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

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.