Russian revolutionaries and Japan’s record breaking rollercoaster

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Pop quiz. What's in your kid's lunchbox? At Whole Foods Market, they've already done the studying. Over 300 food ingredients are banned from their shelves. No hydrogenated fats in the peanut butter and no high fructose corn syrup in the cookies. And for sandwiches, there are no synthetic nitrates or nitrites in any of their deli meat. So you can pack lunchboxes with peace of mind. Get back to school ready at Whole Foods Market.

0:59and the racist, discredited pseudoscience of eugenics with Desiree Birch. We'll meet many medieval saints in their bone boxes with Rachel Parrott. So, if that sounds like your sort of thing, listen to You're Dead to Me wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. Bye.

1:22Hello and welcome to the History Hour from the BBC World Service with me, Max Pearson, the past brought to life by those who were there. Coming up, from the year 2000, the political assassination in the Basque region of northern Spain of a long-time campaigner for independence. One thing that really struck me was the fact he had the smile on his face. A smile that said to me, yes, they have killed me, but we are going to win. Plus, the death of a mining town in Chile, Cleveland's botched balloon world record, and from Japan, a record-breaking roller coaster. It was definitely, was a huge statement.

2:01I think the ride budget itself was something like$50 million. All of those events happened in the past and to a greater or lesser extent left their mark. But first, a moment when the great tides of history turned on perhaps the smallest of events, the loan of the price of a ticket for a boat journey. This was in 1907, when the men who would go on to lead the Russian Revolution almost failed to make it to a crucial meeting. Vicky Fargham has been listening to an archive report from the British journalist Henry Brailsford, recorded for the BBC in 1947. It's May 1907 and we're in London, in the newsroom of the Daily News.

2:45Into my office, with a look of excitement and anxiety on his face, walked Fedor Rothstein, an able journalist. He was the son of a well-known Russian doctor and had come to London with his exiled father as a schoolboy. On this spring day, he startled me by asking me to lend, beg or borrow for him immediately a sum of 500 pounds. What for, do you suppose? The Russian Social Democratic Party needed it and it couldn't wait a day. Henry Brailsford doesn't have£500, but he is sympathetic to the cause of the Russian Social Democratic Party, which is to overthrow Russia's autocrat Tsar Nicholas II. In our innocence, many of us imagined that Tsardom was the last and the worst of the tyrannies that scourged mankind, and we were eager to see it fall.

3:44Rothstein explains the urgent need for the£500. He revealed that the party was meeting in Congress of all places in the world at New Southgate in the northern suburbs of London. The sittings had run on for three weeks, but now they were nearly over. And somehow the 300 delegates would have to find their way back to Russia. But the party was stony broke. The cheapest way home would be by sea, and£500 was the smallest sum on which the thing could be done. I asked Rothstein how on earth the party had got into such a predicament. It's a bizarre tale involving a sail around the Nordic seas. They had originally intended to hold their conference just outside the group of the Tsarist police at Helsingfors in Finland.

4:39But just as they were about to meet, the Tsar struck a blow at Finnish liberties and the party had to change its plans. And so those Russian socialists chartered a ship and sailed for Copenhagen. There the Danish police, fearing the Tsar's anger, forbade them to land. They sailed on cheerfully to Stockholm. but there, once again, the same thing happened. There was still one hope left. They would try England. Their things went better. They landed safely on the shores of the Thames. Our English police force in those days, if it wasn't exactly hospitable, was at least indifferent. Well, after that fantastic journey in search of the right of free discussion, it wasn't surprising that the funds of this adventurous party were exhausted.

5:44It's not just a lack of funds tiring out the party members, but infighting. This would turn out to be the last ever united congress of the Russian Social Democrats. At this period, they were split into two warring factions which differed furiously over tactics. The hardline Bolsheviks want a rapid socialist revolution led by workers and peasants, while the Mensheviks believe in a slower path through cooperation with liberals and the gradual building of democracy. The aim of the Congress is to try and heal these deep divisions and agree a way forward. but all of it will count for nothing if they are marooned in London.

6:25After some reflection, Brailsford thinks of a man who may be able to stump up the Russians for her home. Joseph Fels was an eccentric and generous millionaire who had made his money in America from a popular household soap. He was born in Russia and had fled in his early days from the land of pogroms to New York. So I guessed that he might have a fellow feeling for these rebels stranded on our shores. So off we went, wrote Stein and I, to Fels' office in the city. Fels readily agrees to hand over the money, and soon the three men are in a cab to the Congress via Fels' bank. The party was meeting in a rough temporary building made of corrugated iron, known as the Socialist Church.

7:17we were shown up to the gallery. On the floor below us a lady was speaking to an audience that listened with rapt attention. He spoke easily. There wasn't a trace of fatigue. Though in those days I knew no Russian one could tell that this was a closely reasoned speech without rhetoric and without the distractions of emotion. From time to time, however, he made a joke. doubtless at the expense of his opponents, at which everybody laughed. Finally, he sat down, manifestly well content, for in this speech he had contrived to split the Russian Social Democratic Party beyond repair. Rather than uniting the two factions, the conference marks the point of no return for the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks.

8:11It also consolidates Vladimir Lenin as the leader of the Bolsheviks. Within five years he will expel the Mensheviks and the movement will go on to become the Russian Communist Party. In this conference he was sorting out those he could trust and rejecting the rest. It looked at the time like the tactics of a fanatic. But this fanatic, as history was to show, was also a realist with an uncanny gift of foresight. After Lennon sits down, the conference audience breaks into its opposing factions. Evidently, the news ran round among the delegates that there were friends in the gallery who had brought the money for which they were hoping.

8:58One by one, the leaders came up to thank us. First up, Georgi Plakonov representing the Mensheviks. I still recall with pleasure his graceful manners and the perfect French in which he thanked us. Down below, meanwhile, on the floor of the church, with a cluster of his friends around him, Lenin was moving towards the iron ladder that led to the gallery. They were joking and laughing, and finally they pushed the sturdy, bear-like figure of their leader up the ladder. What, I wondered, were they saying? Comrade, you've got to do it. Up you go. and thank the queer old bourgeois who's rescued us in the nick of time.

9:47He didn't make a formal speech, just a few words of thanks in German, rather brusquely spoken. And then he sat down beside Joseph Fels. A document is drawn up promising to repay Fels' loan of£500 after the victory of the revolution in Russia. And now for the end of my story. thanks to Fels' money most of the delegates got safely home to Russia ten years after that obscure conference of penniless rebels and exiles in the tin tabernacle at New Southgate the workers of St. Petersburg swept the Tsar of all the Russias from his throne the bankrupt party which had borrowed its fair home from Joseph Fels remembered its debt in the hour of victory.

10:43In the interval, that kindly and generous personality had died. But the£500 owing to him was duly paid to his widow. Vicky Farncombe took us through that archive recording of the journalist Henry Brailsford, who died in 1958. Vladimir Lenin led the Soviet Union until his death in 1924. his embalmed body remains on display in Moscow's Red Square to this day. Dr. Lara Dowds is Assistant Professor of Russian History at Northumbria University in the UK. The early 1900s was an extraordinarily consequential moment in history because of that split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, and that had enormous consequences for the whole world.

11:30The model that Lenin and the Bolsheviks establish and, you know, develop, it develops under Stalinism is exported across Eastern Europe in the wake of the Second World War. But there are many other, you know, beyond Europe, this kind of influence in, you know, on decolonization in the mid 20th century, you know, sort of Cold War's hijacking decolonization in Africa and many other places, leading to sort of proxy wars in a place like Congo in the 60s or Angola from the 70s onwards. You know, the Russian Revolution inspires, you know, communist movements and regimes in China. It becomes a sort of model or a point of departure in China from the 1920s, you know, until the establishment of the People's Republic there in 1949.

12:23And it's not only in spreading communism, but it's also the way in which, you know, the Russian Revolution inspires anti-communism and fascism. You know, the fascist movement identifies itself as against communism in many senses. So it's inspiring radical responses. It also inspires, you know, even in Britain and in the West, you know, the welfare state by prompting governments, you know, in Britain and elsewhere to kind of implement social reforms to stop the spread of communism. So, you know, there are so many ways in which it really has a huge global impact. And back to those meetings in coffeehouses and church halls where the struggle for the heart of Russian socialism was taking place in the early 1900s.

13:13Why was Britain more tolerant, if not exactly welcoming, than other countries in allowing these revolutionaries to assemble on its soil? Britain had a long tradition of priding itself on being a refuge for political refugees. You know, this is dating back to Magna Carta, which has clauses that say, you know, aliens or foreigners should enjoy rights under British law. And this becomes part of the kind of national conversation, I suppose. And it's really put into practice, you know, from the 17th century onwards, where we see waves of emigres fleeing political and religious persecution from all over Europe.

13:57So we've got, you know, the Protestant Huguenots famously coming after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, 1685. We've got French refugees from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. Of course, many Jews from Eastern Europe in the late 19th century and many, many political radicals, anarchists, not only from Russia, but from Italy. Malatesta, I'm thinking of here in the late 19th century. And then we end up by the first decade of the 20th century with these radical Marxists who see London as a kind of safe haven. Why did Lenin bother to try to pay back the loan? It's 1922 that the Soviet government decides actually that it's going to pay back this money.

14:42And it's really, I think, signaling a change in Lenin's approach to the economy. It's a period from 1921 of a new economic policy where Lenin is forced to make a kind of tactical retreat away from the war communist style economy. and to reintroduce a degree of capitalism in the Soviet Union because of the devastation of the economy, of grain production, of industry. And so he wants to, you know, part of this is to restart foreign trade. And it's at this point that he's pursuing an Anglo-Soviet trade agreement. And the debt that's, you know, repaid eventually to Fels' widow, Mary Fels, is repaid in 1922, at this point when the Soviet government is resuming these trade negotiations.

15:33That's Dr. Lara Dowd's assistant professor of Russian history at Northumbria University. Now, I'm not a great fan of roller coasters, but I might be in a minority because millions of people ride them every year. And every now and then, a new ride is opened, which raises the bar for the rest. That's what happened 25 years ago when Steel Dragon 2000 opened to the public in Japan. Kurt Brooks has been hearing from the designer.

16:03This ride, it was on a little computer screen for a year and a half. So to actually see it in real life was phenomenal. It was just so big.

16:20Located at the Nagashima Spa Land Park in Kawana, Japan it was built by American amusement company D.H. Morgan Manufacturing. When it opened on the 1st of August 2000 it censored the record books of being the longest roller coaster on the planet at just under two and a half kilometres. It also took the records for the fastest and highest roller coaster as well as having the biggest drop. Steel Dragon 2000 was designed by Steve Okamoto. Born in 1957 in California, Steve had worked in Amusement since the late 1970s and before designing the massive adrenaline pumping Steel Dragon, had worked on rides across North America and Europe.

17:03One of the first rides that I designed myself was at the Expo 86 in Vancouver and that ride later moved to Six Flags over Mid-America and that ride is the Ninja. Another ride that I did the first Seven Looper, that was the Shockwave and that was at Six Flags at Chicago. What can you tell us about the first time that you heard about Steel Dragon 2000? We were also talking to a park in America called Cedar Point about possibly building a ride like Steel Dragon 2000. And we were also talking to this Japanese company. But I think that they thought that we were going to be building this ride for Cedar Point.

17:53So they felt like we didn't have the ability to build the ride for them. But Steve says going out to Japan himself helped seal the deal. My wife and I were going to visit some friends of ours that lived in Singapore. And I said, well, maybe I should see if we can stop in Japan and I could go ride some of the big rides that they have in Japan.

18:20We kind of got in touch with this company, looked at their site and met with the owner of the park. and I had a little sit-down with them and then they decided that they would work with us and we ended up getting the contract to build that ride for them. And Steve says the brief they were given was very ambitious. Mr. Otani, who owned the Nagashima Spa Land Park, I think that he felt like he wanted a statement. It definitely was a huge statement. And I think the ride budget itself was something like$50 million. Someone telling you to design a massive roller coaster is simple enough. But what's the reality of it?

19:03It's really pretty basic physics. So the higher you go, the faster you can go. And we try to get the twists and turns in there to give you an exciting ride, an exhilarating ride. We look a lot at the forces that the people are subjected to. We try to limit the G's that you feel it to not something that's going to black you out. And Steve says special considerations have to be made, given that the amusement park is in a country known for its tectonic activity and sometimes wild weather. This ride sits right on the coast, so in addition to just being holding up a 300-foot-tall ride, it was really massive because of all the earthquake and typhoon regulations that we had to meet.

19:55When Steel Dragon 2000 was announced in November 1999, construction was already underway on what would be the tallest roller coaster in the world, Millennium Force, at Cedar Point in the United States. But Steve knew this record wouldn't last very long.

20:16Cedar Point comes out and they say, well, our ride is going to be 310 feet high. At that point, we had not said how tall our ride was going to be. Knowing that we're about a foot and a half higher than Cedar Point, we were kind of like, well, maybe we shouldn't say because maybe Cedar Point would go out and, I don't know, dig a hole underneath their ride to make theirs higher. And the reason behind this was down to Steve's Japanese heritage. The guys from the Japanese company had come in and they are saying, well, this ride is 94.2 meters high. The owner doesn't like it because he feels like this is not a good number.

21:01I do know that four is an unlucky number in Japan. So at that point, I just said, well, maybe we should just make it 95 meters. And immediately they were very happy. At 95 metres, we were about a foot and a half higher than 310 feet. When Steel Dragon 2000 opened on the 1st of August, Steve says it broke a series of world records, including taking the tallest rollercoaster record from Millennium Force at Cedar Point. It was the tallest ride, which was 95 metres. It had the biggest drop, which was 93.5 metres. The highest speed, which was 95 miles an hour, and it was the longest ride, which was, I think it's 8 ,100 feet long.

21:52To break one record, let alone four at the same time, was just amazing to me. And Steve says that on the opening night, the park went all out to celebrate. They'd had a big, big party. I mean, they put out this big, huge spread and the Guinness people were there and they presented Nagashima with the records. They lit the ride up with so many lights. I mean, I was staying at a hotel, I think, that was about 30 miles away. I could look out the window and I could see the ride lit up. And the reaction from the riders was very satisfying. Oh my goodness, it's just so fulfilling to stand there and watch people.

22:38They come on, they get on there, and they go for a ride, and they come back, and they're so excited. They've had such a good time. What was it like for you riding Steel Dragon that first time? It's funny because I think I'm probably a lot more critical of the ride because in my head I've ridden it hundreds of times. So I know how I want it to feel and to ride it and have it actually do that. It was a pretty amazing feeling and a little humbling to see this big thing that a year and a half before was just imagination. Everything was just in such big proportion. And I knew the little support columns out there that looked like they were little sticks were actually 36 inches in diameter.

23:2925 years on, Steel Dragon 2000 is still a huge draw for Nagashima Spa Land. And although it has since lost records for its height, speed and drop, thrill seekers from around the globe still flock to the roller coaster, which is still the longest in the world. The one record that we set with this ride that I think will last for a long time is just the length because people just don't build rides that are over a mile and a half long. It's a lot of investment. How do you look back on your time working on Steel Dragon 2000? I just have a good feeling about it. It was just such a good ride. Just to spend the time with the people there who had been working on it, they were just phenomenal.

24:14So it was an all-around great experience, I think.

24:24Rollercoaster designer Steve Okamoto. I suppose it's a job that someone has to do. He was speaking to Kurt Brooks in that Made in Manchester production for the BBC World Service. Still to come, a mining town in Chile, abandoned nearly 20 years ago. And from 1986, Cleveland, Ohio's attempt to set a world record with balloons. It was beautiful. It looked like confetti going up. That was great! Totally awesome! People cried. People said this is the most important thing that ever happened in our city. But first, an assassination in Spain's Basque country. This was in July 2000, and the victim was the retired politician Juan Marie Haurégui.

25:07He'd been involved in the Basque independence movement for decades. Curiously, on the morning he was killed, he woke in a cold sweat after a nightmare, as his wife, Maishabel Lassa, has been telling Ben Henderson. Juan Mari told me he had a dream. In the dream he was with his friend and they were meeting up for coffee. And when he got in the car, they killed him. I was a little shocked, of course, by what he said. I reassured him. I said, don't worry, it's only a dream. Dreams don't come true.

25:48We met each other a long, long time ago in a very small village which only had about 1 ,400 inhabitants. We were in the same year group at the school. More or less every Sunday we went on day trips to the mountains. Always, ever since we were little. Juan Mari was my best friend. I had so much trust in him. We started going out romantically when we were about 17 years old.

26:19Between the Atlantic coastline of northwest Spain and the foothills of the Pyrenees, there are nearly 3 million people who consider themselves a separate and forgotten nation. Not Spanish, but Basque. Fiercely proud of his Basque heritage, Juan Marí wanted an independent Basque state. At the heart of the independence movement was the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, in which most Basques sided with the Republicans against General Franco's nationalists. First pictures from the Basque Republic of the holy city of Guernica, scene of the most terrible air radar modern history yet can boast. Hundreds were killed here, men, women and children.

26:58Under Franco's repressive dictatorship, a Basque resistance group emerged called ETA, which stands for Ayouskadita Ascatasuna, meaning Basque Homeland and Freedom. Juanmari joined Eta's cultural wing, but the group became increasingly violent, assassinating Spain's prime minister in 1973. That year, Juanmari left and eventually joined the socialists. It must be said that Juanmari was a man who lived politics intensely. He was a political animal. As he climbed the political ladder, Juanmari condemned Eta, who killed a number of his friends and colleagues. So, when the socialists lost power in 1996, he moved to Chile for his own safety.

27:39Every three months he'd come back to the Basque country to be with his friends and family. In July of the year of 2000, on the 23rd of July, we celebrated our silver wedding anniversary. So we had a big family meal in the same restaurant where we were married 25 years before. I still had the receipt from our wedding day, so I brought it with me to compare prices. We ordered the starters, the jamón, the fried calamari, classic Basque style, with everyone celebrating around a big table. It was a beautiful day. Less than a week later, on the 29th of July, Juan Marie wakes from his disturbing dream.

28:27And when he got in the car, they killed him. After Maisha Bell's reassurances, Juan Marie travels to meet a friend for coffee, just as he dreamt the night before. When the friends sit down, two members of an ETA unit walk in. One acts as lookout while the second approaches Juan Marie and fires two bullets into his head from point-blank range. There have been protests in northern Spain against the shooting of a local politician by suspected Basque separatists. The former governor was shot dead as he sat in a cafe. It was the seventh killing linked to Eto terrorists since the end of their ceasefire last December.