A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 is a history book by British historian Orlando Figes on the Russian Revolution and the years leading up to it. It was written between 1989 and 1996, and first edition was published in 1996. A second edition was prepared for the centenary in 2017.

The book chronicles Russian history from the Russian famine of 1891–1892, the response to which Figes argues to have severely weakened the Russian Empire, to the death of Lenin in 1924, when "the basic elements of the Stalinist regime – the one-party state, the system of terror and the cult of the personality – were all in place". According to Figes, "the whole of 1917 could be seen as a political battle between those who saw the revolution as a means of bringing the war to an end and those who saw the war as a means of bringing the revolution to an end".^[1]

A People's Tragedy won the Wolfson History Prize, the WH Smith Literary Award, the NCR Book Award, the Longman/History Today Book Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In 2008, the Times Literary Supplement listed it as one of the "hundred most influential books since the war".^[2]

Eric Hobsbawm, reviewing the book, called it a "very impressive piece of history-writing."^[3]

The Harvard historian Richard Pipes found scholarly shortcomings in it.^[4][which?]

Richard J. Evans, Figes' predecessor at Birkbeck, has characterised it as "an almost self-consciously literary narrative of the Russian Revolution and Civil War, weaving in the stories of individuals, some of them very obscure, to the larger picture, and eschewing ... socioeconomic and statistical analysis", and thus an example of the unacknowledged "theoretical and methodological impact of postmodernism".^[5]

A 47 hour audiobook edition of A People's Tragedy narrated by Roger Davis was released in 2018.

• Figes, Orlando (1996). A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891–1924. London: Jonathan Cape. p. 923. ISBN 0-224-04162-2.
• Figes, Orlando (1997-03-01). A People's Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution. New York: Viking. pp. 960. ISBN 0-670-85916-8. First American Edition