
A People’s Tragedy
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Narrated by:
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Roger Davis
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By:
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Orlando Figes
About this listen
Opening with a panorama of Russian society, from the cloistered world of the Tsar to the brutal life of the peasants, A People’s Tragedy follows workers, soldiers, intellectuals and villagers as their world is consumed by revolution and then degenerates into violence and dictatorship.
Drawing on vast original research, Figes conveys above all the shocking experience of the revolution for those who lived it, while providing the clearest and most cogent account of how and why it unfolded.
Now including a new introduction that reflects on the revolution’s centennial legacy, A People’s Tragedy is a masterful and definitive record of one of the most important events in modern history.
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Story
The Russian Revolution of 1917 was one of the most cataclysmic events in world history, profoundly shaping politics, international relations, social patterns, economics and science in the century that followed. It created long-lasting aftershocks which travelled far beyond its geographical borders. How did it happen? What were the sequence of events that led, following the shocking upheaval of the old Romanov order, to a fierce and violent rivalry between a variety of revolutionary factions and the ultimate victory of the Bolsheviks?
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One of the Greatest Works of History Ever Written
- By Sophie on 12-01-22
By: Leon Trotsky
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The Soviet Century
- By: Moshe Lewin, Gregory Elliott - editor
- Narrated by: Rich Miller
- Length: 16 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Departing from a simple linear history, The Soviet Century traces all the continuities and ruptures that led from the founding revolution of October 1917, to the final collapse of the late 1980s and early 1990s, passing through the Stalinist dictatorship, the impossible reforms of the Khrushchev years, and the glasnost and perestroika policies of Gorbachev.
By: Moshe Lewin, and others
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The Russian Revolution
- By: Sheila Fitzpatrick
- Narrated by: Steve Fortune
- Length: 7 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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The Russian Revolution had a decisive impact on the history of the 20th century. In the years following the collapse of the Soviet regime and the opening of its archives, it has become possible to step back and see the full picture. Starting with an overview of the roots of the revolution, Fitzpatrick takes the story from 1917, through Stalin's "revolution from above", to the great purges of the 1930s.
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Skewed West
- By Amazon Customer on 02-02-24
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The Russian Revolution
- A New History
- By: Sean McMeekin
- Narrated by: Pete Larkin
- Length: 15 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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From an award-winning scholar comes this definitive, single-volume history that illuminates the tensions and transformations of the Russian Revolution. In The Russian Revolution, acclaimed historian Sean McMeekin traces the events which ended Romanov rule, ushered the Bolsheviks into power, and introduced Communism to the world. Between 1917 and 1922, Russia underwent a complete and irreversible transformation.
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Great Book on the Russian Revolution
- By Nostromo on 09-02-17
By: Sean McMeekin
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The House of Government
- A Saga of the Russian Revolution
- By: Yuri Slezkine, Claire Bloom - director
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 45 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction. The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment.
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Inside saga of the leaders of Bolshevism & the USSR
- By Edward V. Blanchard on 11-05-17
By: Yuri Slezkine, and others
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The Soviet Century
- Archaeology of a Lost World
- By: Karl Schlogel, Rodney Livingstone - translator
- Narrated by: Ciaran Saward
- Length: 29 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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The Soviet Union is gone, but its ghostly traces remain, not least in the material vestiges left behind in its turbulent wake. What was it really like to live in the USSR? What did it look, feel, smell, and sound like? In The Soviet Century, Karl Schlögel, one of the world's leading historians of the Soviet Union, presents a spellbinding epic that brings to life the everyday world of a unique lost civilization. A museum of—and travel guide to—the Soviet past, The Soviet Century explores in evocative detail both the largest and smallest aspects of life in the USSR.
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Great work
- By J. H. Robinson on 07-28-24
By: Karl Schlogel, and others
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A Concise History of Russia
- By: Paul Bushkovitch
- Narrated by: Adam Barr
- Length: 20 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Accessible to students, tourists, and general listeners alike, this book provides a broad overview of Russian history since the ninth century. Paul Bushkovitch emphasizes the enormous changes in the understanding of Russian history resulting from the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since then, new material has come to light on the history of the Soviet era, providing new conceptions of Russia's pre-revolutionary past.
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Exhaustive history
- By nancy riffle on 05-16-23
By: Paul Bushkovitch
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Russia
- Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921
- By: Antony Beevor
- Narrated by: Rob Heaps
- Length: 21 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Between 1917 and 1921 a devastating struggle took place in Russia following the collapse of the Tsarist empire. The doomed White alliance of moderate socialists and reactionary monarchists stood little chance against Trotsky’s Red Army and the single-minded Communist dictatorship under Lenin.
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Not Enough Context
- By Amazon Customer on 02-14-23
By: Antony Beevor
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The Great Terror
- A Reassessment
- By: Robert Conquest
- Narrated by: Frederick Davidson
- Length: 30 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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The definitive work on Stalin's purges, The Great Terror was universally acclaimed when it first appeared in 1968. While the original volume had relied heavily on unofficial sources, later developments within the Soviet Union provided an avalanche of new material, which Conquest has mined to write this revised and updated edition of his classic work.
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Compelling and Devestating
- By A Midwesterner in Jersey on 07-01-09
By: Robert Conquest
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Stalin
- New Biography of a Dictator
- By: Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Nora Seligman Favorov - translator
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim
- Length: 18 hrs
- Unabridged
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This essential biography, by the author most deeply familiar with the vast archives of the Soviet era, offers an unprecedented, fine-grained portrait of Stalin, the man and dictator. Without mythologizing Stalin as either benevolent or an evil genius, Khlevniuk resolves numerous controversies about specific events in the dictator's life while assembling many hundreds of previously unknown letters, memos, reports, and diaries into a comprehensive, compelling narrative of a life that altered the course of world history.
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Loved it, but wouldn't want to live it
- By Neil on 01-12-20
By: Oleg V. Khlevniuk, and others
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The Last Empire
- The Final Days of the Soviet Union
- By: Serhii Plokhy
- Narrated by: Alex Wyndham
- Length: 15 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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On Christmas, 1991, President George H. W. Bush addressed the nation to declare an American victory in the Cold War: Earlier that day Mikhail Gorbachev had resigned as the first and last Soviet president. The enshrining of that narrative, one in which the end of the Cold War was linked to the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the triumph of democratic values over communism, took center stage in American public discourse immediately after Bush's speech and has persisted for decades. As Serhii Plokhy reveals, the collapse of the Soviet Union was anything but the handiwork of the US.
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Full of Holes; Horrid Narrator
- By Donald on 03-02-23
By: Serhii Plokhy
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The Cultural Revolution
- A People's History, 1962—1976
- By: Frank Dikötter
- Narrated by: Daniel York Loh
- Length: 15 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives between 1958 and 1962, an ageing Mao launched an ambitious scheme to shore up his reputation and eliminate those he viewed as a threat to his legacy. The stated goal of the Cultural Revolution was to purge the country of bourgeois, capitalist elements he claimed were threatening genuine communist ideology. But the Chairman also used the Cultural Revolution to turn on his colleagues, some of them longstanding comrades-in-arms, subjecting them to public humiliation, imprisonment and torture.
By: Frank Dikötter
A Great Story
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Excellent History of Russian Revolution
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I bought this book because I wanted to know more about why the Russian Revolution happened, how and why the Bolsheviks managed to grab and hold power from the democratic revolution of early 1917 and how and why the Whites lost the resulting civil war, but learned as well how little I actually knew of Russia before the revolution, how poor the peasants were, how little experience Russians had with democratic institutions, how blind the Monarchy and Nobility were in understanding what was happening and how close Lenin and the Bolsheviks came to failing. I started this book understanding very little of what happened and why, and finished knowing a great deal more about the causes of the revolution and why all of the counter-revolutionary movements failed, even though the people were sick of the tyranny of the Bolsheviks.
The book, at 48 hours, is long but never boring. The history and politics of what was happening is clearly explained, the roles of those involved are clear and the failures of many of those involved are clearly related to their unwillingness to see what was happening rather than see what they wanted to see. The book is not kind to the Bolsheviks and it is clear from his speeches and letters that Lenin himself was the main reason that the revolution turned from its democratic beginnings and became the tyranny that caused the deaths of thousands in The Terror and of millions in the great famine, as well as the beginnings of the police state. Prior to reading this book I was familiar with many of the names of those in the Bolshevik movement - Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Kamenev and others - but could not have explained precisely what they believed and how their views differed from each other, from Lenin and from Stalin, but all of that is also covered in this book.
Parts of the book are difficult to listen to, particularly those involving the famine and the forcible requisitioning of food and grain from the farmers. Those people become real in the telling rather than just the statistic they used to be for me, and the tragedy, made by the Bolshevik leaders, is painful to read about with only the saving grace of the relief effort made by the United States to feed those who were starving and provide grain for future harvests. In addition the wide-spread torture used by both the Reds and Whites as well as the pogroms against the Jews are covered and are painful to listen to.
The narration is excellent, the material is well organized and makes a history of what happened and why it happened easy to understand. The book also explains how Stalin gathered his power and became head of the Soviet government after the death of Lenin in spite of Lenin’s attempt to prevent his rise to power,
Highly recommended for anyone interested in this period of history.
The three Russian Revolutions
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Easily one of the top 100 books in History ... maybe one of the top 100 books in all topics
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Excellent
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excellent and not dry
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Narration sometimes sounds arrogant and all-knowing rather than compassionate
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Revolution, or perhaps I should say revolutions. The book is exhaustively researched,
well written and cogently argued.
Figes starts with the background of Russian society, from the centuries of poverty and
isolation of the peasants to the blindness of the Romanovs both to the sufferings of the
Russian people and to the social and political developments of the West and of Japan.
The book traces the many decades of failed reform efforts, the inabilities of reformers to
connect with the peasants, the social isolation of the urban intelligentsia and the popular
frustration and anger resulting from the failed reforms and the intractability of the tsars,
the aristocracy and the church.
Figes shows how the mobilization and industrialization of WWI gave the socialists
access to organized groups of workers, soldiers and sailors, and how the losses,
privations and general hopelessness resulting from the war galvanized the frustration
and anger of the populace to bring down the tsar. Given the lack of any tradition of self-
government beyond the local peasant commune, however, there was no societal
commitment to a democratic government and thus no viable successor to the tsarist
state.
Most of the socialists were tied to doctrinaire Marxism and believed that a bourgeois
society had to be created before socialism could take hold. Their efforts to this end, in
the interim government, further alienated both workers and peasants. Figes shows how
the Bolsheviks were able to capitalize on popular frustration with the slow pace of the
liberals’ reforms, and the anger with continued involvement in WWI, to quash all the
reform efforts and seize power. He shows how the Bolsheviks then betrayed, and
subverted the work of, the local soviets, peasant communes, workers’ committees and
soldiers’ committees, all of which had helped to bring down the tsar, in order to
consolidate their power. Figes also illustrates Lenin’s megalomania and unwillingness
to tolerate any true collaboration, leading to a new autocracy, police state, terror, famine
and eventually Stalinism.
The book discusses how the new Bolshevik totalitarianism mirrored so many aspects of
the old autocracy, from its use of terror to the prevalence of privilege and corruption.
The main difference between the two regimes was that the new masters came from the
same social class as those they ruled. This made it easier for the workers and
peasants to sympathize with, or perhaps tolerate, the Bolsheviks in the civil war, rather
than the Whites.
The foreword to the latest edition discusses the lasting effects of the Revolution and
paints a depressing picture of Russia under Putin.
Exhaustively Researched and Well Written
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Beautiful, detailed, long
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Extraordinary
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