Reworking Russia's History: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

Robert Service, A History of Twentieth-Century Russia, is a traditional political history, focusing on the Soviet experience from the standpoint of its chief policymakers. Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924, is a more nuanced social and political analysis of the Russian revolutionary period. Despite the respective strengths of these studies, neither breaks substantially new historiographical or methodological ground, and neither seriously engages questions of gender.