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My Favourite Book of 2014, Jamie Broadhurst
by Jamie
History / December 11, 2014
Orlando Figes had me at the opening sentence of Revolutionary Russia 1891-1991: A History, “My aim is to provide a brief account of the Russian Revolution in the longue durée, to chart one hundred years of history as a single revolutionary cycle.”
This takes me right back to my happiest days at school reading French medieval social history and Soviet politics. The longue durée is a style of historiography that tries to show that history happens at a deeper social, material and environmental level than a purely political narrative can capture. A lot of these types of books are massive, this is not a big book in the traditional sense. Revolutionary Russia is a beautifully written work of historical concision; precise and clipped but never feeling rushed. It is a literary work that befits a recipient of the Wolfson History Prize. His writing stimulates all sorts of fresh questions and opens up vistas into the deeply tragic Soviet experience from which the reader can think about more deeply. I wish I had this excellent book in school. It is the best single volume on Soviet history I have ever read.
Figes picks his details like novelist. Like for example, the night of the October insurrection when the Lenin is smuggled back in Petrograd but is stopped by a policeman—he is not recognized and is allowed to pass, and rushes off to bully the Central Committee into launching the October revolution. A great “What If? “ question of history. And the torture techniques of the Red Terror during the Civil War in places read likes pages out of 1984 and Room 101: what is with police states and torture by rabid rats eating flesh? Or the social mobility caused by Stalin’s purges where young apparatchiks took the job titles and prestige of their seniors who were dragged off to the Gulag. The fact that Brezhnev and Khrushchev were both promoted off the factory floor in 1928 in the wake of their immediate party superiors being arrested personalizes the argument about the social basis of Stalinism in a way I hadn’t thought about before.
Soviet foreign policy also comes into sharper relief. That Castro and Cuba voluntarily chose Communism led the Kremlin to remember too fondly the lost opportunity of the suppressed Soviet uprisings of 1918 across Europe and to over play their hand in the Caribbean. This rings true to me for all countries are haunted by the spectre of the past success and failures (to misquote Marx). And the immense fortitude of the Soviet people to endure the unbearable comes across in almost every page; the slave labor used to dig the White Canal by hand in which tens of thousands died (and was used as PR triumph by the regime) or the great Patriotic War where the daily loss of life was double the Allied losses on D-Day. That is two D-Days every day for four years.
Revolutionary Russia came out earlier this year, just as Russia was pushing back into its traditional spheres of influence in Crimea and the Ukraine, acting on imperatives that would have been well understood by the Soviet regime. In doing so, the contours and control of the security state run by the former KGB officer Vladimir Putin have become ever more apparent. The last question then is whether Figes has been too optimistic in dating the end of the Revolution at 1991, perhaps the longue durée of Soviet history is longer than we suspected.
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communism favourite books 2014 history orlando figes russia russian revolution soviet history
