[7][8][4] In line with his title, Figes offers an unqualifiedly negative assessment of the revolution due to its alleged failure to overcome the social inequality of the Tsarist era and its apparent unpopularity, expressed in various revolts against the Bolsheviks by 1921.

[6] The dominant colouring of the account has been described as "dark, at times completely black"[12] and the attribution of the Russian people's incapacity for self-government to their deep-seated political and cultural legacy said to advance a fatalistic philosophy of history.

[8][4][2] While Figes's first book used archival sources to offer a structural analysis of Russian peasant society through the quantitative method, A People's Tragedy consciously departs from this approach and puts the anecdote first in its pursuit of the individual experience of the revolution.

One reviewer contrasted the "aggressive promotion" of the book, which he considered "a market-driven piece of history", with the reception of its more scholarly predecessor, the "perceptive and path-breaking" Peasant Russia, Civil War (1989).

[2] Richard J. Evans, Figes' predecessor at Birkbeck, characterised A People's Tragedy 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".