It
is indeed tough for anyone to abstain themselves from being impressed by the
book that Orlando Figes wrote on Russian Revolution and its after effects on
the entire community. Especially, those who have some knack in studying and
researching the historical events cannot go past the elaborately researched,
rigorously structured, and coherently argued A People’s Tragedy- Russian
Revolution 1891-1924. The book puts forward a comprehensive view of one of the
most important and most complicated events in the history of the world.
The
knowledge that Orlando Figes holds about Russia is amazing, and it is in his
skills the way he has actually used this knowledge in addressing the larger
questions of the very nature of History itself. Once Tolstoy has already
mentioned some important nature about History, which says, it not the singular
leaders which determine the History of a nation, instead, it is the significant
gestures of the unnamed men who actually drills into the crux of the Historical
events.
Orlando
Figes seems to have gone by this concept pretty hard and
has balanced all the facts of revolution’s great personalities with some
special attention to the human context as well. This special treatment helped
the fabric of a whole society to rip open. In the current trends followed, it
is quite unfashionable to talk about the national characters, since the
rhetoric of the national character has been quite easily adopted by the right
wing to serve the purposes of racism and prejudice. As a result of this, all
the arguments that Figes came up with were completely untrammeled by the
political correctness, and they have the ring of truth by default.
In
this book, Figes put forward the proposal that the Russian Revolution went from
1891 to 1924, and they are rightly debatable. While there have been some vague
ideas regarding when the revolution actually was begun, most of the events
justify the dates to be 1891 and 1924; however, they are convincingly
predictable as well. The effect of choosing these dates for the revolution was
Figes found it easy to tell his readers the story of two tragedies that occurred
consequently. The first being the demise of the nobility, and the second one
that followed was the brutal horror of the revolution itself and the
dehumanization of the entire population. These two events and its outcomes kept
mounting together resulting in the burst out through the Russian Revolution.
There
are quite a few interesting styles and trends noticed in his form of writing. Orlando
Figes proved his knowledge in ancient history by
following the Tolstoyan style where he kept on telling some stories in between
of the individuals who held medium importance, and this actually helped him in
depicting the real picture of what men did during the course of the revolution.
These individual narratives turned out to be outright prototypical and
emblematic in some ways as well.
It
is the game of signifier and the signified that kept on tussling in between the
narratives, and in this mind game, the micro-narratives took their form and
shape, making the book a cult in the history of Russian Revolution.
