A people's tragedy

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.