Revolutionary Russia 1891-1991: A History by Orlando Figes Metropolitan Books 4 stars Nick Walker "We want the USSR back!" was a separatist slogan heard in a restive city in eastern Ukraine, by a correspondent for a major British daily. So Orlando Figes' Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991: A History is eerily timely. The conventional narrative is that the Russian revolution took place in October 1917, and launched the world's first communist state. However, Figes argues that the revolution was continuous phenomena covering a century of Russian history, and which unfolded in three "movements". Delving deep, Figes identifies the period 1891 to 1922 as the first movement. The famine of 1891 provided a catalyst for revolutionary change in impoverished 19th-century Russia. Drawing from a widespread sense of oppression and neglect, Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik peers were able to build up a power base. The second stage, led by the heirs of the founding generation of the revolution, was the age of Joseph Stalin, war and peace, and terror. Despite the paranoia of Stalin's three-decade-long rule, Figes notes that the dictator is held in high regard by many Russians today. The third movement of the revolution started in 1956, three years after Stalin's death, with Nikita Khruschev's speech denouncing his dictatorial predecessor. The generation of 1956 was the one that guided the revolution until its 1991 demise. The Sino-Soviet split took place during this phase of the revolution, with the catalyst being a speech Khruschev made on the 40th anniversary of the October revolution. He asserted that the USSR would overtake the US in industrial output within 15 years, a proclamation that goaded a suddenly competitive Mao Zedong into saying the same would apply to China overtaking Britain in the same way over the same period. From this point the two giant communist states also competed for power and influence over the developing world. Figes explains that while China adhered to the Leninist model, the Soviet Union in the 1960s wanted something of a break from the bonds of the revolution's origins, and became more progressive. And so from the late 1950s through the 1960s, China lambasted the Soviet Union as "a revisionist state", and ties soured until the unseemly but brief 1969 border war along the Amur River. The schism only began to thaw when Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev visited Beijing in 1989. In the last section of the book, the author reflects on the trauma of the collapse and on lingering Russian perceptions of its revolution that shook the world.
