine’ has been used throughout this book, rather than the currently correct but ahistorical ‘Ukraine’.

Introduction to the 100^th Anniversary Edition

It is hard to think of an event, or series of events, that has affected the history of the past one hundred years more profoundly than the Russian Revolution of 1917. A generation after the establishment of the Soviet system, one-third of the human race was living under regimes modelled, more or less, upon it. The fear of Bolshevism was a major factor in the rise of fascist movements, leading to the outbreak of the Second World War. From 1945, the export of the Leninist model to Eastern Europe, China, South-East Asia, Africa and Central America engulfed the world in a long Cold War, which came to an uncertain end only with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. ‘The revolution of 1917 has defined the shape of the contemporary world, and we are only now emerging from its shadow,’ I wrote in the Preface to the first edition of A People’s Tragedy in 1996. Today, in 2017, that shadow still hangs darkly over Russia and the fragile new democracies that emerged from the Soviet Union. Its presence can be felt in the revolutionary and terrorist movements of our age. As I warned in the final sentence of A People’s Tragedy, ‘The ghosts of 1917 have not been laid to rest.’

That was not how it appeared to many in the years immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union. There was a widespread feeling, in the West at least, that the Russian Revolution was over, its false gods toppled by democracy. In that moment of democratic triumph and triumphalism, Francis Fukuyama wrote his influential book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), in which he announced the ultimate victory of liberal capitalism in its great ideological battle against communism. ‘What we are witnessing,’ Fukuyama wrote, ‘is not just the end of the Cold War, or a passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.’

When I was working on A People’s Tragedy, between 1989 and 1996, there was, for sure, a liberating sense for me, as a historian, that my subject need no longer be defined by Cold War ideological battles. The Russian Revolution was becoming ‘history’ in a new way: with the collapse of the Soviet system, it could at last be seen to have a complete historical trajectory – a beginning and a middle and, now, an end – which could be studied more permissively, without the pressures of contemporary politics or the limiting agendas of Sovietology, the political-science framework in which most Western studies of the Revolution had been written when the Soviet Union was alive.

Meanwhile the opening of the Soviet archives enabled new approaches to the Revolution’s history. Mine was to use the personal stories of ordinary individuals whose voices had been lost in the Cold War-era histories (both Soviet and Western), which had focused on the abstract ‘masses’, social classes, political parties and ideologies. Having worked in the Soviet archives since 1984, I was sceptical that startling revelations about Lenin, Trotsky or even Stalin were yet to be found, which is what the new arrivals in the reading rooms were mostly looking for. But I was excited by the opportunity to work with the personal archives of the Revolution’s minor figures – secondary leaders, workers, soldiers, officers, intellectuals and even peasants – in much larger quantities than had previously been allowed. The biographical approach I ended up adopting in A People’s Tragedy was intended to do more than add ‘human interest’ to my narrative. By weaving the stories of these individuals through my history, I wanted to present the Revolution as a dramatic series of events, uncontrolled by the people taking part in them. The figures I chose had one feature in common: setting out to influence the course of history, they all fell victim to the law of unintended consequences. By focusing on them, my aim was to convey the Revolution’s tragic chaos, which engulfed so many lives and destroyed so many dreams.

My conception of the Revolution as a ‘people’s tragedy’ was also meant to work as an argument about Russia’s destiny: its failure to overcome its autocratic past and stabilize itself as a democracy in 1917; its descent into violence and dictatorship. The causes of that democratic failure, it seemed to me, were rooted in the country’s history, in the weakness of its middle class and civil institutions and, above all, in the poverty and isolation of the peasantry, the vast majority of Russia’s population, whose agrarian revolution I had studied in detail in my first book, Peasant Russia, Civil War (1989).

When A People’s Tragedy came out, some reviewers thought the book too bleak in its assessment of the Revolution’s democratic potential. Part of this reaction had its origins in the Marxist view of October 1917 as a popular uprising based on a social revolution that lost its democratic character only after Lenin’s death, in 1924, and the rise of Stalin to power. But part of it was rooted in the democratic hopes invested in post-Soviet Russia by a wide variety of interested parties, ranging from those veteran idealists, the Russian intelligentsia, who wanted to believe that Russia could yet become a flourishing democracy once it had been freed from its Stalinist inheritance, to Western business leaders, more pragmatic but ignorant of Russia, who needed to believe the same in order to put their money into it.

Those hopes proved short-lived, as Russia under Vladimir Putin, elected President in 2000, reverted to a more authoritarian and familiar form of rule. The causes of this democratic failure were similar to those in 1917, as I had identified them in A People’s Tragedy, but with one important difference. Unlike the downfall of the Tsarist system in February 1917, the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991 was not brought about by a popular or social revolution, leading to the democratic reform of the state. It was essentially an abdication of power by the Communist élites, who, at least in Russia, where there were no lustration laws like those in Eastern Europe and the Baltic states to keep them out of public office, were soon able to recover dominant positions in politics and business with new political identities. Spared any public scrutiny of its activities in the Soviet period, the KGB, in which Putin had made his career, was allowed to reconstruct itself, eventually becoming the Federal Security Service (FSB), without substantial changes in its personnel.

As in 1917, the drift towards authoritarian government under Putin was enabled by the weakness of the middle classes and public institutions in post-Soviet Russia. Subjected to the pressures of the market, the intelligentsia proved far smaller and less influential than it thought it was, and lost its credibility as the people’s moral voice, a role it had assumed since the nineteenth century: it lived in a world of books at a time when power and authority were increasingly defined by the state-controlled mass media. In the quarter of a century since the collapse of the Soviet regime, the development of public bodies in Russia has been pitifully weak. Where are the professional societies, the trade unions, the consumer organizations, the real political parties? The problem for democracy in Russia lies as much in the weakness of civil society as in the state’s oppressive strength.

But the biggest problem for the democratic project in 1991, as it had been in 1917, was the simple historical fact that the Russians had no real experience of it. Neither the Tsarist nor Soviet governments had given them a taste or even an understanding of parliamentary sovereignty, government accountability or legally protected liberties. The popular conception of ‘democracy’ in 1917 was not as a form of government at all, but rather as a social label, equivalent to ‘the common people’, whose opposite was not ‘dictatorship’ but instead ‘the bourgeoisie’. On this basis, for the next six or perhaps seven decades, people could believe that the Soviet system was ‘the most democratic in the world’ insofar as it provided, more or less, universal employment, housing, health care and social equality. In such a view, the economic crisis that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet system undermined the credibility of the capitalist versions of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ that were offered in its place.

For the majority of ordinary Russians, especially for those of a certain age who identified themselves as ‘Soviet’, the 1990s were little short of a catastrophe. They lost everything: a familiar way of life; an economic system that guaranteed security; an ideology that gave them moral certainties, perhaps even hope; a huge empire with superpower status and an identity that covered over ethnic divisions; and national pride in Soviet achievements in culture, science and technology. Struggling to adapt to the harsh realities of the new capitalist way of life, where there was no great idea, no collective purpose defined by the state, they looked back with nostalgia to the Soviet period. Many yearned for the mythic past they remembered or imagined under Stalin, who, they believed, had presided over times of material plenty, order and security, the ‘best times in the country’s history’. According to a poll of 2005, 42 per cent of the Russian people, and 60 per cent of those over 60 years of age, wanted the return of a ‘leader like Stalin’.

From the start of his regime, Putin aimed to restore pride in Soviet history. This was an important part of his agenda to rebuild Russia as a great power. The rehabilitation of the Soviet past, including Stalin, sanctioned Putin’s own authoritarian government, legitimizing it as the continuation of a long Russian tradition of strong state power, going back before 1917 to the Tsars. The order and security provided by the state, according to this myth, are more highly valued by Russians than the Western liberal concepts of human rights or political democracy, which have no roots in Russian history.

Putin’s historical initiative was popular in Russia, particularly when it gave encouragement to nationalist feelings, patriotic pride about the Soviet victory of 1945 and nostalgia for the Soviet Union. When he declared to the Russian Federal Assembly in 2005 that ‘the breakup of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the twentieth century’, Putin was articulating the opinion of three-quarters of the population, who, according to a poll in 2000, regretted the collapse of the USSR and wanted Russia to expand in size, incorporating ‘Russian’ territories, such as the Crimea and the Donbass, which had been ‘lost’ to Ukraine. In 2014, volunteers with neo-Soviet flags would cross the border from Russia to fight for the return of these two Ukrainian territories.

The positive rewriting of Soviet history also came as a relief to those Russians who had resented the ‘blackening’ of their country’s history in the glasnost period, when the media was full of revelations about ‘Stalin’s crimes’, which undermined the Soviet textbook version they had learned at school. Many had been made uncomfortable by the questions they had been forced to ask about their families’ actions in the period of Stalin’s rule. They did not want to listen to moralising lectures about how ‘bad’ their country’s history was. By restoring pride in the Soviet past, Putin helped the Russians to feel good as Russians once again.

His initiative began in schools, where textbooks deemed too negative about the Soviet period were denied approval by the Ministry of Education, effectively removing them from the classroom. In 2007, Putin told a conference of history teachers:

Putin did not deny Stalin’s crimes. But he argued for the need not to dwell on them, to balance them against his achievements as the builder of the country’s ‘glorious Soviet past’. In a manual for history teachers commissioned by the President and heavily promoted in Russian schools, Stalin was portrayed as an ‘effective manager’ who ‘acted rationally in conducting a campaign of terror to ensure the country’s modernization’.

Polls suggested that the Russians shared this troubling attitude to the Revolution’s violence. According to a survey conducted in 2007 in three cities (St Petersburg, Kazan and Lenin’s birthplace, Ulyanovsk), 71 per cent of the population thought that Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka (the forerunner of the KGB) in 1917, had ‘protected public order and civic life’. Only 7 per cent believed he was a ‘criminal and executioner’. More disturbing was the survey’s finding that while nearly everyone was well informed about the mass repressions under Stalin – with most acknowledging that ‘between 10 and 30 million victims’ had suffered – two-thirds of these respondents still believed that Stalin had been positive for the country. Many thought that, under Stalin, people had been ‘kinder and more compassionate’. Even with knowledge of the millions who were killed, the Russians, it appeared, continued to accept the Bolshevik idea that mass state violence can be justified to meet the Revolution’s goals.

In the autumn of 2011, millions of Russians watched the TV show The Court of Time (Sud vremeni), in which various figures and episodes from Russian history were judged in a mock trial with advocates, witnesses and a jury of the viewers, who reached their verdict by voting on the telephone. The judgements arrived at in this trial by state TV do not hold out much hope for a change in Russian attitudes. Presented with the evidence of Stalin’s war against the peasants and the catastrophic effects of forcible collectivisation, in which millions died of starvation and many more were sent to the Gulag camps or remote penal settlements, 78 per cent of the viewers nonetheless believed that these policies were justified, a ‘terrible necessity’ for Soviet industrialisation. Only 22 per cent considered them a ‘crime’.

Politically the Revolution may be dead, but it has an afterlife in these mentalities, which will continue to dominate the Russian polity for many years.

* * *

So how should we commemorate the Revolution during its centenary? In 1889, to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, the Eiffel Tower was inaugurated at the entrance to the Paris World Fair of that year. The tower symbolized the values of the Third Republic derived from 1789. No such landmark could be built in Russia, where the commemoration of the October Revolution has divided Russia since the downfall of the Soviet regime. In 1996, Boris Yeltsin replaced the 7 November Revolution Day with a Day of Accord and Reconciliation, ‘in order to diminish confrontations and effect conciliation between different segments of society’. But Communists continued to commemorate the Revolution’s anniversary in the traditional Soviet manner with a demonstration in massed ranks with red banners. Putin tried to resolve the conflict by establishing a Day of National Unity on 4 November (the date of the end of the Polish occupation of Russia in 1612). It took the place of the 7 November holiday in the official calendar from 2005. But the Day of National Unity did not catch on. According to a 2007 poll, only 4 per cent of the population could say what it was for. Six out of ten people were opposed to the dropping of Revolution Day. Despite Putin’s efforts to reclaim the positive achievements of the country’s Soviet past, there is no historical narrative of the October Revolution around which the nation can unite: some see it as a national catastrophe, others as the start of a great civilization, but the country as a whole remains unable to come to terms with its violent and contradictory legacies.

Likewise, no consensus could be achieved on what to do with the founder of the Soviet state. Yeltsin and the Russian Orthodox Church supported calls to close the Lenin Mausoleum on Red Square in Moscow, where Lenin’s preserved body has been on display since 1924, and bury him next to his mother at the Volkov Cemetery in St Petersburg, as he had wanted for himself. But the Communists were organized and vocal in resisting this, so the issue remained unresolved. Putin was opposed to removing Lenin from the Mausoleum, reasoning that it would offend the older generation of Russians, who had sacrificed so much for the Soviet system, by implying they had cherished false ideals.

With such division and confusion, the commemoration of the Revolution will probably be muted in Russia in 2017. That too seems most likely in the West, where the Russian Revolution has retreated in our historical consciousness, partly as a result of declining media interest since the end of the Cold War, as our focus has been redirected to the Middle East and the problem of Islamic extremism; and perhaps in part because our growing concern about human rights, which dominates our moral discourse about political change, has led us to be less understanding of the emotive force of other values, such as social justice and wealth redistribution, which fuel revolutionary violence.

But as events in recent years have shown, the age of revolutions has not passed. The ‘colour revolutions’ in the Balkans, Ukraine, Georgia and the Lebanon, the Arab Spring and Ukraine’s Euromaidan remind us of the power of mass protest to bring down governments, usually with violence. In all these movements there are lessons to be learned from comparisons with 1917. Their use of social media to organize the crowds, for example, would have been appreciated by Lenin. As the Jacobins were for the revolutionaries of the nineteenth century, so the Bolsheviks became a model for all the revolutionary movements of the twentieth century, from China to Iran, as well as for the terrorists of our own age. All the methods used by ISIS – the use of war and terror to build a revolutionary state, the fanatical devotion and military discipline of its followers, and its brilliant use of propaganda – were first mastered by the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War.

We should not complacently suppose that revolution could not pose a threat to Western liberal democracies. The recent rise in populist mass movements across Europe should remind us that revolutions can erupt unexpectedly: they are never far away. Europe’s history in the twentieth century demonstrates how fragile democracy has been. If it won its great ideological battles against fascism and communism, it did so only narrowly, and its victory was by no means preordained: it could have turned out otherwise. As I wrote in the final paragraphs of A People’s Tragedy in 1996, ‘we must try to strengthen our democracy, both as a source of freedom and of social justice, lest the disadvantages and the disillusioned reject it again’.

London, January 2017

Preface to the 1996 Edition

These days we call so many things a ‘revolution’ — a change in the government’s policies on sport, a technological innovation, or even a new trend in marketing — that it may be hard for the reader of this book to take on board the vast scale of its subject at the start. The Russian Revolution was, at least in terms of its effects, one of the biggest events in the history of the world. Within a generation of the establishment of Soviet power, one-third of humanity was living under regimes modelled upon it. The revolution of 1917 has defined the shape of the contemporary world, and we are only now emerging from its shadow. It was not so much a single revolution — the compact eruption of 1917 so often depicted in the history books — as a whole complex of different revolutions which exploded in the middle of the First World War and set off a chain reaction of more revolutions, civil, ethnic and national wars. By the time that it was over, it had blown apart — and then put back together — an empire covering one-sixth of the surface of the globe. At the risk of appearing callous, the easiest way to convey the revolution’s scope is to list the ways in which it wasted human life: tens of thousands were killed by the bombs and bullets of the revolutionaries, and at least an equal number by the repressions of the tsarist regime, before 1917; thousands died in the street fighting of that year; hundreds of thousands from the Terror of the Reds — and an equal number from the Terror of the Whites, if one counts the victims of their pogroms against Jews — during the years that followed; more than a million perished in the fighting of the civil war, including civilians in the rear; and yet more people died from hunger, cold and disease than from all these put together.

All of which, I suppose, is by way of an apology for the vast size of this book — the first attempt at a comprehensive history of the entire revolutionary period in a single volume. Its narrative begins in the 1890s, when the revolutionary crisis really started, and more specifically in 1891, when the public’s reaction to the famine crisis set it for the first time on a collision course with the tsarist autocracy. And our story ends in 1924, with the death of Lenin, by which time the revolution had come full circle and the basic institutions, if not all the practices, of the Stalinist regime were in place. This is to give to the revolution a much longer lifespan than is customary. But it seems to me that, with one or two exceptions, previous histories of the revolution have been too narrowly focused on the events of 1917, and that this has made the range of its possible outcomes appear much more limited than they actually were. It was by no means inevitable that the revolution should have ended in the Bolshevik dictatorship, although looking only at that fateful year would lead one towards this conclusion. There were a number of decisive moments, both before and during 1917, when Russia might have followed a more democratic course. It is the aim of A People’s Tragedy, by looking at the revolution in the longue durée, to explain why it did not at each of these in turn. As its title is intended to suggest, the book rests on the proposition that Russia’s democratic failure was deeply rooted in its political culture and social history. Many of the themes of the four introductory chapters in Part One — the absence of a state-based counterbalance to the despotism of the Tsar; the isolation and fragility of liberal civil society; the backwardness and violence of the Russian village that drove so many peasants to go and seek a better life in the industrial towns; and the strange fanaticism of the Russian radical intelligentsia — will reappear as constant themes in the narrative of Parts Two, Three and Four.

Although politics are never far away, this is, I suppose, a social history in the sense that its main focus is the common people. I have tried to present the major social forces — the peasantry, the working class, the soldiers and the national minorities — as the participants in their own revolutionary drama rather than as ‘victims’ of the revolution. This is not to deny that there were many victims. Nor is it to adopt the ‘bottom-up’ approach so fashionable these days among the ‘revisionist’ historians of Soviet Russia. It would be absurd — and in Russia’s case obscene — to imply that a people gets the rulers it deserves. But it is to argue that the sort of politicized ‘top-down’ histories of the Russian Revolution which used to be written in the Cold War era, in which the common people appeared as the passive objects of the evil machinations of the Bolsheviks, are no longer adequate. We now have a rich and growing literature, based upon research in the newly opened archives, on the social life of the Russian peasantry, the workers, the soldiers and the sailors, the provincial towns, the Cossacks and the non-Russian regions of the Empire during the revolutionary period. These monographs have given us a much more complex and convincing picture of the relationship between the party and the people than the one presented in the older ‘top-down’ version. They have shown that instead of a single abstract revolution imposed by the Bolsheviks on the whole of Russia, it was as often shaped by local passions and interests. A People’s Tragedy is an attempt to synthesize this reappraisal and to push the argument one stage further. It attempts to show, as its title indicates, that what began as a people’s revolution contained the seeds of its own degeneration into violence and dictatorship. The same social forces which brought about the triumph of the Bolshevik regime became its main victims.

Finally, the narrative of A People’s Tragedy weaves between the private and the public spheres. Wherever possible, I have tried to emphasize the human aspect of its great events by listening to the voices of individual people whose lives became caught up in the storm. Their diaries, letters and other private writings feature prominently in this book. More substantially, the personal histories of several figures have been interwoven through the narrative. Some of these figures are well known (Maxim Gorky, General Brusilov and Prince Lvov), while others are unknown even to historians (the peasant reformer Sergei Semenov and the soldier-commissar Dmitry Os’kin). But all of them had hopes and aspirations, fears and disappointments, that were typical of the revolutionary experience as a whole. In following the fortunes of these figures, my aim has been to convey the chaos of these years, as it must have been felt by ordinary men and women. I have tried to present the revolution not as a march of abstract social forces and ideologies but as a human event of complicated individual tragedies. It was a story, by and large, of people, like the figures in this book, setting out with high ideals to achieve one thing, only to find out later that the outcome was quite different. This, again, is why I chose to call the book A People’s Tragedy. For it is not just about the tragic turning-point in the history of a people. It is also about the ways in which the tragedy of the revolution engulfed the destinies of those who lived through it.

* * *

This book has taken over six years to write and it owes a great debt to many people.

Above all, I must thank Stephanie Palmer, who has had to endure far more in the way of selfish office hours, weekends and holidays spoilt by homework and generally impossible behaviour by her husband than she had any right to expect. In return I received from her love and support in much greater measure than I deserved. Stephanie looked after me through the dark years of debilitating illness in the early stages of this book, and, in addition to her own heavy work burdens, took on more than her fair share of child-care for our daughters, Lydia and Alice, after they were born in 1993. I dedicate this book to her in gratitude.

Neil Belton at Jonathan Cape has played a huge part in the writing of this book. Neil is any writer’s dream of an editor. He read every chapter in every draft, and commented on them in long and detailed letters of the finest prose. His criticisms were always on the mark, his knowledge of the subject constantly surprising, and his enthusiasm was inspiring. If there is any one reader to whom this book is addressed, it is to him.

The second draft was also read by Boris Kolonitskii during the course of our various meetings in Cambridge and St Petersburg. I am very grateful to him for his many comments, all of which resulted in improvements to the text, and hope that, although it has so far been one-sided, this may be the start of a lasting intellectual partnership.

I owe a great debt to two amazing women. One is my mother, Eva Figes, a past master of the art of narrative who always gave me good advice on how to practise it. The other is my agent, Deborah Rogers, who did me a great service in brokering the marriage with Cape.

At Cape two other people merit special thanks. Dan Franklin navigated the book through its final stages with sensitivity and intelligence. And Liz Cowen went through the whole text line by line suggesting improvements with meticulous care. I am deeply grateful to them both.

For their assistance in the preparation of the final text I should also like to thank Claire Farrimond, who helped to check the notes, and Laura Pieters Cordy, who worked overtime to enter the corrections to the text. Thanks are also due to Ian Agnew, who drew the splendid maps.

The past six years have been an exciting time for historical research in Russia. I should like to thank the staff of the many Russian archives and libraries in which the research for this book was completed. I owe a great debt to the knowledge and advice of far too many archivists to name individually, but the one exception is Vladimir Barakhov, Director of the Gorky Archive, who was more than generous with his time.

Many institutions have helped me in the research for this book. I am grateful to the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, and — although the Fellowship could not be taken up — to the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington for their generous support. My own Cambridge college, Trinity, which is as generous as it is rich, has also been of enormous assistance, giving me both grants and study leave. Among the Holy and Undivided Fellows of the college special thanks are due to my teaching colleagues, Boyd Hilton and John Lonsdale, for covering for me in my frequent absences; to the inimitable Anil Seal for being a supporter; and, above all, to Raj Chandavarkar, for being such a clever critic and loyal friend. Finally, in the History Faculty, I am, as always, grateful to Quentin Skinner for his efforts on my behalf.

The best thing about Cambridge University is the quality of its students, and in the course of the past six years I have had the privilege of teaching some of the brightest in my special subject on the Russian Revolution. This book is in no small measure the result of that experience. Many were the occasions when I rushed back from the lecture hall to write down the ideas I had picked up from discussions with my students. If they cannot be acknowledged in the notes, then I only hope that those who read this book will take it as a tribute of my gratitude to them.

Cambridge
November 1995

1 The Dynasty

i The Tsar and His People

On a wet and windy morning in February 1913 St Petersburg celebrated three hundred years of Romanov rule over Russia. People had been talking about the great event for weeks, and everyone agreed that nothing quite so splendid would ever be seen again in their lifetimes. The majestic power of the dynasty would be displayed, as never before, in an extravaganza of pageantry. As the jubilee approached, dignitaries from far-flung parts of the Russian Empire filled the capital’s grand hotels: princes from Poland and the Baltic lands; high priests from Georgia and Armenia; mullahs and tribal chiefs from Central Asia; the Emir of Bukhara and the Khan of Khiva. The city bustled with sightseers from the provinces, and the usual well-dressed promenaders around the Winter Palace now found themselves outnumbered by the unwashed masses — peasants and workers in their tunics and caps, rag-bundled women with kerchiefs on their heads. Nevsky Prospekt experienced the worst traffic jams in its history as trams and horse-drawn carriages, cars and sleighs, converged on it. The main streets were decked out in the imperial colours of white, blue and red; statues were dressed in garlands and ribbons; and portraits of the tsars, stretching back to Mikhail, the founder of the dynasty, hung on the façades of banks and stores. Above the tram-lines were strung chains of coloured lights, which lit up at night with the words ‘God Save the Tsar’ or a Romanov double-headed eagle and the dates 1613–1913. Out-of-towners, many of whom had never seen electric light, stared up and scratched their heads in wonderment. There were columns, arcs and obelisks of light. In front of the Kazan Cathedral stood a white pavilion filled with incense, bromeliads and palms, shivering in the Russian winter air.

The rituals began with a solemn thanksgiving in the Kazan Cathedral led by the Patriarch of Antioch, who had come from Greece especially for the occasion, the three Russian Metropolitans and fifty priests from St Petersburg. The imperial family drove out from the Winter Palace in open carriages accompanied by two squadrons of His Majesty’s Own Horseguards and Cossack riders in black caftans and red Caucasian caps. It was the first time the Tsar had ridden in public view since the 1905 Revolution, and the police were taking no chances. The route was lined by the Imperial Guards gorgeously turned out in