The October Revolution

On the night of October 10th, 1917, a revolutionary disguised as a priest slipped into an apartment in Petrograd and browbeat his comrades into an armed insurrection. The revolutionary in question was Vladimir Lenin, and two weeks later, he and the Bolsheviks seized power in a coup that set the course of the 20th century. Victor Sebestyen, author of 'The Russian Revolution', joins us to trace the extraordinary chain of events that put Lenin's party in control of one of the largest nations on Earth. Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Tim Arstall. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Dan Snow's History Hit is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 2:45Speaker 00

  At 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 Illich 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

• 3:30Speaker 00

  change the course of the 20th and 21st centuries. His destination was 32 Karlovka, a small apartment block overlooking the Dnieva 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 Sukhanov's wife, Galina Flagzman, was a secret Bolshevik. And that evening, she had gently suggested to her husband that he should spend the night

• 4:14Speaker 00

  near his office downtown, sparing himself the long journey home through a city where trams were unreliable. And so, while Sukhanov was away, Lenin slipped into his living room and found a table lit by a flickering lamp around which 12 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.

• 4:57Speaker 00

  For an hour, he argued that the time for waiting was over. Russia's shambolic, provisional, revolutionary government was divided, it was weak. The 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 catches a lucky break, a good harvest, or success in the war with Germany. They had to seize power now.

• 5:42Speaker 00

  But there was resistance in the room. Lenin's oldest comrades, Grigory 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, 10 in favor.

• 6:26Speaker 00

  Lenin reached across the table and picked up a pencil. There was no sheaf of papers, Tom, 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. That 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 where much of Petrograd slept. The planning began, and within days, the Bolsheviks would move, take control of the capital. The October Revolution was about to begin. But why was Lenin, 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?

• 7:11Speaker 00

  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? And 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 historian author Viktor 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.

• 7:56Speaker 00

  He'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.

• 8:16Speaker 00

  Viktor, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast.

• 8:18Speaker 04

  It's a great pleasure to be back, Dom.

• 8:20Speaker 00

  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?

• 8:43Speaker 04

  I hate that word, inevitable, in any kind of historic, historic thing, because you can always do, you can always point to places where it might have been very different. And actually, this is a classic example. If the, if the Tsar, over the last 25 years, had tried to, I wouldn't say democratize, but introduced any level of, of, of political activity, things might have been different. But he banned politics altogether. It was a result of, of, of his view of, of, of his autocracy.

• 9:23Speaker 04

  The just liberal people who basically supported the Tsar supported the status quo, but wanted some liberal reforms. He banned any, any of that, and that pushed moderate, moderate conservatives to supporting the far-left, which they, they shouldn't have. If he'd tried to bring the 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. So 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.

• 10:07Speaker 00

  So you've got a situation with your, a 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?

• 10:26Speaker 04

  Well, they were losing extremely badly, having already lost 10 years before that, they'd lost the war against Japan. It would show now in combatant the autocracy was. But also, it had led to economic disaster. There was almost, you know, there was really massive starvation. Certainly, there was that winter of 1917. People were, they were losing the war. People were fed up with the war. They didn't, they didn't see why the war was necessary. In a way, there was more anti-war feeling in Russia than almost anywhere else on the continent nations. And the extreme parties were agitating totally against the

• 11:08Speaker 04

  war and blaming the, the autocracy and blaming the, blaming the Tsar for an iconic disaster.

• 11:14Speaker 00

  And they had a point, didn't they? Because unlike Britain and even Germany, where the sort of titular command of the armed forces might rest with the head of state, the Tsar, the Kaiser, the King, the Emperor. Actually, 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.

• 11:36Speaker 04

  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. Almost nothing. Almost

• 12:16Speaker 04

  no decision went right for him. His judgment was truly appalling as a, 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.

• 12:29Speaker 00

  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 communist Bolshevik revolution.

• 12:43Speaker 04

  The Bolshevik revolution.

• 12:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. So we've got the, we've got 1916, late 1916. So as you say, it's a catastrophic disaster. We've got mass desertions, people aren't obeying their officers on the front line, hyperinflation, breadlines.

• 12:57Speaker 04

  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 famine in the big cities.

• 13:14Speaker 00

  People say about the French Revolution as well, sometimes historians, political thinkers are looking for the kind of deep, substructural reasons and, and the ideas swirling around. But 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, looking, trying to break into shops, getting, you, you end up with just a spontaneous breakdown of order in one of the most important cities in the empire and in the imperial centre.

• 13:41Speaker 04

  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, you know, the army to guarantee their safety and to guarantee their republic. This time, what was happening was it was, there were a whole load of deserters from the, from the army. And the army, it was a mutiny in most of the Guards regiments and the army that really caused that revolution. They were the revolutionaries. It was the soldiers who were fighting in the, in their unpopular war. They hated the war as much as the population did, obviously.

• 14:21Speaker 00

  And they'd just been put into the meat grinder in, in various offensives, which had sort of wiped out the, the old elite of this Russian Imperial Guard, who had been the sort of backstop of the Romanovs, they say, for centuries. So you've got, they're just, the army's just, it's just very unreliable. It's not the same army that it once was. Yeah.

• 14:36Speaker 04

  When the, all the Guards regiments that were there specifically to protect the Tsar rebelled, that was it, basically. His military could not guarantee the Tsar's safety or the continuance of the throne.

• 14:51Speaker 00

  He was then forced to abdicate on March the 1st, 1917. And then we get this period that some people may sort of forget about, which is this very, very brief constitutional government.

• 15:06Speaker 04

  It was called the provisional government.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:08Speaker 04

  And it was very provisional. It didn't last very long.

• 15:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:11Speaker 04

  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, that it was a fig leaf parliament, really. But they'd made, 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, which just, which simply means a council in Russian.

• 15:46Speaker 00

  Sort of army council. Yeah.

• 15:48Speaker 04

  But the agreement was that the provisional government couldn't do anything that the Soviets disagreed with. So you have this dual, you have this dual government, which in the end couldn't agree on anything and, and were, and broke down relatively quickly.

• 16:05Speaker 00

  And so you, you have sort of rebellious military units, they have their own sort of Soviets, you'd have factory Soviets as well, would you? So you'd have sort of Soviets popping up all over the place.

• 16:14Speaker 04

  You had Soviets of café waiters.

• 16:16Speaker 00

  Oh, right. Yeah. And then you've got a sort of government of French and British style, sort of grandees, you know, bankers, officials.

• 16:24Speaker 04

  And some democrats and some liberal politicians.

• 16:26Speaker 00

  And they're trying to, they're trying to build a modern, a sort of reasonably modern representative democracy. Okay. So it's Lenin's followers, Lenin is in exile in Switzerland, writing sort of newspaper articles and drinking.

• 16:38Speaker 04

  With not very many followers.

• 16:40Speaker 00

  Not many followers. The organised revolutionary movements, such as they are, they don't play much part in that first revolution. It's just, it's spontaneous. It's just, it's just incredibly annoyed workers and women and people, people on the streets just take, just taking matters in their own hands.

• 16:54Speaker 04

  Yeah. And pissed off soldiers. And, and yeah, and they, exactly. And they only supported this revolution when they saw that it was working, really, Lenin. Or 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.

• 17:29Speaker 00

  So then now there's a provisional government, this is a chaotic scene. And this is when the more professional revolutionaries think, right, hang on a second, this, this regime's now ripe for the, ripe for the plucking.

• 17:38Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 17:39Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 17:40Speaker 04

  We are a very, very organised group who can manipulate the situation and seize power.

• 17:48Speaker 00

  Because in a sea of chaos, a, a small organised group has enormous advantages.

• 17:54Speaker 04

  You've also got to remember that, you know, how vast Russia is. So it's, okay, there was power in the city, in Peters, St Petersburg, Petrograd and Moscow, but 85% of Russia were, it was not an industrialised society in the way Germany, France, Britain was. 85% of the workforce were on the land and were peasants on the land. So it's a, we're talking about very different places than Western Europe.

• 18:20Speaker 00

  But this is what I find so astonishing about this whole period is, so this is, it vast sways of territory, often quite thinly populated, often with agricultural workers. Are they just, they're just sort of waiting to receive orders from Moscow and St Petersburg, are they?

• 18:37Speaker 04

  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.

• 18:45Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 18:46Speaker 04

  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.

• 18:59Speaker 00

  Right.

• 19:00Speaker 04

  So that was happening not in an organised way by the Bolsheviks. That was happening anyway, you know, over large swathes, large swathes of Russia. The chaos was not only in the cities, the chaos was happening throughout the country and the land.

• 19:15Speaker 00

  A multi-layered meltdown of an entire empire.

• 19:17Speaker 04

  An entire way of life.

• 19:19Speaker 00

  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?

• 19:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, well, that was the immediate decision made by the provisional government to continue in the war. Continue the alliance with, with Britain and France in the war, you know, that was.

• 19:40Speaker 00

  Astonishing.

• 19:41Speaker 04

  And they took a gamble in the summer that they were, they'd been on the defensive in the war for two and a half years. Basically, Russia was losing, losing the war. You know, month by month, they were losing vast areas of territory in Ukraine and Belarus. And, you know, 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.

• 20:15Speaker 00

  Astonishing. So you've got this revolutionary government that hardly controls Russia and yet it's launching this massive offensive.

• 20:20Speaker 04

  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, was the principal reason why that government failed.

• 20:35Speaker 00

  And so Lenin, he's been delivered by a German train from Switzerland through the German empire and injected like a virus into the Russian empire.

• 20:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:43Speaker 00

  He's got lots of German cash.

• 20:45Speaker 04

  He's got huge amounts of German cash, which set up newspapers and set up propaganda units.

• 20:52Speaker 00

  And he's got a very simple message.

• 20:53Speaker 04

  Peace, land, bread.

• 20:55Speaker 00

  Peace, land, bread. So there'll be peace, we're not going to script your sons anymore and send them off to fight. You'll have some of your former aristocratic owners' land and they'll be bred for.

• 21:05Speaker 04

  He promised, he promised to give all the land to the people. He 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, it would be very, very simple.

• 21:21Speaker 00

  Imagine that, imagine politicians winning over lots of apathetic voters with extremely simple, but undeliverable messages.

• 21:29Speaker 04

  I know, it's so hard to imagine.

• 21:31Speaker 00

  So hard to believe, yeah, so hard to imagine.

• 21:32Speaker 04

  How can that happen?

• 21:34Speaker 00

  So he says peace and bread. You've got the, the sort of constitutional government are trying to sort of steer a middle way and keep the war going, but also have a, sort of build a modern democracy. That is not as, that, that is not a sexy rallying call, is it?

• 21:48Speaker 04

  No.

• 21:49Speaker 00

  Can't put that on a, can't put that on a bumper sticker.

• 21:51Speaker 04

  They weren't, and Lenin actually was, on the whole, Lenin, which whom whom I 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 Lenin, except he went into hiding in Finland. But they did arrest quite a few, including Trotsky. And they, they tried a revolution in July, which failed. And they breathed the provisional government breathed a bit more easily for a while.

• 22:36Speaker 04

  But, you know, the Bolsheviks kept their cool, gathered themselves and organised for another try a bit later.

• 22:43Speaker 00

  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, you know, various constitutional changes.

• 22:56Speaker 04

  But the Bolsheviks are not the only revolutionary group. Again, as to add to the chaos upon chaos, I mean, the Bolsheviks probably are the best, best organised. And now obviously, you know, because they won through the best known. But there were lots and lots and lots of different revolutionary groups. There were, you know, the Mensheviks, which you know, the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks were slightly less extreme. But the most popular groups were socialist revolutionaries of various kinds. They were peasant, they were parties of the peasantry to try and take, take over. So they were not, the Bolsheviks were not the only group out to, to try and introduce a brave new world,

• 23:41Speaker 04

  to change the world. The Bolsheviks were the best, probably the best organised, that's all.

• 23:46Speaker 00

  So they're well-funded.

• 23:48Speaker 04

  Well-funded, but so were some of the others. The Germans paid lots of different, they paid the Mensheviks, they paid other socialist revolutionary groups. It wasn't only the Bolsheviks. 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.

• 24:20Speaker 00

  You're listening to The Russian Revolution, more coming up.

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• 27:33Speaker 00

  So the Bolsheviks, they're well organised. They've got a simple goal, which is that they are going to violently seize control of the political cerebral cortex of Russia.

• 27:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:43Speaker 00

  And it's made easier by the fact the regime is, launches this disastrous offensive. It just is, it's not able to deliver on, on, presumably it's losing legitimacy all the time. And, and the infighting really starts going, heating up in the regime towards the second half of the year.

• 27:58Speaker 04

  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, you know, the Bolsheviks to some extent. Lenin 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 pull 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.

• 28:43Speaker 00

  Wearing a wig.

• 28:43Speaker 04

  Wearing a wig and shaving his beard to try and force the Bolsheviks to actually seize power. At one, you know, 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. And at first, lots of dramatic moments in history when history has changed and, you know, on the barricades or on the battlefield or whatever, but actually quite often, history has changed in committee rooms. And he overnight at an apartment block in Petrograd, he gets them all, literally by candlelight, to force them to vote on an agreement

• 29:29Speaker 04

  on one particular day that they were going to, they were actually going to go for it and seize, seize the power. All kinds, 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, finally, more or less at dawn, he persuaded them. So there was, there was this agreement within the Bolshevik, his Bolshevik group, that, who did have quite a few Red Guards and, and some hard men, two by the way. But he forced them that they were going to do this on, on the 25th of October. That was a kind of very historic meeting, which was in a very important date in history. Could easily have lost that.

• 30:14Speaker 04

  When you say things are inevitable, Zinoviev and Kamenev and some others might have, might very well have held their ground and said, no, we're all going to be, 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 Bolshevik revolution if Lenin hadn't been in Petrograd. It just wouldn't have happened, wouldn't have happened then. Maybe the socialist revolutioners would have had a Bungold revolution instead. And there's, there's, again, there's so many what ifs. But this is what happened and the agreement was finally, finally reached.

• 30:57Speaker 00

  So they then spent the next two weeks planning, I mean, it's, it's.

• 30:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, Trotsky planned the details, but yeah.

• 31:02Speaker 00

  So this is the opposite of that February revolution. This is a very, very finely, well, it's a, it's a pre-prepared coup by a small group of people who know exactly what they're doing and, and strike at the key, key nodes of the, of the Russian state. You mentioned the Red Guard earlier, just quickly tell everyone who the Red Guards are.

• 31:19Speaker 04

  Well, the Bolsheviks did have armed, again, they seized arms, mostly from, a lot of them were old soldiers who'd moved in. They were solid supporters of the Bolshevik, but there weren't very many of them. There probably weren't more than 2,000 of them at, at that stage.

• 31:36Speaker 00

  But that's, but that's enough to take over a capital city, isn't it? I mean, it's a, it's a.

• 31:39Speaker 04

  No, but they weren't all in, no.

• 31:41Speaker 00

  Oh, I see.

• 31:41Speaker 04

  There were less than that in the capital at that time.

• 31:45Speaker 00

  However, many there were, it was enough because on the night of the 24th, 25th of October, there is this famous, well, the, the start of this second and, and famous revolution. And yet it sort of, it gets rather quiet, isn't it?

• 31:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, you could have been in St Petersburg that day and not, over that night and not have known anything was going on. The trams were running, the restaurants were open. The Bolsheviks had seized that, you know, classic coup type thing, that seized the telephone exchanges, that, um, the, the, the wires, that seized some of the bridges, the, the post office, the train stations. But most people in, on that night and overnight, wouldn't have known anything was going on. The theatres were open, totally as normal. The idea that there were some people milling around or, um, wherever they were supposed to be. But there were no big crowds anywhere, no barricades, no street fighting.

• 32:43Speaker 04

  There was almost no fighting at all in this, in this revolution. It was not, but in any way, a big public performance revolution. People woke up next morning, mate, and there was people declaring there was a new government.

• 32:59Speaker 00

  And the, the winter, the taking of the Tsar's Winter Palace, the big palace in the heart of the house of this big.

• 33:04Speaker 04

  Actually.

• 33:05Speaker 00

  That was quite, tell, tell us what happened there.

• 33:07Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, again, most of it was quite carefully organised, but the central, the central part of it was the storming of the Winter Palace. There 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, were still having a meeting inside. Koransky had left the city to try and raise some troops to come, you know, to come back and fight the, fight the Bolsheviks. But it was important for Lenin to do it that day and say that it had been done

• 33:49Speaker 04

  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.

• 34:01Speaker 00

  So that's, that's the timing. So, well, lots of the Red Guards broke into the Tsar's wine cellar, didn't they, and got.

• 34:06Speaker 04

  Oh, they did and got hopelessly pissed, yeah, got hopelessly drunk. But, and the government, what was left of them as they were having dinner, that was storming, but it was about, it was one, 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 line, the, the first of, the, the worst of 75 years of, of, of Bolshevik line.

• 34:43Speaker 00

  The small numbers of people involved, the fragility of the whole operation.

• 34:45Speaker 04

  There were far, far, far more people. There was no fighting on the streets. Almost, almost no one was killed in, um, in the revolution, Bolshevik revolution. There were some isolated shots and some people shot in some crossfire. But far, far more people were involved as extras in the famous Eisenstein movie, October.

• 35:08Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 35:10Speaker 04

  Years later than were involved in the revolution, far more.

• 35:12Speaker 00

  So what does Lenin do to make sure that he won't just be toppled? I mean, he manages to, once he sees control, obviously, well, in last decades effectively. But what, what does he do that the previous government had been unable to do? How does he lock down?

• 35:25Speaker 04

  Well, always what separated Lenin from the other revolutionary groups was that he was serious about it. Most of the other revolutionary groups in Russia were, all the ones in exile, for example, were quite happy to talk about what they were going to do in, 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'd seized power, Lenin hadn't slept for two days.

• 36:06Speaker 04

  He went to sleep, a Bolshevik government was established and Kamenev was put in temporary charge for a few hours. One of the first decrees it made was to get rid of capital punishment for anyone on the front. And 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, 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 introducing organs of repression is how he, how he did it.

• 36:51Speaker 04

  From the very beginning, everyone understood that, that the Bolshevik revolution was going to be different and it was going to be seriously violent.

• 36:59Speaker 00

  And so he realised that, that the government, the previous government had been stupid not to have restricted his access to printing presses and newspaper circulation. So he immediately does that, strictly.

• 37:09Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, almost within, yeah, I mean, there was no, yeah, yeah. Within, within a week, there are no more opposition newspapers. He banned the bourgeois party. Within, of course, there were elections that had been promised to a constituent assembly. Lenin never, never wanted those elections, but he thought he had to go through with them. And he met, he, because he didn't believe in bourgeois democracy. His version of the Soviets was, was his version of democracy. And then finally met in January 1918.

• 37:49Speaker 04

  And he allowed it to remain open for 13 hours before closing. And he 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, the elections to the Constituent Assembly, which took place at the end of November.

• 38:23Speaker 04

  Nineteen seventeen were the Bolsheviks, it's true, they they were in a minority, twenty two percent of the vote, but the socialist revolutionaries were thirty nine percent of the vote. The nice liberal democrats got six percent of the vote, the cadets. So that, you know, this idea that somehow what they all, what the Russians wanted was a liberal democracy is absolute nonsense and belies all the, between them, eighty percent of the votes were taken by far, far left revolutionaries of one kind or another.

• 38:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, the working men and women of Russia were hurting. Yeah, they were looking for radical change.

• 39:03Speaker 04

  I know, but but but it's kind of, 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.

• 39:17Speaker 00

  How did he extend his control from Petrograd, from Saint Petersburg, to particularly Moscow?

• 39:22Speaker 04

  It was, it was harder in Moscow. There was a lot, 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 kind of withdrew from any government, withdrew from any political activity and just let them, and let, there was not, the, the Mensheviks, for example, in the Soviet had a large number of members of, of, of the Soviet, they pulled out completely of, of, after the Bolsheviks took over and seized power, you know, just, just for themselves.

• 40:07Speaker 04

  They could have been a major irritant, they could have been a major, because they had strong support, relatively strong support, they 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.

• 40:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, so he did keep that promise and, and the result was the most, one of the most one sided, lopsided peace treaties in history and.

• 40:39Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 40:40Speaker 00

  It's called.

• 40:41Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 40:42Speaker 00

  Russia gave away absolutely vast, vast tracts of land in.

• 40:46Speaker 04

  All Ukraine.

• 40:47Speaker 00

  Belarus.

• 40:48Speaker 04

  All of Belarus, yes, it was and paid vast amounts of, of war reparations.

• 40:55Speaker 00

  Bread wise, did, did he just, he just was, the communist, the Bolsheviks was more effective at getting bread and I suppose they just were more ruthless, they go out the countryside and get grain and bring it to cities and feed people. I mean, they, they were, was there a?

• 41:08Speaker 04

  Oh, there was grain repression, 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. And then obviously they hardened, they didn't introduce the secret police, the Cheka, which then became the KGB and, you know, where, but which the, you know, the, the SARS had a secret police that was fairly brutal. The SARS had a kind of Gulag system that was fairly brutal. They just perfected what was already there and, and worked up was already there. But always, always, always the threat of repression was there from the very beginning.

• 41:50Speaker 00

  It sounds like it's very, in a way brutally effective because there's a bit of ideology in there, there's, there's a bit of make peace with Germany at any cost, there'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, it's a sort of curious but very potent cocktail in terms of a new regime.

• 42:21Speaker 04

  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 raves through Russia. There was an organized opposition from very soon afterwards.

• 42:36Speaker 00

  So this is it, Victor. So, so the Bolsheviks, they seize Saint Petersburg and Moscow a, and, but that is, that is the start of the revolution, it's certainly not the end, and then we get.

• 42:48Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 42:49Speaker 00

  What's called the Russian civil war, the gigantic, appalling warfare, which sees various groups lined up against the Bolsheviks.

• 42:56Speaker 04

  So a lot of the repression has to be seen in me, in the context that there was a war going, there was a very serious war going on. So I'm not, you know, not a defence, I'm just saying that that's what happens in war.

• 43:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:09Speaker 04

  Violence happens in war.

• 43:11Speaker 00

  And speaking of violence, there's a very, very, very nearly successful assassination attempt on Lenin quite early on, isn't there, that, that seems to wound him, injure him quite badly, give him issues for his life, pain.

• 43:25Speaker 04

  He was shot, he was shot in a, in a Moscow, after making a speech in a Moscow factory by a socialist revolutionary, so not a nice liberal, but someone even further to the left than him.

• 43:37Speaker 00

  And there's the expression, he overly opened the jaws of terror after that. So then that gives another, another reason to sort of round up any opponents.

• 43:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was done not by him, you know, I mean, he would have agreed with it, but, but it was done when he was still, you know, under the map. 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 attempted murder.

• 44:07Speaker 00

  So the civil war, let's briefly run over some of the top line figures, astonishing, millions of deaths.

• 44:14Speaker 04

  Millions.

• 44:15Speaker 00

  When can we say the Bolsheviks successfully really seized control, imposed their will on, on Russia, on the Soviet Union?

• 44:21Speaker 04

  Nineteen twenty, middle of nineteen twenty. There were three different white armies, which was one of the reasons why they lost, but there were three of them that never talked to each other, whereas the Bolsheviks had managed to centralize control. The main reason, though, that the Reds won through, not only the better organization, but their policy was simply to take Russia back to where it was, you know, give the landlords, back the estate, take it right back to Sarden, but not necessarily with a Tsar, with a Romanov Tsar. So their appeal was only an ultra conservative appeal to, to the past generation, whereas

• 45:06Speaker 04

  the Reds could, could say, no, we're going to continue giving land back. This was before the idea of collectivization, you know.

• 45:14Speaker 00

  They're saying land and bread, we've done peace, now it's land and bread.

• 45:17Speaker 04

  Which they could say, we're still going to deliver that. And it's these reactionary, conservative reactionary, so we're 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, they went destroying, they 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. So, and the whites thought that they were going to get massive amount of aid from, from America and, and Britain and, and the West, and it was extremely limited, the amount of

• 46:02Speaker 04

  aid they, they, they got.

• 46:03Speaker 00

  If Winston Churchill had his way, there'd been an army of a million Brits marching around in central Russia.

• 46:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, there would.

• 46:10Speaker 00

  But there was no appetite for it after the First World War.

• 46:13Speaker 04

  No, absolutely not, only for people like, you know, of his, no, there, there wasn't. I 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 organizing, all the organizations of repression, all the organs of repression were, 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, there was never going to be any

• 46:56Speaker 04

  disagreements within, within, within the party and that allowed any factionalism or deviation, anyone to be killed. And he, he committed lots of crimes, the biggest was to have left a man like Stalin in charge after him.

• 47:16Speaker 00

  More Russian revolutions coming up.

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• 49:19Speaker 00

  I 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 of production, they shape our world. We are just simply, we're just ants running around on that, 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. So how history is driven by luck and timing and chance.

• 49:45Speaker 04

  This is, this is absolutely, without Lenin being there, or Trotsky, there would not have been a Russian revolution. The whole, completely contradicts the old Marxist view of history, the fact that there was a Marxist revolution. But the other thing I wanted to, you know, stress was, was when you asked me, you know, they had a plan. They had lots of plans. But what, what the Bolsheviks had was an ideology and a vision. And they, what they wanted to do was not just to take over and get rid of Assad and introduce a communist, a socialism, or an equal system.

• 50:27Speaker 04

  They actually believed they were, Lenin would say, that Trotsky particularly, that said that they wanted to perfect humankind. They wanted to create a different kind of person who would not. And, and if you, if you produced a social system that got rid of exploitation, one group of people, one class by another, you're going to create a different, a different human being. They profoundly believed that in a religious way. And so, 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 in

• 51:12Speaker 04

  the, 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, eventually murdered into becoming perfect. And of course, they never did become perfect. There never was a homo sovieticus which created. But that made it, was the epic ambition of the vision that made their failure so abhorrent.

• 51:43Speaker 00

  And it was the epic nature of the vision that justified the astonishing violence and...

• 51:48Speaker 04

  Absolutely. But they did lack ideology. They had an ideology.

• 51:52Speaker 00

  But speaking of which, Lenin died and Stalin took over. Lenin, apparently in his last days, realized that Stalin would be a catastrophe?

• 52:02Speaker 04

  Yes. Mind you, Lenin had a series of strokes. He was more or less incapable, but he did muster up and laugh eventually to produce the last, the real thing. Lenin absolutely did not believe anyone was up to running things after him. He didn't leave a plan, but then most leaders don't. So, you know, that was, that's not unusual.

• 52:25Speaker 00

  But he left a, he left a state apparatus that meant that someone like Stalin could unleash unimaginable...

• 52:30Speaker 04

  And then he, and he made Stalin boss of the apparatus that ran things. But then, at the end, he tried very hard. Well, he made his last testament and said, you've got to keep, got to get rid of Stalin as General Secretary of the party, and he got to get rid of, basically, remove Stalin. But of course, it was many years, 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 maneuvered himself into a position. All the others were written out of the will as well. So, you know, there wasn't just, wasn't just Stalin. Nobody was good enough, in Lenin's view.

• 53:15Speaker 00

  One of the most consequential events of them. We're still living with those, with those...

• 53:18Speaker 04

  I think we are. I think absolutely we are still living with them. And it was the most consequential event of the, certainly of the 20th century, because so much of what followed afterwards was a result, was as a reaction to the Russian Revolution. You can argue fascism, Cold, you know, Cold War afterwards, it, and the Second World War, so much of it, the rise of fascism and Nazism was very much a reaction to, to what was happening, happened in Soviet Russia. And of course, there you are, you've still got China. Everyone says it's, it's no longer communist in the way most people might regard it, yet it is a self-perpetuating, one-party state.

• 54:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a bit Leninist.

• 54:05Speaker 04

  That, that, that is state direct, the economy is essentially state-directed. And, I mean, Lenin would have really admired China.

• 54:14Speaker 00

  Amazing. Well, Victor, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. You've got, well, 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.

• 54:28Speaker 04

  I have, yes.

• 54:29Speaker 00

  Go and have a check.

• 54:30Speaker 04

  And I hope you're going to have me on, on your podcast to talk about that in...

• 54:35Speaker 00

  We certainly will. Watch this space, folks.

• 54:37Speaker 04

  Weeks, months, whatever. A lot of Weimars, a reaction to what happened in Russia, the Russian Revolution.

• 54:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's the logical place to go next. Well, thanks for coming on the podcast, Victor.

• 54:47Speaker 04

  No, it was a great pleasure. Thanks for asking me.

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• 55:43Speaker 06

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• 55:45Speaker 05

  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's been set, there's already holly jolly music playing in the grocery store, reminding you that the year is coming to a close.

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• 56:15Speaker 05

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• 56:23Speaker 00

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