Europe: Early Modern and Modern
minister of interior also calls for elaboration. But
perhaps such personal data, often rare for Russian
public figures, will be forthcoming as archival research
becomes more feasible.
JOHN A. ARMSTRONG
EMERITUS
University of Wisconsin,
Madison
ORLANDO FIGES. A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924. Paperback edition. New York:
Penguin. 1998. Pp. xx, 923. $19.95.
This lengthy account of modern Russian history from
the 1891 famine to V. I. Lenin's death in 1924 has
already created quite a stir. Recipient of several
literary awards, the book provoked an acerbic exchange in 1997 between a senior American specialist
on Russia, Richard Pipes, and the author, a younger
British historian. Orlando Figes vehemently rebutted
Pipes's review, which alleged that certain passages
amounted to unattributed borrowings from Pipes's
earlier work in Russian history. Fortunately, subsequent reviews and discussion of Figes's volume have
focused on his various interpretations, some of which,
by emphasizing social history, support the revisionist
school of revolutionary historiography and some of
which, by emphasizing the ruthlessness and despotism
of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, appeal to conservative,
Cold War historians of the early Soviet period.
A difficulty for reviewers and readers alike is that
this book fits none of the customary historiographic
categories. Although the author draws on useful archival material and excerpts a number of fascinating
primary sources, the book is not a monograph. It
covers so many topics that it cannot delve deeply into
any of them. Moreover, despite Figes's knack for
providing fresh detail and lively illustrative material
(including some unusual and fascinating photographs)
on a wide range of subjects, no significant new findings
or pathbreaking interpretations are broached. At the
same time the volume is neither a popular history for
general readers nor suitable as a textbook for undergraduate students. Its many pages, its inordinate detail, and its assumption that the reader possesses some
basic knowledge about Russia and its history rule out
either audience. Finally, Figes's study, happily, is not
an ideological jeremiad. He propounds no simplistic
explanations for the Russian Revolution or the rise of
Soviet authoritarianism. Almost all his conclusions
respect the complexities of the cataclysmic events
under analysis and are eminently sensible and centrist.
What, then, is the nature of the book? First, it
represents a magisterial synthesis of Russian domestic
history through three decades of rapid change, war,
revolution, and civil war. Scholars, teachers, and serious students alike can turn with confidence to Figes's
account for a clear, well-written, and thorough treatment of most significant events in Russia's internal
development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
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681
centuries. Second, the author's sketches and assessments of the leading personalities, whether tsarist,
revolutionary, or Soviet, are crisp, fair, and informative. Lastly, Figes has admirably succeeded in enlivening an overly long book by frequent quotations from
pertinent, intriguing, and often unknown or seldomused primary sources, including diaries, letters, memoirs, and eyewitness accounts. Clearly sympathetic to
the reactions and evaluations of Maxim Gorky concerning the unfolding of the revolution, the author
relies a bit too much on that radical writer's articles
and observations, but this Gorkyan slant is frequently
apropos.
Despite the size of the study, damaging lacunas
exist. Russia's international relations, whether diplomatic, economic, cultural, or revolutionary, are almost
entirely ignored. Figes writes as if Russia existed in a
vacuum: for example, the enormous pressure on Sergei
Witte and other modernizers created by the need to
compete within a cutthroat European state system and
in a global imperialist economy is never mentioned. As
a result, Russia's ties with France, the alliance system
that emerged, and Allied military pressures before and
during the war are slighted. Again, despite lengthy .
treatment of the Civil War, Figes pays scant attention
to German and Allied intervention, each of which had
major domestic and international import. Moreover,
the degree to which the Bolsheviks' decisions were
shaped by their misguided faith in world revolution,
the impact on Western opinion of the bogeyman of the
Third International, and the foreign policy aspects of
Lenin's New Economic Policy (NEP) are totally absent.
Moreover, despite the author's prefatory promise to
focus on the people of Russia, the resulting book is
overwhelmingly political history. On the economic
side, agriculture is given due and extraordinarily useful
treatment, although I disagree with Figes's conclusion
that Pyotr Stolypin's reforms had almost no effect. But
the remarkable industrialization of Russia from the
1880s to 1914 receives inadequate coverage. Passing
mention is made of urban conditions and workers'
circumstances, but the scope and intensity of the social
upheaval created by sudden industrial growth are
seriously underplayed. Concomitantly, although Figes
helpfully traces the life stories of two peasant-workerrevolutionaries, he fails to convey to the reader the
transformation of family life, values, education, public
health, and social structures (e.g. the growth of the
cooperative movement) that took place after 1891. Not
because of its political incorrectness, but because of
the extensive and wrenching nature of the changes
involved, Figes's sketchy treatment of the rapidly
evolving role of women in Russian society is regrettable. Finally, the years Figes covers saw a burst of
creativity in Russian science and culture that significantly enriched European and world civilization, yet
the author devotes only a couple of pages near the end
of the volume to these developments.
Figes is certainly to be commended for incisive and
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Reviews of Books
revealing accounts of many major episodes. For example, he assesses Nicholas II and the tsardom skillfully,
concluding that revolution, although not inevitable,
was made probable by the determined resistance of the
tsar and the aristocratic elite to reform. Persuasively,
the author also argues that the failure to integrate the
peasantry into society made them the key to the
revolution, while their egalitarian beliefs and moral
subjectivity ensured that violence and civil war would
accompany any social upheaval. Figes is both penetrating and sensible on War Communism, the reasons for
the Whites' failure in the Civil War, and the distinction
between Leninism and Stalinism.
One is bound to sympathize with his overall interpretation that a history of oppression and the poverty,
pettiness, and brutality of peasant culture made it
almost impossible for the Russian people to construct
a new society of justice and self-rule on the ruins of
tsarism. As a result, they were tragically destined to
suffer further under a new form of autocracy. On the
other hand, the logic of Figes's conclusion seems a bit
muddled. He argues that the Russian people were not
victims of alien Bolshevism but rather "protagonists"
in the revolution's deplorable outcomes of violence
and despotism: "To be sure, this was a people's tragedy
but it was a tragedy which they helped to make" (p.
808). Yet surely the Russians did not choose cultural
backwardness and a legacy of "serfdom and autocratic
rule that had kept the common people powerless and
passive." In my view, the Russian people who sought a
new and better life in 1917 were indeed tragic victims
of their past-and indeed failures at creating what they
truly wanted-but they were not the architects of their
own destruction.
JOHN M. THOMPSON
University of Southern Maine
DILIARA KHANIFOVNA IBRAGIMOVA. NEP i Perestroika:
Massovoe soznanie sel'skogo naseleniia v usloviiakh
perekhoda k rynku. [NEP and Perestroika: Mass Consciousness of the Rural Population During the Transition to the Market]. Moscow: Pamiatniki istoricheskoi mysli. 1997. Pp. 217.
Diliara Khanifovna Ibragimova has written a comparative study of two similar periods in Russian history
separated by sixty years. The first period was the
transition from the rigidly centralized system of War
Communism (1918-1921) to the mixed market system
of the New Economic Policy (NEP) (March 1921 to
1928). The second was Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika, begun in 1985. Both events represented significant changes in the way the Soviet rural economy was
operated. Ibragimova's book provides a cliometric
(econometric) analysis of the opinions of elites and of
peasants concerning agriculture in both periods. For
the NEP period, she has collected databases of opinions expressed by Communist Party elites (including
V. I. Lenin) at the Eleventh Party Congress in early
1922 and of letters sent to the Peasant News and to the
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
journal Peasant between November 1923 and June
1924. Ibragimova compares these two data sets with
similar data sets from the perestroika period of the
second half of the 1980s. Specifically, one data set is
provided by a questionnaire completed by rural delegates to the Twenty-Eighth Party Congress (1990) and
by delegates to the first meeting of the Peasant Union
(1991). The second data set is constructed from letters
sent by rural dwellers to the editors of the newspaper
Rural Life between December 1989 and August 1990.
By analyzing these four data sets, Ibragimova is able
to compare elite and rural-resident attitudes during
NEP and perestroika. Through the use of factor analysis, she shows that peasant concerns were quite
different in these two periods. The results are complicated and difficult to summarize briefly.
Ibragimova's book is representative of the growing
cliometric scholarship of new Russian historians working largely under the direction of Leonid Borodkin of
Moscow State University. The long tradition of cliometric and econometric work in Russia, begun by Ivan
Kovalchenko, should be noted. These new works by
young Russian historians show the richness of the
databases with which they are able to work and their
accomplished applications of empirical methods to the
study of Russian history.
PAUL GREGORY
University of Houston
ELIZABETH A. WOOD. The Baba and the Comrade:
Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia. (IndianaMichigan Series in Russian and East European Studies.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1997. Pp.
318. $35.00.
BARBARA EVANS CLEMENTS. Bolshevik Women. New
York: Cambridge University Press. 1997. Pp. xiv, 338.
Cloth $64.95, paper $24.95.
These two fine books add to the small but growing
collection of studies of gender (not just women) in
twentieth-century Russia and the USSR. Barbara
Evans Clements explores the first two generations of
women Bolsheviks, who comprised in the 1920s
roughly ten percent of the Communist Party. Elizabeth
A. Wood explores the politics of gender in the first
decade of Soviet power, looking primarily but not
exclusively through the lens of the special party organization created to mobilize women, the women's
sections or zhenotdel. Both authors address some of
the key paradoxes associated with the Bolshevik
project to emancipate women. The first of these is
reflected in the title of Wood's book, the tension
between the "baba" (woman, usually married), the
woman in nature, and the "comrade," the woman
whose primary identity is with class, not gender.
Feminism, or placing gender above class, was anathema in the Bolshevik canon, and those who tried to
combine the two, both women activists and activists on
behalf of women, struggled to reconcile the unrecon-
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