A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

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; Photo-khronika 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 Revolution est Id, (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, II, 14, 16-17, 24, 27, 30-1, 34, 39, 41-4, 49-50, 53-7, 63-4, 72, 94-6; Tula District Museum: 33.

Preface

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,