Orlando Figes - A people's tragedy 2017 edition

class="book">22 Peasant women hauling a barge

23 Twin brothers, former serfs, from Chernigov province

24 A typical Russian peasant household

25 A meeting of village elders

26 A religious procession in Smolensk province

27 The living space of four Moscow factory workers

28 Inside a Moscow engineering works

Dramatis Personae

29 General Brusilov

30 Maxim Gorky

31 Prince G. E. Lvov

32 Sergei Semenov

33 Dmitry Os’kin

34 Alexander Kerensky

35 Lenin

36 Trotsky

37 Alexandra Kollontai

Between Revolutions

38 Soldiers fire at the demonstrating workers on ‘Bloody Sunday’, 1905

39 Demonstrators confront mounted Cossacks during 1905

40 The opening of the State Duma in April 1906

41 The Tauride Palace

42 Petr Stolypin

43 Wartime volunteers pack parcels for the Front

44 A smart dinner party sees in the New Year of 1917

45 Troops pump out a trench on the Northern Front

46 Cossacks patrol the streets of Petrograd in February 1917

47 The arrest of a policeman during the February Days

48 Moscow workers playing with the stone head of Alexander II

49 A crowd burns tsarist emblems during the February Days

50 The crowd outside the Tauride Palace during the February Days

51 Soldiers receive news of the Tsar’s abdication

Images of 1917

52 The First Provisional Government in the Marinsky Palace

53 The burial of victims of the February Revolution

54 A meeting of the Soviet of Soldiers’ Deputies

55 Waiters and waitresses of Petrograd on strike

56 The All-Russian Congress of Peasant Deputies

57 Fedor Linde leads an anti-war demonstration by the Finland Regiment during the April Crisis

58 Kerensky makes a speech to soldiers at the Front

59 Patriarch Nikon blesses the Women’s Battalion of Death

60 General Kornilov’s triumphant arrival in Moscow during the State Conference

61 Members of the Women’s Battalion of Death in the Winter Palace on 25 October

62 Some of Kerensky’s last defenders in the Winter Palace on 25 October

63 The Smolny Institute

64 The Red Guard of the Vulkan Factory

The Civil War

65 General Alexeev

66 General Denikin

67 Admiral Kolchak

68 Baron Wrangel

69 Members of the Czech Legion in Vladivostok

70 A group of White officers during a military parade in Omsk

71 A strategic meeting of Red partisans

72 An armoured train

73 The Latvian Division passing through a village

74 Two Red Army soldiers take a break

75 Red Army soldiers reading propaganda leaflets

76 A Red Army mobile library in the village

77 Nestor Makhno

78 The execution of a peasant by the Whites

79 Jewish victims of a pogrom

80 Red Army soldiers torture a Polish officer

Everyday Life Under the Bolsheviks

81 Muscovites dismantle a house for firewood

82 A priest helps transport timber

83 Women of the ‘former classes’ sell their last possessions

84 A soldier buys a pair of shoes from a group of burzhoois

85 Haggling over a fur scarf at the Smolensk market in Moscow

86 Traders at the Smolensk market

87 Two ex-tsarist officers are made to clear the streets

88 Cheka soldiers close down traders’ stalls in Moscow

89 Requisitioning the peasants’ grain

90 ‘Bagmen’ on the railways

91 The 1 May subbotnik on Red Square in Moscow, 1920

92 An open-air cafeteria at the Kiev Station in Moscow

93 Delegates of the Ninth All-Russian Party Congress

94 The Agitation and Propaganda Department of the Commissariat for Supply and Distribution in the Northern Region

95 The Smolny Institute on the anniversary of the October coup

The Revolutionary Inheritance

96 Red Army troops assault the mutinous Kronstadt Naval Base

97 Peasant rebels attack a train of requisitioned grain

98 Bolshevik commissars inspect the harvest failure in the Volga region

99 Unburied corpses from the famine crisis

100 Cannibals with their victims

101 Street orphans in Saratov hunt for food in a rubbish tip

102 The Secretary of the Tula Komsomol

103 A juvenile unit of the Red Army in Turkestan

104 Red Army soldiers confiscate valuables from the Semenov Monastery

105 A propaganda meeting in Bukhara

106 Two Bolshevik commissars in the Far East

107 The dying Lenin in 1923

Photographic Credits

Bakhmeteff Archive, Columbia University: 58; California Museum of Photography, University of California, Riverside: 20. Hoover Institution of War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford, California: 82–4; Life on the Russian Country Estate. A Social and Cultural history, by Priscilla Roosevelt (Yale University Press, 1995): 26; Museum of the Revolution, Moscow: 7, 15, 36, 52, 61–2, 77–8, 90; Photokhronika Tass, Moscow: 107; private collections: 10, 32, 97; Russian in Original Photographs 1860–1920, by Marvin Lyons (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1977): 25, 47; Russie, 1904–1924: La Révolution est là, (Baschet, Paris, 1978): 80; Russian Century, The, by Brian Moynahan (Chatto & Windus, London, 1994): 13, 28 (courtesy of Slava Katamidze Collection/Endeavour Group, London), 46 (Courtesy of the Endeavour Group, London); Russian State Archive of Film and Photographic Documents, Krasnogorsk: 18–19, 21–3, 35, 37–8, 40, 45, 48, 51, 59–60, 65–71, 73–6, 79, 81, 85–93, 98–106; Russian State Military History Archive, Moscow: 29; Saltykov-Shchedrin Library, St Petersburg: 12; State Archive of Film and Photographic Documents, St Petersburg: 1–6, 8–9, 11, 14, 16–17, 24, 27, 30–1, 34, 39, 41–4, 49–50, 53–7, 63–4, 72, 94–6; Tula District Museum: 33.

Note on Dates

Until February 1918 Russia adhered to the Julian (Old Style) calendar, which ran thirteen days behind the Gregorian (New Style) calendar in use in Western Europe. The Soviet government switched to the New Style calendar at midnight on 31 January 1918: the next day was declared 14 February. Dates relating to domestic events are given in the Old Style up until 31 January 1918; and in the New Style after that. Dates relating to international events (e.g. diplomatic negotiations and military battles

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