Top 24 Orlando Figes Quotes
#1. Time and time again, the obstinate refusal of the tsarist regime to concede reforms turned what should have been a political problem into a revolutionary crisis ... the tsarist regime's downfall was not inevitable; but its own stupidity made it so.
Orlando Figes
#2. Whereas in Western countries the constitution merely had to guarantee the rights of a per-existing civil society and culture, in Russia it also had to create these. It had to educate society - and the state itself - into the values and ideas of liberal constitutionalism.
Orlando Figes
#3. The remarkable thing about the Bolshevik insurrection is that hardly any of the Bolshevik leaders had wanted it to happen until a few hours before it began.
Orlando Figes
#4. Everybody cursed the Bolsheviks but nobody was prepared to do anything about them.
Orlando Figes
#5. It was ironic but somehow fitting that the 1905 Revolution should have been started by an organisation dreamed up by the tsarist regime itself. No-one believed more than Father Gapon in the bond between Tsar and people.
Orlando Figes
#6. The word 'soviet' means 'council' in Russian (there was nothing particularly Communist about it until after 1917).
Orlando Figes
#7. Lenin's Personal life was extraordinarily dull. He dressed and lived like a middle-aged provincial clerk, with precisely fixed hours for meals, sleep, work and leisure. He liked everything to be neat and orderly.
Orlando Figes
#8. Pavlik denounced his father's crimes, and when Trofim shouted out, 'It's me, your father,' the boy told the judge: 'Yes, he used to be my father, but I no longer consider him my father. I am not acting as a son, but as a Pioneer.
Orlando Figes
#9. To the less privileged it was this arbitrariness that made the regime's power feel so oppressive. There were no clear principles or regulations which enabled the individual to challenge authority or the state.
Orlando Figes
#11. Their notion of training was to march the men up and down in parades and reviews: these were nice to look at and gave them the impression of military discipline and precision, but as a preparation for a modern war they had no value whatsoever.
Orlando Figes
#12. Lenin was always prone to overestimate the physical danger to himself: in this respect he was something of a coward.
Orlando Figes
#13. Sveta had much less to say, but she sat with Lev and held his hand, and when I asked her what had made her fall in love with him, she replied, 'I knew he was my future. When he was not there, I would look for him, and he would always appear by my side. That is love.'
Sveta
Orlando Figes
#14. Whereas land reform was the first act of the Bolsheviks, it was the last act of the Whites: that, in a peasant country, says it all.
Orlando Figes
#15. On the news that the Tsar had sent the troops icons to boost their morals, General Dragomirov quipped: 'The Japanese are beating us with machine-guns, but never mind: we'll beat them with icons.
Orlando Figes
#16. There is no sadder symbol of the crippling poverty in which millions of peasants were forced to live than the image of a peasant and his son struggling to drag a plough through the mud.
Orlando Figes
#17. For the Romanov regime fell under the weight of its own internal contradictions. It was not overthrown.
Orlando Figes
#18. The 'noble savage' whom the Populists had seen in the simple peasant was, as Gorky now concluded, no more than a romantic illusion. And the more he experienced the everyday life of the peasant, the more he denounced them as savage and barbaric.
Orlando Figes
#19. I, Nikolai Ivanov, renounce my father, an ex-priest, because for many years he deceived the people by telling them that God exists, and that is the reason I am severing all my relations with him.77
Orlando Figes
#20. It was not Marxism that made Lenin a revolutionary but Lenin who made Marxism revolutionary.
Orlando Figes
#21. The currents of modern civilization had somehow passed it by, and as he returned to it now, fresh from the sides of England and France, Sergei Semenov saw only familiar signs of backwardness and decay.
Orlando Figes
#22. Gorky called for the building of a monument to the young martyr, who, the writer said, had 'understood that a relative by blood may also be an enemy of the spirit, and that such a person is not to be spared'.69
Orlando Figes
#23. The Provisional Government had lost effective military control of the capital a full two days before the armed uprising began. This was the essential fact of the whole insurrection: without it one cannot explain the ease of the Bolshevik victory.
Orlando Figes
#24. The peasant also found another use for this sacred object. 'He says of the icon: "It's good for praying -- and you can cover the pots with it too.
Orlando Figes
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