How long does it take to read A People's Tragedy?
A People's Tragedy by Orlando Figes takes about 16 hours 55 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 16 hours 55 minutes
A long haul
First published 1996. 923 pages, about 253,825 words.
34 days (about 5 weeks) at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 28 hours 12 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 16 hours 55 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 10 hours 35 minutes |
The page count is the median across 15 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
It is a history on an epic yet human scale. Orlando Figes provides a panorama of Russian society on the eve of the revolution, and then narrates the story of how these social forces were violently suppressed. Within the broad strokes of war and revolution are miniature histories of individuals - pieced together from their private writings - in which Figes follows the main players' fortunes as they saw their hopes die and their world crash into ruins. There is the patriotic general Brusilov, the progressive peasant Semenov, the critical socialist Maxim Gorky...individuals whose lives collapsed under the weight of history. Thus develops a remarkable and unique perspective on what is considered by some to be the century's most important event. Figes depicts the revolution as a tragedy - both for the Russians as a people and for so many individuals whose lives became caught up in the storm. Yet he also shows that the major social forces - the peasantry, the workers, the soldiers, and the subject people of the empire - were not just the victims of the Bolsheviks but also actors in their own complex revolutionary tragedies. Figes argues that the failure of democracy in 1917 was deeply rooted in Russian culture and social history and that what had begun as a people's revolution contained the seeds of its degeneration into violence and dictatorship.
Subjects: History, Russia, Soviet Union, Revolution, Bürgerkrieg, Geschichte
