A People's Tragedy
Orlando Figes traces the Russian Revolution as a thirty-year crisis rather than a single event. He begins with the famine of 1891 and the long failure of the old regime, then carries the story through 1917, the civil war, and the consolidation of Bolshevik power. The book braids high politics with the experience of ordinary Russians, drawing on diaries, letters, and archival material to follow figures such as Lenin, Trotsky, and the writer Maxim Gorky alongside lesser known peasants and soldiers. Figes argues that the revolution was less a clean break than a slow unraveling driven by deep social pressures. The result is a single volume that explains how the autocracy fell and how the Soviet system took its early shape.
What you might want to know about A People's Tragedy
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A panoramic history of the Russian Revolution that follows tsars, peasants, soldiers, and revolutionaries from 1891 through the early Soviet years.
No. Figes sets up the late tsarist context, though the book is long and detailed and rewards a patient reader.
It treats 1917 as one stage of a longer crisis and gives more space to social history and personal stories.
A People's Tragedy was written by Orlando Figes, published in 1996 by Penguin Random House.
A People's Tragedy is 1024 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, A People's Tragedy takes most readers 15 to 22 hours to finish.
A People's Tragedy is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.