Dan Snow's History Hit - Lockdown Learning: Russian Revolution

Episode Date: January 29, 2021

Helen Rappaport, a specialist in Russian history, joined me on the podcast for the third episode of our lockdown learning series to talk about the Russian Revolution. We run through some key moments in the fall of the Romanovs.Many thanks to Simon Beale for creating this downloadable pdf worksheet for students:https://drive.google.com/file/d/1K9b4wZUKbagxobWBPlCOs3ZUuiLmzOj3/view

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hey folks, welcome to Dan Snow's History. It's a Friday. It's a Friday during a global lockdown for COVID. So we listened

to history teachers and they asked us to produce more content for students. And this is my attempt. This is my attempt to do so. We've had the wonderful Professor Anna Whitelock talking about the Tudors. We've had the equally wonderful Dr. Mark Morris talking about the Middle Ages. What were they in the middle of? And what do we get medieval on? Now we've got Helen Rappaport. She is a specialist in Russian history. And we are talking to her about the Russian Revolution. This is a gallop through the Russian Revolution, everybody. And it is accompanied, as ever, with these lockdown learning specials

by a worksheet prepared by the wonderful Simon Beale, a UK teacher. The worksheet is available in the information wherever you listen to this podcast. I will be tweeting it out as well. So huge thank you to him as ever. Huge thank you to Helen Rappaport for rampaging through the fall of the Romanovs with us. 100 years ago at the moment, Russia and Eastern Europe were still undergoing the trauma of that revolution. The upheavals would continue, well, arguably to the present day. Hasn't been an easy ride the last hundred years of Russian history, let's be honest. So enjoy this podcast. If you want to get more

podcasts about Russian history, you've got quite a lot on History Hit TV. It's a digital history channel with audio and video. It like the netflix for history but many ways better than netflix because it's got audio on there as well so take that netflix it's like audible and netflix all wrapped up into one beautiful history location it's the january it's still january you get the january sale at the moment um you get a month for free if you use the code january when you get a history hit.tv and then you get three months for 80 off so that'll see you through lockdown. We're going to be in, we're going to be post-vaccine. We're going to be post

Regeneron wonder drug. We're all going to be hugging. We're going to be having a great time. Let's get some History Hit TV in the meantime, tie you over to those halcyon days in the future when we can go back to worrying about the climate crisis, which will be, which will be a nice change. And also come to the live tour. We've got a live tour in the UK in the autumn. It's going to be awesome. Go to history.com slash tour. In the meantime, everyone, enjoy Helen Rathbord. Helen, good to have you back on the podcast. Hello, nice to see you again, Dan. Sorry, we're not meeting in the flesh this time, but let's talk about one of the most far-reaching and destructive episodes of the

20th century, the Russian Revolution, leading up to the First World War. Describe how did the government of Russia work with its Tsar, its sort of emperor at the top? Well, it was a very autocratic, antiquated system, dominated obviously by the Tsar at the top, who ruled by the divine right of Tsars, much like divine right of kings here, backed up by an enormous Byzantine, corrupt and inefficient bureaucracy. And the other wing to the Tsar's power, I guess, was the army. But the Tsar wielded unchallenged power. He was an absolute autocrat. And that was something that Nicholas inherited from his father, this sense of inviolability, the Tsar being right, the Tsar being in control. So it was a very,

very controlled system of government in the sense that there was little or no democratic rights anywhere for anyone. So you've got the autocrat, you've got the sort of power being focused in the body of one human who thinks he's been put there by God, does he? Yeah, Nicholas implicitly believed in his divine right as Tsar, even though he'd been unprepared to be Tsar, of course, when he became Tsar in 1894. His father had died suddenly and quite young at the age of 46. Nicholas hadn't done the groundwork for the job he was taking on. And he was petrified, actually. He was really very frightened and apprehensive when he became Tsar because he didn't feel up to the job. I don't think Nicholas ever felt up to the job. He was well-meaning, well-intentioned, he did his best,

but it was just a monstrous job to take on controlling such an enormous country with so many different races, religions, you know, it was vast. How could one man be in charge of all that? Until the First World War came along and really finished him off, things were pretty shaky anyway, right? There were revolutions and riots. Shaky, not shaky. You see, the perception is that, oh, right, Russia was going down the pan

and it was all catastrophic and there was inevitable revolution on the cards. Yes, in that sense, politically. But in another sense, economically, Russia actually was beginning to turn the corner. After the disaster of the war against Japan in 1904-1905, they had to recover from that, which was a terrible, useless, senseless war. But after about 1907, Russia really did start making strides economically, building the Trans-Siberian Railway, you know, improving the economy. And it was on the way to being something of an industrial powerhouse. But of course, the war changed all that. Yes, let's talk about the First World War. We won't go into the start of the First World War. That's a whole different topic. But Russia gets involved. Except that Nicholas was

terribly reluctant. Nicholas was not a warmonger. He did not want to enter that war. He was very reluctant to declare war, but he felt duty bound to defend the Russian Orthodox Christians within the empire during that war. And also, he was very loyal to his allies. He was very loyal to his British allies. And Little Serbia is a key Russian ally. Same religion, similar language. They got effectively started on by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. So Nicholas got involved.

What effect did the war, did the war go well for Russia? No, not at all. You see, you have to remember with Russia being such a vast country that the army was, I mean, the rank and file of the army was conscript, largely peasant conscript. So illiterate young men from rural Russia, peasant class, Insiderate young men from rural Russia, peasant class, who were very reluctant in the first place to be conscripted. And they were led by some pretty awful, inefficient generals who got their jobs through connections to the Romanov family or personal influence, bribery and corruption, you name it. So the Russian army was poorly led. And unfortunately, Nicholas made the mistake after some really bad losses in Galicia and some setbacks in the first sort of 18 months or so. He was persuaded that the only thing he could do was take over command of the army. So he pushed out his quite competent uncle, Nikolasha, Grand Duke Nikolai, who was at C&C and took over command of the army. And of course,

the rot set in from that point, because the minute Nicholas took over command of the army, he also left Petrograd. And he was no longer around to keep an eye on what was happening there. But it was a disaster. Although having said that, what wasn't a disaster, although the army was poorly equipped and suffering terrible losses and desertions, what wasn't a disaster, although the army was poorly equipped and suffering terrible losses and desertions, what wasn't a disaster was the figurehead of the Tsar at the front with his son, the Tsarevich. So they were much loved and respected by the peasant army. You know, that sort of the little father of Russia presence was a positive. That sort of the little father of Russia presence was a positive.

And they did love the young Tsarevich, you know, trotting around in his little mini-me uniform like his dad. So that was a positive, Nicholas' presence in terms of the grassroots of the army. But by then the army had suffered such losses and terrible malfunctioning supply lines. You know, soldiers literally without boots, without ammunition. And the whole thing just totally fell apart. You say it fell apart. Was there opposition in Russia? Were there underground groups working to destabilise the monarchy? Or did it just collapse because of the war and its own failings?

There are two sides to this story. There is the fact that the underground revolutionary movement had been going in Russia since they assassinated Alexander II in the 1880s. It was becoming more and more of a visible presence, more and more different dissident groups becoming more active, agent provocateurs stirring up strikes and revolts and shutdowns. So they were becoming a much more visible presence. But one of the major reasons, I think, for the breakdown in Petrograd was hunger, famine, lack of food, because most of the food was being diverted to the army at the front.

And literally, the Russian people were starving. So what really triggered the breakdown of public order in Perth and Brad initially was not political. It was women going out on International Women's Day, marching with banners saying, feed our children, we need bread. So it was bread riots, really. It's a bit like Versailles, you know, 1799, when the women marched on Versailles demanding food, demanding bread. Hunger is a powerful trigger in revolution.

It's the basis instinct. People were hungry. They're going to protest. So the war's going badly. The state is falling apart. People are protesting. Take me through what happened next. This is the issue.

Nicholas is away at the front. He's not getting accurate reports of what really was going down in Petrograd. Why was that? Well, because his wife, Alexandra, underplayed it all. She basically thought it was a few hostile, angry revolutionaries stirring up popular dissent and that once the weather got colder, they'd all go home and shut up. So first and foremost, he was also not given proper intelligence by his own ministers in Petrograd, not told the truth of how serious the situation was becoming. So he stayed at the front over in Belarusia at Mogilev and thought everything was under control. Meanwhile, of course, his wife is out at the Alexander Palace with five children, all sick with measles, and telling him it's all right, you know, they'll get over it, everything's fine, nothing serious is going to happen. Meanwhile, resentment against Alexandra, of course, was very profound by 1917, because rightly or wrongly, the popular perception of her was that she was a

German spy, because she was born in Hesse, of course, she was a German, that she was colluding with Rasputin in the downfall of Russia. And then there was this terrible, terrible character assassination going on of her and Rasputin as being the architects of Russia's doom and downfall. So there was chaos in every direction, everywhere you looked, the whole system was falling apart. There's a terrible atmosphere of mistrust behind the scenes, even of Alexandra and her wise guru, Rasputin. And he was a guru to her. The Romanov family had been plotting to get rid of Rasputin because they saw him as a malign influence. And in fact, he reached the point where Alexander's Romanov relatives were saying, well, look, you know, we're going to have to shut her up

in a monastery somewhere because she's causing so much damage. She did cause a lot of damage because she was wrong about those riots. They kept going. They kept getting worse. Tell me, how did things reach ahead? Well, there was a week of popular protest. And what I do love, having studied the Russian Revolution for my book, Caught in the Revolution, is the fact that the real sense of revolution in the true sense of that word to me is February. I completely dismiss October as a genuine revolution. It wasn't. It was a coup. It was a very simple, straightforward Bolshevik coup. The real grassroots popular revolt of people getting on the streets,

mothers, women, people across all the professions in Russia. You know, it wasn't just grassroots workers and lower class people, you know, even people from the moneyed classes were out there protesting. And it was protests about lack of food, lack of democratic rights, workers' rights, housing, you name it. And there was a whole week where day in, day out, people got out on the streets and they marched and they had meetings and they protested and that really for me was the people's revolution of February which was completely and utterly betrayed by October. Well we'll come on to the October revolution in a second but after this week of marching what happens? The Tsar abdicated. He was, of course, away at military HQ. He was persuaded

by two deputies from the Duma who went out there and said to him, look, you've got to abdicate for the sake of the country. It's all falling apart. And also the other thing to bear in mind is that they pressured Nicholas over that, bearing in mind that the Russian army was in disarray, very high desertion rate. The morale was incredibly low. And they basically said to him, you know, you've got to keep Russia in the war. You've got to keep the war effort going. If you stand down, things might stabilise. So for the good of Russia, and I have to say, Nicholas, in many ways, was a good man, a very good man. He abdicated. And many historians now are arguing that he was absolutely tricked into abdicating for what he thought was the good of Russia. And ultimately, of course, it wasn't. It was for something far, far worse than czarism.

By the time he'd abdicated, Alexandra and the children had been put under house arrest at the Alexander Palace, 15 miles out of Petrograd at Sarskoe Selo. at the Alexander Palace, 15 miles out of Petrograd, at South Coast Scylla. She was now utterly trapped, of course. The children were too sick to be moved. So a provisional government was set up. Nicholas was brought back by train and put under house arrest with his family. A provisional government was established to try and kind of gain a hold on the situation and introduce some kind of collaborative democratic kind of government, interim government, till they could have proper elections to a constituent assembly. So it was very, very volatile situation, very tenuous,

lots of different rival factions and groups waiting for the movement to try and seize control. So it was an extremely unstable period from March through to October. And in fact, in July, the Lenin and the Bolsheviks had plotted to try and stir up more protests and seize power then, but it was defused and they failed. So the provisional government juddered on from bad to worse, basically. You're listening to Dan Snow's History, everyone. We've got Helen Rappaport talking about the Russian Revolution. Hope students are finding it useful. More after this. Land a Viking longship on island shores.

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Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. You mentioned Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Tell me, who are they? You mentioned Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Tell me, who are they? The origins of Lenin's political party is the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, which was a revolutionary party founded in 1898 in Minsk by Lenin and a group of half a dozen friends, most notably a friend called Martov. Now, Lenin and his friend, and they were good friends, he and Martoff, they'd been in exile together. They'd suffered the same persecution and repressions. Lenin and Martoff

had this sort of uneasy alliance within the RSDLP for a while. But as time went on, it became increasingly clear that Lenin had a very different agenda, a very extremist, clear that Lenin had a very different agenda, a very extremist, cold-blooded, controlling Jacobin, French revolutionary type agenda, whereas Martov had a more liberal, all-embracing idea of what kind of party they should be at the head of. So by 1903, there was a big, big split between Lenin's group, who wanted to create a hard line controlling elite of the best brains in the party to keep tight control over the plans to get a revolution achieved. So they had a big split at a conference which was held in secret in Brussels and also in London in 1903. The party split. The hardliners with Lenin were known as the Bolsheviks for the majority. So Bolshevik means the bigger, the bigger part, the majority. And Mensheviks group were the Mensheviki, i.e. the minority.

And those are the two fundamental groups that diverged. And under Lenin, the Bolsheviks became more and more hardline. And they eventually, you know, were the ones who plotted the revolution in October and took over in October. All these exiles, they've been living abroad, they all rush back to Russia, and they spend the summer months of 1917 just sort of making trouble. Plotting against each other, making trouble. And meanwhile, of course, the Russian population are starving and it's utter chaos. What was extraordinary in reading and researching my book on the Petrograd in 1917 was how many of the foreigners who were trapped there, and there were a lot of foreigners stuck there, how they observed this complete collapse of society and the people running

around, you know, robbing and killing and shooting. And it was very, it became very violent. And the provisional government, the kind of temporary government that had been set up, was just unable to get a grip on Russia. Absolutely couldn't. One of the main problems they couldn't get a grip was they were led eventually, I mean, he began off as Minister of Finance, I think, a Minister of Justice, that was Alexander Kerensky, who eventually became Prime Minister. He basically, his fatal flaw was that he wanted to keep a foot in both camps. So he wanted to keep a foot in the more liberal remnants of the old guard who were running the provisional government. But there was now a very powerful rival faction, of course, which were the Petrograd Soviet of workers deputies set up by the hardline revolutionaries who supported the Bolsheviks.

by the hardline revolutionaries who supported the Bolsheviks. So he had actually a seat in both bodies, but he couldn't, there was no way you could bring those two extremes together. And so really it was all down to the Petrograd Soviet calling the shots and eventually taking over. And so, Helen, the Petrograd Soviet, Petrograd is the capital of Russia, a Soviet is like an alternative parliament just made up of working people. The Petrograd Soviet was comprised of revolutionaries from the factories, plus remnants of the army and navy who were hardline revolutionaries.

They had another Soviet in Moscow. So this was like a revolutionary council or committee in opposition to the more liberally minded provisional government. And they just gave them constant jip and aggravation the whole time. Because basically, the problem with the Petrograd Soviet was because it was comprised of workers, they had the power because they controlled the railways, they controlled industry. And you know, they could basically cripple things. And so Lenin and his Bolsheviks, how did they seize power? They walked in effectively. I mean, one of the biggest lies in history is Eisenstein's film of

the storming of the Winter Palace. And I'm sure even students may have seen shots of it, that famous scene where all these workers brandishing guns climb over the gates of the Winter Palace and rush in and take the Winter Palace. By October, the provisional government was in such disarray. The next thing you know, Kerensky hot foots it out. He saves his own skin. his own skin. And the Bolsheviks literally, by the time they walked into the Winter Palace, the only guards it had there were a few army cadets and a few women members of the Women's Death Battalion. There was no resistance. They practically, I think about five people died when the Winter Palace was taken. And then the minute they got in, what did they do?

Palace was taken. And then the minute they got in, what did they do? They proceeded to raid the Winter Palace wine cellars and get drunk beyond description. So that's revolution. It wasn't a pretty revolution, the Bolshevik revolution. It was just a walkover. And most by the time they walked in, many members of the provisional government, of course, some had run for cover. Others were immediately arrested. Some were murdered. Kerensky got out. And it was a complete walkover. But how do they consolidate power? They've seized the government offices. They've seized the main former royal palaces. How do they establish government in Russia? Well, the way all dictatorships do, through terror, reign of terror.

And this is the appalling thing when you read the eyewitnesses of Petrograd who greet February with such joy and enthusiasm. Most people were delighted to see the end of czarism because of the iniquities of the system and the oppressive exploitation of the peasantry, etc. Most people were delighted because they knew change was needed. They knew the czars had refused to bring in democratic constitutional government and they wanted change.

And people greeted that with joy. But as time went on, and especially in October, as soon as the Bolshevik seized power, down came the thumbscrews. Down came the iron grip of Bolshevism. And within months, weeks, I got, you know, very ardent Western socialists writing about their horror of what happened in Russia once the Bolsheviks took over. of what happened in Russia once the Bolsheviks took over and how this great hope of a new democratic, wonderful new utopia, you know, all the foreigners who went there, John Reid amongst them, you know,

to greet this wonderful new socialist world. And within weeks they're all saying, you know, not him, because he was very much a useful idiot. They're all horrified at how repressive the new regime, because how do you rule? You rule by arresting people, killing people, threatening people, frightening people, driving people out of their homeland. And of course, the first thing that happened was you get an exodus of all the cream, the best people in the intellectual class, the aristocracy, the professions. If best people in the intellectual class,

the aristocracy, the professions, if they're not killed or arrested, they're driven out. And Russia lost a whole generation of the best people who would have probably been best equipped to help initiate a new and democratic form of government, but they all fled. The vast majority of them fled. We get civil war. Just give us a sense of the scale of that war and the scale of suffering. Well, first, I must say that it broke Nicholas II's heart when the Bolsheviks took Russia out

of the war. He was a man of honour, and to see his country let down the Allies broke his heart, and I don't think it was ever the same again. Once Russia came out of the war, of course, they were gathering again, dissident groups fighting the Bolsheviks from day one. The largest was a fairly amorphous group called the White Russians, who were various remnants of the old provisional government, monarchists, ardent monarchists, government, monarchists, ardent monarchists, others who were just kind of republicans, but not revolutionaries, who basically tried to stage a counter-revolution. And the counter-revolution gathered steam pretty much in Siberia and across the Trans-Siberian Railway, out in that part of Russia. But the problem with the white Russian counter-revolution was

they were not organised. There were various groups all singing from different hymn sheets. If they'd had a unified policy, a unified leader, but because there were different pockets of resistance, they never were a sufficient force to defeat the Bolsheviks. So, you know, by the spring of 1919, the Bolsheviks were really consolidating their power. And the other great thing that made a big difference, of course, Trotsky created the Red Army. And they had a massive new military force to counter the old officer class. Many remnants of the officer class were fighting with the monarchists, with the white Russians. And, you know, they couldn't prevail because they were too disparate. The

groups were too separate from each other. Well, you mentioned the Tsar and the white Russians. The Tsar and his family were held in captivity in a remote location. The white Russians approached and what happened? The white Russians didn't really get near to Yekaterinburg. It was actually the Czechs. A lot of Czech prisoners of war had been held because they were members of the Austro-Hungarian army who'd been fighting with Germany. And they were released and were being transported out of Russia and basically mutinied and turned back and joined the resistance. They joined the white Russian counter-revolution. And they were the ones who took Yekaterinburg. And, well, people say if they got there a week earlier, could they have saved

the Romanovs? I doubt it. I think the Bolsheviks would have murdered them, whatever, if they'd know. But they knew the city was going to fall. They knew the Czechs were approaching. And so then they planned the Romanov murders for at least two weeks, if not a month beforehand. So there was no chance of them ever being released. So it was all the disinformation that came out afterwards, of course, that left everyone guessing for so long about what really happened. So the Romanovs were taken down into a cellar by their captors and executed. I never, ever say that word. Murdered. Murdered. You have to remember, they were not put on trial. There was no judicial sentence of execution. They had no right to appeal or have any kind of legal defence. They were murdered. Pure and simple. And it was a grotesque and hideously botched murder as well. Now the descriptions of it are completely terrifying. Just to finish off try and give all the students listening to this a sense of the the concept I mean if we can are the

consequences ongoing what were the consequences of this of this Russian revolution of this upheaval? Pretty grim I would say. The trouble is it it's the old adage, you know, all revolutions end up eating their own children. And that kind of monolith of oppression and destruction ultimately failed. And it inaugurated a terrible period of an attempt to destroy much of Russia's great cultural heritage. Look at how churches were blown up under Stalin. They drove out all the literary talent, all the intellectual talent. And I've just been writing about that in the new book I've been working on about the many, many Russian intellectuals and artists and people who fled to Paris and Berlin and elsewhere. They drove out the cream of their intellectual elite

and replaced it with this hideous dictatorship of cruelty and power and repression and censorship. And in terms of the Soviet Union's relationships with the rest of the world through the 1920s and 30s. We think of the Cold War after the First World War, but was there almost a state of Cold War even from the beginning of the Soviet Union? Oh, yes, because it was pretty much shut off. The only people from the West who saw, who were invited to go there, were the fellow travellers, as they were called. Fellow travellers were people who were sympathetic with this idea of the new socialist

world, the new communist world, the brave new world. So the only people they really allowed in to see it were people like George Bernard Shaw and Theodore Dreiser and various American journalists who were all very pro the Bolshevik takeover. But people didn't have a real chance in the West to see the real russia for a very long time and it was ultimately down to the dissident movement to keep alive the truth to get the message out through samizdat which was this this um underground press called samizdat where things were typed up on very very thin tissue paper almost and circulated. In Russia during the 30s under Stalin, most of their great poets were repressed. And what happened was people remembered, they recited,

they learnt great chunks of Russian poetry and kept it alive, the dissident poets, by circulating it orally underground. And the one thing I learned too, when I was in Russia at Ekaterinburg, I asked the old ladies there at the church during the commemoration ceremony on the Romanos, and I said, how did you keep your faith alive under Stalin? And they all said, we practiced our religion in secret. We took our children in secret to be baptised. You see, the one thing that Lenin never achieved, and nor did his successors, was to kill religious belief in Russia. Religious faith went underground. And in the end, it's bubbled up again and it's resurgent.

So I think for many living through those years, their religious faith kept them going. many living through those years, their religious faith kept them going. Well, Helen, thank you so much for that huge gallop through one of the most important events of recent history. And that's very kind. What's your most recent book? The Race to Save the Romanovs. It's about how the West failed to get them out. And it wasn't all King George's fault. Let's be kind, poor old King George. It wasn't all down to him, not by a long stretch. I've just written a book all about the Russians who fled after the revolution to Paris. And I'm now working on Mary Seacole's biography. So I'm back to the Crimean War now. Well, Crikey, come on the back on the podcast and talk to us about both of those two new projects, please soon. Well, I'd love to.

I'd love to. Thank you for asking. Thank you very much indeed. Right. Thank you. Hi, everyone. Thanks for reaching the end of this podcast. Most of you are probably asleep, so I'm talking to your snoring forms. But anyone who's awake, it would be great if you could do me a quick favour. Head over to wherever you get your podcasts and rate it five stars and then leave a nice glowing review. It makes a huge difference for some reason to how these podcasts do. Madness, I know, but them's the rules. Then we go further up the charts, more people listen to us and everything will be awesome. So thank you so much. Now sleep well. So thank you so much. Now sleep well.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. world.