Rev Left Radio - The Russian Revolution of 1917: The Bolshevik March to October

Episode Date: September 23, 2025

In 1917, Russia went from a centuries-old monarchy to the world’s first workers’ state in just eight months. From the February Revolution and the fall of the Tsar, to the July Days and the failed Kornilov coup, and finally to the decisive October insurrection, the Bolsheviks and the Soviets navigated setbacks, repression, reactionary coups, bourgeois opportunism, and unprecedented opportunities with remarkable clarity, unmatched strategy, and resolute discipline. Breht is joined by Daniel, host of The Sickle and the Hammer: A Socialist History of the Soviet Union, to walk through the year that shook the world. Together they trace the month-to-month developments from February to October 1917, bringing new depth and insight to a revolution that toppled an empire, established the world’s first socialist state, and still looms over our present and future. Check out our episode on "What Is To Be Done" by Lenin HERE ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio https://revleftradio.com/ Outro Beat Prod. by Spinitch 'Bitter Cocona'

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. All right, on today's show we have on my friend and comrade Daniel from the Sickle and the Hammer podcast to do a deep dive into the year of 1917, primarily between February of 1917 and October of 1917, in which what we know as the Russian or the Bolshevik revolution, took place um i think this it's really important to not only cover this history but to do it in a very detailed way and daniel is really really good at making that detailed history accessible and compelling and allowing people with little knowledge maybe no knowledge at all to follow the historical events as they unfold showing very clearly how you know they are connected to one another and so it's a it's a super way into the really the detailed minutia of the revolution and it is really only through that

detailed analysis of a world historical event like the Bolshevik revolution that we can truly understand the ups and downs and the intricacies and nuances of revolutionary rupture because the October revolution is not something that happened spontaneously it is not something that happened overnight it had months and months of immediate attention buildup and decades of more generalized buildup leading to that moment and it took courage and attachment to the masses and the organization of the vanguard party and to the brilliance of the leaders of the Bolshevik party as well as the resilience of the workers and the soldiers and the masses that made up the Soviets and made up the Bolshevik party and made

up the Russian revolution that created the possibility for it to be successful. So this is a fascinating insight. And even if you are a veteran Marxist, right? Even if you know this history pretty damn well, I guarantee you, you will learn many new things by listening to this wonderful, wonderful episode on the Russian Revolution. And as always, if you like what we do here at RevLeft Radio, you can support us at patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio in exchange for bonus monthly episodes, as well as access to our RevLev Situation Room, where we as a community come together and wrestle with big political events when they unfold and a bunch of other bonus material as well,

including sometimes access to our Buddhist sanga that we run together as a community. And if you don't want to join the membership, you can shoot us over a one-time donation at buy me a coffee.com slash rev-left radio. I'll link to both in the show notes. Your support means the world to us, and as always, RevLeft, is 100% listener-funded.

It always has been. Always will. All right, without further ado, here is my fascinating conversation with Daniel on the Bolshevik Revolution, establishing the world's first socialist state. Enjoy. Hello, everyone. My name is Daniel. I am a Marxist-Leninist, communist from the American Midwest. And earlier this year, I started a show that is called The Sickle and the Hammer, a socialist history of the Soviet Union. I wanted to do this show because as a Marxist-Leninist,

but also as kind of a Russian and Soviet history nerd, I realized that there's a lot of really good information that is not making it out to the American left, to the international left. And there's a lot of kind of lies and obfuscation and distortions about what actually happened in the Soviet Union and what its stated goals were, what its policies were, what the effects were. And I just kind of wanted to set the record straight. So

I've started my show. It's, I just wrapped up the period on the Russian Revolution. I have two kind of retrospective episodes that are coming out soon. I'm working on those scripts. I'm hoping to have those out. I don't know if they'll be out by the time this comes out. But if you go to

Sickle and Hammer on any podcast platform, Spotify, Apple, Amazon, whatever, you should be able to find it right away. And I also have a Patreon page. It's patreon.com slash Soviet pod. If you want to sign

up and support the project. I would love to have you, but you can also just listen to it for free on the podcast feeds because I don't really want to gate-keep this information. I think everyone needs to have it. So, you know, go listen to it. I hope you enjoy it. Absolutely. And I'm honored to have you here. Love bringing up like new voices on the left and those putting out content like this on the left. I love using Rev. Left to kind of boost them and give them a little step up to our listenership. And I think what you're doing is important work, especially covering this revolution in extreme detail from a Marxist-Leninist perspective, I think is very helpful. And there's obviously an infinite amount of things to learn about the first ever proletary and successful revolution

in human history. And so even though people will, you know, have some basic idea of how the revolution went, I think we've structured this conversation to kind of really get into the nitty-gritty details of the revolutionary period itself in a way that, you know, I don't think on this show and Rev. Left, we've covered in this way before. We've covered the period in more, much more broad strokes, I think, and so this will be much more detail-oriented. And I also think there's lots of interesting parallels, right? We, I think it's important to study the lead-up to these revolutionary ruptures, as well as the revolutionary ruptures themselves, because in so many ways, we, we, we, I think, it's important to study the lead-up to these revolutionary ruptures themselves because in so many ways we're living in a time of multiple crises stacking on top of

each other, a time of widespread de-legitimization. And I can only imagine what would happen to this already decaying, rotting society if we had a catalyst like another Great Depression or another World War put pressure on the already decrepit pillars of American society, especially with somebody like the Trump administration in power who almost certainly would handle the crisis in the worst way imaginable. And so as we're going through this, we're not only learning proletarian history, we're going to be, I'm sure, implicitly and explicitly drawing certain connections to our own time and lessons that we can extract for those of us living at this precarious time as well.

Before we get into the first question, which is about the kind of pre-revolutionary contradictions of late Tsarist Russian society, just on a personal note, how did you come to Marxist-Leninist politics and how did you get an interest in history more broadly? Yeah. So I was raised in a religious household. I was raised Catholic, but it was the kind of workers Catholic tradition. And my parents, particularly my father, but also my mother, but my father was like the one having us go to church, they really instilled in me this sense of caring for other people and of not judging and that we are here to serve other people to help in any way that we can. I eventually I grew up I left the church

I haven't gone to mass in decades now and I don't have any plans of going back anytime soon but those lessons really stuck with me and as I went through high school and then college

I just started learning kind of more about history I developed this really deep fascination specifically with Russian history something to do with all the snow and the darkness and the weird accents and stuff

stuff. But then once I finished my kind of formal, my formal education, I started to really get interested in like the inner workings of specifically the Soviet Union. Because if you think about it in the United States, and this kind of makes sense because, you know, most of us listening, we're Americans and, or you and I speaking are Americans. And so like we get taught civics class and we know, at least on paper, like how the Constitution is supposed to work, what the three branches of government are, what elected representatives are supposed to do all that kind of stuff.

I'm not saying it works that way, but we at least were taught this. But when I got out of my education about the Soviet Union, I realized, well, I don't actually know what the Soviet government, how it was structured. I don't know how it functioned. All I know is like Stalin was a dictator and murdered a bunch of people,

and then the economy collapsed. And so it's a bad idea. Don't try it. so I started looking for ways to fill in those gaps in my knowledge and I eventually just started like reading Lenin and then I realized well if I'm going to understand Lenin I got to read Marx and I just I read some Marks stuff I read some Lenin stuff and it just really started to make a lot of sense to me and all the pieces kind of started to fall in the place with historical materialism and you know the analysis not only of what was going on in Russia, but just all over the world throughout all of history I came to realize that I think dialectical materialism

is a very, very powerful analytical lens to examine history and human society through and at that point it started to resonate with me because I realized that Marxism-Leninism is

so if if you're serious about trying to lessen human suffering you have to move past capitalism but if you're serious about moving past capitalism you have to embrace Marxism Leninism and I'm not trying to poo-poo

other revolutionary trends I have anarchist comrades like mad respects to everyone engaged in the struggle I just realized for me personally like no the bourgeoisie the capitalists

will kill you if given the chance if you threaten them in any way and you have to be able and willing to fight back. And Marxism, Leninism is how you do that. It's historically been proven the most effective way of fighting off counter-revolution and building societies that challenge the hegemony of capital. So I've been a communist. I call myself a communist. I'm an ML, whatever you want to call it.

I've been like this maybe for about 10, 12 years now. But really, my journey kind of started much earlier than that in just a basic interest in wanting to be of service to people, realizing that capitalism is an impediment to that and then understanding what we have to do to get past it. Yeah, beautifully said, and I think that resonates with a lot of our listenership. It certainly resonates with me and in my own experience. and I always, like, sort of think about, like, for me, the two greatest elevations of my consciousness, right? The two most revolutionary upward movements in my understanding of the world. And the inner world was Buddhism, and with the outer world, it was Marxism, and Marxism, Leninism, in particular. They just, you know, completely radically changed the way that I see the world in a more true way, right?

That's the crucial part is like you could have radical shifts in consciousness and learn new things. But it's like this actually helps me apprehend reality much more clearly. And so there's like a dignity in having your consciousness elevated in those ways. And then, you know, you go about the work of trying to make the world a better place. And as you said, like at the end of the day, everything that, you know, I try to do politically is geared towards the ending. of unnecessary human suffering, and that is a core moral and existential and in some way spiritual goal of my life and I think a lot of our lives. We would not be in this sort of politics if we did not care about other people and we did not care about making the world a better place.

And so here we are. It's a pleasure to have you on, my friend. Yeah, thank you very much. 100%. I'm very familiar because I've been listening to you for a while with your conception of the bodhisattva revolutionary. I find that to be very compelling. I myself am not a particularly religious or spiritual person, but I don't begrudge anyone their own spirituality just as long as, you know, they're not being fascist about it. Exactly.

And I've also been thinking, this isn't really apropos of our conversation, but just a little note here. I've been thinking a lot lately about how the younger generation and you hear all these things online about how, like, oh, they're turning to fascism and they're becoming super reactionary and especially young men and they're falling into the manosphere and all this other crap that is really scary if you stop and think about it. And I think about when I was young, when I was younger in my late teens and early 20s and searching for the answers to questions about human society and human existence and what is my role here and everything. just to anyone listening, I will say that I found a socialist theory to be incredibly comforting and providing the answers that allowed me to not become a reactionary, well, for lack of a better term, a reactionary douchebag. Like if I hadn't found Marxism or Leninism, I fear that I would have potentially fallen into the Manosphere. So I think having these ideas out there and understanding the history, like you said, it helps you engage in your own mind and your own existence, but it helps you engage in the external world in a non-destructive way.

And that's, I think, super important right now because at least American society, but global society more broadly, really feels to a lot of people like it is teetering on the edge. and we're trying to find ways to pull back from it. And, you know, I think socialists and communist theory and understanding our own history is one of the big keys to doing that. Totally. And the last thing I'll just mention very briefly is that your point about the manosphere and young men being sucked into that sort of algorithmically constructed pipeline to reaction. The saddest thing about all of that is that, I mean,

those things will never solve their problems. The reason that you get sucked into the manosphere, all the problems in your life that you turn to reactionary politics to solve actually only makes them worse. What is, for example, if you go to the manosphere because you're having a hard time dating women or finding women, and then all that does is make you a hundred times more repulsive to women in every way, or you turn to reactionary fascist politics to solve the fact that you can't build a life for yourself, much less create a family and provide for one because you have no real economic opportunities, and you turn to the violent arm of capitalist restoration

to try and navigate those contradictions and they only make the problems worse which is why reactionaries and fascists even when they get what they want they're never happy, they're never satisfied it never actually comes to any satisfying conclusion much less anything like solving the problems that they ostensibly would like to solve

and what's left in the void of actually solving problems hatred and anger and bitterness and it's like okay if I can't solve the problems at least I can hurt the people that I blame for them exactly that is all that fascism ultimately offers. Yeah, I mean, last thing on the Manusphere, just ask yourself, when was the last time you heard of someone who followed the advice coming out of the Manosphere and wound up happily married with a happy family? Like, it just doesn't happen.

It's horrible advice. It's super reactionary. And it, along with all other fascist ideology, just leads to masses astray. Absolutely. All right, my friend, that's a great little prelude to this conversation, you know, talking about contemporary issues before we get into historical ones. So we're going to talk mostly about the revolutionary period of the Bolshevik revolution or just the broadly conceived Russian revolution, however you want to phrase it, because there's many different factions at play here. But I'm interested in the lead up to it, right? So before 1917, what made the Tsarist order unsustainable?

Like, can you speak to peasant land hunger after the 1861 emancipation, uneven but explosive industrialization in Petrograd and Moscow and the devastation, of course, of World War I on workers and soldiers and how they all kind of played into the collapse of the social order. Absolutely. This is one of my, this is one of the reasons why I find the Russian Revolution to be so fascinating, because if you look at the lead up to it, you find exactly what Marx predicts and describes in his own conception of historical materialism that a system will function until the contradictions inherent in it can no longer be effectively managed and then the explosion of the tension between those contradictions is the revolution.

So if you go back, so the revolution starts in February 1917, if you go back 50 years before that, you just see one after another, after another of all of these problems not being properly addressed and the system is unable to properly address them

for a whole host of reasons I'll talk about here in a minute, but that's what leads up to the explosion of 1917. So it's just, it's like the perfect blueprint of historical materialism in my mind anyway. So

So, you know, I tend to think of the starting point of the prehistory of the revolution to be 1861. So that is when the Russian Tsar Alexander II finally passed the emancipation of the serfs. Russia had had served him at that point for about 200 years. It was, I think, one of, if not the only country in Europe or that was considered to be part of Europe that still had serfdom at that time and for a whole host of reasons everyone knew that serfdom had to be abolished. It was horribly

inefficient in the agricultural sphere there were like with slavery in the United States and you had abolitionists. There were plenty of people in Russia who just said hey you can't treat people like this. You can't treat people as property and part of the land. They're individuals and they deserve their freedom.

So in 1861, Alex the second finally passes the Emancipation Proclamation. The problem is it is a half-completed social and economic revolution. What it's supposed to do is free up the serfs and open up the door to agricultural modernization. But what it actually, the issue is it doesn't give the serfs what they need. to actually survive outside of serfdom. So when you're a serf, you're part of the land,

you're tied to the estate of the landowner, but the landowner has certain legal responsibilities to you. They're supposed to allow you to feed yourself and house yourself and you can have your community. You work for the landlord, then the landlord provides you with protection and municipal services. and all this other stuff.

So when you get, when Russia gets rid of serfdom, it changes the legal status of the peasants, but it doesn't actually give them any land. They don't actually have any control over their resources. And in fact, one of the more grotesque aspects of this emancipation of the serfs, this emancipation proclamation is it imposed. poses a tax on the serfs so that they must pay for their own freedom. So the details aren't really important, but what ends up happening is the surfs are on the hook

for the next 49 years making redemption payments to the landlords for the quote-unquote privilege of having been freed. So you have this entire class of people, you know, hundreds of millions of people over the last two two and a half centuries that have been have had their labor exploited and had their surplus value extracted and when that system finally no longer works you impose a tax on them so that they still have to pay to not have their labor be exploited and their surplus value it's this really grotesque failure of the entire system and of of the entire reform form.

Coincidentally, the reason that happens is because it is the land of aristocracy that advises the czar on how they would like to have this process unfold. If you can believe it, no peasants were asked, how should we proceed with the abolition of serfdom? It was all just the landed gentry. And wouldn't you know it? They said, well, if you make them pay us for half of a century, then fine, we'll call it even, which is, you know, ruling classes, what are going to do?

so so you have this this land problem now one of the reasons why this is important though is because um russia recognizes that it has to industrialize it is one of the most industrially underdeveloped nations in europe at the time it actually one of the things that was kind of the direct catalyst to realizing and setting getting on the path to emancipate the serfs was Russia got its ass kicks in the Crimean War in the 1850s, just absolutely humiliated. And it was because they were not an industrial power, but France and Britain were. And they just got completely crushed in the war. So you free up the serfs.

Now you have this giant underclass of reserve labor, which is kind of starting to sound like the prerequisites for capitalist development, right? So the state, the Russian bureaucracy, the Russian, the Tsarist bureaucracy, starts to invest in capitalist production and is able to pull from the now hundreds of millions of serfs who have been, have lost their ability to provide for themselves because they no longer have legal access to the land. So in about the 1870s, 1880s, you start to see this explosion of capitalist production drawing from the peasant class. The peasantry starts to become the proletarian class of the Russian Empire. A really kind of funny, interesting anecdote about this is there was this Russian, he's kind of considered the Russian father of Marxism, a guy named Georgi Plachanov. And he was kind of the first Russian Marxist of the period. And he had studied Marx and then brought back the teachings and the texts to Russia.

And this was right, this turned out to be right on the eve of the explosion of industrialization in the Russian Empire. So everyone's reading all these texts from Marx and Placanov's like, see, man, this is it. This is what we need to be paying attention to. but there's not really any large-scale industrialization in Russia so everyone says, what are you talking about? This is crazy. But within a couple of years, that script has been flipped. And now everyone thinks that Placanov is this, like, genius.

And what I think is funny about that is I kind of think of the analogy of, like, if you are going, if you know the math, you can accurately predict a solar eclipse. If you don't know the math, someone telling you that the sun is going to be blocked out seems crazy. And then when it happens, you're like, oh, my God, this person's a sorcerer. They have such divine knowledge. But really, all it is is they have an understanding of how astrophysics and the math works, and they're just able to apply it.

And that's kind of what happened here. Marks had at this time, he was still alive. But he had started to publish Capital Volume 1, and he was working on the other two volumes. he had kind of developed the inner workings of capitalism he had developed an understanding of the inner workings of capitalism and so all that happened was he looked at it he studied it and he described what he was seen and that was experienced in russia as almost kind of a a divination of what was going to happen it was seen as almost like a miracle because there was no materialist understanding of the progression of history in Russia at the time, not even among the intellectuals.

And that speaks to the scientific aspect of historical materialism, which is really this is genuinely scientific attempt to understand something that has fallen outside the purview of, you know, science proper, which is the development of societies through history. But in the same way that we still have people who deny, you know, Darwinian evolution or people that deny the efficacy of vaccines. Science denial happens all the time. And in some ways, the denial of historical materialism and the historical evolution of societies through time

is still very much alive with us, of course, because it's needed to defend the current system that is currently in power. But we know from a historical materialist perspective that regardless of what comes next, capitalism, imperialism is an ephemeral stage in the development of social history. In one way or another, it will pass.

And we hope that it passes through revolution onto a better world, but it could also collapse in on itself. It could also, I mean, in the absolute worst case scenario, lead to something like the extinction of the human species. But we know that it will pass because it is ephemeral. But anybody that defends capitalism has to, on some implicit level, assume that this is the end-all, be-all of modes of production. And maybe we reform it.

Maybe we have to still get it just right. But basically, and this is what Fukuyama was arguing, it's the end of history. And we know implicitly because of Marxism that that's a farce. Yeah, I was just going to bring that up. It's the whole idea of, well, this is all we can do. This is the best we can do. So we got to make do with what we can within this system. And the beauty of historical materialism, dialectical materialism, is it very sublimely describes how,

everything in the universe down to from the atoms all the way up to stars all the way up to black holes everything is constantly changing and morphing and nothing lasts forever um so and constantly morphing and changing in radical relationship to everything else around it exactly yeah yeah yeah that's that's the dialectical part of dialectical materialism right it's that all the composite components of whatever system it is that you're looking at are interacting with each other and through that interaction they are being changed

and changing everything else. Nothing is static. So, anyway, okay, so getting back to the 1870s, 1880s, so industrialization starts to take off and the new proletariat

class is going through the ringer at this point. Lenin actually had, I think, I want to say it was 90, 1892, but I don't know. I know it was the 1890s. One of his very, very first works was a history of the development of capitalism in Russia. So you can go there if you want more details. But you know all the stories that we've heard about the horrors of forced industrialization

and industrialization in Britain and France and the United States and also in colonies around the world. Same thing is happening with the Russian proletariat. They're living in squalor, They're being, you know, they're living in company towns. Whatever pay they get is barely enough to survive on. And they've, their families are suffering. You know, Russia is much farther north. So the winters are much more brutal. So they're also just constantly cold all the time for like seven or eight months out of the year.

And the proletariat class instinctively, without at this point really having any leadership to speak of, the proletariat class in Russia is becoming. very very combative they are not happy with the situation as it stands um so we'll we'll put a pin in that and come back at that later and then moving on to world war one so um you know world war one generally was a horrific war i think a lot of people think of world war too as the kind of worse war because of the nazis and the genocide of the jewish people in europe you know, the fight against fascism. All of that is horrific,

and I'm not trying to take anything away from that. But I think World War I is understudied for how much of an impact it had on everything. For four years, everyone in Europe just called it the meat grinder because the casualty rates were astronomical. The battle lines hardly ever moved because the defenses were much more established and much stronger than the offenses.

so you would just send soldiers across no man's land to just get mowed down on their like they they would fight over just a couple miles in one direction or another and very quickly it becomes apparent to all the combatants and all the soldiers that uh this war is is a terrible war they should not be fighting this war no one wants to fight it anymore specifically in russia what the Russian Empire starts to run into is the limitations of its failure to industrialize ahead of the war. The infrastructure of Russia's, the Russian Empire,

starts to collapse. Agricultural production starts to collapse. And as this starts to happen, you have the proletariat in the cities who are getting angrier and angry, At this point, they've actually had socialist parties like the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks, the socialist revolutionaries. We'll talk about all those guys in a little bit more detail later.

But there has been some agitation. There has been some raising of class consciousness in the early, in the first like 15 years of the 20th century in Russia. So the workers are becoming more class conscious and more combative. But the peasants are also starting to start. the peasants are the ones who are providing the soldiers so they're getting very angry that they're having to send their young men their sons and brothers and fathers to fight in this war and become horribly mutilated or just outright die and the drain of labor power from the villages as they're sending these young able-bodied men to the front means that the

villages are no longer able to produce what is needed to both sustain the war effort and keep domestic production at a level to keep everyone fed. So the entire system just starts to sputter and really begins to collapse in on itself. What you're basically talking is like two generations leading up to 1917 revolution and all of these contradictions building up piling on top of one of one another, the conflict around serfdom and the emancipation, the fallout of that, just like in the U.S. after slavery was officially abolished, problems certainly remained in so many different ways, the failure of reconstruction, et cetera. Do you have the Russia falling behind other European powers and industrialization and seeing

that other countries are ahead of them, in some cases well ahead of them, and that. regard, losing conflicts with other European powers because of it, and then the rise, of course, of World War I, just adding a pressure cooker to the already existing contradictions in Russian society. And I always, I never fail to point out the Bolshevik revolution and the Chinese revolutions came in the wake of world wars. And I think there is something to be studied and thought carefully about how these catastrophic explosions of the social order, the international social order, are the wildfire that clears the ground in some sense for these revolution that create the doorways, the possibilities for revolutionary ruptures. That's not to say that

they're good or that they should be desired, but it is to say that they are the natural outcomes of a broken social order, a broken international order, compiling. compiling, compiling, building up pressure until it explodes. And in some ways, they are the death nail to previous social orders. And that death nail, of course, creates the conditions to build something new. And that's what we see in the many, many decades leading up to 1917. Now, the rest of this conversation, and I think what makes this conversation unique, even though we may have covered, you know, the Bolshevik revolution,

in the past with much broader strokes. The rest of this conversation is literally going to be focused on February 1917 and go all the way through October 1917. We're going to study this in detail in a similar way as we did with China, with Ken Hammond. We have a seven-hour episode on like 200 years of Chinese history that we go through the revolution in detail. And we have one on the French Revolution where we really got into the nitty gritty of how the revolution unfolded.

And this will be the Bolshevik version, I think, of those detailed, deep dives into the revolutionary process itself. So with all of that said, we're going to move up now to the February Revolution and the construction of dual power. And this is February of 1917. So how did the February Revolution actually unfold on the ground? And why did soldiers, mutinies, you know, kind of prove decisive in that unfolding? And also, and I ask these questions, because we're going into great detail, so my questions are detailed. How did this event produce dual power between the provisional government and the workers and soldiers Soviets? Big question. Take it however you want. Sure, sure. So, yeah, by February 1917, the Russian people are fed up.

They hate the participation in the war. The Tsar has actually taken direct command over the Russian Imperial Army. The thing is Germany is kicking Russia's ass because Germany is one of the most industrially advanced nations in Russia at the time. And so the Tsar, by

stepping in and making himself the commander-in-chief of the Russian Imperial Army, ultimately all that does is he is signing his name on all of the catastrophic defeats that are mounting up throughout 1916 and leading into 1917.

So the people don't want the war. The aristocracy is mad that the war is going so badly. Everyone's probably heard of Grigory Rasputin. We're not going to get into him, but his presence in the capital during this time is another reason why the aristocracy around the Tsar and the Tsar's family are starting to abandon them and getting very angry at them because the way that they handled Rasputin and all of his scandals just really. alienated a lot of people so what happens is on mid-February I think it was like

the 21st or the 22nd oh I should say actually and this is the disclaimer I have this on all my episodes this is the disclaimer everyone who talks about this period is kind of obligated to give and that is the different calendars that are used to date these things long story short

Russia at this time was on an old calendar called the Julian calendar it is 13 days behind the calendar that we use now. The Bolsheviks modernized the calendar in February 1918, but at this point, when we say the February Revolution, that's because it was February on the Russian calendar. But if you look in a lot of modern sources, they will give you the dates as having happened in March, even though it's called the February Revolution.

It's same with October. It happens at the end of the October calendar in Russia, but it's on the November calendar in the rest of the world. And so there is that discrepancy just in case anyone. feels like going out and doing their own research, which I obviously support and encourage. If you come across that, I just don't want anyone to be confused. Nice. So anyway, so the Tsar leaves Petrograd, the capital of the Russian Empire, to go to a place

called Mogilyov, which is the army headquarters. And on February 23rd, female textile workers who are enraged at the new rationing system being imposed in the city, they go on strike. Now, they were not the first workers to go on strike. There had been strikes happening throughout most of February at this point, but the female workers were the first workers to have explicitly political demands, such as down with the czar and end the war. And so it's the first time that we see this fusion between the economic necessities of

trying to provide for yourself and your family with the political necessity of we have to move past this system this system is not working for us it is actually making it impossible for our political demands to be met so February 23rd is kind of considered the start of the February revolution because of the explicitly political nature of the demands being made by the women workers there and the strikes basically just snowball from there for the next day or two up to half a million workers have abandoned their stations and their factories and they're out in the streets and they're demanding not only a rise in wages and an end to inflation because the wartime inflation is is out of control at this point just another way that the

system is squeezing the average person but they're tying it to the political demands. Because the Tsar is out of the city, he has to rely on the reports of people back in the city. And so he is slow to respond to what is actually happening. He understands that there are disorders happening. And so he orders a general, a guy named Chabalov to basically put down the strikes and just force everyone to go back to work. So So Chabalov starts to order the soldiers who are stationed in Petrograd to go out into the street and do just that. And this is where we start to see what I think is one of the really inspirational things. It's a motif that we see throughout the Russian Revolution.

Time and again, when you have two classes whose interests actually overlap, what bridges the gap between them is direct communication. So the workers are out in the street, but the soldiers who are, again, they're drawn from the peasantry. The soldiers are being told, well, you had to get the workers to go back to work. But in physically occupying the same space in order to force them back to work, the workers start explaining to the soldiers, hey, our brothers, this is why we're doing this. We're not out here for selfish reasons. We are literally starving and freezing. We cannot clothe ourselves. we don't have fuel to keep ourselves warm.

Our money is worthless. We are fighting for our lives. And I believe it's by the evening of February 26th, the soldiers, when they're back in their barracks that night, start to talk among themselves. And they kind of all independently, not all of them, but many of the regiments, independently start to come to the conclusion

that they actually don't want to be doing this. They are on the side of the workers. The demands that the workers are making seem completely reasonable, totally understandable. And, hey, the workers also want an end of the war, just like we want an end of the war. So on the morning of the 27th, the soldiers end up basically mutinying against the Petrograd garrison and General Khabalov and defecting to the side of the workers. and when that happens, that's basically the ball game because now you have half a million workers joined by 200,000 soldiers.

A lot of them are armed and you have no one else to send in to combat that. There are no reliable troops. Everyone is either at the front or they're so disgruntled by the war that even troops that you could send in, who's to say the same thing is just going to keep happening?

and then they're going to also defect to the side of the revolution. So the demands start to build for the Tsar to go, and by March 1st, the writing is on the wall, and Nikolai's ministers, the Tsar, Nikolai, his ministers come to him and say, look, you got to go. We have no way of ending this crisis and leaving you in power. and Nigelai hesitates but he does abdicate he abdicates first in favor of his brother Mikhail but then Mikhail understands that it would be suicide to take the crown right now because they do

not want a czar it's like a hot potato right exactly like how how is he supposed to unscrew this pooch so so he says no I'm not going to take the um I'm not going to take the crown and he defers to the constituent assembly, which is something I imagine we'll talk about a little bit later. But basically, this is the point where sardom and Russia ends because the Tsars recognize that the people do not want them. The people have rejected them, both in the army and in the factories, in the streets of the cities and out in the countryside. And so they, the czars leave.

and in their place is, I guess we'll talk about it now, is this supposed to be this constituent assembly, which is this idea that, okay, we will eventually have a coming together of the Russian sort of post-Zar government. So that's kind of how czardom ends in Russia, and that's kind of the culmination of the the February

Revolution. Now, the dual power aspect comes into play here because two things are happening at the exact same time. Between February 23rd and March 1st, you have the leftovers of the Russian Duma, and then you have the workers and soldiers spontaneously organizing themselves.

So the Russian Duma is kind of like the Russian parliament. It had been in session during this whole time but it had been powerless to do anything about it because they're just ministers they also don't have control over the soldiers so what are they going to do? So once the Tsar advocates

certain ministers and deputies from this Duma start they declare themselves to be the provisional government of Russia so they say okay we were elected I think it was

like a the year before or something to sit in this Dumas so we will take over governing of the country no one elects the provisional government they just declare themselves to be the of the provisional government but their claim

to legitimacy is that they were voted into the Dumas in the last series of elections along with that though you have the workers and the soldiers who start organizing themselves into

the Soviets. Now, the Russian word Soviet, or as we say, Soviet in English, it literally just means counsel, both in the sense of giving someone advice and also in the sense of a council of people coming together to discuss issues and make decisions. So the Soviets are literally just councils of workers and soldiers that spontaneously start to form so that they can come together and discuss the issues that are important to them.

The Soviets had actually first appeared. There was a revolution in 1905. We're not going to get into it, but that was the first appearance of the Soviets. The Soviets had then gone away after that revolution. But they've come back here and they are, as we know now, the embryo of what would become popular democracy and workers' power in the Soviet Union. They are resurrected right now in February 1917. Now, the dual power nature of this is neither of these institutions at this early stage of the revolution are powerful enough in and of themselves to take over total control of the Russian Empire.

So the masses are very clearly with the Soviets. But the masses are also, and so the Soviets are by extension as well. well, very inexperienced. They were not expecting to step into this role. And their immediate concerns are, okay, how do we feed and clothe ourselves? How do we take care of our families? How do we end this war? The provisional government has this veneer of officialdom because it comes from the Duma.

But they're not really supported by the masses. now that means that the provisional government if they were to try to break up the Soviets they would incite a reaction against them that would very likely lead to a civil war because the masses are with the Soviets and the Soviets start popping up all over the country that it's not just in Petrograd they're in all the cities in a lot of the villages Soviets just are popping up everywhere so the provisional government is not strong enough to just do away with the Soviets altogether. And the Soviets are not experienced enough

and they're not class conscious enough at this point to understand that they don't actually need the provisional government. They are capable of running things by themselves. So you have these parallel tracks of political power being exercised over the next eight months. And the story of the Russian Revolution is very much the story of these two tracks that start out.

parallel starting to curve into each other and heading on a collision course. And that's what ends up happening in October. Yeah, well, the first thing I want to say is just like kind of stepping out of the narrative, just talking like how good you

are at creating an accessible and compelling narrative that doesn't lose the listener. Like sometimes when people go through the morass of these historical details, it's very easy to get bogged down and take detours and kind of lose the narrative thread. You're kind of hopping all over the place or bringing up things that people don't know about or are kind of confused about. So it can be hard to tell history in this hyper-detailed way. And I just wanted to give

you your props of how good you are at it. And, you know, that speaks to the quality of your podcast, The Sickle on the Hammer, which, of course, I'll link to in the show notes. People can check it out. So, you know, hats off to you for that. But also I want to just kind of reiterate the importance of these Soviets, right, of these councils. This is the locus. the embryo, as you said, of proletarian democracy. This, especially coming out of Tsarist, Russia, represents this radical extension of democracy and with that community autonomy, right? The ability for bottom-up democratically organized communities, workers to come together

and make strategic decisions, especially in a time of extreme crisis. And I was trying to think, like, what is the closest thing that we have in modern America to that and I would say it's something like unions but when they're when they're on strike right when unions go on strike and they're out they're out and out in open class conflict with the bosses and they are now no longer being paid right so now meeting the workers material needs through strike funds and mutual aid becomes necessary having alliances perhaps with other elements of the community other trade unions becomes more and more important and then the strategy of how you deal

in this really hot house environment of hostility and conflict with negotiations, you know, what your red lines are. In that context, unions are really forced to kind of, in a miniature version, kind of play the role

of what a Soviet is. And in both of these cases, although the Soviets to a much greater extent, and these entities have been present in multiple socialist experiments, this is really important to remember that these are the root beds, the seed beds

out of which socialist and proletarian democracy can emerge and flourish. And of course, there's a bunch of complications with the Soviets down the road and plenty of criticism to talk about, but just highlighting how beautiful and relatively rare these formations are and how they really are in so many ways at the center of our socialist politics, I think, is worth doubling down on and just reminding people of. Yeah, absolutely. You had said that you think maybe the closest approximation that we would have in the United States today is labor unions.

That just brought to my mind. So Lenin in 1902 wrote, what is to be done, which was basically his theory of the Vanguard Party and why it was necessary and all that stuff. and he points out in that work the very real limitations of unions. Unions are great. They're very necessary. They are the first line of defense for workers against capital and the bourgeoisie

trying to squeeze them for all of their worth. But they are insufficient in and of themselves for overcoming capitalism entirely. If you want to know why, go read that book. I don't want to get into it right now because that'll derail this entire conversation. But you can think of Soviets as the next evolution or the next step in workers' powers. In workers' power. You have unions that are focused on individual, maybe workplaces or industries, but then the Soviets are where those unions start to come together so that you have the bricklayers union and the coal miners union and all these other workers from all over the country coming together. And that's where

they can recognize their common class interests. In the unions, they're mostly limited to their own industry and the immediate interest in their struggle against the specific owner of the mine or the factory or whatever it is. The Soviets are how you kind of universalize that struggle. Beautifully said. And yes, of course, we have an episode, Alison and I on our sister podcast, Red Menace, on the text, what is to be done by Lenin, where we vociferously explain the limitations of trade union consciousness and articulate what a Vanguard party actually is and some of the smears against, you know, the distortions about what it is versus what it really is, the role of the professional revolutionary in Lenin's verbiage, et cetera. And importantly,

when I, you're 100% correct that the Soviets are a maturation and, and a level of above of what unions are. And I was even articulating the, the particular aspect of unions during a strike because there, you know, unions outside of a strike context are even much, the ceiling is even lower. And having recently joined a trade union and obviously I don't have super a lot of experience, but I've been to meetings and I talk with my coworkers about the union. It's awesome. And a lot of ways right there's lots of class class consciousness there's lots of outright hostility towards the bosses they kind of know where they are in the whole thing but there's also deep deep limitations and as my experience unfolds within one of the bigger trade unions in north america

i'll i'll have episodes where i kind of from a first person experience i get to explain the the severe limitations of trade union consciousness because they certainly are there but yeah all interesting thoughts for real i'll link to that show that episode on we that we did on what is to be done in the show notes as well for people because i do think it perhaps one of the most important texts that a marxist could read and understand in depth um for the level of organization needed to confront capitalism imperialism but with all that said let's go ahead and and now move forward in the narrative so coming out of the february revolution the dual power situation we move been to April. And this gives rise to the April theses and accusations of Lenin being a

German agent. So when Lenin returned in April, what was qualitatively new about the April thesis, right? Peace, land and bread versus all power to the Soviets or and all power to the Soviets. How should we understand the German agent accusation like historically as a bourgeois smear? And what evidence do we have about what really mattered, which is the Bolshevik alignment with mass demand, something you've alluded to throughout this narrative already. So when February happens, it catches the established political parties completely off guard. They've been suppressed by the Tsarist regime for, you know, a decade or more at that point. So Lenin and a few other Bolshevik leaders, along with leaders of the Mensheviks and even the

SRs, have gone into exile. So they're in, I think it's Zurich, when the February Revolution. hits. Other leaders like Kamenev and Stalin are in exile in Siberia. So once the Tsar is overthrown, everyone starts to make their way back to

Petrograd, whether it's coming from Siberia or coming from abroad. Lenin because so if he's in Zurich, that means that he has to travel across enemy

lines to get back into Russia. Because if you look at the map, in between Zurich, Switzerland, and Petrograd, Russia, or St. Petersburg today in Russia, is Germany. And Germany is at war on both fronts. They're fighting France and they're fighting Russia. So Lenin basically comes up with the plan of going to the German high command and asking for safe passage back to Russia. now this is a calculated risk because he knows what's going to happen when he does this but he does not see any other way for him to get back into the country he knows that he's not

that everyone's going to read about Lenin working with the Germans and he knows that he's going to be smeared as a German agent but again there there are no choices there are no other ways back into Russia and the the deal that he hatches with the German high command is they'll put him on a train and they'll send him across the eastern half of Europe back into Petrograd.

The reason the German High Command agrees to this is because they want what Lenin wants in this very, very narrow sense, their interests align. Both Lenin and the German High Command

want Russia out of the war. Russia Germany wants Russia out of the war because they are losing even though they're kicking Russia's butt in the war they are fighting on two fronts

and they understand that they cannot keep this up for forever so they need one of the fronts to be closed and the way they think that they can do that is if they can send Vladimir Lenin into Russia as a destabilizing

force in order to force Russia to withdraw from the war so that's why German the German High Command agrees to this. Lenin wants to get back into Russia in order to advocate and do his work in the revolution

including ending Russia's participation in the war. But he wants to do it for two reasons. One, because the war is horrific and he knows that the Russian people are suffering and he knows that the working people all over Europe are suffering and he wants the war to end.

If you go back and look at the documents he puts out like in the April Theses, but also there are just a whole bunch of like proclamations and decrees and all this stuff at no point are the bolsheviks or lenin or even the soviets calling for an end of the war only with germany they are constantly appealing to all belligerent nations and the working classes specifically of all the belligerent nations to end the war because they want the war overall to be finished So Lennon takes German money, he takes German resources, and he takes a train back into Petrograd. He arrives, I believe it's April 4th, or maybe it's a third. But anyway, it's early April. So like I said, Lennon knew that he was going to be smeared as a German agent. And he is because he is such a radical.

advocate for immediate worker's power. We'll get into that with April theses in a second, but just to wrap up the German agent smear. One of the most telling things about how this is purely a political smear

and just a label that's being thrown on Lenin is Lenin is not the only Russian revolutionary who takes up the German high command on this deal. There are Mensheviks. There are S-Rs, there are anarchists, and there are other Bolsheviks who take these trains. They're actually three successive trains.

They all get on these trains and they make their way back into Russia. None of them, other than Lenin specifically and the Bolsheviks generally, are smeared as German agents, even though they all did the same thing. So that, to me, is kind of the biggest proof that it is. It is because Lenin and the Bolsheviks immediately start to advocate for an end of the war, for a transfer of power to the Soviets, that they come up with the smear. The Mensheviks and the SRs are not doing that. They are, Lenin ends up calling them the collaborationist parties. They are working together with the provisional government.

So they don't get this smear because they're not, quote, acting in the interests of Germany. they want to continue the war. So yeah, so that's the German agent thing. It's something that persists to this day. I actually, when I was looking, I went on like a Russian Federation government website today that was talking about their own history. And even today, the Russian Federation, the government has the line of Vladimir Lenin was a German agent. Oh, my God. it's kind of crazy because it's like dude this is your guy but they're they're no longer you know obviously they're no longer socialist they've been capitalists for 30 some years so they're going to join in the party um so um okay so what does lenin do that incurs the wrath of the bourgeoisie and the provisional government and the other socialist parties well when he gets off the train uh in leningrad i'm sorry in petrograd

he immediately like on the platform as he is greeted because people know that he's coming and everyone's excited to have him come back he's got Bolshevik comrades coming to greet him but also just workers and people coming to see Lenin come back into Russia he on the spot starts talking about the need for the revolution to now proceed from the first stage the overthrow of the czar to the second stage the overthrow of the bourgeoisie most people think he's crazy Kamenev one of his closest colleagues even though Kamenev ultimately ends up being a very kind of right-wing Bolshevik so he ends up disagreeing with Lenin on a couple of really key important points but he's still a Bolshevik Kamenev basically says to everyone

hey we're really sorry about this we didn't know he was going to say this don't please don't like get mad at us for this this is just him and of course the bourgeois press is that's when they start hurling the German agent smear the Mensheviks, the Sars everyone is just like

Lenin's out of his gourd this is crazy the next day April 4th Lenin gives a report that is known as the April theses there's an official name I didn't write it down I don't remember what the name of the report is

but we all call it now the April thesis and in the thesis he lays out his argument for why power should now begin to transfer to the working class and why the revolution should proceed from a bourgeois revolution

that overthrows the monarchy to a socialist revolution that overthrows the bourgeoisie. Now, to be fair to the Mensheviks and Sars, they call themselves socialists. I don't really buy it because

you are what you do and the Mensheviks and socialists never support the working class. They never support the Bolsheviks. They try to oppose them at every turn. But they call themselves socialist, and they claim to profess a historical materialist understanding of the progression of society. And their argument is that, look, we just had a bourgeois revolution to overthrow the monarchy.

Russia is not industrialized. We have not had a prolonged period of rule by the bourgeoisie. You can't skip over this stage is essentially the argument. But, and this is kind of the brilliance of Lenin, Lenin sees the Soviets and he immediately, as we were saying, recognizes that they are the embryo of actual political power being exercised directly by the masses. You know, before the Soviets has shown up,

Lenin actually has subscribed to that general understanding of the progression of historical materialism. First, you have the rule of the feudal lords and the kings, and then you have got to get rid of that, and then you've got to have a period of bourgeois rule, and then you get to

Soviet rule. I'm sorry, you get to socialist rule. But in seeing the Soviets start to pop up and the masses start to spontaneously organize themselves, he recognizes that this is actually the perfect opportunity for Russia to become the leading force in a worldwide socialist revolution. One other big aspect of this is the international dimension. So we were talking about World War I.

we don't need to get into this too far but essentially the Bolshevik line on World War I is that it was an imperialist war it was the imperial core countries of Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Austria, Hungary,

the Ottoman Empire these countries were going to war to try to divvy up the imperial pie better. More specifically Germany wanted to get a bigger piece of the pie because Germany like Russia Germany had unified later

and had industrialized later than Britain and France and so by the time they got to a point where they could start going out and colonizing the rest of the world most of the choice pieces of colonial meat had already been

claimed by the British and the French so the Germans were like the only way to get them to give us their colonies is to fight a war with them. So kind of what we were talking about before about these cycles of crises, the Bolshevists to recognize that World War

1 is a global crisis of capital imperialism. And so Lenin says, look, here is the chink in the armor. If capitalism is a global system, here in Russia, the Soviets

have shown us how we actually can move the entire world past capitalism. You don't need to have capitalism, the bourgeoisie have a prolonged rule in any one country before that country becomes socialist. If you look at the totality of capitalism as a global system, this is the chink in the armor. This is how we can get them. If we can utilize the Soviets to first,

affect a socialist revolution in Russia, we can then turn around and affect that revolution across Europe and then that will trickle down to the rest of the world. So the idea that Lenin has come up with is, yes, history progresses in stages, but it's not a rigid first A, then B, then C, then D formula. He's applying his dialectical materialist analysis of the situation in real time. And that's how he identifies

the Soviets as as we keep saying, the embryo of workers' power and the motor for a worldwide socialist revolution. And I think you hit the nail on the head when you emphasize the dialectical approach as opposed to this

they're both operating from historical, both sides of this argument could be operating from an ostensibly historical materialist perspective in making arguments that seem in line with it, but the more dialectical perspective, I think, is Lenin's, and that's what eventually won out. And there is

a deep brilliance there. I mean, there's a, to go against the current in such a bold way to the point where even your comrades are like, I don't know, he must have lost his damn mind, and to see that with such clarity, And to apply a dialectical and historical materialist framework in real life, living, breathing, evolving conditions, as opposed to this more stultified static conception.

There's like this deterministic conception of we have to go through this stage and then we have to go through this stage. You know, there's something that there's something dialectically lost in that, in that rigid perspective. And in both Lenin's case and in Mao's case, they creatively and uniquely and successfully applied the historical and dialectical materialist framework to their own conditions in such a way that they allowed it to be a living, breathing, strategic approach to things as opposed to a stultified dead dogma, just being copy and pasted it onto society, right? Yeah, I could not agree with that more. that is the brilliance of Lenin and the Bolsheviks is exactly that. They are adhering to the spirit of dialectical materialism, not the letter. The letter says A, then B, then C, then D. But the spirit says, examine how all of the composite parts are interacting with each other

and then draw your conclusions and strategy from that. And that's what the Bolsheviks are doing. That's what Lenin does. and that's what it ultimately leads them to victory. And I should say, when these theseses are first put out, the higher-ups in the Bolshevik Party and all the other people that we talked about, they're all disavowing him. But there is one group that immediately latches on to this idea.

And would you at all be surprised to learn? It is the workers and soldiers who immediately start to say, yes, actually, why don't we start, why don't we transfer power to the Soviets? we're ready to have it in the intervening what month and a half two months since February I'd mentioned before that they weren't particularly class conscious enough and politically mature enough to take power directly in the wake of the overthrow of the czar but this is where they starts to recognize that actually maybe we can run things by ourselves now it's still a process we still got six months to go until October but what I want to impress here is that Lenin is not kind of like Christopher Nolan style incepting the

planting this idea in the minds of the working class. He has actually determined that due to the material conditions on the ground this is possible and necessary and because that is an accurate

reflection of the needs of the masses the masses start to resonate with that message. And that's where you start to see this really radical shift within the Bolshevik party. Because when Lenin comes back and puts out these theses within just like a week or two, it becomes the official line of the party because the rank and file workers and soldiers of the Bolshevik party are voting for it. And they want it. And so it is a textbook example of the theory of the Vanguard Party from what is to be.

what is to be done that we talked about where you have the vanguard party that is doing the analytical legwork necessary for the working class but they have to find their their reflection and their roots in the working class and that's what's happening here absolutely and it would almost be regressive or tailist to try to prevent or put a ceiling on what the soviets are And Lenin saw that, that, you know, to go with this more stagist approach would be to abandon the very real development that has been expressed through the Soviets themselves at this point and the alignment of those Soviets with the masses much more broadly. So it's actually quite a beautiful thing. And the brilliance, of course, comes in Lenin's clarity of insight and his application of theory to the moment. And of course his, I mean, this is a hallmark of Lenin and of Marx and Mao and others as well, which is just this confidence, right?

This confidence that I'm, that this is actually the right move, even though it might fly in the face of orthodoxy, even though it'll certainly ruffle some feathers and make other people, you know, get really concerned about where this is going, this is right, I feel it, I see it, and we're going to pursue it. And history has proven Lennon correct on that front. Yeah, exactly. So after, so now we're getting out of the spring moving into the summer. From spring into summer, 1917, how did the Bolsheviks kind of orient tactically, right? In factory communities, garrison, Soviets to win majorities without propping up the provisional government. Because there's a way you can win majorities that simultaneously lends extreme credence to the provisional government as such. So how could you win them without doing that?

and what organizational practices, discipline, agitation, clarity of line, proved essential here. Lenin returns the start of April. By mid-April, his theses have been adopted as the platform of the Bolshevik Party. Independently of that, in the provisional government, a crisis is brewing. Because the one thing that everyone knows is that the masses want Russian participation in World War I, to end, full stop. However, the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, a man named Pavel Milukov, sends a diplomatic note to Britain and France, in which he promises that Russia will not, in fact, be withdrawing from the war.

And in fact, we are going to double down and we are going to win this thing. And we will join you guys as we cross the finish line. the problem is that note gets leaked and people are furious the bolsheviks are furious the masses are furious even the the mensheviks and the srs claim that this is a betrayal of you know the revolution that the provisional government must suffer some sort of consequences for this and it causes a shake-up in the provisional government up to this point all of the official posts in the government have been occupied by holdovers from that rump duma session that I mentioned before. But now we enter what's called the first coalition government where the provisional

government invites socialists from the Soviets into positions in the government. The Mensheviks take them up on this and the socialist revolutionaries take them up on this. And the socialist revolutionaries take them up on this. The Bolsheviks do not. They recognize that working with the provisional government is only going to dilute their message and will eventually lead to falling into the trap of opportunism, which is, well, and class collaborationism. So I would say that's one of the first things that the Bolsheviks do at this time.

They recognize that they should not be working. with the bourgeois government and in the end this is this position is vindicated because they remain the only mass party that is not tainted by participation in the government because we have coming up the failed June offensive and repression after the July days and the Cornelov affair we're going to get to all that soon but yeah by not entering the government the Bolsheviks kind of keep their name clean. In terms of starting to win majorities in the Soviets, really it's just very consistent messaging. You know, they have the slogan, Peace Land, Bread, which speaks to kind of the three groups of

the masses, peace for the soldiers, land for the peasants, bread for the workers. They alternate between the slogan of all power to the Soviets. It's after the July days, they abandoned that slogan, and we can talk about that why later. And then they bring it back starting in September. But it is by consistently advocating for what the masses themselves are saying they want. They want an end of the war, and the workers need a little bit of breathing room. They are starting to experiment with their own kind of direction. control over factories because the bourgeoisie and Petrograd and other cities across the country

are so weak and everything is so disorganized at this point. They're setting up factory committees to start to have influence over their own working conditions. And the Bolsheviks by consistently supporting the masses start to win more and more of the masses. So the Mensheviks and the socialist revolutionaries join the government and then their message starts to get diluted. the workers start to see that maybe these guys aren't actually serious about giving us the things that we want, but the Bolsheviks are because look at what they're saying, look at what they're fighting for. And that's really what draws everyone into the Bolshevik party. Yeah. Fascinating. Fascinating history there and just incredibly well played. And the strategy there is essential.

And we see in our own time to a very different degree, but still one that resonates to some extent. the capitulation that occurs when you try to change the system from within or trying to work within the Democratic Party or work as a work as an even an aspect of the coalition even you know even though we're kind of hostile to the party but we're still going to work as it's left flank you know of the coalition and and what happens in that process and so I think that was a brilliant another brilliant move that and really like the odds of that the odds that the Bolsheviks have to overcome right the consecutive right decisions that they have to make to be able to turn this thing in the direction that it ultimately played out. It's like a domino where every single domino has to fall more or less right. And they're doing it. And it's because of the Vanguard party. It's because in some aspects of the brilliance of Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership more broadly beyond just Lenin and their ties to the masses and their ability to creatively apply theory in real time. So let's go ahead and move forward.

And this is an aspect of the revolution that doesn't get talked about a lot. I think it's obviously kind of washed out with the February revolution and the October revolution. But, you know, this is, I think, is a really important part of this process, which is the July days, right? Why do you characterize the July days as a premature uprising? What actually happened, right? How did the Bolshevik leadership respond under? massive repression, Lenin going underground, Trotsky and others getting arrested, and what strategic lessons about timing and discipline should revolutionaries more broadly

take from these heady and tumultuous days? So first off, what were the July days? So a little bit of backstory here. So I mentioned before that there was a June offensive. So even though everyone was really ticked off at the Milukov note about Russia continuing the war and they formed this first coalition. Still, by mid-June, the Russian government is insisting that they are going to put forward an offensive against Germany to kind of reinvigorate the Russian war effort.

So it turns out bringing socialists into the official government organs does not actually get the workers and the soldiers what they want. the thing is the Russian army is on its last legs and for a whole host of reasons again we don't get into it I do go into quite a bit of detail on my own show so if you want that you can go listen to it there but the Russian army is just falling apart and the June offensive completely stalls and is a major major embarrassment now this happens at the end of June On July 2nd, the first machine gunner regiment stationed in Petrograd, some of the members of this regiment are so ticked off about the June offensive

and everything else that's going on that they start to agitate for immediately overthrowing the provisional government. They're there in Petrograd. They have the weapons. Why don't we march down there and just arrest these bastards, kick them out, and take over for ourselves. So this agitation kind of continues throughout July 2nd and 3rd. At this exact moment, Lenin is taking a much needed break outside of the city because he came

back on April 3rd. He has not had a day off since then. He has been running around doing all the necessary revolutionary work in organizing and agitating and developing his own theories and all that kind of stuff. And he just needs a breather. He happens to take that breather right as this crisis starts to unfold. So he immediately hops on a train and gets back into Pedrograd as soon as he possibly can. He arrives, you know, mid morning of July 3rd.

He immediately goes to the Bolshevik headquarters. And there is this crowd of workers and soldiers who are basically awaiting marching orders. And Lenin goes out in front of them and basically pleads to, them do not do this. This will not work. You have to be patient. This is not the time. And this kind of baffles a lot of people, you know, the workers and the soldiers that are assembled there because, wait a minute, weren't you just saying in your April thesis that the whole point is to take over power from the provisional government? Now, these insurgents are correct that they could, there's nothing stopping them from going down and arresting the

provisional government. But what Lenin realizes and what he argues with the other Bolsheviks and why he's pleading this particular line with the masses is Petrograd, even though it is the capital and it is the seat of the government, is only one city. The rest of the countryside, and it is a big countryside. We all know how big Russia is. The rest of the country is not necessarily unified behind the idea of overthrowing the provisional government. So what Lenin is worried will happen is even if they successfully overthrow the provisional government, if the rest of the masses around the country are not behind them, that's going to leave an opening for, say, the army or some other.

someone from the provinces that's in the provisional government to come in and lead the army back into Petrograd and then crush the revolution for good. He's kind of worried about the history of the Paris commune repeating. I'm sure some of your listeners are very familiar with the history of the Paris commune. The relevant point here is as wonderful as the commune was in many ways, the commune only existed in one

in one city that was Paris and so the rest of France did not come to Paris's aid when the French army marched back into Paris to slaughter all of the communards and Lenin is like hey man it happened to them this will

happen to us you cannot do this now because of this the July days are not nearly as big of a fiasco as they could have been I and many other Marxist Leninists and many other historians generally agree that Lenin was almost certainly completely correct in this.

There's almost no chance that the Bolsheviks would have actually been able to hold on to power or the Soviets, I should say, would have been able to hold on to power had the July days resulted in overthrowing the provisional government only in Petrograd. So there is a little bit of street fighting. it's not nearly as bad as it could have been and by the skin of their teeth

the Bolshevik Party survives this premature kind of adventure in overthrowing the government but in the aftermath of this the government immediately starts to smear the Bolsheviks again

they're German agents but now they are they are traitors because look what they're trying to do they're trying to incite riots and overthrow of the government. A crucial detail here is that the Bolsheviks themselves did not incite the masses to this insurgency. That came, that was a spontaneous moment that came about within the masses because people are hungry and desperate and just very, very angry about how things are happening. So when you have a volatile situation like that, no amount of,

of party discipline is going to account for, you know, the spontaneous expressions of anger and frustration that are present in the masses at this time. It's like a natural event, like a natural disaster. It's like the spontaneous uprising of the people. It can't be controlled or even sometimes predicted and certainly can't be disciplined in the moment. But there's a lot of energy there that needs to be harnessed afterwards. Exactly.

And if you want to take the analogy of the forest fire, the Bolshevians, realized that, hey, we actually need to put this fire out. So the Bolsheviks are doing what they can to try to restrain the masses. But wouldn't you know it? That's not the story that the government ends up telling. The government blames everything on the Bolsheviks. Lenin and his comrades, Zinovia, have to go into hiding. So they flee to Finland, which at this point is a part of the Russian Empire.

It's pretty close to Petrograd, but it's far enough way that he's kind of off everyone's radar and a lot of other prominent Bolsheviks and just regular workers and soldiers, including they have Trotsky at this time, they are arrested and held in prison for their involvement in all of this, or at least their supposed involvement in all of this. So now that their leaders have been either run underground or place into arrest, the idea is, hey, the Bolsheviks aren't going to last very long, right? People are writing articles and they're talking openly about how ha ha ha the bolsheviks are done because they tried to overthrow the government and they couldn't and now they're paying the price but rather unexpectedly

throughout the rest of july in the first couple of weeks of august when this kind of uh reaction to the july days is at its height and you know uh the government is suppressing workers movements and strikes and really trying to persecute the Bolsheviks and passing all of these rules and laws about, you know, against strikes and disarming the workers and all of those stuff. The Bolsheviks are able to survive, I think, for two reasons. One, because the government is not actually as powerful as it keeps telling everyone that it is. Independent of the July days, just on the eve of the July days, the first coalition falls

apart for reasons we don't need to get into but it falls apart so when the july days happens there is not actually an official functioning government in russia at this time and so this disorder makes it nearly impossible for the new soon-to-be officially named prime minister a man named alexander kerensky whom i know i believe a lot of your listeners probably already know who that is So Kerenzky is not actually able to follow through with his persecution of the Bolsheviks because he lacks the institutional capacity to do so. But also, the workers do not abandon the Bolsheviks. There is no mass exodus from the party.

You might think that, oh, well, now there are all these smears and the Bolsheviks are being persecuted. Let's get out of Dodge while we still can so we don't wind up getting, you know, taking, you know, taking down, arrested, persecuted ourselves. But that doesn't happen. The Bolsheviks have built up a lot of street cred with the workers across, again, Petrograd, but all over in all the industrial centers, the Bolsheviks have been gaining a lot of momentum through their strategy of consistent messaging and really having a very direct, organic relationship with the workers, a very direct and organic connection.

So there's no mass exodus from the party and the government is actually not able to persecute the Bolsheviks to the extent that they would like to. The workers, especially in Petrograd, are still armed and the government, whatever interim government is functioning here at this time before a second coalition is named towards the end of July, recognizes that hey they didn't overthrow us this last time but if we actually start to like physically try to take away their weapons if we actually start to go after the workers we can have another July days on our hands

and that one probably is going to end as well for us because now Lennon's not even here to tell everyone to calm down like they're going to be very pissed and that fire is going to get out of control very quickly so it's this very interesting dynamic of the government being weaker than it made everyone think that it was and the Bolsheviks being much more resilience than everyone assumed and that resiliency comes from the connection with the masses. Beautifully stated and yes so and what we're going to go into next is kind of the inversion of that. So if the July days was unfairly and unjustly and cynically put on the Bolsheviks in an attempt to delegitimize them in a way that didn't work, this next event kind of had the opposite effect, right? Of sort of allowing the Bolsheviks to kind of gain prestige and thus even more influence than they already have, even though they are so, you know, deeply tied to the masses.

And that is, of course, as you alluded to earlier, in around late August, the Kornilov affair. I think that's how you pronounce it. You have better pronunciation than me with these Russian words. But what was Kornilov attempting? And how did mass action defeat the coup? Why did this moment discredit both the military reaction and the provisional government and thus accelerate Bolshevik influence among workers and soldiers? And it's pronounced in Russian Kornilov, but Kornilov.

but Kornilov is fine. Totally fine. I'm from Nebraska. I'm out here in Nebraska, so Kornilov is. You're totally fine. I'm also from the Midwest before I actually took Russian. I don't know how any of these names are pronounced. So the Kornilov affair is for my money,

it is second only to October as the most inspirational moment of the entire Russian revolution because of, what happens and how the masses respond. Okay, so what is the Kornilov affair? By mid-August, Karenski, who has now officially become the prime minister of Russia, recognizes that he actually needs help if he's going to get rid of the Bolsheviks. And he approaches a general by the name of Lavr Kornilov or Kornilov.

Kornilov is the commander-in-chief of the Russian army at this time. So he's in charge in the entire war effort. They strike a deal where they're actually going to use a tactic that the right and the forces of reaction and the bourgeoisie have been using for well over 100 years at this point. They're going to set up a bunch of false flag operations across Petrograd in order to have. have a justification for Kornilov sending in troops from the front to, quote, put down the rebellion. Now, the interesting thing is everyone knows that these are false flag events, but it doesn't really matter. The government's going to do whatever the government wants at this point, right? So they're on this path to send in troops to deal with the Bolsheviks and the workers' movement,

because Kerenzky cannot do that on his own. Through a very funny series of unfortunate events that I'm not going to get into, but it is just a choice example of how ridiculously inept Kerenzky is as a politician. If you want the details, check out the episode of my show. I go into them all in there. But basically, Kerenzky falls ass backwards into, breaking with Kornilov, because he is all of a sudden very afraid that Kornilov is going to arrest him, Kerenzky, and execute him. We don't know if that was actually going to happen.

Probably wasn't going to happen. But either way, at the 11th hour, Karenski breaks from Kornilov. The thing is, Kornilov is already starting to send troops in anticipation of the dates on the calendar, which I believe was supposed to be the 27th of August for when the false flag events were going to take place and then they would send in the troops and do what they were going to do. So Kerenzky now is in a bind. He thinks that Kornilov is coming for him personally.

What does he do to protect himself? The only thing he can do is appeal to the masses. Now, he spins some bull about how he's really the innocent victim and all this. he, of course, immediately does not mention that, yes, I was plotting with the military leaders of the army to crush the workers movement. He spins it in a way that makes himself look better. All of this comes out later, which we'll get to in a second. The masses do very quickly realize that Kerensky is lying to them. But nonetheless, this presents the very real choice that they must make.

do we stop Kornilov, and how do we do that? Because whether or not Krenzky is lying, the truth of the matter is Kornilov is sending in his forces, and they are going to slaughter us just like what happened in the Paris commune. So we need to form our own popular defense. This is at this point centered mostly around Petrograd and some of the surrounding areas, the small towns around there and everything. Now, at this point, the Bolsheviks are, again, the most popular party among specifically the workers and they are the most militant party.

And so everyone turns to the Bolsheviks and says, hey, guys, will you help us fight off this military coup? And after a very brief moment of debating whether or not they should do that because some people are saying, hey, man, let these fuckers fry. it. They walked into this. They get to hang. But then the counter argument to that is, well, first them, then us. So what are we going to do about this? We can't, that's not the correct line to take. And very quickly, the Bolshevik party realizes, yep, okay, we got to do this. We hate having to help Kerenzky, but we got to help ourselves. And if that means saving Kerenzki's bacon, fine, we'll do it. So they start to organize, well, actually, I should say, so the Bolshevik party puts out the word that they are going to fight off this basically invasion from Kornilov. The really fascinating thing, and this is the part that's so

inspirational to me, is that there is almost no time to organize actual defense of the Capitol. Because the troops are already on the trains. In the next 24 to 36 hours, they will start arriving at the various

train stations around the city. And the troops are going to start pouring into the city and then it'll be too late. So there isn't any time to debate strategy and tactics and, you know, have some sort of central authorities start to delegate tasks to everyone. Instead, we have a bottom up totally organic coordination of resistance to Kornilov. So you have red guards, which are like arms. soldier armed detachments of workers going out into the city and trying to find the uh the officers

the army officers in the city who were going to stage the false flag uh operations and making sure that they don't stir up trouble uh you have uh the printing presses starting to send out messages to to get the word out to all the people in the city in the surrounding area that this is what's happening and we need to to defend against this um on their own accord workers start taking care of you know securing supplies and foodstuffs for the city in case they have to go through a very long siege you have soldiers start to train uh the workers on how to fire artillery and how to handle weapons and all this stuff the masses of petrograd on their own independent from any sort of higher coordination start to come together to uh resist this

invasion um really really super crucially the uh the railway workers union um they recognize that okay well if they're coming down on the trains why don't we just tear up the tracks and then they can't come in so they go out of the city and they literally just tear up the tracks so that when the trains bringing the troops get to this point they can't go any further and then the troops have to disembark and then they have to march several miles on foot into the city so that slows the troop movement down. Amazing. Yeah, it's like brilliant, you know,

strategic thinking. So when that starts to happen, though, when the soldiers start to disembark from the trains, well, now the soldiers are no longer, the coronal of soldiers are no longer in this bubble. Because they've been told, hey, the revolution is under threat in the capital, we need to go put down these disorders

so that we can, quote, defend the revolution. It's a bald-faced lie, but that's the lie that Kornilov and his officers have been telling all of their troops. And the army officers in charge of this coup attempts have not been allowing communication into and out of the regiments. Well, once the people actually get out of the train, you have detachments of soldiers and workers from Petrograd who just walk up to them. And like I said in the February Revolution, you know, it's, it's, it's. actual physical contact between the, the different groups of masses that leads to the fusion of the revolutionary potential of all of these groups into one movement. As the workers and soldiers from Petrograd are coming out and physically talking to the soldiers,

they're explaining to them, hey, you've been lied to. Everything's cool. This is not a problem. There's no threat to the revolution. We're doing great. and you're being sent in to actually destroy the revolution. And when the rank-and-file soldiers under Kornilov's command get this message, they themselves start to spontaneously form committees and Soviets

and start to declare that, okay, we're not going to listen to our officers anymore. We're not going to do this. We're 100% on the side of the workers and the soldiers of the Capitol, that we, like them, want to defend the revolution. revolution. So those two aspects are why I think the coronal of affair and the way that the masses handled it are so inspirational. You have on the one hand totally organic, bottom-up organization of the masses where everyone gets just a general message, we are under attack, and everyone immediately starts doing whatever it is that they can to prevent this. And then on the

other hand, you have the direct communication between the people and the capital and the troops that are coming in. And that's what diffuses the entire crisis. Because at the end of the day, Cornelov and his officers, they're just a handful of men with guns sitting in an army headquarters in another city, you know, 50 miles away or 50 kilometers away, whatever it is. They don't actually have any power. And so the defeat of the Cornelov affair is this. catalyst within the workers' movement and even the revolutionary movement, because now the masses have actually seen this is what happens when we join forces. We can even stop an invading army if we trust our own power. And my interpretation of these events is this is where

you get on the fast track to October. And there's still a couple of stops along the way. but this is like the rehearsal for October. First they fight off this right-wing military attempted coup, and then they turn on the bourgeoisie that tried to set up the coup in the first place. Yeah, I think this is a chapter in the story that is under-emphasized. I think you're right. It's incredibly inspirational. It shows how the actual practical activity of revolution uplifts and educates in its own

right you know this was a this was a fundamental educational experience for all involved that that did set the foundations or elevated understanding and coordination to the levels that made october even more possible than it might have been without this and to think about all the shit that you know the the the russian workers and soldiers and and masses had to deal with before during and after this revolution. We won't even get into the Civil War that happened after the Bolshevik Revolution, the October Revolution.

And, you know, just the years and years of just conflict and drudgery and concerns about even if we're going to be able to eat tonight and, you know, attempted coup and Civil War and World War I. It's just absolutely amazing and jarring and inspiring. that despite all of that, that this was still successful.

And in the process of making it successful, you know, regular working people, regular soldiers, the masses themselves uplifted themselves out of czarism, out of semi-feudalism, and into, you know, the greatest period of industrialization and advancement for the Russian people in Russian history. So it is truly profound. And, yeah, I do think these middle days and the. summer, the July days, and the Kornilov affair, they don't get as much emphasis in the story as they might otherwise should. You have to kind of really deeply dive into that history to engage with that on a serious level, and you did a great job explaining all of that.

Well, thank you. And yeah, I think you're exactly right that October makes sense if you actually study what happened between February and October. Because if you don't know, you could very easily fall prey to the accusation that, well, there's the February revolution and then they kind of had a government and everything was going great and then the upstart Bolsheviks just got power hungry and and ruined everything and that is so far from the truth of what happened as we are seen and we'll discuss the last little bit here in a minute the masses are taking control over their own destinies and that's why October happens yeah and the anti-soviet smears they're cartoonish once you actually understand the real history and

so much anti-communism, anti-socialism, anti-intellectualism more broadly, is just rooted in profound ignorance. If you can just buy into a simple, lazy, sloppy, you know, bullshit line that some right-wing influencer fed you about the Soviet revolution or what Jordan Peterson said happened or whatever, you never look into it yourself. You can be put on a conveyor belt to anti-communism, anti-socialism, and reaction and fascism. But, but, you know, I always, I always say like the first thing that socialist revolutions tend to do when they take power is get the literacy rate to 99% right? And that's the doorway into education and understanding. And even just listening to this, just listening to this actual narrative and informing yourself

on the actual events that happened will just act as a lifelong vaccination against blazy, sloppy anti-communist smears about this revolution in particular. Yeah, absolutely. So after they defeat this right-wing reactionary coup, they are then, and even aligned somewhat with, you know, Kerenzky and the quote-unquote moderate, center, liberals, whatever you want to call them, now they kind of come to an impasse with the moderates themselves in this era of the Democratic conference, the pre-parliament movement. So how did moderates try to stall the revolution via the Democratic conference and the pre-parliament? and why did Lennon insist by, you know, September, early October, on preparing an insurrection? And finally, how did the Petrograd Soviet's military revolutionary committee legalize and organize the subsequent struggle for power? In the wake of the Cornell affair, the masses are now starting to turn against Kaczynski.

They maybe don't know the details, but they know that he had something to do with insurrection. the crisis in the first place, and after having successfully, you know, beaten off the attack from the military and the coup, the masses start to understand what their real power is, as I was saying before. Now, in order to kind of, I guess, prolong the inevitable, and Kerensky bills this democratic conference as a way to bring. quote, the democracy of Russia together to, so that they can have a better say

in the goings-on of the provisional government. Basically, it's a way to try to placate the masses and prevent them from turning on him all, you know, 100%. So he calls together this conference. The Bolsheviks do end up participating in the conference. The conference is not really

very effective, though, because kind of from a materialist standpoint, you know, we were talking before about how the revolutions happen because systems are

incapable of resolving the contradictions which arise within them. What we see here is that bourgeois democracy is actually not capable of solving the problems that are facing it. The bourgeoisie can't pull out of the war

for a whole host of reasons, but the biggest one among them is they need the war as a way to try to distract the masses from the revolutionary tasks at hand. They're also being pressured very heavily by Britain and France to stay in the war. and, you know, the Russian bourgeoisie's allegiance is more to the bourgeoisie of other countries than it is to the population of their native country, as is the case with almost all bourgeoisie classes. So the Democratic conference doesn't really resolve anything, but it does come up with what's called the pre-parliament. The pre-parliament ultimately becomes a consultative body for Kerenzky and the provision.

government. Going on kind of behind all of this, there's a party that we haven't had a chance to talk to about a whole lot. It's the cadet party. The cadet party are basically, they're the constitutional Democrats. That's where the name comes from, Kadei in Russian, the cadets. They are the liberal party. The thing is, the cadets went all in on Kornilov. And so when that failed, they became one of the most hated political parties in. in all of Russia. However, they are the biggest bourgeois party in Russia at this time. Kerensky, even though he styles himself as a socialist,

and I believe he is technically a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, is a petty bourgeois through and through. And so he is incapable of breaking with the bourgeois party. So once the Democratic conference ends before the pre-parliament is supposed to meet, Kerenzky unilaterally declares that he is sending a delegation of the cadets to the pre-parliament. Now, he's not supposed to do this. They voted not to have the cadets part of this because, again, everyone hates them. And the cadets backed Kornilov just a few weeks ago.

But Kerenzky does it anyway. And this pisses everyone off. But it doesn't piss off the Mensheviks and the SR is enough for them to actually back out of the pre-parliament. They grumble and gripe about it, but they ultimately stay and they are like, fine, we'll work with the cadets. The Bolsheviks do not. Once again, we see the Bolsheviks recognizing the importance of not tainting themselves with too close of an association with the bourgeois. government and the importance of establishing and maintaining an independent workers party as a way for the workers to exercise their own power. So the Bolsheviks pull out of the pre-parliament

and it's right around this time that Lenin makes his way back into Petrograd because he recognizes in the wake of the Kornilov affair that now's the time to actually overthrow the provisional government. In July, he was saying the timing's not right because the rest of the country was not favorable

to the idea of the provisional government being abolished. What has changed, though, is the working class saw what happened in Petrograd. They understand that the provisional government is against them. There's also the dynamic that we have not really had a whole lot of time to go into,

but is a very important dynamic, which is the peasant movement out in the countryside. The peasants started way back in March and April thinking, okay, fine, if we're going to have a provisional government, fine, if you guys want to give us the land, we'll give you a chance to do that. As the summer were on, and the provisional government did not end up solving the issues

facing the peasantry, the peasantry became more and more aggressive and combative and militant. And by the end of the summer, by the end of August and going into September, the countryside is in some cases, well, it is figuratively, but in some cases literally in flames. Like the peasants are just going around confiscating grain, confiscating livestock, unilaterally declaring that they are going to take control of this plot of land or that plot of land. or whatever. Some of them are burning down the houses of the more hated landlords. And because of that, Lenin

recognizes that the dynamic has shifted. It's only been a month and a half for two months or whatever it is at this point. But now's the time. Now we can overthrow the provisional government. He starts making this argument in September. But because he's not

on the scene, he can basically be ignored. without a whole lot of consequence. He is sending in article after article and letters with comrades and he is just begging and pleading for the Bolshevik leadership still in Petrograd to seize the moment.

And when they won't do that, he decides, you know what, I got to do it, I got to get back into Petrograd. There's still a warrant out for his arrest, so he still has to stay hidden. This is where he shaves his beard and dons a wig with a cap.

There's a very famous photo of Lenin out there, clean-shaven. If you've seen the photo, if you go Google it, it's a photo of Lenin from this period. This is Lenin trying to go incognito. But yeah, so Lenin makes it back into the Capitol. And now that he is on the scene, he is able to attend in secret parties, meetings of the Bolshevik party. Now that he has a direct line to the rank and file, because he's physically at the meetings here and in the meetings with the Central Committee, which is the kind of the leadership organ of the Bolshevik Party, they can't ignore him anymore. And he starts to win

people over to his side. Now, the military revolutionary committee, or as I call it the MRC, the military revolutionary committee comes about because Kerenzky not only instigated a coup from the military that blew up in his face not only is shoving the cadets down everyone's throats and making them all choke on them which everyone hates he also now gets it in his head that he has to transfer the soldiers that are in petrograd that are actually members of the petrograd soviet he needs to transfer them out of the city to the front from his perspective this makes a lot of sense. One, these soldiers have been a nuisance for months now,

and, you know, fine, I have to get rid of them. He only didn't do it before because after the February Revolution, the provisional government had promised that they were not going to, quote, punish the soldiers that had mutinyed against the czar by sending them to the front. And the soldiers took this promise very, very seriously.

So this entire time, he's not been able, to transfer the troops out of the city without it being blatantly, nakedly apparent to everyone that he's doing it in order to weaken the revolutionary movement in Petrograd. But there is

a second factor that allows him at least a modicum of cover that's happening connected with the war. The Germans are now starting to approach Petrograd. They took I forget which city was, but they took a city in the Baltic states.

I think it was Riga, which is, well, I don't know which present-day city it is. So the Germans have taken the Baltic states and they are approaching Petrograd. This is, in fact, a huge threat to the revolution. Kerenzky's solution is to say, hey, this is why I need to transfer these soldiers out of the city. the problem is the soldiers don't want to go they haven't wanted this war for for months now and they take it upon themselves to simply refuse this order but the question is well how do we refuse this order and the solution is the petro-Soviet at the behest of the bolsheviks

who at this point are now the majority in the petro-Soviet just as they are the majority in a lot of Soviets all across russia the Petro-Soviet establishes the military revolutionary committee. The MRC is basically tasked with finding a way of keeping the soldiers in Petrograd from being deployed outside of the city. I think that's probably enough for now, but I will just say the reason the MRC is important is because very quickly the soldiers and the Bolsheviks and the members of the Petrograd Soviet who are a part of the MRC realize that at this point

there is only one way to achieve their goal of keeping the soldiers from being deployed and that is overthrowing the provisional government they need to overthrow their government in order to sign a peace with Germany in order to end the war that's the only option left to them they do not immediately orient themselves to overthrowing the government but after just a couple of days of being in existence and Lenin recognizing that okay the MRC is actually going to be the launch pad for the final assault against the provisional government from the Soviets it within just a couple of days they are suddenly orienting themselves to this goal. And that brings us to the doorstep of the October Revolution, in some ways, the culmination of decades and decades of political events and upheavals, in conflicts, and contradictions, world wars, all of it, abdications, right?

All of it coming to a head here. And when we can see now what led us to this moment, we can see even just this history of 1917, the step-by-step procedure that goes. got us here, the strategic decisions that got us here, the victories, the, you know, the defensive orientations against outright, you know, attempts at coups and false flags, et cetera. And here we are in October 1917, a world historical moment. Can you walk us through October 24th through the 26th, right? The seizure of bridges, stations, telegraph, telephone, the Winter Palace, and the convening of the second all-Russian Congress of Soviets. And why is it historically accurate to describe this as a transfer of power to the Soviets and not as many anti-communists and anti-soviets still declare some sort of a coup, right,

given the Bolsheviks not only their mass base of support, but their clear majorities? Yeah. So just like the February Revolution actually unfolded over a series of days, very often when we think about the October revolution we think of it as just the one day October 25th is the day that we all circle on the calendar

I will say again remember the calendar discrepancy it's October 25th on the Julian calendar on our modern calendar this is November 7th but anyway so people will circle October 25th as the date of the

October revolution but what happens on October 25th is actually set in motion several days earlier. So the MRC is founded and they start to orient themselves toward overthrowing the provisional government. The first step in this is to challenge the provisional government's authority over the Petrograd Garrison. So I believe it's on the 22nd. They hold a meeting.

They make a decision. and then they march to the Petrograd military district, which is the headquarters of the leadership of the Petrograd garrison from the government side. And they basically tell them, hey, we don't recognize your authority anymore. The soldiers have given us their, the soldiers have entrusted authority over them in us. So you are no longer in control of the Petrograd garrison. we are. The commander of the Petrograd garrison at first laughs in their face and says, yeah, right, get out of here. So they leave and they go back to their offices. And then they start

to have a discussion with among themselves of, okay, well, if they're not going to respect our authority, how do we make them respect our authority? If they're not going to recognize that the soldiers will not follow them, we have to make them understand that the soldiers, are not going to follow them. So they, the, the, the MRC puts out a circular basically publicly declaring that they are the authority over the Petrograd garrison. And this is the first direct challenge to the authority of the provisional government, because everyone knows one of the defining features of any government is control over the

armed forces. If you don't have control over the armed forces, the question starts to come up, are you even actually a government? So, because, and then the, the MRC uses the rejection from the Petrograd military district as a justification for now going around to all of the separate regiments and all the different, you know, actual physical barracks where the, the, the the Pederad Garrison is located and unifying them around the MRC. So once the Petrograd Garrison closes ranks, then they move to the Peter and Paul Fortress.

This happens on the 23rd of October. There's a day full of debates going back and forth about whether the Peter and Paul Fortress should declare for the MRC. By the end of the day of the 23rd, they have done that. This is huge because if you look at a map of St. Petersburg called St. Petersburg today, Petrograd back then, you can see that the Peter and the Paul fortress is about 500 yards across the river that flows through Petrograd, directly across from the Winter Palace. And the Winter Palace is where the provisional government sits. so you've got this military fortress armed to the teeth with cannons and machine guns and soldiers that are now directly staring across the river at the provisional government

and so the tensions start to ratchet up even more throughout the the rest of the day of the 23rd and the 24th of October the MRC and red guard units start to actually take over the literal infrastructure of the city. So they occupy all of the train stations. They occupy the telegraph, the post, the telephone centers. They occupy the electrical stations that provide power across the city. And it's this really kind of banal and yet crucial step in the subversion of the power of the provisional government and the transfer of the power to the

Soviets, because the infrastructure is key. And even today, even though our infrastructure in the 21st century is radically different from what it was 100 years ago, the infrastructure is still key. Whoever controls, say, the computer servers, just like the Soviets took control over the telephone lines, whoever controls the computer servers and the satellites, think about how much they control. if they have that control over the infrastructure. So the streets, the infrastructure of the city are methodically being taken over by the Soviets and the military revolutionary committee. The thing is, Lenin, who is in the city, but still in hiding, is starting to grow impatient. The reason he's growing impatient is because a Congress of Soviets has been scheduled to open on October 25th. The Congress of Soviets, obviously it's for the Soviets all over the country,

but he recognizes that if they're going to overthrow the provisional government, it has to be before this Congress opens. because even though the Bolsheviks are on net a majority in the Soviets across the country, the Mensheviks and the SRs are still a very active, large minority within the Soviets. And if they are not presented with a fate accompli, if they're not presented with the fact that the provisional government has been overthrown, and instead they are presented with a decision should we now overthrow the provisional government the Mensheviks and the SRs are going to muck everything up

they are not going to go for that they are going to protest they're going to muddy up the waters and that's going to cause the entire revolutionary moment to lose all of its momentum so he's like look we got to get this done before midday on the 25th. So late in the evening on the 24th,

he leaves his hiding spot and he makes it across the city to the Smolny Institute, which is where the Petro-Soviet, the military revolutionary committee, and the Bolshevik Party all have their headquarters. Once he arrives, he again starts to push forward

this idea that we have to get everything done before the opening of the Congress. And if you look at the documents and the records, you start to see that, like, like Lennon arrived somewhere around midnight or 1 o'clock in the morning on the 25th at Smolny. If you look at the orders that the MRC is sending out to detachments around the city, the orders are very much, you know, hold your position, await further instructions. By 2 o'clock in the 2 o'clock, 3 o'clock in the morning, the orders that are going out across

the city are prepare for movement we're about to do the thing so we don't know exactly what Lenin said and did once he got to Smolny but it would seem that he really kind of lit the final spark

that pushed everyone past the point of no return in this regard so now we're on October 25th and again this has been a culmination of the last couple of days it's been the Soviets through the military revolutionary committee

led by the Bolshevik Party have been methodically taking over control from the provisional government. Now the only thing left to do is to actually go into the Winter Palace and arrest whatever is left of the

provisional government, the ministers and whatnot. News comes in that the Baltic fleet which is the part of the Russian Navy based in what is now Helsinki back then was called Helsingfors but based in Finland

and if you look at the map that's right across the Gulf heading right into St. Petersburg they say hey we're going to send ships and we're going to send sailors and troops to the capital to help secure the revolution to help

make sure that this succeeds and then you've got the crunchedat naval base which is on a very large island in the gulf that has also been very right or die for the bolsheviks they have been bolshevized for almost this entire year now and they too say okay we are also sending ships and supplies and troops to join in the effort to overthrow the provisional government um it is at this point that kerensky realizes okay i think i'm about to lose here so he secretly high tails it out of Petrograd. He tells everyone in the Winter Palace, hey, I'm going to go leave to find loyal

troops to bring back into the city. And to be fair, he does try to do that a few days later, even though it fails miserably. But really, I think he just knows that the jig is up. I've lost. I've got to get out of here. So with the help of the Americans who lend him a car, he gets out of Petrograd. No one knows that he's left, though, until later in the evening. So as the sailors and troops from the other military installations outside of Petrograd start to arrive in the city. They basically just surround the Winter Palace. Now, there are a couple of forces that the provisional government is able to rally to its defense, but they are very meager.

And as the day wears on, you kind of have this like standoff where you have the forces of the Soviet surrounding the Winter Palace. and then in the encirclement you have the forces of the the provisional government and as the day wears on and more and more forces start to arrive on the side of the Soviets, the troops for the provisional government

are like, yikes. We better get out of here because this is not going to end well for us. So as the day wears on, these troops start to leave. And they are allowed to leave peacefully because there hasn't been any fighting yet. And the Soviets are actually really hoping that if they wait long enough, there won't have to be any fighting.

They're hoping that just the overwhelming display of force is enough to get the provisional government to surrender. Now, unfortunately, this doesn't happen. The ministers are misguided and or stubborn, take your pick, but they refuse to capitulate. So by late in the evening, around about 11 o'clock on the 25th, that is when the storming of the winter palace takes place. now remember i had said the congress of soviets was scheduled to open that day it was gonna open mid-afternoon it got pushed back as far as it could um you know with the the excuse given that

hey we have something else going on to the city right now we got to focus on this um but by about 1040 so just a little bit before the storming of the winter palace takes place uh the congress of soviet opens so lenin just barely misses the deadline but it is at this point fortunately rather moot uh rather moot because the only thing left to do is to actually go in and arrest the the provisional government there's not really any way no one's coming to save the provisional government the entire city is against them uh so even though the mensheviks and the srs in the congress start to immediately denounce and decry

this violation of the democratic norms of whatever the troops of the Soviets and the MRC are taking the Winter Palace. By about 3 o'clock

in the morning on the 26th, the deed is done. The ministers are arrested. Again, there's a little bit of fighting. The Winter Palace is really big. They don't just send in all the troops, all the once because they really are trying to avoid as much bloodshed as possible. So it takes them a couple of hours to work through the building and find the ministers, but they finally do.

The ministers get arrested. And then it is announced in the Congress of Soviets that the provisional government has been overthrown. This is met with both wild applause from the Bolsheviks and a group that I haven't mentioned up to now the left SRs. The left SRs are a faction of poor and working

peasants within the SR party and they've started to separate from the SR party proper and align themselves more closely with the Bolsheviks. So the Bolsheviks and left SRs in the Congress are ecstatic. The

Mensheviks and the right SRs are livid. And they stage a walkout. They say, we will have no part of this. The Bolsheviks are saying, hey, now that the government's gone, maybe we can all come together to form a coalition government. It is the Mensheviks and the right SRs that reject coalition. And I think this is an important point to make because it is often, we are often told

that, well, the Bolsheviks were authoritarian, and they were totalitarian, and it was a single-party state, and therefore there was no democracy. as if the goal the whole time had been for the Bolsheviks and the Bolsheviks alone to take over power. That wasn't their goal. They, even at this late hour, after months of examples of how the Mensheviks and the SRs were not going to work with the workers with the Bolsheviks, how they were actually on the side of the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie, they're still throwing them a bone. They're still extending an olive branch. still are offering to work together with them.

It is the Mensheviks and the right SRs that walk out. This leaves the Bolsheviks and the left SRs. And by, I think, like, five or six o'clock in the morning on the 26th, they've passed a couple of decrees. They have basically declared themselves the new revolutionary government. Everyone is weeping and hugging each other. Everyone's ecstatic. Everyone is also extremely exhausted at this point.

So by like 5.30, 6 o'clock in the morning, they closed the session and everyone goes to try to get a couple of hours asleep before they get back to the work of actually advancing the revolution. And then there we have the first socialist state in history beginning its consolidation. A world historical moment. You know, a profound moment in world history that I think will, I think will only, gain more recognition as such as human history goes on. And if we are at all correct that humanity will mature into a socialist and ultimately a communist phase insofar as it survives, I think, you know, in retrospect, these moments in history where these first experiments in socialist construction were won and built will become more and more prescient and more

recognized universally as crucially important steps forward for our entire species. So, yeah, just a profound, profound moment. And I only wish, you know, that we could experience what it would be like to be, you know, in that moment with the rest of the workers, the revolutionaries that have fought so long and hard to get here and to have that moment of kind of rapturous culmination. And, of course, there's dark days ahead, but this is a brief respite from everything and for a moment of total victory and what that must have felt like emotionally for those that had given their life over to this cause and had fought and put themselves time and time again in direct, you know, existential threat to see this vision of society pushed forward. Yeah, just a fascinating, fascinating moment in human history. All right, let's just end on this question, which is just from a Marxist-Leninist perspective,

what do you take as the core lessons of 1917 for organizers and revolutionaries in the Imperial Corps today? I mean, that is really why I started my podcast, because, I mean, I just wrapped up the section on the Russian Revolution. I will be going all the way through 1991 because the history of the Soviet Union, provides really crucial lessons that we have to learn today in the 21st century in the fight against fascism, which comes obviously a few decades later, and in the ways that they were able to improve living standards and engage in geopolitics from a socialist as opposed to a capitalist perspective and all those kinds of things. Specifically for the revolutionary period, I think

the Russian Revolution basically proves Marxism, Leninism, to be the correct revolutionary doctrine. Again, I'm not trying to pick a fight with anyone else. I know that the Soviet Union committed a lot of mistakes. I'm not saying that the Soviets were utopia. I'm not saying that China today is a utopia state. We all know utopias cannot exist. But in the struggle

against capitalism, we have a vanguard party. So first, we have the correct understanding of the inner workings of capitalism and the fact that it is, in fact, the working class that is the next revolutionary actor in world history. That comes from Marx. And then from Lenin, you have the development of the theory of the Vanguard party. Also something else we didn't have a chance to talk about, but you have the theory of the revolutionary proletarian state. I know a lot of leftists want to see the state completely torn down, whether you're anarchist or you're just kind of on somewhere on the anti-capitalist left. A lot of people say, well, we have to destroy the state first because the state can be used as a tool of repression and et cetera, et cetera. But it is through the building of the revolutionary proletariat state that the Soviets were able to achieve all of all that they did.

for the peoples of the Soviet Union. And then you also just have, as we've said many times throughout this episode, brilliant dialectical materialist understanding and analysis in real time over the course of months. Most of it is done by Lenin, I will say. He gets a lot of credit and he's a really big name, but he's not the only Bolshevik who's doing this stuff. Stalin is also contributing to the real-time analysis. You have Bolsheviks like Nadija Krupskaa, Lenin's wife.

You have Alexander or Kalentai. At all levels of the Bolshevik party, you have people contributing to the movement. You have the workers responding to the Vanguard Party because the Vanguard Party is able to maintain that organic connection with the masses. So, and really, I think the biggest lesson to take away from the Russian Revolution is the true promise of Marxism-Leninism. The accusation is made very often that Marxism-Leninism is this like really rigid, deterministic, almost fatalistic interpretation of history, that capitalism will eventually give way to, socialism and that socialism will eventually bring about utopia, et cetera, et cetera.

Real MLs understand that that's actually, that could not be further from the truth. What Marxism-Leninism gives us is the promise that there will be opportunities for change, along with the blueprint for how to seize those opportunities, capital

on them and actually affect the change that we want. We were talking before about how, you know, you have the boom and bust cycle of the, of capitalist production. And it used to be like every couple of decades, now it feels like every three years, there's some new crisis that is coming about because capitalism is not able to resolve the material contradictions that, lie at its center. And it's running out of ways to actually resolve that.

Marxism, Leninism does not promise us that when that explosion happens, we will suddenly wind up in socialism. What it promises us is through understanding the internal dynamics of capitalism, these crises will, they are inevitable. And they leave open the possibility. that's the inflection point that's where you can actually go in and try to change things

and then Lenin and the Bolsheviks showed us how to do it. Now I'm not saying that in 21st century America or anywhere else in the world at this time the playbook needs to be run exactly as the Bolsheviks did in 1917.

That is not a dialectical understanding of history because we all know we were talking to this whole episode about how things need to be adapted and changed to the moment, but they proved that it can be done. And they proved that if you are able to organically bring the masses together, you can achieve escape velocity from capitalism.

And that to me is really the reason why everyone needs to understand the history of the Russian Revolution. It's, you know, it is arguable if the Soviet Union was. the best example we've ever had in history of how to move past capitalism. But the Russian Revolution was the first time that a nation full of people of different ethnicities and different walks of life and different languages, but welded together in a proletariat and a peasant class, or the two classes, came together and achieved that escape velocity.

And it is somewhat of... a tragedy in my mind that unfortunately after they left the capitalists were able to keep the rest of us in chains that's a different story for why exactly that happened but that is why i think the russian revolution and the soviet union needs to be studied and why honestly i think they deserve our respect amen could not agree more my friend um i really appreciate you being so generous with not only your time but your knowledge again i just want to give you incredible compliments on how you know well you tell history um and how accessible you make the the detail history of a revolution that happened over a hundred years ago and a did when a totally different part of the world um so

huge props to you for that i will link to your show the sickle and the hammer in the show notes as well as your patreon um and i really encourage listeners to go over check it out show some rev left love give you some support and learn more right because that's ultimately what you and I and many others like us are engaged in, which is uplifting consciousness through political education from a principled Marxist perspective. And we share that same goal. So again, thank you so much for coming on. I would love to have you back on any time, Daniel, to do another episode on anything at all.

And in the meantime, keep up the amazing work. Yes, thank you very much for letting me come on and talk to your audience. I would love to see you guys all over on my show. Just keep fighting the good fight. Thank you. So, One So,

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