In this episode, Jack and Blake discuss one of the bloodiest revolutions in history, the Russian Revolution, and the impact it had on the rest of the world. They are joined by Jack's co-host, Blake Neff.
00:04:42.180All the way from Finland and Poland, all the way across.
00:04:47.420So you get to the Urals, and that's really where European Russia kind of ends.
00:04:52.840And the Urals will come up later in this story, folks.
00:04:54.800And then Siberia begins, and it goes all the way across to the Kamchatka Peninsula, which is essentially the neighbor of Japan, and Vladivostok, which abuts North Korea, and then includes all of Alaska all the way up to the Yukon.
00:05:42.820You know, a lot of people know the story of the Archduke gets shot, and there's all these alliances.
00:05:48.160But sort of the big picture background to this that makes the war break out is that Russia is this huge country, a ton of people, and they're behind the ball compared to everyone, but they're finally industrializing.
00:06:00.540They're building the factories that other countries have.
00:06:03.020And Germany, which is hostile to them, has this realization where they just think Russia is going to be terrifyingly powerful.
00:06:11.180It's a lot like how people talk about China in the U.S., maybe.
00:06:14.480You know, this country that is just so huge that it's eventually going to be very strong.
00:06:18.740And so in the U.S., you'll have war hawks who will sometimes say, you know, we should fight China before they're too strong.
00:06:23.780And that was an attitude that existed towards Russia.
00:06:26.180But Russia, it turns out, was a very fragile and a very weak system.
00:06:36.580It has this superficially, this very autocratic monarchy where Tsar Nicholas II is, you know, the heir of this dynasty that goes back 300 years, has this enormous power, all this prestige.
00:06:50.360And yet it's sort of rotten on the inside.
00:06:53.180It's been this elite, it has this elite nobility that is very comfortable, very wealthy.
00:07:00.240They used to have this sort of principle in Russia that being an elite member of the nobility required service to the state.
00:07:06.260So you'd have to serve in the diplomatic corps or in the army.
00:07:09.440And this had some meritocratic elements.
00:07:12.340But by this point, even that was gone.
00:07:14.400So you just had these very regressive nobles who did not do a lot to earn their status.
00:07:20.180And this made it very easy for people to hate them.
00:07:23.200And so Russia is also just not well run.
00:08:22.020And Japan is rapidly industrialized before Russia.
00:08:25.340Yeah, you know, yeah, they're this Asiatic country that people think, oh, you know, they're not European, they're not modern.
00:08:31.820And they were closed off to the world all of 40 years ago.
00:08:35.340And then this country just comes in and just beats the tar out of Russia really badly.
00:08:40.220And this is so shocking that in Russia it causes a sort of abortive revolution, you know, kind of compared to like a George Floyd type thing where there's a lot of rioting.
00:09:37.280And this really exposes all the vulnerable.
00:09:40.100And they throw out, in that Russia-Japanese war, that is the first time and really one of the only times that you see an Asian power defeating a European power.
00:09:50.400Yeah, and it's kind of not even close.
00:10:24.400It's hugely stressful on the home front.
00:10:26.980And that's where the tragedy kicks in, is it empowers radical actors who would have been on the fringes, even, of the Russian sort of revolutionary society.
00:10:38.660A funny joke is, in Britain, they have this 26-episode documentary about World War I.
00:10:45.000And their episode on the Russian Revolution is titled, Fat Rozenko Has Sent Me Some Nonsense.
00:10:51.060And that's the telegram that the Tsar gets, where they're saying, hey, there's riots in St. Petersburg, or Petrograd, they called it then, because St. Petersburg was a German name.
00:11:26.820And it's almost like, in the span of a week, monarchy in Russia just vanishes.
00:11:32.020And this is where things get really upsetting.
00:11:34.240And by the way, actually, one key point of that, you mentioned the British, but at this time in World War I, and of course people know this, but, you know, just for those who don't, that all of the, really, the ruling families of Europe at this point are interrelated.
00:11:49.080And there have been weddings where they've all gone together, and so Tsar Nicholas, so the Romanovs, of course, are the ruling family of Russia, Tsar Nicholas even makes an impassioned plea to his cousin, who is the king of England at this point, asking for the British to send some kind of relief to them so that he can flee.
00:12:59.540And now the Germans, right, so Russia's up against the ropes, and they've taken the brunt of it in World War I, the way they took the brunt of it in World War II.
00:13:06.660And they're really up against the ropes, these, as you say, their failure to industrialize early on plays a huge role in this, where, of course, the Germans, you know, as industrious as ever, are slamming them.
00:13:19.640And to mention something, though, that people have heard of, another reason they have so little credibility.
00:13:26.600This is the famous Rasputin, the Russian mystic from the countryside.
00:14:08.420And it's things like this that make it possible for monarchies to get overthrown.
00:14:12.760When everything's nice, it doesn't happen.
00:14:15.400When there's a war, and it seems like a crazy man is running things.
00:14:19.500So this is also when, and of course, and it has been said many times, that Vladimir Lenin, who had been living in exile after the previous revolution, failed revolution, he had been in Switzerland at the time.
00:14:31.220And it's actually the German high command that plays a role in putting him and the Bolsheviks on a train car, essentially, and getting them back to, and I think at the time it was still Petrograd.
00:14:44.020But getting them to Petrograd, where he basically launches in 1917, what becomes the Russian revolution.
00:14:51.080Exactly. So after the Tsar leaves, there's what's called the provisional government, and they promise all the things that early revolutions promise.
00:15:00.900You know, we're going to have democratic elections, and we're going to have a constituent assembly that will set a constitution for Russia.
00:15:06.980They make a lot of fine declarations, but there's all these strains of radicalism within the government.
00:15:13.140And one of the things that happens as part of the overthrowing the Tsar is they create a thing, they create these things called Soviets.
00:15:19.560And Soviet basically means council, and they're sort of like ad hoc unions in various organizations.
00:15:27.180So you could have a Soviet in a factory, a worker's Soviet.
00:15:30.260You could have a Soviet within an armed force, within a military unit, like a soldier's Soviet.
00:15:36.900And these exist, and they're distinct from things like the Duma or the provisional government that's been created.
00:15:44.840And what Lenin does that makes him kind of a genius, to be honest, he's very radical.
00:15:49.780He's on the most radical fringe of the radical, you know, revolutionary party in Russia.
00:15:55.460I think it's the Russian Social Democrat Party, and the Bolsheviks that he's a part of are a faction of this.
00:16:01.240He shows up, gets off the train, and he has a simple platform.
00:16:07.020And then he says that he's going, he demands that land, he demands an end to the war with Germany, and he demands land for the peasantry.
00:16:17.460And it's like a very simple platform that really appeals to people.
00:16:20.600The Russian peasantry, the vast majority of the country at this point, they've always wanted the land.
00:16:25.800This is one of the fatal flaws they did, is they emancipated the serfs, but they still allowed the landholders to hold the vast majority of land in Russia.
00:16:34.300And they had a sort of long-term plan to change this, but they didn't, they basically didn't complete it in time.
00:16:40.080And so you have all these Russian peasants who want land.
00:16:42.200And, of course, the war is unpopular, and the provisional government is promising to keep fighting the war to try to get support from the allies, whereas Lenin says, I'm going to end the war.
00:16:53.620And then he just says, all power to the Soviets.
00:16:55.600And it's the sort of three planks of this platform that make them so powerful, because even though we know their ultimate plan is we're going to confiscate all the land and have a horrible collectivist government, it's an incredibly appealing thing to ordinary Russians.
00:17:11.040And so just like you had in France, as we discussed the other day, in France, you had this mass outburst of violence in the countryside sort of unleashed by the revolutionary fervor.
00:17:31.600And so it turns into Lenin not just saying, we'll give you land, but also saying, we'll let you keep what you've taken after you've murdered this aristocrat.
00:17:41.800And so to just throw in there that, you know, you also have another parallel to the French Revolution in that you sort of have this initial government that gets set up that's somewhat moderate, but doesn't really have total control.
00:17:55.460And so the Russian Revolution, people understand this when you study it, it's actually two revolutions in one.
00:18:00.360There's one that's brief and then one that goes much longer.
00:18:04.160So the moderates, that's called the French Revolution, or excuse me, of course, that's called the February Revolution.
00:19:23.340It's the Bolshevik Revolution is one of those events where it was almost certainly, this is like a one, there's not a 1% chance of happening.
00:19:31.480And it happened to hit because they needed to get so lucky.
00:19:37.220If anyone other than Lenin was leading them, they almost certainly lose, because Lenin is a true political genius, it has to be admitted.
00:19:45.040And Lenin talks this tiny Bolshevik cabal into saying, we should take over the Winter Palace.
00:19:50.560That's where the government is headquartered in Petrograd.
00:19:53.540And they basically just do it overnight.
00:19:55.400They storm the Winter Palace and they take over this little organ of government.
00:19:58.640And, again, it's like the French Revolution, where anything that happened in Paris was just massively more important.
00:20:06.740They take over in St. Petersburg or Petrograd, and they have enough of these Soviets in the area who support them that they keep hold of Petrograd.
00:20:14.840And for a huge amount of the country, it's like, well, okay, Petrograd's in control of these new guys, so now they're the ones in charge.
00:20:23.640And they almost sort of like very – it's surprising how easy it is for them to suddenly take control of this larger revolutionary mass.
00:20:31.820And then, even then, this is the sort of thing that could have easily been stopped by the Germans.
00:20:36.900It could have easily been stopped by the Allies, especially once World War I ends a year into this.
00:20:41.460You just send, like, 100,000 men into this completely chaotic country, and you just sort of snip its head off.
00:22:14.560One of the fantastic books that gets through this where it shows how Lenin pitted those people against each other all the while while he was making these sort of provisional agreements with external actors or various forces around the –
00:22:29.840because remember, as you say, the empire is sort of falling apart at this point, and he's basically going to, you know, the Kazakh nationalists and saying, oh, we'll work with you and we'll put you in power.
00:22:39.840And he goes – he's going around to all these different disparate areas.
00:22:42.940And so they all pledge support to the Bolsheviks.
00:22:47.780And then you do – but the great book that I want to point out is Always With Honor, the memoirs of Pyotr Rangel.
00:22:54.420And he became this – he was a sort of a junior general, a junior in terms of not leading the remnant of the imperial army or the – or I guess I would say the army that remained loyal to the czar.
00:23:08.740And the leader originally was General Denekin, Rangel, a Baltic German, huge guy, like 6'5", just enormous figure, true natural-born leader, remains loyal, and then actually does very late in the civil war begin consolidating some of those forces and just says instead of calling ourselves like the anti-Bolshevik, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, we're just going to call ourselves the Russian army.
00:23:34.580And so the Russian army and people start joining it, he does institute – so they have southern Russia and Crimea at this point.
00:23:42.580But at this point, as you say, the Bolsheviks, they've just been going through and systematically wiping out any opposition, slaughtering prisoners, POWs, priests, nuns, again, just like in the French Revolution, anyone who's an intellectual who stands against them.
00:23:59.560And I actually wanted to mention, though, to get into the Russian royal family, the Romanovs, for about the first year, year and change, are still alive.
00:24:09.040And they become sort of a – sort of almost like a MacGuffin in the sense that it's the whites, the Russian army, are always trying to save the Romanovs.
00:24:18.900So they're always being – you know, planning out their campaigns towards where the Romanovs are.
00:24:34.160And they say, well, because the Romanovs are in St. Petersburg, that's why the army marches towards there.
00:24:40.160And originally, they had been kept – they had been – you know, the Romanovs had been kept pretty safe throughout all this time.
00:24:46.140But because the whites, because the Russian army, the Imperials are getting close, that's when they throw them on the train out to the Urals.
00:24:53.560And that's why they exile – you know, take them all the way away, still in captivity, to a place called Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains, all the way – basically bordering Siberia.
00:25:05.180And it is there where they're taken and put in this building called the House of Special Purpose.
00:25:12.020Yeah, and the Special Purpose is not very good.
00:25:15.780And that is what ends up happening is another group of Russian whites gets – within about a day or two of where they're being held, and they just decide, yeah, this is too much of a problem.
00:25:30.180And that's – I think that's a very important aspect of the Russian Revolution to highlight is it really is monstrously violent in a way that few revolutions are.
00:25:40.900And, you know, we mentioned in yesterday's episode, you know, how mendacity is this core aspect of Marxism.
00:25:47.120And it's really the Russian Revolution where that stands out, that these are, at heart, very bad and vicious people.
00:25:55.160So, you know, they don't just shoot the czar and his wife.
00:26:31.820And as you mentioned before, he's quite sickly.
00:26:33.740And Princess Anastasia, of course, we know there's a lot of popular culture surrounding her.
00:26:41.140And for a long time, there was this popular theory that she may have secretly escaped.
00:26:47.320But 80 years later, after the murders, when the government of Russia finally started – the new government of Russia finally started examining this and exhuming the site, they did actually find the bones of the family, including the bones of the children.
00:27:03.940They were able to use DNA analysis because it was now available.
00:27:06.760And they did confirm that all five children were there.
00:27:10.620And the story that you – that people hear about this, it's actually quite horrific.
00:27:18.300So the family is being kept in this house of special purpose.
00:27:23.940They've not done anything at this point.
00:27:25.940But they serve as that sort of symbol of what could be the restoration of Russia, what could be the restoration of the empire.
00:27:34.600And so to the Bolsheviks, they play this role of considering a threat because they're creating a massive motivation for the white forces, for the imperial army, the imperial remnant, to save them.
00:27:47.160And then potentially something that could rally the people towards them.
00:27:50.860And for folks to understand, they are a Christian dynasty.
00:27:54.260So when they take them down to this basement bunker, they tell them to get dressed.
00:28:01.940And it's said that when they first opened fire that the czar and his wife – the last thing they did was actually make the sign of the cross.
00:28:10.580And that it said that they weren't even able to finish making the sign of the cross before the bullets struck them, according to some accounts.
00:28:18.340But because the guns they were using were particularly smoky and this bunker was so small, there was so much gun smoke in the area that they couldn't tell what was going on.
00:28:27.580And so the Bolshevik murderers say, cease fire.
00:28:31.960And when they do cease fire, they realize that only the adults – and there's some retainers and other adults that are there as well.
00:28:39.680All the adults are killed, but the children are all still alive, including Prince Alexei, because he had been sitting down because I'd said, again, he was sickly.
00:28:47.220Then the Bolsheviks give the order – after the smoke dissipates and they realize the kids are all still alive, they give the order, fix bayonets.
00:28:57.500And so they charge them with the bayonets on the rifles to all the princesses and to little Prince Alexei.
00:29:04.740But – so they kill Prince Alexei very quickly.
00:29:08.120And then with the girls, though, because their gowns have those sequins and the diamonds on them – so these are the crown jewels of Russia –
00:29:16.220they actually can't pierce the dresses because they're protected by these essentially diamonds.
00:29:23.680And then at that point, they order them to pull their side pieces out, the Bolsheviks, draw their side pieces, and just walk up to all the children and shoot them in the head.
00:29:35.880So this is sort of the foundational moment.
00:29:51.960Some of this is also – it's like the inheritance of being in Russia.
00:29:55.940So Russia has this massive secret police operation as the Tsar when it's still an empire.
00:30:03.000And what the Bolsheviks do is they kind of just roll in and take it over.
00:30:06.420They replace the people at top with their own guys, and they go back to the same old methods, and they just make them a lot more lethal.
00:30:14.500And what's terrifying with the Bolshevik revolution is relative to pretty much any other revolution I know of is they're very ruthlessly efficient about killing people that they mark as a threat.
00:30:26.300And this becomes a defining feature of the Soviet regime for basically 30 years.
00:30:33.400You know, they kill a ton of landowners.
00:30:49.560Yeah, they change all these different –
00:30:50.720There are many organizations prior to this.
00:30:53.380Stop buzzing in my ear about the boring people at your office.
00:30:57.080I'm trying to listen to the new human events with Jack Pozovic.
00:31:02.560Yeah, NKVD, you know, it's just anytime they roll in anywhere, the number of people who die is enormous.
00:31:09.060In World War II, Soviet Union notably splits Poland with Germany, and the NKVD rolls in, and they arrest a ton of officers in the Polish army.
00:31:20.140They also take some priests, other intellectuals, and they deport them.
00:31:26.700They take about 20,000 of them to the Moscow area, and then they just decide after about six months, it's too dangerous having these guys around, and they just shoot all of them, and they never speak of it again.
00:31:38.700It's actually a forest called Katyn, the Katyn Massacre.
00:31:47.380And the Germans put out the word, and the Allies say, oh, well, that's just Nazi propaganda.
00:31:52.820And for years, it was considered that the Germans did that.
00:31:56.560And, you know, and for decades, it was sort of the position of the Soviet Union was it didn't happen, and if it did happen, the Germans did it.
00:32:03.420Yet, as the history book I just read pointed out, it was sort of the only Nazi crime the Soviet Union would not talk about too much, so everyone could read between the lines.
00:32:11.840And this is just how they are really from the start.
00:33:18.080So it's important to understand that facet of it, is that they were taking a word that already existed
00:33:23.360and redefining it to apply to a much greater number of people.
00:33:28.320And they essentially made it so it applied to any successful peasant, any peasant who, like, owned a mill or some sort of production facet.
00:33:36.760And eventually, it just applied to anyone who also defended these people.
00:33:41.420And you get this revolutionary campaign in Russia called de-kulakization.
00:33:45.780And the bluntest way to describe this is kill everyone who is more successful than you and you're resentful of it.
00:33:53.580And these are not, you know, old-hand people who are – these are not old aristocrats.
00:34:51.300You'll get these essays that the left will write where they'll say, yeah, guys, you know, we say the problem is these billionaires like Donald Trump.
00:35:00.900But really the regressive force in America is – they call them the American gentry.
00:35:06.200And it's just what you'd say is ordinary rich people or well – upper middle class people who are not in big cities.
00:35:13.660So it's your local successful residents of Tulsa, Oklahoma, of Meridian, Idaho, of Platt, Nebraska.
00:35:23.180It's normal people who have not concentrated in the – in these blue cities.
00:35:34.320So anyone who's got that sort of like –
00:35:36.120People who are financially well-off – it's financially well-off but not remotely near the nerve centers of power.
00:35:42.900They are fundamentally – because these people are fundamentally conservative.
00:35:46.020People who are – who own their own businesses, who are not closely tethered to, you know, some central political regime, they're fundamentally conservative people.
00:35:55.820They have a good amount but they also have a lot they can lose.
00:35:59.340They benefit from the existing system and they don't see a lot of reasons to radically change it and they're not on board with like weird ideological projects.
00:36:08.440And these people are always marked as enemies of a radical revolutionary regime.
00:36:13.740And so in Russia, things were crazy enough that they would just round up and shoot these people and then collectivize their agriculture.
00:36:21.300And if you want to know how well that went, you know, ask someone in Ukraine.
00:36:27.600Yes, yeah, you know, a terror famine in Ukraine.
00:36:31.320But this is what's really horrifying with, you know, the Russian Revolution is it was, for all of its violence, it was enormously successful at totally remaking Russian society.
00:36:42.760When you think of what defines Russians today, it's very different from what defined Russians stereotypically, you know, before the revolution.
00:36:52.300There is that authoritarian strand throughout it.
00:36:54.680But, you know, if you look at a poll, Russians are far more likely to take this very cynical view of morality.
00:37:03.160They're very, even, even like religious Russians, it's almost like it doesn't always take with them their attitudes on what's right or wrong.
00:37:10.780And it's a lot of this is just that the Soviets messed them up in the head so much.
00:37:15.700And they created these very sinister systems.
00:37:18.380So rather than just entirely destroy the Orthodox Church, they would do things like they would just appoint KGB assets to be the heads of the Orthodox Church.
00:37:27.380And, you know, OK, you guys have confession as a sacrament.
00:37:31.360Make sure whatever gets confessed, you know, gets folded over to the KGB's files.
00:37:35.900And I don't think I need to belabor at length the sort of psychological impact this has on people to have institutions that are designed to deceive you and trick you and take something that, you know, whatever its merits in the past is now used against you in a very ruthless way.
00:37:55.580They have this whole system of everyone informing on everyone else.
00:37:59.520That's that's really what defines the great terror.
00:38:01.980It's not that they just shoot everyone at random.
00:38:03.960They create a situation where you get denounced and it's very easy for anyone who gets denounced to be killed very quickly.
00:38:13.820Stalin, probably in the kind of terror before World War Two in the 30s, he I want to say the estimates are he shoots about two million members of the party just outright.
00:38:24.040They just get purged for some ideological offense or just because the NKVD had to hit a quota of state enemies and defenders of socialism or communism will always say this is just Stalin being Stalin and that's not an indictment of communism.
00:39:47.100Antifa, the original one, of course, was in Germany in the 1930s as the street fighting unit of the Communist Party of Germany, of Deutschland.
00:39:54.640But, you know, it would be like if you took the most violent, you know, communist Reddit page and the people who say those just completely insane, unhinged screeds about how they want to wipe out all the class enemies.
00:40:10.880Or these days, of course, they would say the race enemies and the gender enemies and, you know, certainly me and Blake and pretty much everybody else on on any of our programs.
00:40:22.040But if you took those complete nut jobs and put them in charge of one of the most powerful countries in the entire world, certainly one of the most powerful state apparatuses in the world.
00:40:31.760And they tried, of course, to export this around the world.
00:40:34.080This is where you get the the common turn, the communist international.
00:40:37.400But, Blake, and just as we close out here, we have a couple of minutes.
00:40:40.900Talk to us a little bit about how at so many points this just could have been stopped if someone had just come in and and crushed them.
00:40:49.880And yet you had this idea that, number one, that it won't last very long.
00:40:56.380It's better for us to just call out their hypocrisy.
00:41:00.000It's better for us to just point out the double standards of them and how so many people.
00:41:06.420And there's this line in Always with Honor where he says social life continued on its usual course as if the people involved in the sort of the social scene he's describing in St. Petersburg
00:41:18.380would not become victims of the horror soon to befall them.
00:41:30.060You know, when the Reds first take over Petrograd, they control, you know, a couple cities.
00:41:36.060And it's the sort of thing that could get squished.
00:41:38.180But, you know, when it's weak, it looks weak so you don't need to do anything.
00:41:41.880And no one ever is really just willing to take the extra step of, oh, this is actually a huge problem that these people are so radical and them controlling this huge country would be a big deal.
00:41:53.560And obviously World War I plays a role here.
00:41:57.700If this if the Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia out of the blue, like if 1905 had turned into this type of revolution,
00:42:04.800I think beyond all doubt other countries would have intervened to stop it.
00:42:09.300They would have seen how terrible it was.
00:42:27.520Well, of course, this plays into this plays into, as we talked last year when we did the China files, this is very similar because just, you know, about 30 years later after and the Chinese model very, very much follows.
00:42:38.800So obviously Communist China became the Soviet Union's most successful export in terms of exporting the ideology of communism because World War II ends.
00:42:49.900You have all these people that are sitting in, you know, in in China.
00:42:56.580John Birch, by the way, the actual John Birch, being one of them, a military officer, saying, look, you know, just provide some more some more weapons to these to these nationalists in Chiang Kai-shek.
00:43:07.380And you can you can put them out of business.
00:43:09.020You can completely destroy these communists.
00:43:14.340The last thing I would want to highlight is how throughout this, the Bolsheviks always benefited from just the most rigged, lying press support of all time.
00:43:26.300They always have the press in the West, especially in Britain.
00:43:29.780They always have government operators simping for them.
00:43:32.420So they'll always, you know, I would say, you know, the czar probably I don't know if I want to say he deserved to get murdered, but he did not earn his hold on power.
00:43:41.760But everything after that, you'll read like.
00:43:45.700So in the 30s, Stalin's doing terror famines and shooting all these people.
00:43:49.400And so The New York Times sends Walter Durante to Russia to say, oh, it's all above board.
00:43:55.320The British Walter Durante, who later goes on to win the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the establishment of the Soviet Union.
00:44:05.660And so people are always covering for them.
00:44:10.740So during World War Two, you have the press repeating the Soviet narrative on everything about why they had to invade Poland, why they had to invade Finland, why they had to absorb all these countries, why all these people missing is totally OK.
00:44:23.300And then continuing after it, there's another book.
00:44:26.900I can't remember the author, but the book's title is Stalin's War.
00:44:29.880And it just points out that the reputation in the West of Chiang Kai-shek, the head of the Chinese nationalists, is that he was so incredibly corrupt, so bad.
00:44:39.540You know, he anyone else might have been able to win the Civil War, but this guy was just so bad.
00:44:43.280So it made sense that the communists would win.
00:44:45.740And the reality is just that that's the Soviet propaganda against him.
00:44:49.820Maybe there was some corruption, but it's not like he's super exceptional in this regard.
00:44:55.900Yeah, because Chairman Mao is such a shining example of incorruptibility.
00:44:59.980And you're just repeating a narrative that is put up in these ideological actors who just like communists.
00:45:05.920Well, this is where we get the phrase fellow traveler.
00:45:13.640Which, and there's a very strong, in the current era, by the way, there's a guy by the name of Jamal Khashoggi, who some would say might fit that bill.
00:45:23.140And a final thing from, Lenin had strength for some turns of phrase.
00:45:27.860And another one that's useful to remember is he gives a speech at some party event after they've taken power, where he says the key question of, you know, the modern political struggle is not, you know, one of theory or whatever.
00:45:43.940It is fundamentally, who will overtake whom?
00:45:47.320And this is sometimes abbreviated, who, whom?
00:45:51.280And it's a very useful frame, I believe, for understanding left-wing politics, is the left will always be able to bring up some ideological reason.
00:46:02.420Okay, we don't like the police because of this thing about oppressing black bodies, systemic racism.
00:46:10.880Okay, if we do this policy, this will lead to greater egalitarianism.
00:46:28.080Yeah, in America, you can very easily tell who they want to be on top and who they want, especially, to be on the bottom.
00:46:35.880And it's like, in the left today, they will always be able to find a reason to explain why, you know, if you're one of these opposed groups,
00:46:45.260like, you know, America's Kulak class, why anything bad that happens to you is okay, why it's okay to loot your store, why it's okay to ruin your community, why it's okay to discriminate against you in colleges.
00:46:57.660And yes, if necessary, like, why it's okay for you to be, like, violently killed by some mob.
00:47:02.340And you're not, you know, anyone can say whatever they want about you.
00:47:16.780You can find leftists on the internet today who think that because Kyle Rittenhouse was this white teenager, that it was eminently fair that Antifa should be allowed to just hunt him down and just shoot him in the streets of Kenosha.
00:47:30.740And, you know, it's a very communist ideology that Lenin would have been proud of that take.
00:47:35.120Right, and so this is the—and you take people with this communist ideology, you put them in charge of a country, and then they decide who can live, they decide who dies, they decide who's in power, they decide whose power is taken away.
00:47:49.460This is where you get the system of gulags that Solzhenitsyn wrote about.
00:47:53.520This is where you get the system of the systemic killings that went on all the way from the Red Tower, really up all the way until the end of the 1990s and the collapse of the entire system.
00:48:03.040You know, they—and Solzhenitsyn, of course, you know, he's good to read, not so much at the start of the revolution, but how things ended.
00:48:09.780But they did ask him once at the very end of all of it, if you could sum up all of this in one phrase, how could all of this have happened?
00:48:23.740Blake Neff, thank you so much for joining us today on Blood on the Snow, the Russian Revolution, this installment, Chronicles of the Revolution.