A People's Tragedy

The book chronicles Russian history from the famine of 1891-1892, the response to which Figes argues to have severely weakened the Russian Empire, to the death of Lenin in 1924, when "the basic elements of the Stalinist regime - the one-party state, the system of terror and the cult of the personality - were all in place". According to Figes "the whole of 1917 could be seen as a political battle between those who saw the revolution as a means of bringing the war to an end and those who saw the war as a means of bringing the revolution to an end".[1]

A People's Tragedy won the Wolfson History Prize, the WH Smith Literary Award, the NCR Book Award, the Longman/History Today Book Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In 2008, the Times Literary Supplement listed it as one of the "hundred most influential books since the war".[2] Eric Hobsbawm, reviewing the book, called it a "very impressive piece of history-writing."[3]

• Figes, Orlando (1996). A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891–1924. London: Jonathan Cape. p. 923. ISBN 0-224-04162-2.
• Figes, Orlando (1997-03-01). A People's Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution. New York: Viking. pp. 960. ISBN 0-670-85916-8. First American Edition