After the Red victory in the Civil War it was to be the anti-Bolshevik peasant revolts in the Russian heartland which forced the U-turn of the New Economic Policy on Government and Party.

Out of the Great Dark Whale · LRB 31 October 1996 Eric Hobsbawm · Out of the Great Dark Whale · LRB 31 October 1996

The failure of the 1905 Revolution did not gain tsarism much time, and in any case Nicholas II sabotaged his most capable minister, Stolypin; and even his reforms, in Figes’s view, were not ‘capable of stabilising Russia’s social system after the crisis of 1905’. It was only after the final defeat of the Whites that the peasant revolts against the Bolsheviks assumed mass proportions. Left-wing critics have represented Figes as a conservative because of his negative assessment of Lenin and his focus on the individual and "the random succession of chance events" rather than on the collective actions of the masses. Figes wrote that he had "tried to present the revolution not as a march of abstract social forces and ideologies but as a human event of complicated individual tragedies". The idea that tsarist Russia was on the road to a flourishing liberal capitalism, and was diverted only by the war, is a fantasy; as is the post-1991 idealisation of tsarism and its institutions, including the Orthodox Church – Figes has absolutely no doubt of that.In its absence, the Civil War was fought between armies ‘which could count neither on the loyalty of their mostly conscript troops nor on the support of the civilian population within the territories they claimed to control. Nor does Figes consider such problems as those of the pastoralist peoples for whom ‘land’ meant something quite different from what it meant to peasant cultivators (a theme familiar from films about the American Wild West and not irrelevant in some regions of Russia). Even here what is new is not the biographical detail but the curious emphasis, perhaps derived from a polemical essay by Gorky, on Lenin’s ‘noble background’ as ‘one key to his domineering personality’, which helped him run a party distinctly lacking in members with the sense of guilt that elsewhere Figes sees as the psychological inspiration of the Revolution. Figes condemned the police raid, accusing the Russian authorities of trying to rehabilitate the Stalinist regime.

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The novelty of his account of Russia before 1917 – and indeed of the Revolutionary years themselves – lies in his treatment, not of tsarism and its crises but of the forces subverting it, and particularly the peasants and their urbanised sons and daughters, who made up the overwhelming bulk of the Russian people. A People's Tragedy is a study of the Russian Revolution, and combines social and political history with biographical details in a historical narrative. The misery and cruelty of the Russian peasants is also narrated with skill, and one can feel how painfully and rapidly the idealism of the early revolutionaries gave way to chaos and disaster as the idea of a Communist revolution was conflated with a savage and enraged desire for anarchy. As for my use of the quotations by Lenin (on the need to beat people without mercy) and Shliapnikov (on the disappearance of the working class), neither merits the charge of distortion, although in the first I did miss out some dots.A People’s Tragedy will do more to help us understand the Russian Revolution than any other book I know of written since the end of the Soviet Union. In December 2013, Figes wrote a long piece in the US journal Foreign Affairs on the Euromaidan demonstrations in Kyiv suggesting that a referendum on Ukraine's foreign policy and the country's possible partition might be a preferable alternative to the possibility of civil war and military intervention by Russia. Figes's knowledge of Russia is astonishing, and he is able to use that knowledge to address larger questions of the very nature of history. He attended William Ellis School in north London (1971–78) and studied History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, graduating with a double-starred first in 1982.