[From the YouTube description] After almost 1,000 pages of reading this, A PEOPLE'S TRAGEDY: THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 1891-1924 by Orlando Figes might just be the gold standard for a single-volume narrative history on the subject.

In this (probably too long) video essay/book review we'll go from the Romanov's repeatedly shooting themself in the dong to Lenin and the Bolsheviks seizing power while digging into some of the most fascinating, absurd and devastating stories from one of history's most consequential revolutions.

We're also gonna get into:

• Rasputin's outrageous reputation (and yes, the obsession about his... you know)

• Why the February Revolution happened without Lenin

• The political chaos after the fall of the tsar

• The spectacularly botched storming of the Winter Palace

• How the Bolsheviks consolidated power

• The Russian Civil War and the Red and White Terrors

• The Kronstadt rebellion and revolutionaries turning against the revolution

• The bizarre ambition to engineer a new kind of human being

• The catastrophic famine of 1921–22

• The ordinary people caught up in all this, including some genuinely heartbreaking stories