"Sometimes, history needs a push."
When Vladimir Lenin spoke these words, he thrust himself into one of history's oldest debates: Do great individuals shape the course of human events, or do larger forces—social currents, economic conditions, the movement of masses—determine our collective fate?
Leo Tolstoy had his answer. Throughout War and Peace, he argues relentlessly that leaders are mere vessels, carried along by tides they can neither create nor control. Karl Marx offered his own verdict through historical materialism, insisting that class struggle and economic transformation, not individual brilliance, drive history forward.
Both men seem vindicated by the story of Russia leading up to 1917. The tsarist autocracy was crumbling under the weight of its own contradictions—industrialization without reform, war without victory, power without legitimacy. Its collapse felt inevitable, a conclusion written by forces far beyond any single person's command.
Yet what happened in November 1917 defies such determinism. In that moment, one man's will, one man's push, redirected the course of the twentieth century. Without Lenin, our world would be unrecognizable.
This is an exploration of that paradox, viewed through Orlando Figes's masterwork, A People's Tragedy—one of the most acclaimed accounts of the Russian Revolution ever written.
“It is possible to argue that the really influential book is not that which converts ten millions of casual readers, but rather that which converts the very few who, at any given moment, succeed in seizing power. Marx and Sorel have been influential in the modern world, not so much because they were best-sellers, but because among their few readers were two men, called respectively Lenin and Mussolini.”
Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World