A People's Tragedy

A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891–1924 is an award-winning book written by British historian Orlando Figes. First published in 1996, it chronicles Russian history from the Famine of 1891-1892, the response to which, Figes argues, 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." 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 A People's Tragedy as one of the "hundred most influential books since the war".