A People's Tragedy — Orlando Figes

Figes traces the Russian Revolution from its origins in the late Tsarist period through the chaos of 1917 and the civil war that followed, drawing on memoirs, letters, and provincial records to reconstruct the revolution as it was experienced by ordinary Russians rather than simply as an event made by the Bolsheviks. The result is a history of a society coming apart — the peasant communes, the factories, the armies, the intelligentsia — in which the Bolshevik seizure of power appears as one moment in a longer catastrophe.