The Russian Revolution： An In-Depth Guide - Antony Beevor
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 29 minutes
Words per Minute
161.01587
Summary
In this episode, we take a deep dive into one of the most important revolutions in history: the revolution in Russia in the early 20th century. We're joined by historian Anthony Blumberg to talk about the events leading up to the February Revolution, and the role of the revolutionary leader, Vladimir Lenin.
Transcript
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When the February Revolution breaks out, nobody lifts an arm or a sword even to save the Tsar,
00:00:38.480
and Rasputin contributed to that in a very major way.
00:00:43.020
They had a very strong leader in the form of Lenin.
00:00:45.720
Now, his speeches were so extreme that even members of the Bolshevik Party were sort of shot and thought this was madness,
00:00:51.760
because he wanted the abolition of the police, he wanted the abolition of money and of the finance and all the rest of it.
00:00:57.280
It was going to be the party and the state combined together, who were going to control everything, with him up at the top.
00:01:04.000
It really was, as I say, a coup d'etat. It was not a revolution.
00:01:07.900
Anthony, you've written this brilliant book about the Russian civil war and the revolution.
00:01:13.960
We're delighted to have you on. We've got you for a good period of time, which means we can really get to the core of it.
00:01:18.780
And the format of our show, as you may know, is we're two people who don't really know a huge amount about the things that we interview people about,
00:01:25.080
which means that we ask the sort of questions that most ordinary people would want answered.
00:01:29.520
So before we get into it, I thought one of the most interesting things to talk about would be what were some of the things that were happening in Russia prior to the civil war
00:01:37.960
and prior to the Russian revolution that created the preconditions for the events that followed?
00:01:42.420
The whole situation in Russia was one of great oppression, in a way, because the Tsar, Nicholas II, who actually was rather a weak character,
00:01:55.620
had been so impressed by his father, Alexander III, who was a very strong character.
00:02:01.620
And he, in turn, had reacted against the liberalism of his father, Alexander II, who was the one who liberated the serfs.
00:02:10.260
And the whole idea, therefore, the pressure, the moral pressure on the Tsar was to maintain the autocracy for him, for his son, and for the future.
00:02:24.820
And there was tremendous pressure from his wife that there should be no lessening up and no liberalization.
00:02:31.540
And he made this absolutely clear from as soon as he took over as Tsar.
00:02:36.680
And he said that any hopes for change were senseless.
00:02:42.060
Well, that automatically outraged a lot of people, as well as, of course, even depressing many monarchists,
00:02:49.740
because they felt if there's total inflexibility, it's likely to break.
00:02:54.000
But the conditions in the countryside, even though the serfs had been liberated by Alexander II, were still desperate.
00:03:01.840
There had been some reforms brought in by Shalipin, who was prime minister in the early part of the century, of the 20th century.
00:03:16.800
He was hoping to create a sort of far more rich peasantry,
00:03:21.480
which, A, would be producing more food more effectively,
00:03:26.880
but also, therefore, that you would win the peasantry over to the capitalist system.
00:03:34.760
And as a result, one saw total rigidity in the countryside.
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Some of the landowners were liberal, wanted to improve the conditions,
00:03:47.680
And this was the trouble, because agriculture was so inefficient.
00:03:51.840
But in the same time, in the cities, the Russian economy was starting to pick up in the early years of the century.
00:03:59.640
The trouble was that conditions in the factories were appalling,
00:04:02.740
far worse than anything even in sort of, you know, Dickensian Britain.
00:04:06.160
And the treatment of the workers was abominable.
00:04:11.420
I mean, there was the dangerous working conditions and all the rest of it.
00:04:15.340
So as a result, there was tremendous resentment growing at this particular time.
00:04:19.840
And therefore, there were revolutionary groups,
00:04:22.420
whether it was the socialist revolutionaries who really emerged out of the sort of narodniks,
00:04:28.120
those who believed in the sort of the countryside and in the peasantry.
00:04:31.060
And, of course, then much more the social democrats, later Marxists and Mensheviks and Bolsheviks,
00:04:39.560
who were developing revolutionary groups in the big cities.
00:04:44.260
So all of this could be kept in a pressure cooker, because revolutions only succeed, of course,
00:04:50.500
when the ruling class loses confidence much more than as a result of just activism from below.
00:04:56.480
But the real changes came because of the disaster, really, of the Japanese war.
00:05:02.740
And this was, in many ways, sheer stupidity on the part of the Tsar.
00:05:07.080
He'd been egged into it slightly by his cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm II,
00:05:11.640
who had saluted the Emperor of the Pacific as he was the Emperor of the Atlantic.
00:05:16.900
And others, some of the Tsar's ministers, were encouraging him to take a far more aggressive line
00:05:24.480
in the Far East against China and to seize more territory and all the rest of it.
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And then when it came to Japan, Japan at this particular stage already had ideas,
00:05:36.660
as their own version of Lebensraum, of taking land on the Eurasian continent
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And so pressure was starting and competition was starting to grow in the Far East.
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And the Tsar was persuaded to take a very, very firm line.
00:06:01.820
But it was a very arrogant line in the way that they treated the Japanese,
00:06:04.860
because they assumed that being non-Europeans, they'd be easy to defeat.
00:06:08.580
Well, that led to the huge disaster of losing the whole of their fleet at Tsushima.
00:06:14.680
This was the Baltic fleet, which had sailed all the way around the world to get there.
00:06:18.940
And the consequences of that were actually uprisings in the countryside in Russia during the course of 1905.
00:06:28.080
And then the Tsar was forced to accept what was known as the October Manifesto,
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which was to accept a Duma, a parliament of some form or another,
00:06:38.080
even though he had no intention really of allowing it to change the autocracy.
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But he was in tears himself, having felt that he'd surrendered the family, tradition and inheritance
00:06:55.120
So all of this was making the situation quite a lot worse,
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and was also stirring despair, even amongst certainly the intelligentsia, of course,
00:07:06.600
but even amongst the sort of the more liberals who basically supported the monarchy.
00:07:11.140
So from that point of view, he was really losing the support that he needed.
00:07:15.960
So you've got a weak ruler who is attempting to cling on to the restrictive nature of power,
00:07:26.000
You've got a disaster and war, and then World War I breaks out.
00:07:31.720
Well, even before World War I breaks out, things get worse.
00:07:34.460
I mean, as one of the leading members of the Duma said, you know,
00:07:39.540
there's nothing worse than an autocracy without an autocrat.
00:07:45.740
There was the weakness of the Tsar, who was also a total fatalist,
00:07:51.620
and really felt everything was the will of God.
00:07:55.980
And of course, this was encouraged even more by the Empress,
00:07:59.560
who was soon going to come under the influence of Rasputin.
00:08:04.780
She already was under the influence of a French charlatan called Monsieur Philippe.
00:08:12.300
And she was going to persuade the Tsar again not to shift.
00:08:16.640
But the outbreak of World War I in 1914 was a disaster.
00:08:23.520
Rasputin rightly predicted, of course, that this would mean the destruction of the dynasty,
00:08:37.760
And the problem was, of course, that Russia did not have the industry,
00:08:43.260
and it certainly didn't have the finance, even though it had vast gold reserves.
00:08:46.780
It just simply handled things so badly and so incompetently.
00:08:53.220
It never raised war bonds in the way that the other allied countries,
00:09:05.660
They weren't allowed to take the bernet off their rifle
00:09:14.960
The whole army was dominated by the guards' regiments, the lifeguard regiments.
00:09:21.880
And they were literally sort of controlled the whole system.
00:09:27.840
And the disaster really started straight away when they advanced into East Prussia
00:09:35.380
And they did in that way save the French and the British
00:09:39.100
as the Germans advanced on Paris in the whole early stage of that Schlieffen plan.
00:09:45.640
But in 1915, the disaster and the retreats became worse and worse.
00:09:52.840
And to compound the whole problem, the Tsar then suddenly announced,
00:09:57.960
against the advice of all of his ministers and everybody,
00:10:04.340
that he should take over the supreme command of the armies.
00:10:07.240
Well, to take over the supreme command when already you're facing a disaster
00:10:12.120
and a major retreat means that he was going to get blamed, really,
00:10:16.900
for everything that went wrong, whether it was his fault or not.
00:10:20.420
And, of course, he wasn't actually in control, really, of anything.
00:10:23.680
He did have a very good chief of staff, General Alexeyev.
00:10:26.600
But even so, there was a huge problem of ammunition resupply,
00:10:33.560
particularly of artillery, due to incompetence.
00:10:36.480
And it wasn't really until 1916 when they had a very, well, late 15 and 16,
00:10:41.880
when they had an excellent minister and general, Polivanov.
00:10:45.700
But then, because he didn't like Rasputin, the emperors got rid of him,
00:10:54.720
I mean, at that stage, the Russian armies actually were starting to recover.
00:10:58.900
So it was, as I say, disaster compounded upon disaster.
00:11:02.900
And then in the winter of 1917, sorry, the winter of 1916, 217,
00:11:09.260
you have in December, you have the assassination, the murder of Rasputin.
00:11:22.360
It was known as ministerial leapfrog because, you know, she kept on firing somebody
00:11:26.420
if she didn't feel that he admired or adored Rasputin as much as she did.
00:11:34.000
I mean, it was about as bad as it could possibly get in that particular stage.
00:11:38.700
And then the other problem was, although there was actually plenty of food
00:11:42.860
or potential food in the form of grain, the severity of the late winter,
00:11:50.140
or sorry, of that middle winter, Aurelia of 1916-17, meant that most of the locomotives froze up.
00:11:56.560
And so there were bread queues and then there were bread riots
00:12:00.100
because the food simply could not be distributed.
00:12:02.980
And it was a spontaneous revolution which did break out in February 1917.
00:12:15.140
I'm actually thinking of the Bolshevik coup of October 1917.
00:12:25.680
But the important thing, really, is to understand a street revolution of February 1917.
00:12:32.200
And people are there saying, you know, will Putin face another sort of February 1917?
00:12:39.680
He's got far too large and effective police force,
00:12:44.580
as well as National Guard and all the rest of it,
00:12:47.200
all incorporated within his security structure,
00:12:51.740
but a very complicated one of 27 different security organizations.
00:12:56.520
And he has no intention of stepping down because he knows perfectly well
00:13:04.100
And so parallels between 1917 and today should be resisted,
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It's interesting, though, and we'll come back to the parallels
00:13:17.980
between the past and the present day later on in the interview.
00:13:24.580
behind every successful man, there is a good woman.
00:13:28.260
Is what happened with the Tsar the inverse of that?
00:13:34.600
Yes, you know, there was behind every real disastrous man,
00:13:45.460
because there have been plenty of disastrous men
00:13:59.360
that she seemed to wield more power in the relationship than he did.
00:14:09.540
She got a first taste for it when Nicholas had a bad attack in the Crimea,
00:14:18.920
And she wouldn't allow anybody to come to see him.
00:14:32.640
this is against the Constitution and all the rest of it.
00:14:40.880
in which case his younger brother, Grand Duke Michal,
00:14:50.400
Fredericks had to speak from behind a screen in the Tsars' bedroom,
00:14:54.700
and he was allowed four minutes, no more than that.
00:15:05.600
And, of course, when it came to the Tsar moving to the Stavka,
00:15:26.320
And, of course, always on Rasputin's advice, you know.
00:15:41.040
And this is where the ministerial leapfrog began.
00:15:44.320
I love shopping for new jackets and boots this season.
00:15:48.840
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00:15:59.540
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00:16:25.980
I think, recognized both in Russia and around the world.
00:16:34.120
which is he basically let his wife take over the governance
00:16:40.920
What does it mean to be a weak Tsar in Russia in that period of time?
00:16:47.020
a weak leader is usually a very obstinate leader.
00:16:54.860
He, in many cases, refused to listen to his ministers.
00:17:00.940
as soon as they were saying anything that was faintly disagreeable,
00:17:08.180
and turn towards the window and look out at the garden,
00:17:12.980
that he was simply not going to listen to what they said.
00:17:31.640
or how dangerous it was out in the countryside.
00:17:37.000
But that was the problem with any autocracy in that sense.
00:17:56.660
so that he didn't even see the damage in Berlin
00:50:54.020
insisting on this and completely misrepresented
00:51:14.980
to install discipline again amongst the troops in
00:51:29.160
rumors there were newspapers were one thing but
00:51:40.060
were some who were definitely muttering about it and so
00:51:44.000
Kerensky then threw in his hand with the left with the
00:51:50.320
over the counter-intelligence organization they
00:51:53.440
were the people were able to infiltrate all the
00:52:00.580
were members were carrying out propaganda in all of
00:52:04.900
the barracks in Petrograd itself so this meant already that
00:52:09.520
they were in place and this was the preparation of what
00:52:13.200
became the coup the October coup when the Bolshevik
00:52:22.780
communication networks at that point yes so when was the
00:52:28.080
moment that they then decided right we're going to go for the
00:52:30.960
juggler here we're really going to be able to seize power well
00:52:34.260
many members of the central committee of the Bolshevik party were
00:52:37.560
saying to Lenin oh goodness listen we were nearly crushed in July
00:52:42.500
you know when things went wrong if this doesn't come off we'll all be
00:52:46.180
crushed and in prison and that'll be the end of the revolution
00:52:48.540
and Lenin basically told them that stop being wet
00:52:52.180
you know get a backbone and all the rest of it you know we're going for it
00:52:56.880
and Trotsky had managed to take over the military committee of the
00:53:01.920
Petrograd Soviet which meant that they could then send their orders to the
00:53:07.160
arsenal so they started handing out weapons to all of their supporters in the
00:53:11.320
so-called red guards who were already in existence in the factories they were
00:53:15.660
volunteers from the factory floor defending or guarding or just acting as
00:53:21.060
security for the factories in Petrograd so he did have the nucleus of a force
00:53:27.000
in that particular way but he also had the Latvian rifle regiments the
00:53:32.240
Latvians had had been very badly treated by their czarist commanders in the
00:53:38.080
defense of basically what was really became Lithuania during the last stages of
00:53:44.920
the fighting on the front in the Great War of the Eastern Front and they had been
00:53:51.520
pulled back and they were going to basically be the Praetorian Guard of the
00:53:57.460
Bolshevik party so they had these elements there and the trouble was that you know
00:54:04.080
Kerensky had basically could only count really on a battalion of women who had been
00:54:11.660
used as a way of trying to shame the soldiers in the July offensive counter-offensive against
00:54:18.260
the Germans and they were back in Petrograd so he had those and he basically had some officer
00:54:24.300
cadets but he basically had he had really no troops regular troops on whom he could count
00:54:30.080
so you know the whole of the those images of storming the Winter Palace and all the rest of it
00:54:37.460
total fantasy I mean those all come from the Eisenstein propaganda film made under the Soviet Union
00:54:44.620
and so all of these ideas of the October Revolution I mean the battleship or sorry the cruiser Aurora
00:54:54.600
which was sort of fired the famous shots well actually it fired two blanks out of out of their guns at the
00:55:02.340
Winter Palace which was sort of the last place and this is where Kerensky's ministers were
00:55:08.880
holed up because on the morning of the Bolshevik coup Kerensky left Petrograd in an American embassy vehicle
00:55:18.420
basically hoping to summon cavalry help from troops at the front but because of the way that Kerensky
00:55:27.860
had thrown in his lot with the left the needless to say the czarist generals at the front weren't in any
00:55:34.360
way interested in now helping Kerensky get his own chestnuts out of the fire so I mean you know everybody
00:55:41.140
on the non-Bolshevik side had played their cards so badly in every possible way that it was a walkover
00:55:49.200
for the Bolsheviks and what this really talks about is that when there's a revolution people always like
00:55:55.740
to talk about you know a revolution they tend to romanticize it but what we're effectively talking
00:56:00.260
about here is utter chaos and when there is utter chaos all you really need is a clear-minded opportunist
00:56:06.540
to come in who can take everything well yes that is that was certainly true if you're talking about
00:56:13.200
the February revolution again this was not chaos in the sense that I mean there was chaos beforehand
00:56:19.320
which is what the Bolsheviks were able to exploit but when it actually came to their own coup d'etat
00:56:24.600
you know no it was very well organized so you know they they knew exactly where to put their men
00:56:31.440
they had the bridges secured so that they could bring their supporters in across the river Neva
00:56:37.880
and they had secured the key parts of Petrograd within within a matter of hours so from that point
00:56:46.900
of view it really was as I say a coup d'etat it was not a revolution so we're on the coup the coup's
00:56:54.320
happened tell us briefly what actually happens in the coup itself well the coup really consisted of
00:57:05.000
the seizure of points of communication like the telephone exchanges the Latvian rifles were brought in
00:57:14.060
they've fought a certain amount this is all really concentrated in the center of Petrograd around the
00:57:21.620
winter palace um and uh the really the symbolic moment was uh the so-called storming of the winter
00:57:30.160
palace in fact actually what they happened was they found that one of the windows was um uh open or
00:57:35.200
unguarded and uh a whole lot of red guards slipped in there and that was really the end of the resistance
00:57:42.160
as I say it was certainly not a dramatic um charge against across the square and all the rest of it so
00:57:50.140
forget any of the cinematic versions that you might have seen on in that particular way uh anyway so
00:57:56.600
they um as soon as they felt they'd sort of secured the building which was pretty rapid to say the least
00:58:03.640
uh there were the ministers uh there who of course all surrendered and they were rounded up
00:58:09.000
and um then the mass of the red guards and the others uh went straight down into the cellars and just
00:58:17.600
started drinking and smashing open the bottles and uh eventually the uh uh authorities as they say
00:58:26.000
um you know the communists had to bring in um the fire brigade to sort of do something about the uh
00:58:33.520
finishing off the bottles and smashing the rest of them and siphoning out uh all of the wine but i mean
00:58:38.800
there were many who had apparently even sort of drowned from the uh from the wine down below but it was
00:58:44.560
total chaos once they and they started ripping up the whole place whether it was uh leather for their
00:58:50.880
boots off the chairs or uh and um so there was a huge amount of destruction what happens to the royal
00:58:59.840
family the royal family meanwhile had been uh kept as prisoners for a certain amount of time a few weeks
00:59:08.160
or more uh out at their palace at sasco's halo at the alexander palace um then they were suddenly told
00:59:15.520
that um really for their own safety uh they were going to be sent off to siberia so any hope that
00:59:22.480
they could be uh sent to britain or uh accepted there and there are a whole lot of complicated stories to
00:59:29.200
what degree it was the british royal family who were advised not to accept them because of potential
00:59:36.640
revolution in in britain uh or to what degree it was the responsibility of the government at the time
00:59:42.720
uh for putting pressure on the royal family um is still to this day not exactly clear but the hope
00:59:49.200
on was that this was their last chance so um they were then told no we're sending you to tobalsk in
00:59:56.720
beyond the urals uh mountains in western siberia um and um they were kept there in shall we say
01:00:05.680
fairly civilized circumstances not too bad uh in the governor's house and uh they had some of their
01:00:13.520
servants looking after them and uh it was a fairly boring existence and very limited one but it wasn't
01:00:20.240
as bad as the imprisonment which came later when they were moved to ekaterinburg um in 1918 in the
01:00:28.080
the following year which is where they were eventually going to be slaughtered um every
01:00:33.760
single one of them and one of the things that you mentioned one of lenin's big lies was he promised
01:00:39.440
peace on the western front and the bolsheviks do sign the treaty of brest-litovsk which is gives away
01:00:45.120
huge that's coming later yes yes well take us through towards that in uh november 1917 after they've taken
01:00:54.480
one of the first things that lenin wants to do is to negotiate peace with the germans and so he sends
01:01:02.400
out peace feelers and uh messages in that particular way now for the germans this is wonderful but at the
01:01:08.960
same time they want to be certain of where things stand because this is when they start to need to
01:01:14.960
move their troops from the eastern front to the western front and the uh headquarters of the german
01:01:22.320
armies of uh um what's called ober ost um the supreme headquarters in the east uh is in the old
01:01:30.160
fortress of brest-litovsk and so to begin with they send representatives then they start to send a peace
01:01:38.160
delegation uh which is pretty hilarious because uh uh the uh bolsheviks feel where we've got to have a
01:01:44.880
representative so we've got to have uh one socialist revolutionary we've got to have a um um a peasant
01:01:53.520
and uh uh a soldier and a sailor uh as well as their sort of main negotiators uh but they had to
01:02:02.240
suddenly realize that they haven't got a peasant and so they pick one up off the street literally
01:02:06.480
to take with them um he doesn't know he doesn't know what luckies had you know he was saying i want
01:02:12.880
to go home and they said no no no we're going to take you and he realized suddenly he's onto a good
01:02:16.720
thing because uh uh when prince leopold of bavaria who is the commander-in-chief in the uh well should
01:02:23.120
we say the figurehead of uh german forces on the eastern front uh gives a dinner on their arrival um
01:02:30.240
the peasant sitting next to one german prince uh when he's asked by one of the waiters you know which
01:02:35.600
do which would you like uh red wine or what wine so he turns to the prince and said which one's the
01:02:40.240
stronger um it's almost like he's russian anthony well i know well the sorry the peasant was the
01:02:47.920
one who wanted to know that whether it was a red white or white wine yes what i don't get oh no it
01:02:53.600
was i was just going to say that obviously the person anyway it doesn't matter he was an unfunny
01:02:58.000
joke yeah it was an unfunny joke sorry crack on well i think yes anyway i think that the uh certainly those
01:03:03.920
president thought it was those present thought it was pretty funny um it was unlike any uh any other
01:03:10.800
negotiations and then eventually the germans started to say right this is starts to get serious uh because
01:03:17.760
by then um they wanted to move in all their troops into ukraine uh because german cities were starving
01:03:25.120
as a result of the british blockade of germany uh the austro-hungarian empire was on the point of
01:03:30.640
collapse because their cities were starving uh and you know there were a million tons of grain just
01:03:37.280
sitting there in ukraine which they wanted to get there get a hold of um and so when things started
01:03:45.440
to be thwarted if you like by the negotiating tactics um trotsky thought and he then took over
01:03:52.560
the negotiations um that he could have sort of intellectual arguments and discussions you know with his
01:03:59.200
counterparts on the german side um and then finally you know from berlin came the order this has got to
01:04:04.800
stop and uh they then handed over to the ukrainians um the ukrainian rada um uh saying right well
01:04:15.520
we're moving in um and we'll deal with you and not with the bolsheviks uh and this was a major blow as
01:04:21.280
you might imagine and um suddenly uh lenin was trying to warn trotsky saying you've got
01:04:29.440
come to an agreement with the germans however humiliating it is and trotsky sort of said no
01:04:35.200
i can't and even by then the bolsheviks had a um an almost an alliance with the left socialist
01:04:41.520
revolutionaries who are saying listen if the germans continue the war um you know the whole of europe
01:04:48.400
will rise up in our favor and all the rest of it we want peace um but without any reparations or loss
01:04:55.600
of territory well the germans saying well you're not going to let you get away with that uh because
01:05:00.400
of course you know they had the whip hand and uh trotsky came back having declared at brestley 12
01:05:06.960
saying right we're off uh we want neither peace nor war and um the uh german uh negotiators said you
01:05:15.520
know this is unheard of you know this is just not done uh and so they started to move their forces
01:05:22.160
forward and started seizing territory uh and they were advancing almost towards petrograd i mean
01:05:27.120
they'd seize the um baltic states or them as they were then the baltic regions and um lenin said to
01:05:34.720
to the rest of the um bolshevik central committee uh we have got to accept their uh terms which would
01:05:43.440
mean the loss of the baltic states the loss of belorussia and the loss of the whole ukraine he said
01:05:49.200
because we need both hands to strangle the white counter revolution which was has already starting
01:05:56.160
in don territory in um the northern caucasus and uh and southern russia uh as a counter revolution to
01:06:06.640
the bolshevik seizure of power and so from that point of view lenin again showed his ability to see
01:06:15.280
that even though this would be the greatest humiliation ever for russia they still needed that if they were
01:06:21.440
going to keep the power uh over the rest of the country uh so they gave in and they had to sign
01:06:29.600
the treaty of brest litos which was a total humiliation and was the greatest achievement of
01:06:34.960
germany in the whole of the first world war and what strikes me listening to the story is how lenin
01:06:42.640
is a master tactician but he's ultimately a pragmatist as well oh well to be a master tactician or
01:06:49.600
a factory master strategist um you have to be a pragmatist um he was saying and he knew perfectly
01:06:55.680
well if you're going to have uh guerrilla resistance to the german advance you know we will be wiped out
01:07:02.240
we don't stand a chance and it was true i mean there were places where one or two people tried to resist i
01:07:07.600
mean you know the germans just swept them aside they had they had their uhlans their lancers you know
01:07:13.280
advancing ahead and i mean you know they were um as uh the major general who was in charge of the
01:07:20.400
whole operation uh at brest itosk uh said you know this is the strangest war of all we send forward a
01:07:27.040
train and uh we capture yet another town and already you know our troops are moving forward and this is
01:07:33.120
when uh the bolshevik said to lenin yes you're right or whatever and they had to had to buckle down and
01:07:39.760
uh accept exactly this total humiliation so the bolsheviks give away huge chunks of territory to
01:07:46.000
the germans later by the way that they get back because germany is ultimately defeated but nonetheless
01:07:51.360
they give away huge chunks of swathes of territory in order to try and fight what is effectively the
01:07:57.440
civil war that is what is the start the incipient civil war uh there's a little bit in um siberia
01:08:05.200
uh and there is the main thing is actually the don cossacks and actually they then managed to
01:08:11.360
disperse the don cossacks um and uh then they advanced on kyiv against the uh radar which is
01:08:19.520
the ukrainian nationalists um i mean they hardly have any troops at all uh so even though an army in
01:08:26.160
those days was sort of a thousand two thousand men um um moravyev who was leading the attack on uh
01:08:33.680
ukraine on uh kiev um was able to advance without any problem at all but as soon as the germans start
01:08:39.600
coming in in march you know of course they have to run for it uh and get out of get out of the way
01:08:44.640
uh because you know there's no way that they could face up to the occupation of the german forces under
01:08:50.880
field marshal von eichhorn and how does it go from there with the civil war that is essentially
01:08:55.760
breaking out because you mentioned that there was these local rebellions but ultimately it becomes
01:09:01.760
a big war it becomes a big war once the uh germans withdraw um there is a volunteer army as it's called
01:09:13.680
in the northern caucasus who've had to withdraw from don cossack territory uh as sort of the red
01:09:19.840
guards arrive in two greater strength um and they have what's called the ice march i mean they're
01:09:25.520
only literally um you know a couple of thousand less than a couple of thousand of them many of them
01:09:31.440
in appalling condition dying but by just keeping the fight going they then link up with some of the
01:09:37.840
kuban cossacks later who are again of course are fiercely anti-bolshevik and also anti-semitic
01:09:43.920
um and um then the don cossacks rise up again in revolt against uh the reds because of the way that
01:09:52.320
the reds have treated them and actually the reds have been very stupid in the way that you know if
01:09:56.960
you are going to repress a martial race like the cossacks um they're going to come back um they buried
01:10:05.680
their weapons and they dug up their weapons and got out their saddles again and again they had cavalry
01:10:11.920
and of course the important point of the first stage of the russian civil war was that it was
01:10:16.560
a cavalry or train war because the distances were so immense um infantry didn't really stand a chance
01:10:24.080
and of course the reds only really had infantry uh and so they were sort of marching over vast
01:10:28.960
distances or had trains and advanced with the train and and this is why it was rather largely a railway
01:10:35.520
war and when trotsky then starts setting up or trying to set up the red army uh and he knows that
01:10:43.200
the red guards on their own are going to be no good because they had no commanders or they voted for a
01:10:47.920
an officer or whatever but they had no discipline or organization or military knowledge um he said right
01:10:54.400
we're going to have to recruit czarist officers and so he did but this was first of all the reason for
01:10:59.680
the split with trotsky with uh between trotsky and stalin um the idea of bringing in um czarist
01:11:07.600
officers to command red troops because how can we how can we trust them i mean you can imagine the
01:11:11.920
paranoia um and um and then trotsky realizes actually um slightly later on that cavalry is essential you
01:11:21.360
know um so you have these amazing posters of you know proletarians to horse uh because trotsky
01:11:28.560
had despised cavalry as basically an aristocratic pastime um and thought that sort of you know
01:11:34.400
good proletarian infantry would uh would always win but um this is when they started to create their own
01:11:40.560
cavalry armies and we've spoken about lenin and we've mentioned trotsky but we haven't really discussed
01:11:47.440
about the man himself what was he like and not only that what role did he play in this in the revolution
01:11:57.280
and in the civil war well his role in the revolution was vastly important i mean we mentioned earlier
01:12:02.720
that uh trotsky of course was the uh head of the military committee of the petrograd soviet and he
01:12:08.880
was the one who got the weapons from the arsenal into the hands of the all of their bolshevik supporters
01:12:15.920
for the coup d'etat of october um trotsky then became a foreign minister um he spoke many foreign
01:12:24.160
languages he had great charm he was a brilliant orator as i mentioned earlier um and he uh was
01:12:32.400
able to uh in many ways uh force the foreign ministry or the uh diplomatic corps uh to make their
01:12:40.720
choices did they support the bolsheviks or should they just get out of their embassies elsewhere so you
01:12:45.680
had all these russian czarist embassies all over the world most of them of course did not join the
01:12:50.400
bolsheviks only a tiny minority ever did um and for a large to quite a little period of time um you
01:12:57.600
know the bolsheviks had no control over foreign policy really in that way and they had to send
01:13:01.760
their own delegations but um when trotsky's real role was the start of the creation of the red army
01:13:09.360
um and he showed tremendous bravery as well that he would keep going to the front um lenin was not did
01:13:16.800
not shall we say display a great deal of uh physical courage um uh and um he in fact of course
01:13:24.080
had been uh already had one assassination attempt against him um and then there was the major
01:13:29.520
assassination attempt in uh uh in the summer of 1918 uh when dora caplan managed to put two bullets
01:13:37.600
in him uh and he very nearly died and this actually was the start of the uh personality cult of lenin because
01:13:46.000
his his revival was sort of almost portrayed in biblical terms of jesus and uh and so forth it was
01:13:53.360
extraordinary the way that the communists seized upon christian iconography and not in a way uh trotsky
01:14:00.800
meanwhile though was uh basically uh fighting in the volga region uh where the right socialist revolutionaries
01:14:10.800
had tremendous support um and this was again part of the paradox really of the counter revolution of the
01:14:19.040
whites because there you have uh what was called kumuch which was basically right socialist uh revolutionaries
01:14:28.800
um supporting the whites uh against basically they believed in the continuance of the constitutional
01:14:36.880
assembly um and wished to see a proper parliamentary uh democracy evolving uh but of course the allies
01:14:46.720
from the czarist army the officers who in fact of course were bitter uh embittered and uh their hatred of
01:14:55.280
the left and of the socialists was intense especially after you know their family estates had been burnt
01:15:01.600
down their manor houses destroyed and all the rest of it and you even had sort of young cavalry officers
01:15:07.600
going out with cossacks to to beat up the peasants who had burned down or um taken over their sort of
01:15:13.760
family places um and of course the others were the cossacks who were violently anti-semitic um and so you
01:15:22.160
had really a sort of um three elements within the white armies which were incompatible in many ways
01:15:29.360
because the cossacks um really were any interested in securing their cossack regions and they wanted
01:15:35.680
to have a cossack federation uh which would be almost independent well of course this was fundamentally
01:15:41.680
opposed to the old czarist russian imperialist idea of russia as one whole and as far as they were
01:15:49.040
concerned you know poland uh should still be part of russia uh so should finland and um the baltic
01:15:56.000
states but of course and of course ukraine um but of course finland had managed to break free free
01:16:02.160
with its own civil war uh in the earlier part of well late 1917 but very early 1918 marshal manorheim
01:16:10.720
general manorheim was a czarist general uh leading the white fins um and the trouble was of course that
01:16:18.080
they were the obvious allies for the whites but the imperial obsession which we see today of course
01:16:24.240
with putin the imperial obsession meant that of course they put up the backs of the poles the fins
01:16:30.000
and um the baltic states so i mean the estonians who were extremely well organized um got very good
01:16:38.080
effective army together um the one thing they didn't want to have anything to do with was although they
01:16:43.600
were both anti-bolsheviks and anti the reds um they didn't really want to have anything to do with
01:16:48.400
the white generals um yanukovych and others you know leading leading the czarist forces and it's so
01:16:55.360
interesting because right the way through this to me this is a story about how clarity of ambition
01:17:02.160
but clarity of purpose but also the fact that an army is united behind a common ideology can defeat
01:17:09.680
practically all comers well it's it's um sort of you know napoleon's um argument argument about morale
01:17:16.480
you know that it's sort of uh it's it's sort of worth three times almost anything else uh and there's
01:17:22.400
a large element of truth there it's a question of the coherent discipline and all the rest of it if
01:17:27.920
you've got that lot going um you're in a very strong position i mean the trouble with the whites was
01:17:33.280
that many of them believed in looting because they knew they'd probably be uh sent into exile so uh
01:17:40.480
certainly the generals were all trying to line their pockets as much as they could which made them
01:17:44.640
even more hated i mean quite often you know the white cavalry would arrive in a city or in a town
01:17:51.280
which they'd liberated from the reds uh people would come out the church bells would ring um they would
01:17:56.720
even kiss the stirrups of the cavalry um in sort of not in submission but in joy and relief that uh
01:18:04.000
they'd finally been liberated from the reds and within three days they wanted the whites out just
01:18:08.000
as much as they wanted the reds out because of the way that they were looted and treated themselves
01:18:13.680
well it and that is really the story of division on one side and unity as francis says on the other
01:18:19.920
which is how we get to uh the bolsheviks effectively seizing control of the country now one of the things
01:18:25.840
we haven't touched on and as we we head towards the end of the conversation is the ideology the
01:18:31.360
bolsheviks are motivated by which was of course marxism uh and well marxist leninism rather than just
01:18:37.520
pure marxism yes marxism would not in theory have allowed them to launch their own coup d'etat in october
01:18:45.120
of 1917 um because the and this is the menschvik position was that we have to go through a
01:18:51.440
bourgeois revolution first of all lenin was not going to mess around with the bourgeois revolution
01:18:56.000
he wanted his own so-called proletarian revolution which basically meant uh the bolshevik seats are
01:19:01.200
apart yeah and i'm curious about um how you see you you made several allusions to uh vladimir putin and
01:19:08.960
what's happening in the modern world and one of the things we've discussed on the show many times
01:19:13.040
with people is how the idea of certain marxist ideas uh seem like they're making a comeback in modern
01:19:19.200
society with people um you know being divided into oppressors and oppressed and all of this stuff is
01:19:25.360
are there any parallels that you see well i think there is one or two in a way i mean marxist uh
01:19:31.200
prediction of uh capitalism developing uh becoming completely monopolistic uh one does see a certain
01:19:38.960
amount of sticking the tech um industry and all the rest of it um and the feeling therefore of alienation
01:19:46.240
by uh people you can see certain elements of shall we say marxist predictions uh coming true but that
01:19:52.320
does not mean that basically um you know we are seeing a sort of repetition because the one thing
01:19:59.200
as a historian i find i'm having to do more than more and more um is to fight the idea that history
01:20:05.600
repeats itself it's does not um and it's absolutely pernicious idea particularly with the second world war
01:20:12.720
which has become almost sort of the defining element of any crisis or conflict people could
01:20:17.840
start referring back to the second world war which actually was a war like no other um so for the way
01:20:22.720
that people make parallels with it is uh ridiculous and misleading and very very dangerous um and one has
01:20:29.600
to be extremely careful particularly when we have the first uh conflict on the eurasian landmass which
01:20:35.920
we're seeing obviously in ukraine at the moment uh when people are immediately again trying to make
01:20:40.720
somehow comparisons with the second world war and there are some superficial ones i mean you know
01:20:46.720
funny enough it's not mentioned about the sudetenland about uh you know in some ways that's similar to
01:20:52.720
what putin was playing hitler's game with the sudetenland in um splitting off part of uh ukraine the
01:21:01.280
russian-speaking part just as uh just as hitler did in in czechoslovakia but leaving that one aside
01:21:08.720
um when it comes to other things no i think that the important what one has to the real lesson of the
01:21:15.600
russian civil war is that historians today accept that the first world war was the original catastrophe
01:21:25.840
of the 20th century but the russian civil war was actually the most influential of the lot because it
01:21:30.880
was the circle of fear and horror of the sadism the destruction the total uh impoverishment um for
01:21:41.520
generation or more afterwards uh of all of the population which made fear created fear right across
01:21:49.440
europe and beyond this is where one finds in uh in 1935 and 1936 in spain uh you get this circle of fear
01:21:59.200
with again uh lago caballero uh trying to be the spanish lenin and prophesying the destruction of
01:22:06.800
the middle class and uh the annihilation of the middle class i mean all of this sort of genocidal
01:22:11.920
rhetoric can often obviously lead to violence and so that is why actually the russian civil war created
01:22:18.560
the pattern of the whole of the 20th century and to a large degree the also the pattern of the first cold
01:22:26.320
war from 1989 through um uh sorry from uh 1945 through to 1989 but now we're seeing a second cold war um
01:22:36.800
and the real danger today which is again part of the problem with uh ukraine is we're in a completely
01:22:43.920
different geopolitical environment i mean even during the first cold war uh the west could rely more or
01:22:50.640
less on the assurances or declarations of communist leaders both in russia and in china now you cannot
01:22:59.760
rely for a second either on what president xi sinping says or certainly not on what vladimir putin says
01:23:06.720
so how anyone is going to settle or negotiate the end of uh the crisis or the war in ukraine
01:23:15.040
is almost impossible to tell and what is the future of diplomacy in these sort of uh circumstances
01:23:21.440
but anyway that i think is the uh main legacy really from um the russian civil war um what has happened
01:23:29.120
since the first cold war is really that the axis of conflict has changed uh not so much between left
01:23:36.000
and right or communism and capitalism uh but much more between autocracy and democracy um but uh you know
01:23:44.640
where where it develops from there it'll be difficult to see but we're definitely seeing a
01:23:48.320
lineup of the autocracies whether or not just china and russia but say venezuela cuba uh or one or two
01:23:55.200
other countries um and uh you know some people will say it's going to be in north versus south i don't
01:24:01.360
think i think that's a bit too a bit too sweeping it's going to be more complicated than that
01:24:06.560
and anthony before we head over to locals for our supporters questions and we ask you our last question
01:24:11.840
that we normally ask the one thing i noticed we speak to a lot of historians on the show frequently
01:24:17.120
is often the people we've spoken to will talk about these great events in history from a kind of
01:24:23.840
big picture perspective they will talk about well this this movement was taking off of that movement
01:24:29.360
taken off whereas with you i get the sense that you place a higher emphasis on the role of individuals
01:24:35.520
in history is that a fair observation um well i have some interesting debates over the great man theory
01:24:43.680
of history um i think one's got to look very carefully at the russian revolution and see that without lenin
01:24:50.880
uh or if lenin for example had been killed i don't really like counterfactual history but
01:24:56.400
you should pose the questions if lenin had been killed by fanny caplan
01:25:00.480
um or had not managed to get back to the finland station or whatever it might be
01:25:06.640
uh then history might have been very different in that particular way but there's no doubt about it
01:25:10.320
i think without lenin without his decision making of over the brisly tosk uh uh agreement and a whole
01:25:17.040
number of other things uh and also but without his sort of uh clarity and uh determination um i'm not
01:25:24.800
sure that the bolsheviks actually would have won um i mean the whites were appalling and incompetent
01:25:31.680
and a whole lot of other things uh but the bolsheviks also had so much against them um history cannot
01:25:37.840
is not predictable of course in any of those ways uh but one should raise these questions but you cannot
01:25:44.880
rule out the role of major certain characters you know without hitler uh the second world war i'm sure
01:25:52.320
there would have been a conflict in europe but without hitler would it have been have taken the
01:25:57.600
same form genocidal form that he did in the second world war i don't think so um so you know characters
01:26:06.160
what about napoleon i mean you know to what degree would europe have been different without him so there
01:26:11.760
are key individuals but there are also of course huge uh non-human um forces at play um as has been
01:26:22.800
shown by many um historians whether it's a question of famine whether it's a question of environmental
01:26:29.200
change and a whole lot of other things um one's got to take all of these into into account but you
01:26:35.120
know there is human agency too it's been a fantastic conversation thank you so much for coming on
01:26:41.680
the show the final question we always ask is the same what's the one thing we're not talking about
01:26:46.400
as a society that we really should be before anthony answers the final question make sure to head over
01:26:53.120
to our locals at the end of the interview the link is in the description where you'll be able to see
01:26:59.200
this trump has done the same thing you know you just hammer away rather as lenin did too you just
01:27:04.880
hammer away one or two very simple ideas who they need to hate why did communism happen in russia china
01:27:11.120
and vietnam but not in the uk taiwan australia and other countries why does stalin get a pass but
01:27:18.080
hitler doesn't arguably the former killed far more people yeah everyone is a fascist these days but no
01:27:23.200
one calls anyone a stalinist i know this is very well in fact it is very much linked to what we have
01:27:30.400
been talking to and that is we are seeing that the world is a far more dangerous place than we'd thought
01:27:36.880
even two years ago or three years ago certainly um we underestimated the threat uh of putin because
01:27:45.200
rather like with hitler we could not imagine that anybody would want to have another war in europe
01:27:52.080
like you know in a way that like the second world war and this was something that we did with hitler
01:27:56.800
in the 1930s we couldn't imagine that after the first world war anybody would want anything
01:28:01.040
and this is the danger of looking at the world through um through the shall we say the um confirmation
01:28:10.720
bias of the democratic mentality we cannot really imagine people thinking in a slightly different
01:28:16.720
way to us and that has been our great weakness and i'm afraid that means also a question of military
01:28:23.040
expenditure we have not been preparing for war uh and i'm afraid if you don't prepare for war now we are
01:28:30.880
going to be totally vulnerable in the future because there is no doubt about it putin is not just
01:28:36.880
interested in ukraine um he would like to go a lot further we've seen with the trouble now in developing
01:28:43.760
in transnistria um and he's determined to have back some of the baltic states uh even part of them or
01:28:51.440
whatever so um you know for the fact that europe has been under spending i'm afraid has played entirely
01:28:58.720
into the hands of donald trump and uh we have been very very stupid frankly or blind in that
01:29:05.280
particular way and we got to do something about it anthony thank you so much for coming on the show
01:29:11.040
and head on over to locals where we ask anthony your questions
01:29:15.920
what are the tell your tell signs we should be on the lookout for if we are to keep communism