The October Revolution

0:00Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe.

0:32When it comes to managing money, forget the hype and look at results. Bill has a trillion dollars of secure payments powering our BillPay tools. Instead of just moving money, Bill is powering the financial operations of nearly half a million customers. So stop the guesswork and start scaling with the proven choice. Ready to talk with an expert? Visit bill.com slash proven to get started and grab a$150 gift card as a thank you. Terms and conditions apply. See offer page for details. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Ah, fall. That cozy season where we swap the swimwear for sweaters and sunnies for scarves.

1:08But before the Halloween decorations are put away or Thanksgiving table has been set, there's already holly jolly music playing in the grocery store, reminding you that the year is coming to a close. Time to kick end of year into high gear. When you use Apple Card with Apple Pay, you earn 2 % daily cash back on all purchases, including food, decorations, gifts, and more. Get a head start on your end of year purchases. Apply for your Apple Card in the wallet app on your iPhone today and start using it right away with Apple Pay. Subject to credit approval, Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank, USA, Salt Lake City Branch, terms and more at applecard.com.

1:39Therapy's biggest impact doesn't show up in some dramatic breakthrough. It shows up in the smallest moments. You bite your tongue instead of escalating. You put your phone down instead of firing off that text. You say what you actually mean instead of what would hurt someone else the most. Nobody applauds those moments, but they quietly change your life. That's what growing feels like, and that's exactly what Grow Therapy is here for. Grow is therapy that works, covered by insurance. Sessions average$21 with insurance, and some pay as little as$0, depending on their plan. There are no subscriptions, no long-term commitments.

2:16You just pay per session. Grow connects you with thousands of high-quality, licensed therapists across the U.S., offering both virtual and in-person sessions, nights and weekends. You can search by what matters, like insurance, specialty, identity, or availability. And you can book a therapy session in minutes and begin in as little as two days, not the national 48-day average. See if you could pay as little as$0 for therapy in seconds at growtherapy.com slash ACAST. That's growtherapy.com slash ACAST. growtherapy.com slash ACAST. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan.

3:02At 10 o 'clock on the evening of Wednesday the 10th of October 1917, a rather unlikely figure made his way through the streets of Petrograd. He was dressed as a priest, but beneath the clerical collar and the bushy wig of hair, was not a man of the cloth, not a disciple of the Prince of Peace. Instead, it was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, Lenin, Russia's most wanted revolutionary. He was in hiding. He had just risked all by returning from exile, so he was disguised, and he was on his way to one of the most important meetings in the history of the world, one that would change the course of the 20th and 21st centuries.

3:51His destination was 32 Karpovka, a small apartment block overlooking the Niva River. The apartment belonged to Nikolai Sukhanov, a prominent Menshevik journalist. He was a fierce critic of Lenin's Bolsheviks. They were both parties of the radical left. And it's precisely because Sukhanov was so hostile to Lenin's party that the apartment was considered a safe place for this meeting to go ahead. And there was another interesting reason why it was a perfect venue. And that's because Sukarnov's wife, Galina Flaxoman, was a secret Bolshevik. And that evening, she had gently suggested to her husband that he should spend the night near his office downtown, sparing himself the long journey home through a city where trams were unreliable.

4:38And so, while Sukarnov was away, Lenin slipped into his living room and found a table lit by a flickering lamp, around which twelve men sat. They were the members of the Bolshevik Central Committee, a small group at the summit of a small revolutionary party. And yet, in this modest apartment, they were about to make a decision with staggering consequences. Lenin always understood the power of simplicity, and tonight he'd arrived with a very simple demand. An armed uprising, a coup to take over the government of Russia. For an hour, he argued the time for waiting was over. Russia's shambolic, provisional revolutionary government was divided, it was weak.

5:23The political situation was shifting by the day. The Bolsheviks, he insisted, had to seize power before the opportunity disappeared. He was impatient. He was angry. At times he struggled to contain his temper. Occasionally his fist came down hard on the table. We must seize power now. Now is the time, was the essence of his argument. Not after another Congress. Not after an assembly has time to meet and gather legitimacy. Not wait until the government perhaps catch a lucky break, a good harvest or success in the war with Germany. They had to seize power now. But there was resistance in the room.

6:02Lenin's oldest comrades, Gryoghi Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, warned that an uprising, an armed uprising, was really a gamble with the future of the revolution. Why launch a coup, they said, when the Bolsheviks might win elections, they might win a majority in a new parliament within weeks? Why risk everything when there wasn't really the popular demand for a violent uprising? If it failed, everyone in that room would surely face execution. The argument went on and on. Seven and a half hours passed But as the night wore on Lenin slowly won the doubters round Just before dawn he asked for a vote Two voted against Ten in favour Lenin reached across the table and picked up a pencil There was no sheaf of paper at hand But he did find a children's exercise book And in that he wrote the resolution That would commit the Bolshevik leadership To armed insurrection A few lines of scrawled text in a child's notebook.

7:01That was the enormous decision. A decision taken not in a vast public meeting, parliament, or on a battlefield, but around a small table in a private apartment while much of Petrograd slept. The planning began, and within days, the Bolsheviks would move to take control of the capital. The October Revolution was about to begin. But why was Lenin and this small group of men even in a position to take over the government of one of the biggest empires on earth? What was going on? Why was Russia in such turmoil in 1917? How did this war-weary empire slip from the grip of the Romanov family and into that of the Bolsheviks?

7:39And how has this revolution come to determine the course of history since? In this episode, we're going back to St. Petersburg, going back to Petrograd, as it was called at the time in 1917, a time of revolution and war, when there were competing visions for Russia's future. and we're going to look at the extraordinary chain of events that culminated in the Bolsheviks seizure of power. To help us understand why this happened I'm really pleased to be joined by the historian and author Victor Sebastian. His book The Russian Revolution brings together the personalities, the politics and the human drama behind one of the defining events of modern history.

8:13He's also the author more recently of Weimar Germany, Death of a Democracy, there you go, which was published earlier this year and we're going to be having him back on soon to discuss all that. Now let's get into it.

8:33Victor, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. It's a great pleasure to be back, Dan. You know, this is one of those subjects, I feel very naughty because it's one of those classics where when you know there's a revolution coming, every single thing in the preceding, rather, 300 years of Russian history feels like it's been building up to this moment. How inevitable do you think it was? How desperate was the state of Russia during the First World War? I hate that word, inevitable, in any kind of historic thing, because you can always point to places where it might have been very different.

9:13Actually, this is a classic example. if the Tsar over the last 25 years had tried to I wouldn't say democratize but introduced any level of political activity things might have been different but he banned politics altogether it was a result of his view of his autocracy that just liberal people who basically supported the Tsar supported the status quo but wanted some liberal reforms, he banned any of that. And that pushed moderate conservatives to supporting the far left, which they shouldn't have. If he'd tried to bring Russia into the 20th century instead of keeping it back in the 17th century, Russia might very well have been different and there might not have been a revolution.

10:12So I don't believe it was inevitable at all. Maybe it was inevitable by 1917. And the whole point was there was no alternative in Russia because all other politics were banned. So you've got a situation where you're really a functioning autocracy. You've got sort of quite radical industrial change going on, big cities, workers, all those kind of pressures that you see across the developing world at the time. And then you get the hammer blow of the First World War. How does that sort of contribute to the tractor beam of revolution? Well, they were losing extremely badly, having already lost 10 years before that.

10:49They'd lost the war against Japan. It would show how incompetent the autocracy was. But also, it had led to economic disaster. There was really massive starvation, certainly. It was that winter of 1917. People were losing the war. People were fed up with the war. they didn't see why the war was necessary. In a way, there was more anti-war feeling in Russia than almost anywhere else in the Comitant Nations. And the extreme parties were agitating totally against the war and blaming the autocracy and blaming the Tsar for an economic disaster. And they had a point, didn't they? Because unlike Britain and even Germany, where the sort of titular commander of the armed forces might rest with the head of state, the Tsar, the Kaiser, the King, the Emperor.

11:43Actually, the Tsar had literally taken over, very publicly taken over the command, the conduct of the war. He was away at a military headquarters making decisions every day. It was a terrible mistake when he took over direct responsibility. As you said, elsewhere, the governments or the emperors were titular heads, but he took day-to-day responsibility and kept saying he was responsible. So, of course, everyone was going to blame him. It's very hard to find almost any decision in Tsar Nicholas's reign where he took the right choice. He was almost an autocrat who was wrong about almost everything from the time he took over to the time he abdicated and was then killed.

12:31Almost nothing, almost no decision went right for him. his judgment was truly appalling as a monarch. If you're an autocrat, you've got to be decided as the person who takes charge. So he's got to be held responsible. You've got to deliver the goods as an autocrat. There's no one to hide behind. So we have, as I say, covered this in recent podcasts. Please go and check them out. We've done one about Rasputin recently, all sorts of good ones. So I want, because I want Victor to really, let's focus on the communists, the Bolshevian revolution. The Bolshevian revolution. Yeah. So we've got late 1916.

13:05So as you say, it's a catastrophic disaster. We've got mass desertions. People aren't obeying their offices on the front line. Hyperinflation, bread lines. It was one of the worst winters on record for a long, long while. So there was no deliveries of grain anywhere in the cities. People were really hungry. There were famines throughout Russia, but not usually in the big cities. And there was a famine in the big cities. People say this about the French Revolution as well. Sometimes historians and political thinkers are looking for the kind of deep substructural reasons and the ideas swirling around.

13:39But on this occasion, in the cold winter, the beginning, the first few months of 1917, people are just starving to death and are getting really pissed off about it and start rioting, trying to break into shops. You end up with just a spontaneous breakdown of order in one of the most important cities in the imperial centre. Yes, that's precisely what happened. And normally what happened, the Romanovs always brought out, whenever there was trouble, they brought out their Praetorian guard, the army to guarantee their safety and to guarantee the Republic. This time, what was happening was there were a whole load of deserters from the army.

14:21And the army, it was a mutiny in most of the guards regiments in the army that really caused that revolution. They were the revolutionaries. It was the soldiers who were fighting in their unpopular war. They hated the war as much as the population did, obviously. And they'd just been put into the meat grinder in various offensives, which had sort of wiped out the old elite of this Russian Imperial Guard, who had been the sort of backstop of the Roman officers, say, for centuries. So you've got, the army's just very unreliable. It's not the same army that once was, yeah. When all the guards' regiments that were there specifically to protect the Tsar rebelled, that was it, basically.

15:03His military could not guarantee the trial safety or the continuance of the throne. He was then forced to abdicate on March 1st, 1917. And then we get this period that some people may sort of forget about, which is this very brief constitutional government. It was called the Provisional Government, and it was very provisional. It didn't last very long. So it was, I mean, provisional actually is quite a good term for it. But it was a bourgeois government, essentially. But one side of that government was the bourgeois members of the kind of parliament, but it was a fig-leaf parliament, really. But they'd made an agreement with, essentially, the mutinous armies, which formed themselves into Soviets, that they weren't going to do anything that the Soviets, this is how we get the word Soviet here, which simply means a council in Russian.

16:04Sort of army council, yeah. But the agreement was that the provisional government couldn't do anything that the Soviets disagreed with. So you have this dual government, which in the end couldn't agree on anything and broke down relatively quickly. And so you have rebellious military units. They have their own Soviets. You'd have factory Soviets as well, would you? So you'd have Soviets popping up all over the place. You'd have Soviets of cafe waiters. Oh, right. Yeah. And then you've got a sort of government of French and British-style sort of grandees, bankers, officials. And some Democrats and some liberal politicians.

16:44And they're trying to build a reasonably modern representative democracy. Okay, so it's Lenin's followers. Lenin is in exile in Switzerland writing sort of newspaper articles and drinking. Yeah, with not very many followers. Not many followers. The organized revolutionary movements, such as they are, they don't play much part in that first revolution. It's just spontaneous. It's just incredibly annoyed workers and women and people on the streets just taking matters into their own hands. Yeah, and pissed off soldiers. Right, yeah. Exactly. And they only supported this revolution when they saw that it was working, really, Lenin.

17:23Or they saw that it was actually going to bring down the Tsar at last, because otherwise it was touch and go whether they were actually going to support. They didn't want to support what was going to be another failed revolution. So it was only when it looked like working that Lenin and his group of Bolsheviks. But then they moved to get into Russia as soon as possible so that they could undermine the provisional government and seize power. So now there's a provisional government, there's a sort of chaotic scene, and this is when the more professional revolutionaries think, right, hang on a second, this regime's now ripe for the plucking.

17:56Absolutely. We are a very, very organized group who can manipulate the situation and seize power. Because in a sea of chaos, a small organized group has enormous advantages. You've also got to remember how vast Russia is. So, okay, there was power in the city in St. Petersburg, Petrograd, and Moscow, but 85 % of Russia, it was not an industrialized society in the way Germany, France, Britain was. 85 % of the workforce were on the land and were peasants on the land. So we're talking about very different places than Western Europe. But this is what I find so astonishing about this whole period. is, so this is a vast swathes of territory, often quite thinly populated, often with agricultural workers.

18:49Are they just, they're just sort of waiting to receive orders from Moscow and St. Petersburg, are they? A lot of what happened was they were also doing what the kind of Soviets were doing in the city. They were taking over the landed estates. There was a revolution all that time between February and the Bolshevik Revolution, which we'll come on to later. throughout Russia on the land, peasants were taking over the estates and driving the old landlords out. So that was happening not in an organized way by the Bolsheviks. That was happening anyway over large swathes, large swathes of Russia. The chaos was not only in the cities.

19:29The chaos was happening throughout the country and the land. A multi-layered meltdown of an entire empire. An entire way of life. So by the summer of 1917, the government is run by a chap called Kerensky. He is incredibly, he tries to prosecute the war against Germans, doesn't he? Well, that was the immediate decision made by the provisional government to continue in the war, continue the alliance with Britain and France in the war. You know, that was astonishing. And they took a gamble in the summer. They'd been on the defensive in the war for two and a half years. Basically, Russia was losing the war.

20:10Month by month, they were losing vast areas of territory and Ukraine and Belarus. They were losing the war, and it wasn't even a stalemate. They were losing, and they took the rash gamble of a big offensive to try and change the balance of power and balance of the war, which was a lamentable failure. Astonishing. So you've got this revolutionary government that hardly controls Russia, and yet it's launching this massive offensive. It couldn't control a Moscow suburb. It tried to, you know. And that was a, it was the continuation of the war that was just going continually badly that was the principal reason why that government failed.

20:52And so Lenin has been delivered by a German train from Switzerland through the German Empire and injected like a virus into the Russian Empire. Yeah. He's got lots of German cash. He's got huge amounts of German cash. which set up newspapers and set up propaganda units. And he's got a very simple message. Peace, land, bread. Peace, land, bread. So there'll be peace. We don't have to fight. We're not going to conscript your sons anymore and send them off to fight. You'll have some of your former aristocratic owners land and they'll be bread for us. Oh, he promised. He promised to give all the land to the people.

21:26He never talked about collective farms or anything like that. He said, I'm going to give you peasants land and bread. It's a very simple message. it would be very good on X or Twitter. I mean, it would be very, very simple. Imagine that. Imagine politicians winning over lots of apathetic voters with extremely simple but undeliverable messages. I know, it's so hard to imagine. So hard to believe. Yeah, so hard to imagine. How can that happen? So he says, peace and bread, you've got the sort of constitutional government are trying to sort of steer a middle way and keep the war going, but also have them sort of build a modern democracy.

22:00See, that is not a sexy rallying call, is it? No, it's not. Can't put that on a bumper sticker. No, they weren't. And Lenin actually was, on the whole, Lenin, which whom he might come on to, was an incredibly sophisticated, brilliant political tactician. He did make one error, which was to try and grab power in the summer of 1917. And then the provisional government tried to ban the, arrest some of the Bolshevik leaders. And they would have arrested Lemion except he went into hiding in Finland. But they did arrest quite a few, including Trotsky. And they tried a revolution in July, which failed.

22:48And they breathed, the provisional government breathed a bit more easily for a while. But, you know, the Bolsheviks kept their cool, gathered themselves, and organized for another try a bit later. And is that important? Because the Bolsheviks, at least they know what they're building towards. I mean, have they got a plan? They're like, yeah, we are going to just seize power around here. Whereas other people are sort of thinking about voting systems and various constitutional changes. But the Bolsheviks are not the only revolutionary group. Again, to add to the chaos upon chaos, the Bolsheviks are probably the best organised now, obviously, because they won through the best known.

23:29But there were lots and lots and lots of different revolutionary groups. There were the Mensheviks, which you know the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were slightly less extreme. But the most popular groups were socialist revolutionaries of various kinds. They were parties of the peasantry to try and take over. So the Bolsheviks were not the only group out to try and introduce a brave new world to change the world. The Bolsheviks were probably the best organized, that's all. So they're well-funded? Well-funded. So were some of the others. The Germans paid lots of different... They paid the Mensheviks.

24:12They paid other socialist revolutionary groups. It wasn't only the Bolshevites. They didn't put all their eggs. What they wanted was to knock the Russians out of the war so that they could fight on one front and they didn't have to fight on an eastern front. So they actually spent money on supporting lots of groups that might help them towards that end. You're listening to The Russian Revolution. More coming up.

24:48This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery. A detail, but suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialised. Now I wonder what all baffle historians about us. Mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different.

25:20Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at TikTok.com slash discover more.

25:31When it comes to managing money, forget the hype and look at results. Bill has a trillion dollars of secure payments powering our BillPay tools. Instead of just moving money, Bill is powering the financial operations of nearly half a million customers. So stop the guesswork and start scaling with the proven choice. Ready to talk with an expert? Visit bill.com slash proven to get started. And grab a$150 gift card as a thank you. Terms and conditions apply. See offer page for details. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Ah, fall. That cozy season where we swap the swimwear for sweaters and sunnies for scarves.

26:07But before the Halloween decorations are put away or Thanksgiving table has been set, there's already holly jolly music playing in the grocery store reminding you that the year is coming to a close. Time to kick end of year into high gear. When you use Apple Card with Apple Pay, you earn 2 % daily cash back on all purchases, including food, decorations, gifts, and more. Get a head start on your end of year purchases. Apply for your Apple Card in the Wallet app on your iPhone today and start using it right away with Apple Pay. Subject to credit approval, Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch, terms and more at applecard.com.

27:02is here for. Grow is therapy that works, covered by insurance. Sessions average$21 with insurance, and some pay as little as$0, depending on their plan. There are no subscriptions, no long-term commitments. You just pay per session. Grow connects you with thousands of high-quality, licensed therapists across the U.S., offering both virtual and in-person sessions, nights and weekends. You can search by what matters, like insurance, specialty, identity, or availability, and you can book a therapy session in minutes and begin in as little as two days, not the national 48-day average. See if you could pay as little as$0 for therapy in seconds at growtherapy.com slash ACAST.

27:46That's growtherapy.com slash ACAST. growtherapy.com slash ACAST. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan.

28:08So the Bolsheviks, they're well organized. They've got a simple goal, which is that they are going to violently seize control of the political cerebral cortex of Russia. And it's made easier by the fact the regime launches this disastrous offensive. It's not able to deliver on... Presumably, it's losing legitimacy all the time. And the infighting really starts heating up in the regime towards the second half of the year. Absolutely. And they keep putting off the elections. One of the things the provisional government promised was elections, so they put them off and put them off, which caused a problem for the Bolsheviks to some extent.

28:49Lenin, particularly, and he's the central figure in all this, because there are quite a lot of Bolsheviks who didn't think that they could put it off, and they had to be dragged towards actually taking the plunge and organising a coup, a proper coup. So they were not going to do it. Lenin was there, stuck in Finland in hiding. He secretly goes from Finland back to Petrograd. Wearing a wig. Wearing a wig and shaving his beard to try and force the Bolsheviks to actually seize power. He picked the date it would be, and it was when there was going to be this Congress of Soviets, so he said it had to be in the middle of October, towards the end of October.

29:39And at first, lots of dramatic moments in history when history has changed on the barricades or on the battlefield or whatever, But actually, quite often, history has changed in committee rooms. And he, overnight, in an apartment block in Petrograd, he gets them all, literally by candlelight, to force them to vote on an agreement on one particular day that they were actually going to go for it and seize the power. He was in a minority to start with that night. Overnight, he kind of bullied and threatened to resign, and all kinds of things and used clever arguments as well. And finally, more or less at dawn, he persuaded them.

30:27So there was this agreement within his Bolshevik group who did have quite a few red guards and some hard men, a two pound away, but he forced them that they were going to do this on the 25th of October. That was a kind of very historic meeting, which was a very important date in history, could easily have lost that. When you say things are inevitable, Zinoviev and Kamenev and some others might very well have held their ground and said, no, if we fail, we're all going to be hanged from lampposts. We're all dead men. We're not going to do it right now. We're not ready yet. We can't do it yet. And yet his force of personality, Trotsky used to say, and others used to say, there would never have been a bullshit revolution if Lenin hadn't been in Petrograd.

31:15It just wouldn't have happened. It wouldn't have happened then. Maybe the socialist revolution would have had a bungled revolution instead. Again, there's so many what-ifs, but this is what happened. And the agreement was finally, finally reached. So they then spent the next two weeks planning. Yeah, Trotsky planned the details, but yeah. So this is the opposite of that February revolution. This is a very, very finally, well, it's a pre-prepared coup by a small group of people who know exactly what they're doing and strike at the key nodes of the Russian state. You mentioned a Red Guard earlier.

31:52Just quickly tell everyone who the Red Guards are. Well, the Bolsheviks did have armed, again, they seized arms, mostly from a lot of the Morales soldiers who'd mutinied. They were solid supporters of the Bolsheviks, but there weren't very many of them. There probably weren't more than 2 ,000 of them at that stage. But that's enough to take over a capital city, isn't it? I mean, it's a... No, but they weren't all in, no. Oh, I see. There were less than that in the capital at that time. However many there were, it was enough, because on the night of the 24th, 25th of October, there is this famous...

32:27Well, there's the start of this second and famous revolution, and yet it sort of gets rather quiet, isn't it? Yeah, you could have been in St. Petersburg that day and not have known anything was going on. The trams were running, the restaurants were open. The Bolsheviks had seized the classic coup type thing. They'd seized the telephone exchanges, the wires, they'd seized some of the bridges, the post office, the train stations. but most people in that night and overnight wouldn't have known anything was going on the theaters were open totally as normal the idea that there were some people milling around or wherever there was supposed to be but there were no big crowds anywhere no barricades no street fighting there was almost no fighting at all in this revolution it was not but in any way a big public performance revolution people woke up next morning may and there was people declaring there was a new government and the the winter the taking of the czar's winter palace to the big palace in the heart of actually that was quite tell us what happened there well i mean again most of it was quite carefully organized but the central the central part of it was the storming of the Winter Palace.

33:54There actually was no storming. There were a few isolated shots from the famous battleship Aurora in the Navy. Most of the shots missed, but occasionally it was hit. The remnants of the provisional government were still having a meeting inside. Kerensky had left the city to try and raise some troops to come back and fight the Bolsheviks. But it was important for Lenin to do it that day and say that it had been done because it was the day when that Soviet was the Soviet of Soviets were meeting, the Congress of Soviets was meeting. So he could go to this meeting and say, we have now taken power.

34:37So that's the timing. So, well, lots of the Red Guards broke into the Tsar's wine cellar, didn't they? Oh, they did and got hopelessly pissed, yeah, got hopelessly drunk. And the government, what was left of them as they were having dinner, That was storming, but it was one group of Red Guards of maybe 10 people with guns and the rest of the ministers. But it hadn't been done. By the time Lenin got up and said at the Congress of Soviets, the Soviets of Soviets, we've taken power, actually hadn't happened yet. So that was the first Bolshevik government lie, the worst of 75 years of Bolshevik lying.

35:18The small numbers of people involved, the fragility of the whole operation. There were far, far, far more people. There was no fighting on the streets. Almost no one was killed in the revolution, Bolshevik revolution. There were some isolated shots and some people shotting some crossfire. But far, far more people were involved as extras in the famous Eisenstein movie, October. Oh, really? Years later, they were involved in the revolution, far more. So what does Lenin do to make sure that he won't just be toppled? I mean, he manages to, once he's seized control, obviously, well, it lasts decades, effectively, but what does he do that the previous government had been unable to do?

36:00How does he lock down? Well, all is what separated Lenin from the other revolutionary groups was that he was serious about it. Most of the other revolutionary groups in Russia, all the ones in exile, for example, were quite happy to talk about what they were going to do in the left bank of Café and the left bank of Paris or whatever. Lenin was really serious about it. And from day one, he knew that his brave new world could only be introduced at the point of a gun. So within literally the first day, after they had seized power, Lenin hadn't slept for two days, he went to sleep. A Bolshevik government was established.

36:46and Kamenev was put in temporary challenge for a few hours. One of the first decrees it made was to get rid of capital punishment for anyone on the front, in fact, get rid of capital punishment. When six hours later Lenin woke up, he absolutely lost his temper and said, how can you ridiculous, ridiculous decree this? how do you cannot introduce a revolution without killing people? This was on the first hours of the Russian Revolution. So how he did it was by introduce organs of repression is how he did it. From the very beginning, everyone understood that the Bolshevik Revolution was going to be different and it was going to be seriously violent.

37:35And so he realized that the previous government had been stupid not to have restricted his access to printing presses and newspaper circulation. So he immediately does that. Oh, yeah. Almost within, yeah. I mean, there was no, yeah. Yeah. Within a week, there are no more opposition newspapers. He banned the bourgeois party. And within, of course, there were elections that have been promised to a constituent assembly. Lenin never, never wanted those elections, but he felt he had to go through with them. And he met him because he didn't believe in bourgeois democracy. His version of the Soviets was his version of democracy.

38:18And then finally met in January 1918, and he allowed it to remain open for 13 hours before closing. And it didn't open again. There wasn't a free parliament again for 75 years. But we should be under no illusions. and it's said by lots of revision historians that Russia, A, was on the way to a constitutional monarchy at the time of the revolution and B, was on the way to a liberal democracy. Well, when the elections to the constituent assembly, which took place at the end of November 1917, were the Bolsheviks, it's true, they were in a minority of 22 % of the vote, But the socialist revolutionaries were 39 % of the vote.

39:10The nice liberal Democrats got 6 % of the vote, the cadets. So this idea that somehow what the Russians wanted was a liberal democracy is absolute nonsense. And between them, 80 % of the votes were taken by far-left revolutionaries of one kind or another. Yeah, the working men and women in Russia were hurting. Yeah, they were looking for radical change. But we kind of ignore the fact that Russia was going to be that melting pot. There was not the likelihood of a nice, decent liberal democracy emerging at that point in Russia. How did he extend his control from Petrograd, from St. Petersburg, to particularly Moscow?

39:57It was harder in Moscow. There was quite a lot of fighting in Moscow for about three weeks. and thousands of people were killed because there was quite a lot of opposition. One of the principal ways that he managed it was a deep, serious mistakes by other left-wing groups who withdrew from any government, withdrew from any political activity and just let them... The Mensheviks, for example, in the Soviet had a large number of members of the Soviet. They pulled out completely after the Bolsheviks took over and seized power just for themselves. They could have been a major irritant. They could have been a major, because they had strong support, relatively strong support.

40:49They had lots of activists. They could have been a major irritant, but they decided they were going to pull out of any political activity and let the Bolsheviks get on with it. What he did, the principal thing is he did, Lenin did, number one, was to get a peace deal with the Germans, pull out of the war, which is one of the promises he kept. Yeah, so he did keep that promise. And the result was one of the most one-sided, lopsided peace treaties in history. Yes. And Mr. Toph, it's called. Yes. Russia gave away absolutely vast, vast tracts of land. All Ukraine. Belarus. All of Belarus. yes it was and paid vast amounts of of war reparations bread wise did he just he just was the communists of the bolsterix is more effective at getting bread in i suppose they just were more ruthless they go out the countryside and get grain and bring into the cities and feed people i mean they they were was there a oh there was grain there were bands of soldiers went in and literally as you say they just went to the countryside and took took the grain they wanted to feed the cities.

41:55And then, obviously, Dave Hardin, they didn't introduce the secret police, the Cheka, which then became the KGB, and, you know, where, but which, you know, the Tsars had a secret police that was fairly brutal. The Tsars had a kind of gulag system that was fairly brutal. They just perfected what was already there and worked out what was already there. But always, always, because always the threat of repression was there from the very beginning. It sounds like it's very, in a way, brutally effective, because there's a bit of ideology in there. There's a bit of make peace with Germany at any cost.

42:34There's some eye-catching reforms around the status of women, for example, gender equality. But then there's also just absolutely discordant, but equally effective, you know, savage raids on the countryside for bread, brutal secret police executing people out of hand. So it's a sort of curious but very potent cocktail in terms of a new regime. But there was, again, you've got to remember that the Civil War began almost as soon as the revolution. Within, almost immediately, there was the Civil War which raged through Russia. There was an organized opposition from very soon afterwards. So this is it, Victor.

43:13So the Bolsheviks, they seize St. Petersburg and Moscow, but that is the start of the revolution. It's certainly not the end. And then we get the phase of what's called the Russian Civil War, the gigantic, appalling warfare, which sees various groups lined up against the Bolsheviks. So a lot of the repression has to be seen in the context that there was a war going. There was a very serious war going on. So I'm not in a defence. I'm just saying that that's what happens in war. Violence happens in war. And speaking of violence, there's a very, very, very nearly successful assassination attempt on Lenin quite early on, isn't there, that seems to wound him, injure him quite badly, give him issues with his life, pain.

44:00He was shot in Moscow after making a speech in the Moscow factory by a socialist revolutionary. So not a nice liberal, but someone even further to the left than him. And there's the expression, he really opened the jaws of terror after that. So then that gives another reason to sort of round up any opponents. Yeah, it was done not by him. I mean, he would have agreed with it, but it was done when he was still under the knife. That was the first big example of Bolshevik terror against their opponents. That's when they started getting rid of them en masse. The immediate reaction to his attempts at murder.

44:42So the Civil War, let's have briefly run over some of the top-line figures. Astonishing. Millions of deaths. Millions. When can we say the Bolsheviks successfully really seized control, imposed their will on Russia, on the Soviet Union? 1920, middle of 1920. There were three different white armies, which was one of the reasons why they lost. that there were three of them that never talked to each other, whereas the Bolsheviks had managed to centralise control. The main reason, though, that the Reds won through not only a better organisation, but their policy was simply to take Russia back to where it was, give the landlords back the estate, take it right back to Tsardom, but not necessarily with a Tsar, with a Romanov Tsar.

45:33So their appeal was only an ultra-conservative appeal to the past generation. Whereas the Reds could say, no, we're going to continue giving land back. This was before the idea of collectivisation. They're saying land and bread. We've done peace, now it's land and bread. Which they could say, we're still going to deliver that. And it's these reactionaries, conservative reactionaries, who are going to take you right back. So it was not a great appeal. It was not very appealing. However hated the Bolsheviks might have been and the Reds might have been, the whites were not very appealing. There were massive pogroms.

46:13They tried to get recruits in villages and they destroyed the whole villages if they couldn't round up enough press. They couldn't press enough people to join them. And the whites thought that they were going to get a massive amount of aid from America and Britain and the West, and it was extremely limited, the amount of aid they got. If Winston Churchill had his way, there'd been an army of a million Brits marching around in central Russia. Yeah, there would. But there was no appetite for it after the First World War? No, absolutely not. Only for people like, you know, of his. No, there wasn't.

46:55I mean, Lenin's legacy was ghastly, but his belief that the, always his belief that the ends justified the means drove absolutely everything. All the rest emanated from that absolutely, absolute belief. He established all the organizations of repression, all the organs of repression were his. He forced through this thing within the Bolshevik party that then became stronger and stronger and stronger, that there was only one voice within the board. There was never going to be any disagreements within the party, and that allowed any factionalism or deviation, anyone to be killed. And he, he committed lots of crimes.

47:44The biggest was to have left a man like Stalin in charge after him. More Russian revolutions coming up.

48:32This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Ah, fall. That cozy season where we swap the swimwear for sweaters and sunnies for scarves. But before the Halloween decorations are put away or Thanksgiving table has been set, there's already holly jolly music playing in the grocery store reminding you that the year is coming to a close. Time to kick end of year into high gear. When you use Apple Card with Apple Pay, you earn 2 % daily cash back on all purchases, including food, decorations, gifts, and more. Get a head start on your end of year purchases. Apply for your Apple Card in the wallet app on your iPhone today and start using it right away with Apple Pay.

49:04Subject to credit approval, Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank, USA, Salt Lake City branch, terms and more at applecard.com.

49:18I guess I just want to ask, it's funny that Marxists talk a lot about how the big substructural forces of the economy and the means production, they shape our world. We are just ants running around on that sort of architecture that's constructed for us by those big substructural forces. And yet, actually, the story of this revolution is one of individuals making a difference, how history is driven by luck and timing and chance. This is absolutely, without Lenin being there or Trotsky, there would not have been a Russian revolution. The whole completely contradicts the whole Marxist view of history, the fact that there was a Marxist revolution.

49:59But the other thing I wanted to stress was when you asked me, they had a plan. They had lots of plans, but what the Bolsheviks had was an ideology and a vision. And what they wanted to do was not just to take over and get rid of Assad and introduce a communist, a socialist or a equal system. They actually believed they were, Lenin would say that, Trotsky particularly, they said that they wanted to perfect mankind. They wanted to create a different kind of person. It would not. And if you produced a social system that got rid of exploitation and one group of people, one class by another, you're going to create a different human being.

50:51They profoundly believed that in a religious way. And so the messianic epic ambition, the failure, made it even more shocking. And the way that the failure happened would make that even more shocking. Of course, most people, a majority as it turned out, didn't want to be perfected. And they had a really annoying habit of not wanting to be perfected in the way then the comrades wanted. So that made it all the worse. So they had to be bullied. They had to be coerced. They had to be terrorized and eventually murdered into becoming perfect. And of course, they never did become perfect. There never was a homo sovieticus which was created.

51:36But that made it, it was the epic ambition of the vision that made their failure so abhorrent. And it was the epic nature of the vision that justified the astonishing violence. Absolutely. But they did lack ideology. They had an ideology. But speaking of which, Lenin died and Stalin took over. Lenin apparently in his last days realised that Stalin would be a catastrophe. Yes. Mind you, Lenin had a series of strokes. He was more or less incapable, but he did muster up enough eventually to produce the last... The real thing, Lenin absolutely did not believe anyone was up to running things after him.

52:18He didn't leave a plan, but then most leaders don't. So that's not unusual. But he left a state apparatus that meant that someone like Stalin could unleash unimaginable. He did. And he made Stalin boss of the apparatus that ran things. But then at the end, he tried very hard. Well, he made this last testament and said, you've got to get rid of Stalin as General Secretary of the Party, and they've got to get rid of, basically remove Stalin. But of course, that was never read out. That plan was never read. It was secret, kept secret for quite a long while. And by the time it was revealed, Stalin had already manoeuvred himself into position.

53:04All the others were written out of the will as well. So, you know, there wasn't just Stalin. Nobody was good enough in Lenin's view. One of the most consequential events of the, we're still living with those. I think absolutely we are still living with them. And it was the most consequential event, certainly of the 20th century, because so much of what followed afterwards was a reaction to the Russian Revolution. You can argue fascism, Cold War, afterwards. The Second World War, so much of it. The rise of fascism and Nazism was very much a reaction to what happened in Soviet Russia. And of course, there you are, you've still got China.

53:52Everyone says it's no longer communist in the way most people might regard it. Yet, it is a self-perpetuating one-party state. Yeah, it's a bit Leninist. The economy is essentially state-directed. I mean Lenin would have really admired China Amazing, well Victor thank you so much for coming back on the podcast we could talk about a couple of books we've got the Russian Revolution but if people want to know more about this it was published a couple of years ago but just recently you've had Weimar Germany, Death of a Democracy out I have, yes and I hope you're going to have me on your podcast to talk about that in forthcoming weeks, months, whatever a lot of Weimar's reaction to what happened in Russia, the Russian Revolution.

54:43Yeah, it's the logical place to go next. Well, thanks for coming on the podcast, Victor. No, it was a great pleasure. Thanks for asking me.

55:1198 of the top 100 U.S. accounting firms trust Bill to simplify and secure BillPay. That's proven financial infrastructure built on over a trillion dollars of secure payments. Visit Bill.com slash proven for a special offer. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Ah, fall. That cozy season where we swap the swimwear for sweaters and sunnies for scarves. But before the Halloween decorations are put away or Thanksgiving table has been set, there's already holly jolly music playing in the grocery store, reminding you that the year is coming to a close. Time to kick end of year into high gear.

55:46When you use Apple Card with Apple Pay, you earn 2 % daily cash back on all purchases, including food, decorations, gifts, and more. Get a head start on your end of year purchases. Apply for your Apple Card in the Wallet app on your iPhone today and start using it right away with Apple Pay. Subject to credit approval, Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank, USA, Salt Lake City Branch, terms and more at applecard.com. Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III.

56:21We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. Thank you.