Synopsis
This is the first book in any language to offer a comprehensive analysis of the political culture of the Russian Revolution. Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii examine the diverse ways that language and other symbols - including flags and emblems, public rituals, songs, and codes of dress - were used to identify competing sides and to create new meanings in the political struggles of 1917. The Revolution was in many ways a battle to control these systems of symbolic meaning, the authors find. The party or faction that could master the complexities of the lexicon of the revolution was well on its way to mastering the revolution itself. The book explores how key words and symbols took on different meanings in various social and political contexts. 'Democracy', 'the people', or 'the working class', for example, could define a wide range of identities and moral worlds in 1917. In addition to such ambiguities, cultural tensions further complicated the revolutionary struggles. Figes and Kolonitskii consider the fundamental clash between the Western political discourse of the socialist parties and the traditional political culture of the Russian masses. They show how the particular conditions and perceptions that coloured Russian politics in 1917 led to the emergence of the cult of the revolutionary leader and the culture of the Terror. Orlando Figes was Professor of History at Birkbeck College, London. He is the author of 'Peasant Russia', 'Civil War' and 'A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924'. Boris Kolonitskii was Senior Researcher at the Institute of History of the Academcy of Sciences in St. Petersburg.
Review
Compared to the gargantuan, award-winning study of the Russian Revolution,A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924, which consolidated Figes' reputation as one of the foremost authorities on the subject, this volume appears almost as an afterthought, running to less than 200 pages. Appearances, though, are by design deceptive, something the authors prove in their comprehensive analysis of the cultural manifestations and struggles that defined the events of 1917. Spin-doctors are taken to be a late 20th- century phenomenon, but there is little new under the sun. The rumour mongers who flooded Petrograd with tales of court debauchery, Rasputin and Germanic "dark forces", significantly helped Tsar Nicholas II bring about his own downfall, but what did not disappear with the hapless monarch were Tsarist attitudes. The workers, the peasants, the people (all terms endlessly defined and argued over) still demanded an authoritarian figure, which in turn allowed a cult of personality to develop, raising and then dashing characters such as Kerensky and Kournilov. In truth, Russia was a rather ugly patchwork of sects and divisions who were united only by their obeisance to a brutal creed of "them" and "us", though who was who remained ambiguous at best. "Bourgeois" meant all things to all men and when corrupted to the word "Burzhooi" was applied by peasants to all selfish, foreign, wealthy or educated persons, or in other words, not themselves. "Democracy" lost its constitutional gladrags in the mêlée, being used by the populace as the diametrical opposite to "bourgeois". Clothes, songs, flags and language became potent, stirring symbols (even prostitutes courted men with the cry "share some fraternity!"), as all sides struggled to define a lexicon of battle and to lay sole claim to the emblems of revolution. Figes and Kolonitskii dissect the semiotics of revolution with a thoroughness that does not prove intrusive to what is a fluid and commanding sociological text. From disparate, gabbling voices they've pieced together an alternative, mellifluous history of the symbolism endemic in 1917 Russia, which proves a small, but not slight, coda to its mammoth predecessor.--David Vincent
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