Dan Snow's History Hit - The Life and Death of Vladimir Lenin

Episode Date: January 22, 2024

Vladimir Lenin died just over 100 years ago, on the 21st of February, 1924. The Russian revolutionary leader fought in no battles, spent much of his time in libraries and was in his 40s before he held high public office. Yet he managed to take over one of the world's largest empires and set the wheels of Communism in motion, a turning point that continues to shape our world today.Dan is joined by Victor Sebestyen, a journalist and historian of Eastern Europe and author of Lenin: The Dictator. Victor explains how Lenin went from an insignificant Bolshevik conspirator to one of the most consequential people of the 20th century.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up now for your 14-day free trial.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. On the 21st of January 1924, 100 years ago, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin died. He has a decent claim to being one of the most important men of the 20th century. A man whose legacy endures. A man whose decisions change the course of history. To talk about Lenin, we've got Viktor Sebastian. He's a journalist. He's a historian of Eastern Europe, Russia, and communism. He covered wars in the former Yugoslavia. He was there when the Soviet Union collapsed, and he authored a huge and impressive biographical account of Lenin's life, Lenin the Dictator. He's been on the podcast before. It's great to have him back on this time.

He's going to tell us about the man who was a non-entity, a blowhard, touring Western Europe, haranguing small groups of conspirators in smoky rooms above pubs and in cafes. He fought in no battles. He spent much of his life in rooms and libraries, printing pamphlets and newspapers. And yet he took over one of the world's largest empires. It's one of the most extraordinary stories in history. Millions of people across the world would fight, be murdered, or killed on the battlefield in the name of the gigantic social and political experiment that he himself put into motion. It is almost impossible to imagine a Bolshevik revolution in Russia and communism spread to China and elsewhere were it not for Lenin. On a centenary of his death, here's a chance to look back on his life. Enjoy.

Victor, so good to have you back on the podcast. It's a great pleasure to be with you again. So, Victor, if we were at the beginning of 1905 and we were looking out at the world and we were editors of a magazine and we were compiling top 30, under 30, or something like that, would Lenin be anywhere near our list of ones to watch? Absolutely not.

No one would have heard of him. Barely anyone in Russia had heard of him outside the secret police that followed him. A tiny, tiny group of far left revolutionaries, sort of, but almost nobody in the country would have heard of him. No, almost no one outside that group would have known him. He spent most of his time in small towns in Western Europe or capitals in Western Europe. Hardly anyone outside some cafes where they discussed socialism would have heard of him. So absolutely nobody would have known who Lenin was in 1905. On the brink of the first revolution, attempted revolution in Russia, which is why you picked that date. But quickly, why his route to radicalization? He was born into a sort of reasonably

conservative family? Absolutely nothing in his background would have we have thought this was one of the great rebels of history. He came from a noble background. His father was a hire in the Russian civil service and he got noble rank. He was brought up absolutely bourgeois way in a large, large district of Russia. And it was a very happy bourgeois family. He had a really quite idyllic childhood, but not at all. His father died when he was 16. So nothing would have suggested where he was going to go. Something was going on because his brother was studying at university. Well, that was, yeah.

going on because his brother was studying at university. Well, that was, yeah. When Lenin was just nearly 18, his brother was arrested for taking part. He was at St. Petersburg University. He was three years older than Vladimir Ulyanov, as he was, took part in a plot to assassinate the then Tsar Alexander III. And the younger Ulyanov was absolutely not interested in politics at all. Hardly had read any political books, was only interested in literature and history up to a point. So it was the execution of his brother, Alexander, is what radicalized him. And even more

what radicalized him was the fact that his family was then shunned by all the bourgeois liberals of the town, which his hatred then for the bourgeoisie was as much emotional as political. And that stayed with him for the rest of his life. He loved the bourgeois, and that drove his politics and radicalizing. It was after that that he started reading politics and more contemporary history and got him involved in rebellion. Oh, my goodness. He had a very particular aspect of that too, which, again,

after the brother was arrested and before he was executed, his mother wanted to get to St. Petersburg where he was being held. And Lenin was dispatched, the young Lenin, 17 and a half, 18, was dispatched to try and find someone with these bourgeois people in the town to take her. And everyone whose door he knocked on, they all just said no. And they shunned and snuffed the entire family. And that drove Lenin's politics considerably. Lenin would take one of history's most terrible avenges on those bourgeois and noble families, wouldn't he? But we'll come to that. We'll come to that. So he's a teenage, 17-ish, and his brothers of early 20s, his brother's been

killed. He was executed just as he was 21. And so young Lenin now, so his big brother's been killed, aged 21. Lenin's a teenager still. He wants to go and study, does he? Yeah, and he gets a place. He's banned from the big universities, St. Petersburg and Moscow, but he gets a place in quite a respectable university. But then after one term, he gets thrown out for not even taking part, being at a demonstration and doing, basically just being there. And they picked on him and threw him out of university.

And then he had to just take the exams from a visiting student at St. Petersburg, taking exams. And he finished a law degree that's supposed to take four years in two and a half years. And he came top in the country. And then he started reading seriously about politics and economics. And small time away, he got involved in revolutionary groups. And you'd be right to critique Bazar's system in late 19th century Russia.

But does he go all the way to violent, insurrectionary Marxism at that point? I mean, what's his journey like? What's his plan? It took him a while. Because there were two branches of the revolutionary movements. There were the radical socialist revolutionists who thought that the revolution would come from the peasantry in a country like Russia, where 85% of the population was. This seems like an abstruse point now, but actually it was quite important. The Marxist idea is that revolution is going to

come from an industrial proletariat. It was very, very small in Russia at that time. So the socialist revolutionaries who thought they were going to come from the peasantry and all they needed to do was get to the land and preach revolution to the peasants would succeed. And Lenin never really believed in that. As soon as he started reading Marx, he was fairly convinced by all the stages of revolution that's outlined in Marx. But he became a Marxist and read widely in Marx and Marxist theory because there were earlier Marxists in Russia. Plakhanov was the great Marxist theoretician of Russia, and he was persuaded. And then he joins the first Marxist

big group inside the country, as opposed to the Marxist exiles. He and another Marxist called Matov, who became a Menshevik. They were the two leading Marxists in Russia in the early 1900s. Is that a pretty big fish in a small pond? I mean, are there many Marxists knocking about? Very small number. Very small number. And of course, as you said, it wasn't as though Tsarist Russia was a nice, liberal, decent democracy that allowed any politics at all. It was absolutely an authoritarian, autocratic regime where thousands of people were arrested and sent to Siberia just for reading the wrong kind of books. This idea that Russia under the last SARS was moving towards a modern, democratic, enlightened constitutional monarchy is nonsense. It was an absolutely strict authoritarian rule with a police state upon which Lenin and his followers basically copied

to form the KGB. Now, he's important enough to be arrested. And well, you mentioned lots of people have been arrested in since Siberia. He is arrested in since Siberia. Exactly. And everyone, well, you had to be arrested and sent into exile to the Arctic waste in order to get any social cachet amongst the revolutionaries. I was going to ask, that presumably is part of his foundation myth, is it? Yeah, yeah, you had to. And he was jailed in St. Petersburg or outside St. Petersburg for 18 months, but was then sent to, he had it fairly easy in exile. He was in southern Siberia where the climate wasn't quite so extreme.

It was in a small village. He was allowed... He got married in Siberian exile. He was allowed a gun and he could go shooting for food. So he had it fairly easy. A lot of people had it much, much worse. And he does his three years. He then travels outside Russia.

Is he sort of in like Joseph Conradian smoke-filled rooms of talk of revolution across Europe? Absolutely. Well, he was the founder of what became the Russian Communist Party. And the important thing to get the message across was to found a newspaper called Pravda, which carried on until late into the Soviet years. And he was the editor, the founding editor of Pravda, along with Martov. That was their propaganda weapon. And they had to smuggle it into the country using all kinds of conspiratorial ways. But it was basically to keep Pravda going, which couldn't exist inside Russia, had to be published outside Russia. And that was one of

the main reasons. What a thought. So first step is get the propaganda machine up and running. I mean, Lenin's great contribution to the revolution was in organizing the propaganda. to the revolution was in organising and the propaganda. He wasn't much of a theoretician of Marxism, actually, despite so much of what was said later. His great contribution was to found a revolutionary party and found a revolutionary newspaper, that organ of opinion. Crikey. There's a lesson in there today, I expect. And then suddenly in 1905, the czarist regime looks vulnerable. The army shot and killed hundreds of demonstrators. And that was the start of a revolution which was prompted by a failed war in which the Russians were losing, the Russian-Japanese War, which the entire fleet was destroyed by the Japanese in the war.

They were losing the war. war. And the Tsar originally caved in a little bit and allowed a kind of parliament called the Duma, which was better than anything they'd had before, but he didn't really believe in it. He was only waiting to suppress that. He felt himself forced into this, so he never gave that any chance. And the moment he could, he suppressed the series of different Dumas. But the revolution was nearly succeeded. I mean, two-thirds of the country was under doomers. But the revolution was nearly succeeded. I mean, two-thirds of the country was under martial law. And the repression against the revolution was by Nicholas II was extreme. Whole villages were burned.

Thousands of people were hanged after no trials of any kind at all. So this idea that Russia was moving to a civilized kind of constitutional monarchy is an illusion. He returned to Russia briefly, didn't he? But then was, as you mentioned, Nicholas cracked down and he escaped again back to Western Europe. Yeah, with a dramatic escape through Finnish wastes where he merely drowned. Then he's got 11 more years in exile in Paris for a while, in Poland towards the end.

He'd been in London, that's all, in Zurich, Switzerland, mostly Switzerland. He liked Switzerland partly because he loved the Alps and he loved climbing and walking, but largely because it was fairly free and easy and they weren't followed too much by the secret police in Germany for a while. It was in a series of boarding houses. He lived with a tiny group of people in a series of boarding houses. It's an extraordinary story of how someone like that can take over one of the largest empires in the world.

Well, let's get to that bit. The First World War happens. He's still sort of issuing lofty statements. Well, let's get to that bit. The First World War happens. He's still sort of issuing lofty statements. Yeah, he gets to Zurich. And then the First World War happens, the Russians, the big losers. The Eastern Front was more terrible, like the Second World War. The Eastern Front was more terrible than the Western Front. The Russians are losing very, very badly. And Lenin's stuck in Switzerland with a logistical problem of how do you get to Russia? He can't.

The first revolution in Russia in 1917 after a starving winter when nobody, you know, again it starts with a series of strikes and the Tsar is toppled. The Bolsheviks, Lenin and his series of strikes, and the tunnel is toppled. The Bolsheviks, Lenin and his team of extreme revolutionaries, had almost nothing whatever to do with the first revolution in 1917. But he can see that he desperately has to get there, back to Russia. But the problem is, he's stepped in Switzerland. How do you get to Russia? So he

starts a negotiation with the Germans. This is the episode of the sealed train. One of the most crazy strategic decisions ever made by a country. So what is the sealed train? Well, it's a kind of illusion. Basically, no one's allowed to get off and on. It goes through from Switzerland into Germany. It's Lenin and about 20 of his closest followers, his wife and his mistress and his 20 followers. The main part of it is that you can't get off and on and you don't need a passport, which immediately gets through Germany, which Russia is at war with Germany. So the sealed bit is simply that no one's allowed on and off the train. And was it laid on for Lenin?

It was laid on specifically. The bit through Germany is laid on for Lenin and his group. So Germany think we're going to take this virus from the lab over here, from this Petri dish, and we're just going to inject it into this failing, unstable enemy of ours. Yes. The Germans tried all kinds of other methods to unleash revolution into Russia on the basis that you want to knock Russia out of the war first, so you can move all your arms and men and military to the Western Front. That was the object. They were fighting on two fronts and knocked out one of them. It's an obvious idea.

And they were the first. They didn't really believe it was going to work. They just did it because it didn't actually cost them much. They did give the Bolsheviks a lot of money as well, but it didn't really cost them that much. And it seemed like a good idea at the time. There's something extraordinary. I mean, history, it's just endlessly fascinating.

The idea that Lenin and his Bolsheviks arrive, transported and financed by Imperial Germany into Russia. Absolutely extraordinary. To create a socialist revolution, which then, yeah. Well, just to create trouble, presumably. I mean, just to sort of add to the headache of the russians and the yeah yeah but with the with the strategic ideas to not rush out of the war one way or another so he goes through germany he actually goes through sweden neutral sweden and then into russia sweden finland russia yeah and there's a great moment

is there when he arrives at petrograd the the train station was now St. Petersburg? Yeah. But by then, there'd already been a revolution in Russia, which had toppled the song, of which the Bolsheviks had nothing to do with. So he arrives, and there was political freedom for a few months, of which they'd never been before. So the Bolsheviks and every party was legalized in Russia by the provisional government. That was possibly a mistake. And so there's a great upsurge of freedom of expression and public meetings and people haranguing each other on street corners. So Lenin is sort of thrust into this tumult.

And this was the period that made Lenin, actually. I mean, he was a remarkably effective political tactician. Obviously, the circumstances were right and everything, but he used the circumstances really quite cleverly. And this was where, again, when he got there, he still was barely known. There wasn't a picture of Lenin, and no one knew what he looked like in Russia. There was never a picture in the newspaper or anything.

Very few people, even when he got there in 1917, had heard of it. So if you'd have said, you asked me in 1905, would anyone have thought this was going to be the great leader who was going to change the world? No. But even in 1917, in February and April 1917, when he arrived back at the Finland station, nobody could have predicted, nobody would have thought this was the man who's going to lead a socialist revolution. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about Lenin. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research

from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades.

Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. And so what's his strength here? Is it the inside game? Is it sort of working the committees, working the pamphlets and the organising? Or is it the retail? Is he just great? Did the public love him on a stand?

Well, it was beginning to love him. But the main thing was the message. It was, stop the war. He would have been fantastic on Twitter now. His simple messages were peace, land, bread. And his demagogue style, he's a very modern kind of political phenomenon as an extreme leader. He's the kind of figure that we'd recognize in Western democracies as well as in autocracies. in Western democracies as well as in autocracies. He'd promised people anything and everything. He offered very, very simple solutions to complex problems.

He lied unashamedly. He justified everything on the basis that winning meant everything, that the ends justifies the means. Anyone who's living now would recognize the Lenin phenomenon. It's all over the world now. I called him the godfather of post-truth politics. And I think that's exactly what he was. But the message was very, very simple and very, very direct. And he had, with German money, they established a dozen new newspapers very quickly that ran this very simple message home.

Populists have all the best messages, don't they? They distill things. It all becomes very straightforward. Absolutely. You promise anything. And you look at social media now and it's not that different. 1917 is complicated and there's various coups and counter-coups. 1917 is complicated and there's various coups and counter-coups and you just get a sense of that things are so contested that it becomes imaginable that one group could just seize the seat of government and just crack on. Talk to me about that revolution, the Bolshevik-Lenin-led revolution. Well, it was a coup. Yeah, because it's quite quick and clinical, isn't it? It's not

sort of a gigantic upheaval. It was almost entirely peaceful as well, to begin with. He took over in the classic, you know, you take over the post office, a few banks, the railway stations. Lenin's great gift was to persuade his group that they can do it. Because most of them were very, very reluctant, the Bolsheviks. By this stage, they were gaining in popularity. There were reasonable numbers by then, but the leadership just thought, most of them just thought, well, we're not going to do this. Lenin, by force of persuasion, by threat of resignation, by extraordinary will, dragged his people into agreeing

that they were going to mount an insurrection. And at a particular time in October, that was important too. So that was probably his greatest, greatest gift to world revolution, how he dragged his supporters, many of whom were reluctant, many of whom were very, very reluctant. This is the bit that I wanted you to help me with. So Russia, enormous empire. You know, you're in local governments in Central Asia

and Vladivostok in the forest. There's all this jumping around shenanigans going on in St. Petersburg, Petrograd. These people called the Bolsheviks sort of seize all the key levers of government. Do you, as a local government official, do you just sort of, okay, I'll take my orders from them? I mean, why does this work? Well, that isn't what happened to begin with,

is it? There was a civil war. Right. So actually, they only control Petrograd at this point? To begin with. Okay. And then they created a new army, which was strong, the Red Army. So you now have to go around conquering the rest of the Russian Empire. Yeah, which is what they did. They had the weapons and the army. And in large, large areas of the country, their writ didn't run. And it was occupied by the so-called whites. So to begin with, they only had Petrograd, Moscow, little bits of southern Russia. But what they did have was they still people kind of believed in their promises. So

the peasants may not have liked it, but there were rebellions on the land all over the place because peasants taking over the property of the landowners, which was popular for a while, extremely popular. So the peasants weren't that reluctant, and the local authorities were what there was of them. They didn't want to go back to what the whites were offering, which was baptismalism. The first revolution in February had been popular. There was still some idealism around there. And remember, Russia was a violent and dangerous and horrible place. So the fact that there was violence, I mean, nobody knew there was going to be a huge, you know, the gulag. Nobody knew there was going to be Pol Pot. You know, nobody knew the future.

Look back at that point. And the choice to lots of people was to go back to czarism, which is what the whites seem to offer in the civil war. Or do we stick with a kind of revolution? It took a while for people to realize exactly what the Bolsheviks were. So if you squint, they looked a bit like a kind of European social democrat. Did they think, well, we could probably live with this? Well, yes. The workers, what there were of them, you know, they were promised control over the factories. You know, we're going to own our factories. They didn't quite, if you're offered a glimpse of that and offered the first bit of the revolution before the repression started taking over, it didn't seem quite so illusory to them.

Peasants for a short while did have control over the land, and food was already scarce, but they were at least attempting to do something. And the Civil War, which lasted two and a half years, the whites made no bones about what they were offering, which was a return to the past, which didn't seem very attractive to most people. return to the past, which didn't seem very attractive to most people. The choice was not a nice liberal democracy. They'd just been through a ghastly war. There was violence all around. We've got to remember what Russia was like at that time, the chaos, the anarchy that had existed under appalling conditions. So it was not a nice, decent, liberal place. So Lenin's immediate task is lockdown Moscow, your kind of big cities, I suppose, Kazan, where he went to university, Kiev, Minsk,

presumably. And then from there, just sort of extend out into the countryside, just extend the writ. Okay. I mean, he was remarkably clear-sighted, and Trotsky too. At this time, Trotsky was who created the Red Army in a very, very quickly and double quick time. A very efficient fighting force to fight three different white armies. And he was a remarkably efficient leader, actually, Trotsky. As the civil war's going on and the Bolsheviks are sort of tightening their grip, do they also open the jaws of terror here? When do we start to get the gigantic repression, the attacks on prosperous peasants, for example, let alone the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie? Pretty quick. The terror began, and the idea of terror, and then the terror,

began on day one of the revolution. It didn't really affect most people in the provinces, but literally from the moment Lenin took power, the only thing that he cared about was how he was going to keep it. And he knew that you could only keep it through terror. He was up two nights during the revolution, the coup, the takeover in October 17. He was up two nights during the revolution, the coup, the takeover in October 17, when Lenin goes to sleep for three or four hours just to get some rest. Meanwhile, his deputy Kamenev writes a decree stopping the capital punishment on the front. Lenin wakes up, loses his temper in a mass rage and says, well, do you think we're going to create a revolution without firing squads? So from day one, Lenin understood that the only way he was going to,

his revolution was going to work and his type of revolution was going to work was through terror. He knew that. That's when it began. Day two, he suppressed the free press. I mean, the serious terror began after the attempt on his life. Is this August 1918? He's terribly wounded. Yeah, he was making a speech outside a factory in Moscow, and he gets shot there. It narrowly misses very important arteries,

and then a bullet gets lodged in his neck that they couldn't take out until much later. She's Fanny Kaplan, the fervent revolutionary who feels that Lenin's betraying the revolution. Yes. There were people much further to the left than Lenin. And the repression began immediately, and then the suppression of any democracy. Because the provisional government that operated between February and October had promised elections, and the elections were duly held in November 1917. And the Constituent Assembly was going to work out a new constitution on January 18. Lenin allows it to operate for 13 hours before he closes it. And that was the extent

of free parliament in Russia. Indeed, it's pretty similar to now. In the elections, the Bolsheviks only win 20% of the vote, just over 20% of the vote. But the socialist revolution is further to the left in some ways than that, win 30% of the vote and other left groups. So the left groups win 75% or 80% of the vote in that free election. So it's not as though the alternative was nice, decent, liberal Democrats. And again, it's a kind of fact everyone kind of ignores, but it's an essential point. kind of ignores, but it's an essential point. The country was already way left. So a lot of the revisionist historians seem to, they kind of conveniently forget this point, that it's as though the communists seized power from a nice bourgeois, liberal, centrist politicians,

which isn't the case at all. Perhaps he never really recovers from that assassination attempt. But by, what, 1921, 1922, his health is a mess. Yeah, he had a series of strokes. His last 18 months were more or less bedridden. He couldn't do anything. I mean, it's funny, isn't it, that he's the founder of the Soviet Union, but he didn't see much of it, did he? No, but he did establish, I i mean a lot of what the next 70

years was very much in lenin's image actually the secreted most the asceticism a lot of the political culture of the soviet era was very very much in lenin's image and a lot of the referral of what the country was going to be that constantly referred back to Lenin, kept him in this mausoleum that's still there. Children were taught, Jedrushka, grandfather Lenin. He was the founder and the country was very much in his image. But he didn't see much of it, yes, directly. Although what he did do, a big move, was three years after the chaos and the peasants refuse. There are big campaigns against the rich peasants, the kulaks, and he completely changes the nature of the land. But then, of course, what it means is no one's producing any food. So he introduces a new, what he called a new economic policy,

which is rowing back a lot of the more extreme communist measures. He said it was a tactical retreat by introducing elements of capitalism back, particularly onto the land and shops and private shops were committed. And he could see what was going wrong. And he thought it needed a dose of capitalism to modernize the economy. Electrification plus the Soviets equals communism, was his refrain. Groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends.

Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. So he was, in some ways, he was just making it up. I mean, although he'd spent years writing and engaging with all this theory.

Everyone regards Lenin as an extreme fanatic, and in many ways he was. But why he won out against the others was that he was extremely pragmatic. against the others was that he was extremely pragmatic. He had great tactical acumen, and he was prepared to change ideology 180 degrees if they got him where he wanted to be. And that's why he won out against the others. A lot of the other revolutionaries, of which, as we discussed, there are dozens all over Western Europe and Russian revolutionaries, as Conrad described them. Most of them would have been actually happy just to sit in a cafe on the left bank in Paris discussing socialism, whereas Lenin actually wanted to do it. His great contribution was to forge a program of how you set up a party that can then take power, and then a small group can seize authority. And that was real Lenin. That's Leninism. And it's still used. I mean, his greatest work for anyone, everyone, is the thing called what is to be done, which is exactly how to set up a party, how it should be run, centralised. And it's still used today.

When the Americans got into Afghanistan and the caves in Afghanistan, they found computers with what is to be done, with Arabic version of what is to be done. And Hitler read it, Mussolini read it. It is still a kind of manual. They're probably survivalists in the Midwest reading what is to be done. Sounds like I'm going to read it, because I would love to start a party and seize control of the country. I have to say.

You'll do a lot better, I'm sure, just by a conversation. I join you. Thank you, thank you. Now, speaking of seizing power, talk to me about the last. Lenin is ill. He's bedridden. He's got problems with this guy Stalin, hasn't he? One of his last actions, trying to stop Stalin,

achieve supreme power after... But it wasn't so much because of the politics. It was because Stalin had a row with Lenin's wife and abused her. It's been a contested thing, you know, on the left, but Lenin's testament, like so many leaders in democratic countries too, they don't have a succession plan. But Lenin had no success. He didn't think anyone was good enough, as good as him. No one was quite right. Lenin created Stalin. He kept promoting him to the highest positions. He had no real objection to Stalin's politics or his methods at all. Lenin committed lots and lots of

big crimes. And the greatest was to leave a man like Stalin in charge of Russia after him. He invented Stalin. He invented all the machinery of the organs of repression. He created the Cheka, which then morphed into the KGB. He created the Gulag. He wrote in his own hand, and I've seen it, the resolution against factions and deviation, that all of Stalin's opponents in the Great Purge were all executed through a law passed by, a decree passed by Lenin. Lenin created the police state that the Soviet Union became. This idea that everything would have been okay and the revolution would have been a wonderful idealistic thing if it wasn't hijacked by psychopaths like Stalin. It's complete illusion on the left, on the far left.

The importance of Lenin just makes me think, I mean, the world today, Lenin just had a massive enduring impact. I mean, without Lenin, would there have been a Bolshevik revolution without Lenin? Well, Russia might be. There would not have been a Bolshevik revolution without Lenin? And would, well, Russia might be... There would not have been a Bolshevik revolution. Even a man as vain as Trotsky, when he couldn't get much vain, said in the preface to his history of the revolution, it wouldn't have happened without Lenin. It wouldn't have happened in the same way.

And actually, I don't think it's an exaggeration to argue that Lenin and the revolution he made have made more a profound impact on the modern world since, say, 1900 or the First World War than any other event in history. The history of most of the 20th century is a reaction to the specter of communism made flesh by Lenin and his revolution. Fascism, the failure of the first German Republic, the rise of Stalin, the Second World War, the Cold War, the containment by America of Soviet penetration, the emergence of a new incarnation of Russian nationalism under Putin, they're all one way or another the result of the Russian Revolution. And one little fact, which seemed like when I was writing it and discovering it, it didn't seem very important, but actually in the great continuum of what's happened

in Russian history, it is. Lenin, after he took over, his cook was someone called Spilydon Putin, who was Vladimir Putin's grandfather. So in the great continuum of Russian history, there we are. Well, that's circular, very circular. Victor, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Your wonderful book is called Lenin, the Dictator. Go and get it, everybody. Yes. Bye early, bye Go and get it, everybody. Yes. Bye, Ali.

Bye, Orphan. Thank you, Dan. you