The Matt Walsh Show - The Real History of Communism： The Russian Revolution

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00:00:30.000 Imagine a country where a small group of resentful, unpopular left-wing radicals

00:00:37.920 seize power and then use their power to deliberately destroy the family.

00:00:45.700 Crush the church.

00:00:48.280 Unleash criminals on the streets. 1.00

00:00:50.840 Legalize abortion. 0.91

00:00:52.060 Implement no-fault divorce.

00:00:54.000 Enact insane economic policies. 0.54

00:00:55.960 Institute affirmative action.

00:00:57.960 Persecute their political enemies. 0.56

00:00:59.160 and so chaos to expand their control.

00:01:02.300 Sounds familiar, but I'm not describing America. 0.68

00:01:07.980 I'm describing Russia in 1917.

00:01:13.020 You've probably never been to Russia,

00:01:15.500 and you probably weren't alive during the Bolshevik Revolution,

00:01:18.500 but let me assure you, you'll recognize it.

00:01:21.500 And that's because the totalitarian left

00:01:23.840 has not changed its playbook in a century.

00:01:26.500 Their tactics, motives, and goals don't change over time.

00:01:31.260 In this episode, we'll break down the eight rules of a communist takeover one by one and

00:01:36.320 survey how those rules overlap with what's happening in America today.

00:01:40.240 We'll do so by surveying the history of Russia from 1899 to 1918, a period rarely taught

00:01:48.020 in great detail in American schools, despite, or perhaps because of, its obvious relevance

00:01:53.180 to today.

00:01:54.540 To the extent communism is covered in schools at all, it's either in the context of World War II,

00:01:59.420 in which communists are presented as the good guys, or in rare cases of honesty,

00:02:03.980 it's about the horrors of communist regimes, gulags, famines, death camps.

00:02:09.440 Now, those things matter, but they miss the more important point, which is,

00:02:13.680 how did communist lunatics take over a massive empire in the first place?

00:02:18.720 That question is the central question of our times, 0.78

00:02:21.500 because those same tactics are being run again right now.

00:02:25.740 As the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana warned,

00:02:30.060 those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

00:02:32.940 And that's the point of this episode.

00:02:34.720 So we don't repeat it. That's why we're doing this.

00:02:37.960 This is the real history of communism, the Russian Revolution.

00:02:51.500 we're obligated to start this episode by acknowledging that the russian revolution

00:02:59.280 the subsequent civil war and the rise of soviet communism are some of the most complex and

00:03:05.440 intricate subjects in history the shocking levels of betrayal and intrigue the complicated russian

00:03:11.100 names and improbable events illustrate how a country like russia produces literary geniuses

00:03:17.680 like Dostoevsky or Tolstoy.

00:03:20.720 The country's history really is like a complicated Russian novel,

00:03:24.260 and to make this episode accessible to a large audience,

00:03:26.840 we can't possibly provide every single detail

00:03:29.160 and every single aspect of these major world-changing events.

00:03:33.260 What we can do is describe in broad terms what happened

00:03:37.220 and feature specific events that directly relate to our own situation today,

00:03:42.040 and that's what we're going to do.

00:03:44.200 The lessons you'll learn hold enduring truths about humanity that are relevant far beyond politics.

00:03:50.620 If you follow the citations throughout the episode, you'll find books and essays that are good starting points for a more in-depth understanding of what happened, and I highly recommend you do that.

00:04:02.220 Now, like a lot of history, this story begins with a bad idea.

00:04:06.560 The idea that history is a dialectic centered on a class conflict between oppressors and the

00:04:13.300 oppressed. In the words of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, solving the class conflict could be

00:04:19.140 done only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. This meant the

00:04:24.760 abolition of money, of eternal truths, of nations, of the bourgeois family, which Marx said would

00:04:31.880 vanish as a matter of course and of private property.

00:04:35.780 Under Marxism, you would own nothing and be happy.

00:04:48.100 Marx's ideological pronouncements were radically at odds with how he actually lived,

00:04:52.840 a pattern you'll recognize from leftists today.

00:04:55.600 For example, Marx actually hated industrial workers.

00:04:58.480 According to Sean McMeekin's book, To Overthrow the World,

00:05:01.320 When Marx visited factory workers in the summer of 1845, he was not impressed with the workers' intellectual acumen.

00:05:09.280 And when a tailor explained to Marx that they were organizing workers into collectives to negotiate better conditions with their employers,

00:05:16.360 an angry Marx was seen pounding on the table with his fist before shouting that ignorance has never yet helped anyone.

00:05:22.660 Marx sustained his lifestyle by taking handouts from his friend Friedrich Engels

00:05:27.840 and collecting inheritance money from family members and wealthy supporters.

00:05:33.120 He called for the abolition of inheritance, of course, for everybody else.

00:05:36.420 Marx employed servants to help his wife with housework,

00:05:39.840 lived in a spacious and comfortable dwelling in Modena Villas in Maitland Park in London,

00:05:45.880 and threw a formal ball complete with gold-rimmed invitations,

00:05:48.940 liveryed servants, and a dance band, just as he was seizing the reins of the

00:05:53.620 International Working Men's Association. Marx was a prolific writer and a major

00:05:57.940 public intellectual known for his journalism and political organizing. His

00:06:02.320 books, like Das Kapital, were published in multiple languages and printed

00:06:06.460 throughout Europe. By the 1880s Marx realized that it was in Russia, home of

00:06:10.660 the strongest autocracy in Europe and also the most Baroque and violent

00:06:15.160 political radicalism that his book was more read and appreciated than anywhere else czarist censors

00:06:21.720 let russian translations of his book slip through the cracks because they thought it was basically

00:06:26.940 unreadable turns out that was a bad call the book sold very well on february 8th 1899 st petersburg

00:06:33.480 university students mostly upper middle class children of the russian intelligentsia planned

00:06:38.260 to celebrate tatiana day the traditional anniversary of the university's founding

00:06:42.900 According to the historian Richard Pipes, the university's rector banned those celebrations by decree.

00:06:49.160 Students booed the rector for 20 minutes straight and then started to riot.

00:06:53.600 The students pelted the police with snowballs and the officers hit the students with whips.

00:06:58.420 Things spiraled out of control and the students announced a strike.

00:07:01.980 St. Petersburg University socialist groups ignored the situation at first, but quickly realized what an opportunity it was.

00:07:08.600 They could co-opt the riots for their own purposes.

00:07:12.160 And so they did.

00:07:13.260 Radical left-wing strike leaders brought in the aims of the unrest,

00:07:16.820 moving it from a protest against university administration

00:07:19.860 to opposition against the entire political system.

00:07:23.620 They convinced many students that the entire system of government

00:07:26.740 had to be burned to the ground.

00:07:28.940 Within days, all major institutions of higher learning in the empire were shut down.

00:07:33.860 25,000 students boycotted class.

00:07:36.220 The government arrested the strike leaders,

00:07:38.680 but university officials started making concessions for the students,

00:07:42.620 and this led to a tit-for-tat cycle of protest, repression, and concession.

00:07:47.220 For decades, Russian universities had been incubators of extremism and radical ideology.

00:07:53.240 This period was defined by radically escalating political violence, often committed by students.

00:07:58.920 One former student who had been expelled from various universities decided to exact vengeance on behalf of his comrades.

00:08:05.680 His name was P.V. Karpovich. On February 14, 1901, Karpovich entered the reception area of the Ministry of Education, where the education minister was addressing the public.

00:08:18.120 Karpovich shot the minister in the neck with a revolver, mortally wounding him.

00:08:22.460 The next year, in April 1902, a former student turned socialist revolutionary named Stepan Balmyshev assassinated the minister of the interior, triggering a drastic expansion of police powers.

00:08:35.680 As a contemporary academic named Prince E. N. Trebetskoy put it,

00:08:39.780 the student strikes of 1899 marked the beginning of the general crisis of the state.

00:08:45.860 Russians didn't realize it at the time, but the old order was coming to an end.

00:08:51.080 This was the start of the Russian Revolution.

00:08:53.920 And its immediate cause wasn't an uprising of starving peasants and industrial workers,

00:08:59.080 but of radicalized, privileged young students driven by political ideology and resentment of

00:09:06.000 the system that created them. Now the lesson is obvious. By failing to take the student protests

00:09:11.180 seriously, university administrators and the czarist government allowed them to spiral out 0.87

00:09:16.980 of control and into something different. This is the first rule in a communist takeover. 0.81

00:09:23.100 Any revolution can become your revolution. You should never allow the government to choose

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00:10:10.880 When the student protests first broke out, one Russian radical was reading about them from afar

00:10:16.640 in Siberia, having been exiled for revolutionary activities. He was an intellectual, smart,

00:10:22.880 highly disagreeable, highly motivated, and had no attachment to society as it existed.

00:10:28.240 His name was Vladimir Lenin, and like Marx before him, he was an idealist. His goal wasn't just to

00:10:34.260 create a new political and economic system, but to remake humanity itself. Lenin had a privileged

00:10:40.320 upbringing. His father had noble status under the Tsarist regime. As a child, Lenin idealized his

00:10:46.400 mother and loved to read. His favorite book was Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. The

00:10:51.560 family was comfortably bourgeois, highly religious, entirely apolitical. It wasn't until after the

00:10:57.320 sudden death of Lenin's father that his brother, Alexander, was radicalized at his university and

00:11:03.220 then executed for plotting to assassinate the czar. These events were transformative for Lenin,

00:11:08.560 who, curious about his brother's radicalism, started reading Marxist literature, but also

00:11:13.020 witnessed his mother's social status collapse because of her oldest son's execution. This

00:11:17.600 triggered Lenin's dissent into radicalism and resentfulness. Just before the student protests

00:11:23.040 began in 1898, Russian Marxists founded their own political party called the Russian Social

00:11:29.280 Democratic Labor Party. Their core belief was that Russia's path to revolution ran through

00:11:35.120 the industrial working class. The party was very small and drew its membership mostly from educated,

00:11:41.520 radicalized professionals and unemployed college students. They saw themselves as the vanguard

00:11:46.640 of the working class the actual working class wasn't interested in the new party for the most

00:11:51.940 part. Though small in numbers party members had big disagreements about strategy. According to a

00:11:57.080 Russian-born aristocrat named Serge Obolensky one faction quote wanted to ally the Russian labor

00:12:02.900 movement with the reformers and socialists of Europe and to break with the terrorism and

00:12:07.400 political conspiracies of Russian revolutionists. These members were called the Mensheviks and they

00:12:12.580 were relatively moderate or at least didn't want a violent revolution to change society and they

00:12:17.600 were led by a man named Julius Martov. The other faction was led by Lenin who quote wanted a small

00:12:23.160 conspiratorial party of dedicated revolutionists. They were called Bolsheviks and they had no

00:12:28.700 problem with violent tactics and were not moderate at all. Obolensky's tutor who was a party member

00:12:34.740 described the Bolsheviks as quote disciplined and organized. They are stronger, they are ruthless

00:12:39.920 And mind you, he said earnestly, if there is any catastrophe, there's going to be a terrific socialist movement, and eventually the Bolsheviks will win. 0.63

00:12:47.980 It was a pression prediction.

00:12:50.140 In 1905, Russian discontent accelerated after the country's humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese War.

00:12:57.640 The war was sold to Russians as a quick and easy victory against an inferior Asian nation.

00:13:03.000 Russia was, in fact, completely humiliated.

00:13:05.480 After sending its Baltic fleet on an 18,000-mile voyage to the Pacific, the Russian Navy was routed by the Japanese, losing 21 of their 35 ships in just two days.

00:13:16.100 Things were worse on the ground. Russia suffered 300,000 casualties in battles with the Japanese.

00:13:21.960 Their supposedly impregnable fortress at Port Arthur was forced into surrender.

00:13:28.600 This led to organic mass protests in Russian cities.

00:13:31.960 On January 22nd, 1905, hundreds of thousands of industrial workers and their families

00:13:37.760 marched through St. Petersburg holding icons and pictures of the Tsar.

00:13:44.080 They wanted better working additions, but to be clear, most of these protesters liked the Tsar.

00:13:49.320 They believed that he was benevolent and would provide for them.

00:13:54.760 The Tsar didn't take the march seriously at first, which, as you'll see, will become a pattern.

00:13:59.600 He departed to his country residence for the weekend, confident that everything was under control. 0.95

00:14:04.680 Nonetheless, Cossacks, a group of semi-nomadic frontiersmen known for their martial skills,

00:14:09.700 who were often employed by the Russian government for crowd control,

00:14:12.560 and Imperial Guard troops were put under standing orders to keep the palace safe from any potential intruders.

00:14:21.600 Ultimately, they fired into a massive crowd in St. Petersburg, killing 200 people and wounding another 800.

00:14:27.860 The event ignited months of escalating protests.

00:14:32.760 What mattered was that the event destroyed the foundational myth that the Tsar was some

00:14:36.760 sort of unimpugnable religious leader.

00:14:39.360 He was increasingly seen as a political actor who could be criticized and even coerced into

00:14:44.260 making concessions.

00:14:45.800 The mass protests and ensuing terrorist campaign forced the Tsar to issue an October manifesto

00:14:51.800 to restore order, allowing the first ever Russian parliament or Duma to convene and

00:14:56.740 even legalized labor units.

00:14:58.820 But rather than restore order,

00:15:00.100 those concessions inspired the dissidents

00:15:01.840 to demand even more.

00:15:03.600 Like the student protest, the czarist regime

00:15:05.980 treated the 1905 protests as a manageable outburst

00:15:09.680 rather than a systemic crisis.

00:15:11.800 By granting limited concessions and then clawing them back,

00:15:15.320 it ensured that the next explosion would be much worse.

00:15:18.800 And that's exactly what happened.

00:15:20.160 To be clear, none of this was provoked by the communists.

00:15:22.780 Lenin himself wasn't even in Russia for these events,

00:15:25.440 But they did lead him to one of his most important conclusions,

00:15:29.140 that these patterns of unrest

00:15:31.280 could be turned into a political program.

00:15:33.880 Because of the 1905 revolution,

00:15:36.440 Lenin understood that national humiliations

00:15:39.480 led to periods of great turmoil.

00:15:41.720 If he could subvert his country's war efforts,

00:15:44.560 it would diminish the credibility of the old regime

00:15:47.360 and create the conditions that he needed

00:15:49.080 to start a civil war, which he would use to take power.

00:15:52.360 Under such an approach, according to McMeekin,

00:15:54.960 Marxist revolutionaries would crow

00:15:57.060 after a government-endured military setbacks

00:15:59.620 and openly undermine its military effort.

00:16:02.060 Lenin was arguing for mutiny,

00:16:03.920 organizing mutiny on a scale large enough

00:16:05.880 to poison and ultimately destroy a country's armed forces.

00:16:09.000 Now this approach became known as revolutionary defeatism,

00:16:12.040 and it worked by intentionally destroying a country

00:16:14.880 from the inside to create a revolutionary environment.

00:16:18.620 In the context of Russia's upcoming military campaigns,

00:16:21.780 This meant turning an imperialist war into a civil war.

00:16:25.800 This is the second rule in a communist takeover.

00:16:29.020 Never let a crisis go to waste.

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00:17:19.780 One sign that the Tsar was losing his grip on power was the sheer amount of political violence in Russia in his final years.

00:17:29.440 In her book, Thou Shall Kill, Anna Geifman notes acts of terrorism became so common that newspapers stopped running in-depth reports on each incident.

00:17:38.620 Instead, they published daily rundowns recapping all the political violence and the theft that had taken place over the last 24 hours.

00:17:45.240 after the 1905 revolution the czar and his team were able to briefly stabilize the situation in

00:17:55.300 russia a lot of this was due to the czar's interior minister a man called pyotr stalypen

00:18:00.520 took a hard-nosed approach to the revolutionaries he created a system for fast executions for

00:18:06.400 terrorism arrested some legislators for their contact with the terrorists and even dissolved

00:18:12.800 parliament when it refused to cooperate with his efforts. Stolypin was undeniably tough,

00:18:18.000 but he also balanced this with pragmatism. He worked to solve the underlying problems

00:18:22.560 that might have made the public sympathetic to the radicals.

00:18:25.600 He implemented limited land reforms and tried to expand the middle class.

00:18:30.880 The idea being that once regular people had something to lose,

00:18:33.840 they would fight to protect it by supporting the government and stability.

00:18:38.160 By cutting the revolutionaries out of the conversation through his zero-tolerance 0.66

00:18:42.000 approach to terrorism, Russians started calling nooses stolly-pin neckties, but by still making

00:18:47.820 reforms that improve the quality of life for most Russians, he created a new lane for addressing

00:18:52.760 the country's problems while mitigating the risk of immediate revolution. However, his reforms and

00:18:59.880 aggressive style infuriated large landowners and conservatives in parliament, eventually forcing

00:19:05.160 him out of government and left-wing terrorists assassinated him in 1911 in revenge for his

00:19:10.540 crackdown on terrorism. Russia's decline was accelerated by its entrance into World War I

00:19:19.000 in 1914. Bread lines became commonplace. Tsar Nicholas II took personal control over the

00:19:25.460 military, which further weakened his prestige with news of every setback on the battlefield.

00:19:30.840 Inflation spiked more than 300 percent from 1914 to 1917, causing real wages for factory workers

00:19:37.860 to plummet by roughly 50 percent the main issue which probably sounds familiar was money printing

00:19:44.260 within days of the war's outbreak russia abandoned the gold standard and began printing rubles on

00:19:50.020 february 23rd 1917 international women's day female textile workers in st petersburg which 0.89

00:19:57.380 was then known as petrograd because st petersburg sounded too german walked off the job to protest 0.99

00:20:03.460 their deteriorating quality of life. That winter was one of the coldest on record. Factories were

00:20:08.820 routinely shut down due to lack of fuel and the number of protesters quickly swelled up to hundreds

00:20:14.200 of thousands. Now this might have been Lenin's moment. Never let a crisis go to waste. Once again

00:20:20.060 he was not in Russia and his party, which was small and dwindling, was heavily infiltrated by

00:20:25.100 Tsarist secret police. But it was still an opportunity for the revolutionary left and

00:20:29.840 critics of the Tsar. Russian troops were extremely demoralized by the social and political chaos that

00:20:35.140 had overtaken the country. By 1917, more than a million had already died in the world war.

00:20:41.560 Major cities were filled with huge numbers of poorly trained and low morale draftees awaiting

00:20:46.680 transfer to the front. On February 26th, the Tsar called in the army to deal with protests 1.00

00:20:51.800 only for two inexperienced trading companies to fire into a crowd of protesters, killing 40 and

00:20:58.340 wounding a similar number, which unleashed a mutiny that spread like wildfire through

00:21:02.720 Petrograd garrison. Hundreds than thousands of soldiers deserted, sold their weapons,

00:21:08.820 commandeered vehicles, and ran up the red flag or joined the milling grounds.

00:21:15.840 The Minister of War wanted to execute all of them, but the general in charge of securing

00:21:20.580 St. Petersburg, Sergei Kabalov, decided to arrest only the ringleaders. It was, as Pipes 0.98

00:21:26.480 notes a fatal loss of nerve.

00:21:28.720 This is a critical lesson on leadership.

00:21:30.920 Leaders who hold power but shrink from using it decisively

00:21:33.660 at the critical moment rarely get a second chance.

00:21:37.820 A fire needs only oxygen and fuel to become unmanageable.

00:21:42.760 Mass movement opposition needs only time.

00:21:46.140 One of the hallmarks of the February Revolution

00:21:48.560 was total hostility to the police.

00:21:50.700 Nikolai Rangel, witnessing the events in St. Petersburg,

00:21:53.980 noted in his memoirs that the revolutionaries

00:21:56.000 launched a war of extermination against police.

00:22:01.100 Angry mobs murdered police officers on site, harassed

00:22:06.080 their families, and even regularly killed random people

00:22:10.380 claiming that they were undercover officers.

00:22:12.880 Although the violence eventually subsided,

00:22:14.880 the police had basically been abolished.

00:22:17.520 This is how the historian Sean McMeekin

00:22:19.320 described the February Revolution.

00:22:21.060 Quote, police stations were overwhelmed,

00:22:23.020 and some of them were torched to the ground,

00:22:25.020 though usually only after inmates were freed—freed inmates were often the ones doing the torching—uniformed policemen were lynched, shops and markets raided, and the main city arsenal looted of weapons.

00:22:35.680 Baron Nikolai Rangel described how leftists unleashed the criminal population on society as the media cheered, writing, quote,

00:22:41.820 The prisons containing those detained for political offenses were thrown open, and then for the sake of consistency, the prisons were ordinary criminals as well.

00:22:49.900 A flood of convicts in their gray clothes, with the convict's yellow square on the back, streamed out.

00:22:55.480 These excellent fellows plundered the confectionary shops, changed their clothes in the street,

00:23:00.180 and good citizens once more mingled with the crowd.

00:23:03.360 I saw this incident myself, and it was not very reassuring.

00:23:06.280 On that day, a large number of crimes were committed.

00:23:08.900 Nobody felt safe, especially as the authorities, including the police, had disappeared.

00:23:12.880 But liberty had been won, and now we were all free men, riding in cars.

00:23:17.420 At any rate, the papers were unanimous in saying so.

00:23:20.620 Unleashing the criminal population on middle-class families is a hallmark of communism.

00:23:25.320 By early March, half the Petrograd garrison had mutinied.

00:23:29.200 High-level military officials who had already lost confidence in the monarchy

00:23:32.480 and were looking for ways to change the political situation

00:23:35.380 told the czar, who was unable to even return to Petrograd amid the disruptions,

00:23:39.860 that he had no choice but to abdicate.

00:23:42.100 His first move was to attempt to hand power to his 12-year-old son, Alexei,

00:23:46.580 But then he changed his mind and tried to give the throne to his brother, Grand Duke Michael,

00:23:51.780 a liberal who immediately gave his new power away to the revolutionaries.

00:23:55.640 The Tsar and his family were imprisoned at the Summer Palace.

00:23:58.780 With nothing to do, he shoveled snow and lived under a new name, Nicholas Romanov.

00:24:04.080 Everyone thought the left would moderate. That never happened.

00:24:07.060 The third rule of a communist takeover, let your enemies defeat themselves.

00:24:11.940 the power passed to a provisional government formed from members of the existing parliament

00:24:20.800 a fragile coalition of liberals and socialists who found themselves ruling a country in the

00:24:26.200 middle of a catastrophic war it was headquartered in the winter palace a symbol of the monarchy

00:24:31.060 it just replaced but from the beginning the provisional government was forced to share power

00:24:35.460 with the petrograd soviet a workers council which managed the workers and rogue soldiers

00:24:40.720 who controlled the streets. Russia had achieved a power vacuum and Lenin was on his way back from

00:24:46.240 exile to Philip. The key here was the workers councils or soviets which became a kind of shadow

00:24:52.480 government. Soviets were mostly urban socialists and would hold votes on matters of public interest.

00:25:00.880 They enforced decrees with riots, mob violence and strikes that herald public infrastructure. 0.64

00:25:07.120 The Soviets projected their power by using organized industrial workers, known as Red

00:25:11.800 Guards, and defected soldiers to patrol the cities, enforce their dictates, and engage

00:25:17.420 in mob violence, much like modern-day Tifa.

00:25:20.060 They often lynched police officers, looted businesses, and assassinated their enemies. 0.89

00:25:24.840 Through these intimidation tactics, the Petrograd Soviet became incredibly powerful.

00:25:29.960 On March 1, 1917, the same day the Provisional Government was forming, the Soviet issued

00:25:34.540 Order number one, a military order that transferred control of the military from officers to elected soldiers' committees.

00:25:41.240 Soldiers were supposed to follow the provisional government only if their orders didn't conflict with those issued by the Soviet.

00:25:48.220 One radical sailor noted at the time, quote,

00:25:51.120 Educated folk will read it differently, but we understand it straight.

00:25:55.120 Disarm the officers.

00:25:56.700 Revolutionary politics and the Russian military were now directly linked.

00:26:00.900 And this, as you'll see, would create a direct line for communists to subvert the military from within

00:26:06.080 and help them accomplish their goal of turning the imperial war into a civil war.

00:26:11.000 This is the fourth rule of a communist takeover.

00:26:14.160 It's easiest to destroy a country from within.

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00:27:02.640 It's worth noting that at this point, late winter 1917, it didn't seem like the Bolsheviks

00:27:08.400 would ever run Russia or even a small part of it. The Soviets were run by their rivals, 0.81

00:27:13.520 mostly socialists, but also some Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks were a fringe party, disliked by

00:27:20.020 nearly everyone and their leader was thousands of miles away across enemy lines taking over soviets

00:27:29.220 let alone the russian government would require discipline dispatch and ruthlessness three things

00:27:34.820 lenin was distinctly capable of but first he had to get to russia which required traveling

00:27:39.620 through an active war front or across germany which was a hostile nation 0.91

00:27:43.940 But it turns out, much like how both Baptists and bootleggers supported Prohibition, Lenin

00:27:51.180 found common cause with German intelligence. 0.65

00:27:54.180 Both sought to overthrow the Russian government and end their participation in World War I.

00:27:58.980 Who better than a charismatic leader who literally said that he wanted to overthrow the government,

00:28:03.560 end the war, and as a bonus, provoke a civil war that would cripple Russia for years. 0.74

00:28:09.620 The Germans didn't care about Marxism or Bolshevism. 0.72

00:28:12.300 The Germans were solely interested in getting Russia out of the war and having them cede

00:28:16.920 as much territory as possible to Germany.

00:28:20.460 The plan to get Lenin into Russia was led by a German diplomat named Arthur Zimmerman.

00:28:25.860 Now, you might recognize his name.

00:28:27.880 He's the same guy who offered military support to Mexico to retake Texas in his famous Zimmerman

00:28:33.420 telegram, which infuriated Americans at the time.

00:28:39.380 worked through intermediaries to transport Lenin along with dozens of

00:28:43.400 other revolutionaries from Switzerland through Germany into Petrograd as

00:28:47.960 quietly as possible. It was a foreign subversion plot, probably the most 0.94

00:28:52.880 successful one of all time. When Lenin arrived in Russia his party was almost 0.99

00:28:58.220 completely irrelevant to the extent they had any support at all. It was an urban

00:29:02.060 industrial centers and on military bases full of low morale draftees far behind

00:29:06.500 the lines the party's elected officials at the time had mostly been exiled to siberia but where

00:29:12.500 there's a will there's a way lenin's first move was to start a media operation in february they

00:29:18.180 hadn't produced any printed propaganda by the month of june they had printed 85 000 copies of

00:29:23.700 their new newspaper called pravda along with 75 000 copies of a soldier's newspaper plus a paper

00:29:30.420 for frontline troops. They'd achieved a circulation of about 100,000 in a country of 125 million.

00:29:37.800 By early July, the Bolshevik's press was pumping out 320,000 copies of printed propaganda in

00:29:44.060 various formats, along with 350,000 pamphlets and broadsheets. It was a massive media operation

00:29:50.740 and an expensive one. According to historian Richard Pipes, quote,

00:29:54.760 such organizational and publishing activities required a great deal of money. Much, if not most

00:29:59.480 of it came from Germany. From the party headquarters in a mansion in central Petrograd, the Bolshevik 0.84

00:30:04.960 military organization started dispatching commissars to army and navy units to convert

00:30:10.540 enlisted men to the cause. The Bolshevik plan was simple. Create chaos that would lead to military

00:30:16.180 defeat and collapse the government. Intimidation tactics, ruthlessness, and a major mass media

00:30:22.560 blitz helped the Bolsheviks rise in Russia's biggest cities. Provisional government's failure

00:30:28.180 to take them seriously, allowed the Bolsheviks to gain support from more industrial workers

00:30:33.340 and soldiers. And in turn, they used this support to call for additional strikes, riots, 0.54

00:30:38.500 and other forms of public disorder that paralyzed life in Russian cities. 0.85

00:30:43.340 The Bolsheviks' tactics of belligerence and aggression, which successfully cowed the 0.74

00:30:47.700 provisional government and other socialist parties, helped them gain credibility.

00:30:51.580 This led to major defections, including Leon Trotsky, who was until then aligned with the

00:30:56.100 Menshevik. After Trotsky joined causes with Lenin, he called on the Bolshevik party's militant wing

00:31:01.020 to kill the leaders of the provisional government, saying down with the minister capitalists.

00:31:05.580 Around the same time that Trotsky gave that speech, a marching mob of 10,000 Bolsheviks

00:31:11.480 gathered outside the Torid Palace in St. Petersburg, along with thousands of Red Guard

00:31:17.100 sailors and other mutineers. It seemed like the Bolsheviks' moment had come, but it was too much 0.94

00:31:22.660 too fast. Lenin refused to address the mob. The provisional government leaked information from an

00:31:27.740 investigation into Lenin's German connections. They blanketed the city with a newspaper headlined

00:31:32.500 Lenin, Gnetsky and Company Spies. According to Meakin, when Lenin saw the headline, he told

00:31:39.060 Trotsky, quote, now they're going to shoot us before shaving his beard and going to ground in

00:31:44.560 the Finnish countryside. Abandoned by their leader, the Bolsheviks could only watch as the 0.74

00:31:49.180 Pravda printing press was smashed and their headquarters raided by loyal Russian army troops

00:31:54.120 who arrested 2,000 Bolsheviks and swept up a mother load of intelligence. 11 Bolshevik leaders

00:31:59.840 were charged with high treason and organizing an armed uprising. Trotsky was arrested. Lenin

00:32:05.420 was in hiding. Forces loyal to the provisional government machine-gunned Bolsheviks on the

00:32:10.040 streets. No one seemed to care that the Bolsheviks who terrorized everyone else for so long were 0.65

00:32:14.580 finally being crushed. It was all but over. By the summer of 1917, it seemed the Bolsheviks 0.90

00:32:20.060 would never control Russia, but they never admitted defeat. And very soon, their fortunes 0.92

00:32:25.180 were about to change. This is the fifth rule of a communist takeover. Nevertheless, they persisted.

00:32:35.200 History class is supposed to teach us not to repeat the same mistakes. And yet every September,

00:32:39.960 we do exactly that. We set earlier alarms, fill up the calendar, and assume we'll function

00:32:44.160 perfectly well on the same lousy sleep we got all summer. But the second week, the results of this

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00:33:51.820 As we documented in chapter two, the end of the czar's reign was marked by incompetent leadership,

00:33:58.200 military failures, deteriorating domestic conditions, hyperinflation, and most importantly,

00:34:03.820 extreme indecision. But what we didn't mention was that Russia's ruling class at the time,

00:34:09.320 including the Tsar's own family, joined in with the mob. On March 1st, 1917, the same day the

00:34:15.060 Petrograd Soviet issued Order No. 1, which functionally ended discipline within the Russian

00:34:20.660 army, the Tsar's first cousin, Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich, marched his elite team of imperial

00:34:26.540 guards to the state Duma wearing a red ribbon, effectively declaring his support for the

00:34:30.960 revolution. The Tsar's brother, Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich, didn't support the

00:34:36.840 revolution but pleaded for his brother to make concessions to the rioters. When his

00:34:41.220 brother abdicated and made Grand Duke Michael the new Tsar, he issued a

00:34:45.780 manifesto telling Russians to support the new provisional government and

00:34:49.500 effectively ended the family dynasty. Once a leader acknowledges that change is

00:34:54.520 necessary, the breaks usually come on. The government that followed the Ramanov

00:34:59.880 dynasty it turns out was even more incompetent and ineffective than its predecessor by july 1917.

00:35:06.200 it seemed they'd crushed lenin and his movement but they still managed to snatch defeat from the

00:35:11.000 jaws of victory this is how they did it after indicting lenin and the other bolshevik leaders

00:35:16.200 with treason and with thousands of the bolsheviks foot soldiers in prison the provisional government

00:35:21.640 which was led by a lawyer named alexander kerensky started to assemble evidence for a treason trial

00:35:27.080 against the communists. As before with the university protests, the 1905 revolution,

00:35:32.600 and the February revolution, there's a clear point here. When you get your chance to crush your enemy,

00:35:37.640 you must take it. It seemed like the provisional government was going to. Kerensky had appointed

00:35:42.520 a Russian military leader called Lover Kornilov to restore discipline in the military's ranks and

00:35:47.880 quell domestic uprisings. In August 1917, Prime Minister Kerensky and General Kornilov were

00:35:55.160 communicated through an intermediary named Vladimir Lavov. Here's how it went down.

00:36:00.200 General Kornilov had a pre-existing agreement with Kerensky that he'd send in troops to restore

00:36:05.480 order in the city if and when that became necessary. But Lavov went to General Kornilov

00:36:11.000 claiming to represent the prime minister and asked what would it take for you to be a temporary

00:36:15.400 dictator to stabilize the situation. General Kornilov didn't want to be a dictator or to

00:36:20.440 accept responsibility for leading the country but in response to the hypothetical he gave a list of

00:36:24.920 conditions for taking power. Then Lvov went back to the Prime Minister, Kerensky, and stated that

00:36:30.680 General Kornilov had a list of demands that must be met. The Prime Minister, Kerensky, was startled.

00:36:36.120 He'd just received a list of demands from a top general, which sounds a lot like a coup attempt.

00:36:41.000 But rather than reach out to the general directly to see what's going on, Kerensky started

00:36:44.920 impersonating him. So Kerensky, pretending to be Lvov, sent telegrams to various military

00:36:50.760 officers with vague questions like, are you ready for action? His goal was to try to detect whether

00:36:56.420 a coup was underway. But because his message was so vague, his military leaders responded with

00:37:01.300 responses in the affirmative, making it seem like a coup was in fact underway, even though it wasn't.

00:37:07.240 Kerensky concluded that his own general was marching on St. Petersburg, so he issued an

00:37:12.020 arrest warrant for General Kornilov, which greatly confused the general, who in turn concluded that

00:37:17.200 the arrest warrant must be because a coup had already happened. Otherwise, why would Kerensky,

00:37:22.160 or maybe someone claiming to be Kerensky, want to arrest him? And this convinced Kornilov he needed

00:37:27.380 to head to St. Petersburg with his soldiers right away. But General Kornilov's troops didn't get

00:37:32.480 far. One of his commanding officers shot himself, and the railway workers wouldn't let the soldiers

00:37:37.180 use the trains.

00:37:44.060 This was a decisive moment in human history because Prime Minister Kerensky, thinking

00:37:48.980 General Kornilov's troops were approaching to depose him, opened the jails and released

00:37:53.600 the thousands of Bolsheviks who were awaiting trial for plotting to overthrow the government,

00:37:57.940 including Trotsky.

00:37:59.680 Immediately upon release, they seized 40,000 rifles from a government arsenal to defend

00:38:04.880 the city against the provisional government's own army. It was Kerensky's last-ditch effort to have

00:38:10.160 every man on deck to fight the army he believed was trying to remove him from power. By all

00:38:15.920 accounts, this was a pivotal blunder. At precisely the wrong moment, the government freed its greatest

00:38:21.260 enemies from prison, and the government, at the same time, infuriated the military by mistreating

00:38:27.100 Kornilov. The soldiers and the army's officers weren't going to be much help in putting down a

00:38:32.340 rebellion. This debacle became known as the Kornilov Affair. The Bolsheviks were now free

00:38:38.060 from prison, heavily armed, and the conservative elements of the army that opposed them were now

00:38:43.060 either imprisoned or in disarray. Lenin returned from exile. Trotsky began to plan the actual coup.

00:38:49.440 Plans for the coup leaked, but Kerensky adopted a policy of no enemies to the left and began

00:38:54.220 suppressing conservative military officials and political associations. Rather than call out

00:38:59.020 radicalism on the left, he tried to side with them to protect himself. 0.65

00:39:03.840 By mid-September, the Bolsheviks were sweeping to power in Russia's biggest workers' councils

00:39:09.200 with huge majorities. 0.74

00:39:10.980 They were in control of the most important Soviets.

00:39:14.360 Within a month of taking control of the Soviets, the October Revolution took place.

00:39:18.400 It was a coordinated takeover by the newly freed Bolsheviks, not a spontaneous worker

00:39:23.940 uprising like the February Revolution.

00:39:26.540 the prime minister announced a plan to close Bolshevik newspapers, the Bolsheviks saw the

00:39:31.020 move as a pretext to openly revolt. On the night of October 24th, they seized the banks, the power 0.60

00:39:35.740 stations, the bridges, and post offices, mostly without any resistance. Russia's most important 0.82

00:39:40.880 city was theirs. Kerensky fled in disguise. By November 1917, when an all-Russian congress of 0.65

00:39:48.460 Soviets met in Petrograd, it was clear the Bolsheviks were the triumphant faction. The Bolshevik 0.92

00:39:54.620 control of the Soviets in Petrograd and Moscow had given them a huge majority of the convention.

00:40:00.140 The Russian left had failed to contain its most extreme elements. The less radical leftists,

00:40:05.260 who were upset at the growing Bolshevik violence, walked out of the conference,

00:40:08.860 ceding any remaining power they might have had. As they left, Trotsky shouted at them,

00:40:12.780 you are pitiful, isolated individuals. You are bankrupt. Your role is played out.

00:40:17.580 Go where you belong from now, into the dustbin of history. Trotsky told the Soviet in Petrograd

00:40:23.260 that the provisional government no longer existed.

00:40:26.140 Lenin delivered a speech in which he declared,

00:40:28.300 we shall now proceed to construct the socialist order.

00:40:31.260 And indeed, that's exactly what happened.

00:40:33.340 Lenin took Russia out of World War I

00:40:35.580 and ceded enormous amounts of land to Germany. 0.84

00:40:38.300 And almost immediately, the Bolsheviks, 0.62

00:40:39.980 who still lacked majority support,

00:40:41.980 turned to ruthless violence to enforce their rule.

00:40:45.180 Lenin's takeover of the left and of St. Petersburg

00:40:47.980 happened with astonishing speed

00:40:49.820 and came seemingly out of nowhere

00:40:51.260 When Lenin arrived in St. Petersburg on April 16, 1917, after the February Revolution,

00:40:57.260 he had almost no popular support and was viewed with suspicion even by his fellow Bolsheviks.

00:41:02.060 By July, he was in hiding in Finland. His movement was in disarray with most of its supporters in

00:41:07.100 prison. By mid-September, he was the triumphant figure on the Russian left, and by October,

00:41:13.100 he had overthrown the government. The new one formed in its place was to be called the Soviet

00:41:17.580 Republic. He had turned the imperial war into a civil war. As it turns out, revolutions happen

00:41:24.320 faster than you'd expect. This is the sixth rule of a communist takeover. Act quickly so the enemy

00:41:32.400 doesn't have time to respond. Just weeks after the Bolsheviks announced their new Soviet Republic, 0.69

00:41:42.320 it became apparent just how unpopular they were. That November, Russia held the first free elections

00:41:47.260 in its history. Considering the circumstances, the election went well. 41 million Russians voted.

00:41:53.180 There was also a clear repudiation of Bolshevism. Roughly three quarters of Russians voted against

00:41:57.840 Lenin and his party. The top party, by a long shot, was the one former Prime Minister Kerensky

00:42:03.560 belonged to. The Bolsheviks disregarded the outcome. They banned rival political parties

00:42:08.100 and claimed a popular mandate anyway. It's worth noting that the word Bolshevik means

00:42:13.640 one of the majority. Bolsheviks presented themselves as representatives of the people

00:42:18.760 as populists whose platform reflected the national will. From their seat of power in 0.66

00:42:24.400 St. Petersburg the Soviet Republic which had no legal authority and was recognized by no one

00:42:28.800 including left-wing political parties rejected the election results. According to McMeekin

00:42:33.260 they refused to ratify the results as legitimate, postponed the convocation of Russia's long-awaited

00:42:38.880 constituent assembly until electoral abuses could be investigated. They then convened their own

00:42:44.440 rump parliament full of party loyalists, which cemented Lenin's authority. The seventh rule of

00:42:49.700 a communist takeover, claim a popular mandate even when you don't have one. One reason the

00:42:56.240 Bolsheviks seized power despite being highly unpopular, as we demonstrated earlier in the

00:43:00.700 episode, weak and disorganized opposition. Writing about how the Bolsheviks expanded their power

00:43:05.720 beyond Petrograd, Sergey Abolensky observed, quote, the entire incident remains as a clear

00:43:11.500 warning what can happen to a government like Kerensky's, whose members are afraid to shoot

00:43:16.200 to defend their parliamentary system or fight for their constitution. After all, it was only a

00:43:21.400 Bolshevik minority that took over St. Petersburg with mob violence. This minority then consolidated

00:43:26.080 in the north and then did the same thing over again in Moscow and so on throughout the cities

00:43:30.680 of Russia. After that, there was no one stopping them. It was a brilliant technique. Much of this

00:43:36.420 expansion happened because of the Bolsheviks' sheer ruthlessness. Within their first month in 0.79

00:43:41.300 power, Bolshevik sailors bayoneted the former head of the Russian military, Nikolai Dokunin,

00:43:47.220 to death. The next month, they murdered other officers in Odessa, hurling their bodies into

00:43:52.460 the water after being shot. In January 1918, they murdered 300 officers on the Crimean coast by

00:43:59.120 breaking their limbs and dumping them in the ice-cold water alive, it was open

00:44:03.320 season on anyone who might be a threat to the Bolsheviks. One of the remarkable 0.95

00:44:06.980 facts of life in the earlier Soviet Union is how the Bolsheviks enlisted 0.91

00:44:11.660 their supporters to rat out their neighbors, which they did with 0.81

00:44:14.300 enthusiasm. In his memoir titled, Always with Honor, General Pyotr Rangel, a future

00:44:20.540 general in the white resistance forces that gradually formed to oppose the

00:44:24.620 Bolshevik Reds, described being forced out of his home at gunpoint by Bolshevik

00:44:29.060 sailors after one of his former servants accused him of being a counter-revolutionary he and his

00:44:35.220 wife reached the pier which was crowded with people a torpedo boat was moored there as soon

00:44:40.900 as the crowd saw us they began to yell look out here come the bloodsuckers to the water with them

00:44:45.620 to the water there were bodies floating in the water as wrangle walked out to the ship former

00:44:50.860 officers members of the nobility people with a little bit of money anybody who had attracted

00:44:55.420 the Bolsheviks' attention. Rangel was put on trial, quote-unquote, by a Bolshevik judge who had

00:45:01.400 no idea what Rangel was even accused of. There was no crime, no evidence, no defense. Rangel would

00:45:07.120 have been killed if it weren't for the quick thinking of his wife, who refused to leave his

00:45:10.620 side and eventually talked the Bolsheviks into releasing him. One of the grisliest deaths at

00:45:14.880 the hands of Bolshevik forces was the former ruling family, the Romanovs. When the provisional 0.78

00:45:19.980 government first put them under house arrest, it was generally understood that the former czar and

00:45:23.960 his family would be able to leave the country in exile.

00:45:26.800 That never happened.

00:45:27.860 England's King George V, Romanov's cousin,

00:45:31.020 revoked an asylum offer because he was concerned

00:45:34.020 that bringing the Tsar to Britain

00:45:35.400 could set off a socialist revolution in the UK.

00:45:38.260 By July of 1918, Bolsheviks in the town of Yekaterinburg

00:45:42.380 were concerned that they might lose control

00:45:44.540 of the ex-Tsar and his family.

00:45:46.760 Accordingly, with approval from Bolshevik leadership, 0.86

00:45:49.440 a commandant named Yakov Yurovsky woke the Romanovs

00:45:53.200 around midnight on July 16th, 1918.

00:45:56.400 He told them that because of combat operations in the city,

00:45:59.620 they needed to move to the basement for their own safety.

00:46:02.100 Shortly after they arrived in the basement,

00:46:03.640 a death squad arrived and blasted the family

00:46:06.660 with gunfire so fast they had to wait for smoke

00:46:09.660 in the room to clear in order to confirm

00:46:11.160 the children were dead.

00:46:12.460 As Sean McMeekin writes in To Overthrow the World,

00:46:15.440 quote, the finale was gruesome 1.00

00:46:18.060 because the four Ramanov daughters wore special corsets

00:46:21.400 in which diamonds and other jewels had been sewn,

00:46:24.340 the girls survived the initial machine-gun volleys

00:46:27.420 and had to be finished off with bayonet thrusts.

00:46:29.960 Then, in Yurovsky's clinical recollection,

00:46:32.580 the detachment began to undress and burn the corpses. 0.91

00:46:36.000 To prevent the nearby Czechoslovak Legion

00:46:38.160 and anti-Bolshevik force from discovering the bodies,

00:46:41.440 Yurovsky had the Romanov remains dumped

00:46:44.180 into the nearby Four Brothers Mine,

00:46:46.180 only to realize it was not deep enough.

00:46:48.340 The bodies were lifted up and tossed into a ditch

00:46:51.120 along the Katernberg-Moscow Road,

00:46:53.780 doused with sulfuric acid,

00:46:55.920 and covered with sticks and branches.

00:46:58.480 Urofsky's men drove over the makeshift grave

00:47:00.900 with trucks to mangle everything beyond recognition, 0.62

00:47:04.320 and it worked.

00:47:05.160 The Romanov remains were only discovered,

00:47:07.180 with identities confirmed by DNA testing, in 1989.

00:47:11.380 The executions of the Romanovs, though horrific, 0.62

00:47:14.460 were just a prelude to the truly massive, 0.86

00:47:17.000 organized political violence that would soon follow.

00:47:20.360 On August 30th, 1918, a high-ranking leader of the Bolshevik secret police, called the Cheka, was assassinated in Petrograd.

00:47:29.060 That same day, Lenin was shot multiple times.

00:47:31.980 Unlike the indecisive czar and the incompetent leaders of the provisional government, Lenin cracked down with total ferocity.

00:47:38.700 Terrorism became official state policy.

00:47:41.100 Martin Latsis, a high-ranking Bolshevik and Cheka official, wrote the following message on November 1st, 1918.

00:47:48.440 Quote,

00:47:48.600 We are not fighting against single individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class.

00:47:54.820 And indeed, that's exactly what they did.

00:47:57.020 Summary executions and concentration camps were each legalized by decree,

00:48:01.420 with a particular emphasis on commissars and soldiers who were alleged to have deserted their posts.

00:48:06.940 In September and October 1918 alone, the Red Terror claimed 15,000 lives, according to McNeekin.

00:48:12.820 quote, more than twice the total number of prisoners of all kinds executed in the entire

00:48:17.380 century of czarist rule before 1917. That's not bad for a political party that started the

00:48:23.420 revolution by banning the death penalty. Among the various targets the Bolsheviks systematically 0.88

00:48:29.360 slaughtered, one notable group was the kulaks, middle-class Russians similar to self-sufficient

00:48:35.460 rural small business owners in America today, the kind of people American leftists call

00:48:40.300 deplorables kulaks had the most to lose and were a frequent source of resistance to bolshevik

00:48:46.220 requisition policies which caused mass starvation during one of their rebellions lenin sent a

00:48:51.440 telegram calling for the kulak districts to be ruthlessly suppressed adding an example must be

00:48:57.160 made hang absolutely hang in full view of the people no fewer than 100 known kulaks fat cats 0.88

00:49:04.460 bloodsuckers publish their names seize all grain from them do it in such a fashion that for hundreds 0.98

00:49:10.100 of versed russian unit of measurement that's roughly two-thirds of a mile around the people 1.00

00:49:15.300 see tremble no shout the blood-sucking kulaks are being strangled and will be strangled 0.78

00:49:21.860 telegraph the receipt and implementation yours lenin he added at the end a call 0.86

00:49:28.100 overriding objections advising his team quote ps find tougher people when thousands of starving

00:49:34.820 peasants tried to raid a building where the bolsheviks were trying to store grain

00:49:39.460 The Red Army opened fire repeatedly on the enraged crowd.

00:49:43.220 When war communism caused the deaths of millions of innocent Russians,

00:49:47.220 according to the Bolshevik mouthpiece Pravda,

00:49:49.940 25 million people were starving in just one region, including 7 million children.

00:49:55.140 The Bolsheviks went to war against their own peasants,

00:49:57.700 who fought back with pitchforks and farm tools.

00:50:00.820 The war, according to McNeekin, cost the army 237,908 casualties.

00:50:07.000 The Bolsheviks went after the Christians, too.

00:50:09.720 The historian Richard Pipes describes some of the violence in Russia under the Bolshevik regime.

00:50:14.820 Most of the violence against the clergy took the form of lynchings and arrests by the security organs.

00:50:20.680 There exist harrowing tales of torture and maiming of prominent clerics.

00:50:25.020 Archbishop Andronic of Perm is said to have had his cheeks hollowed, his ears and nose cut off, and his eyes gouged.

00:50:31.980 Thus disfigured, he was driven through the city and then thrown into the river to drown.

00:50:36.180 Bishop Hermogen of Tobolisk is reported to have been drowned with a rock tied to his neck.

00:50:41.940 Tikhan said in 1920 that, to the best of his knowledge,

00:50:45.180 322 bishops and priests have been executed since 1917,

00:50:50.180 targeting entire groups for what amounted to ethnic cleansing.

00:50:54.180 The Cossacks, the Circassians, and ethnic Germans. 0.95

00:50:57.180 Upon Lenin's death, Stalin completed the job against the Kulaks. 1.00

00:51:01.180 When they weren't committing mass executions, they were forcing people to move to Siberia, 0.99

00:51:05.940 at gunpoint the eighth rule of a communist takeover exterminate the opposition

00:51:15.460 the country we described in this video was a place where a small minority of radical leftists

00:51:20.580 whose ideas were born from idealistic academics but rooted in deep resentment successfully took

00:51:26.660 over a country using nothing but sheer willpower and total brutality they followed the same rubric

00:51:32.580 as all the others have done since.

00:51:34.620 Provoke a crisis, take advantage of the crisis,

00:51:37.680 seize power, then crush your opposition.

00:51:40.740 Thanks to a hapless opposition consumed with conspiracy

00:51:43.680 and infighting, they seize total power,

00:51:46.180 which they use to prosecute and intimidate

00:51:48.680 their political enemies.

00:51:50.040 They force people to believe absurd things,

00:51:52.920 elevated freaks, and intentionally wrought chaos.

00:51:56.720 They use intimidation tactics to terrify the majority,

00:51:59.580 who never supported them, into submission.

00:52:02.020 Their first policy priorities upon taking power included unleashing criminals on normal people,

00:52:06.820 instituting lunatic economic reforms,

00:52:09.320 intentionally wrecking families by instituting no-fault divorce rules,

00:52:13.500 legalizing and subsidizing abortion, 0.96

00:52:15.680 persecuting Christians,

00:52:16.940 and instating a policy of affirmative action for minority groups. 0.96

00:52:20.020 The fact that people were willing to endure their rule for seven decades 0.90

00:52:23.920 is a testament to what humans are willing to put up with.

00:52:28.120 The country we're describing, of course,

00:52:29.760 is the first years of the Soviet Union.

00:52:32.780 But it's also the United States.

00:52:35.420 The reality is that the forces that drive the totalitarian left

00:52:38.460 don't change over time, nor do their tactics.

00:52:42.580 If you defeat them once, they come back in a different form later.

00:52:46.220 Preventing them from achieving power requires constant vigilance.

00:52:49.800 One must match them in their vigor, intensity, and perseverance.

00:52:53.440 If you don't, they win.

00:52:55.260 For most of American history, we've managed to keep them at bay.

00:52:59.000 But to be fair, there have been many, many close calls.

00:53:02.520 In some cases, we got lucky.

00:53:04.240 What would the world look like today had Franklin Roosevelt,

00:53:06.920 one of the great benefactors of Soviet Russia, 0.73

00:53:09.420 whose White House was deeply infiltrated by Soviet communists,

00:53:12.700 had lived through the war?

00:53:14.220 One wonders.

00:53:15.400 There are two points worth noting as we draw the parallels

00:53:18.080 between the history of Russia then and the history of America today.

00:53:22.300 First, the events of 2020 bear remarkable resemblance

00:53:24.900 to the upheaval we described in this episode.

00:53:26.880 You need to remember that Bolsheviks took nearly two decades after the first student protest to seize power.

00:53:32.760 There were numerous bursts of leftist disorder in Russia's power centers before they finally seized it. 0.82

00:53:38.140 Just because we survived 2020 doesn't mean that they're not coming back with a vengeance.

00:53:42.560 They will. They already are.

00:53:44.780 And second, when talking about communism, conservatives spend a lot of time pointing out that communist economic policies don't work.

00:53:52.000 And sure, that's true. And there may be a point to that.

00:53:54.320 Our school system today barely teaches kids anything about communism.

00:53:57.980 Roughly one-third of millennials think George W. Bush killed more people than Joseph Stalin.

00:54:02.840 At Yale University, communist groups routinely disrupt classes and occupy buildings.

00:54:07.320 But you're not going to convince them to change their minds because of your economic arguments.

00:54:12.240 Communists don't care that the economics cause untold human misery, mass starvation, and millions of deaths.

00:54:18.040 They actually support it.

00:54:19.420 Suffering is the point of their economic policies.

00:54:21.560 Communists aren't communists because they care about the working man.

00:54:25.560 Lenin resorted to mass surveillance and extreme propaganda because he knew the workers did not support him.

00:54:31.560 They're communists because they hate him.

00:54:33.560 Their radicalism is rooted in their resentment, a feeling much more powerful than charity.

00:54:38.560 They don't want to build something beautiful. They want to tear it down.

00:54:42.560 And that's exactly what we need to remember.

00:54:51.560 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is ironically one of the most vocal critics of colonialism in modern

00:55:03.860 American politics. Colonized people. Colonization. Colonization. But does she realize her last name 0.92

00:55:08.880 is literally Cortez? Whether she's related to Hernan Cortez or not, he's a hero. And that's

00:55:15.180 why we decided to center our latest episode of Real History on Cortez's incredible and unlikely

00:55:20.180 conquest of Mexico. Now he took a small Spanish army of 500 against hundreds of thousands of

00:55:26.220 native soldiers and won. My real history of the conquistadors, coming soon to Daily Wire.

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The Matt Walsh Show - October 16, 2026

The Real History of Communism： The Russian Revolution

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