Revolutions - Revolutions Podcast Update

Episode Date: May 13, 2019

A Revolutions Podcast Update.  Intelligent Speech Sound Education See ya in a week!

and welcome to revolutions. Episode 10.0, Revolutions podcast update. Hello out there. As you all hopefully have circled on your calendars, revolutions will return for the Russian Revolution one week from today. That'll be May the 19th, 2019. But just to tease what's coming next and do some housekeeping before the narrative begins, I'm here with you now to tease what's coming next and do some housekeeping. and do some housekeeping before the narrative begins.

Okay, so first of all, I have a couple of appearances that you can also put down on your calendars. I mentioned just as we were leaving the Mexican Revolution that I would be in London at the Waterstones on Gower Street on May the 28th, and indeed, I will be. Unfortunately, I had scheduled conflicts that meant I was unable to expand the trip, and also, unfortunately, the event is already sold out. It got announced about six weeks ago while I was on hiatus and sold out within about a day. So if you have tickets, by all means come. If not, well, I'll come back, I promise. Second, I will also be in New York on Saturday, June the 29th. This is something that just came together very quickly for an event called Intelligent Speech,

which is a project spearheaded by a friend of the show, Royfield Brown, that is bringing together history podcasters from all over the world to talk about, well, whatever it is we want to talk about. My presentation is tentatively titled, What is the Point of All this. It will be a day-long thing. I'll put a link to the website for tickets and stuff, along with the show notes, and I'll also release an ad that Royfield put together to publish the event. So I'll be there, Kevin Stroud from the history of English, David Crowther from the history of England, will all be in New York on June the 29th. I will also be doing a similar thing this October at Harvard for the Sound Education Conference, which I managed to miss last year,

because I was so discombubulated from the move to Paris, and then saw basically every history podcaster I know was there and resolved not to miss it in 2019. I'm actually going to be giving a keynote address. So come see me and other history podcasters be nerdy about history and podcasting. Again, I'll put links to all this stuff in the show notes. Now, as for the state of this here Revolutions podcast, I have said previously that I'll be wrapping up in mid-20201 to coincide with the release of Citizen Lafayette. So that's about two years from now. And we are here today, commencing the Russian Revolution. What comes after the Russian Revolution, but before the end of the show, I don't really know for a variety of reasons. First of all, the Russian Revolution is a big,

complicated revolution. Whether or not it surpasses the episode count to the French Revolution, which wrapped up at 55 episodes, the Russian Revolution is definitely going to be at a minimum, the second longest series I have done. That is a title currently held by the Revolutions of 1840, 48 at a cool 33 episodes, and we're just going to blow right past that. One of the reasons we're going to blow right past that is that individual episodes of revolutions are going to be shorter. When I started the show, they were about 25 minutes long, so roughly the length of an old history of Rome episode.

Then they started creeping up and made a very big jump around the Haitian revolution, and ever since then, they've been routinely clocking in at 40 minutes. Now, it may not seem like much, but trust me, cranking out 5,500 words worth of research notes, rough drafting, editing, and recording, that's a lot. And now that I'm moving into really writing Citizen Lafayette and would like to continue to interact with my family, whom I love, something needs to give. So I'm going to go back to my roots. I'm not going to cover less in total.

I'm just going to spread it out over more episodes because they're going to have to be shorter. So 55 episodes on the Russian Revolution? I would advise you to take the over on that. But that still leaves us with the question, what happens after the Russian Revolution, but before I end the series completely? And the answer is, I don't know. We're just going to have to play it by ear. Now, as for what will be covered in the Russian Revolution,

I get this question a lot, because like the French Revolution and most recently the Mexican Revolution, it's difficult to know when the Russian Revolution stops. Are we talking about just October 1917 through the Civil War? Stalin's consolidation of power in the 1920s, the great purge that cleared out the old Bolsheviks in the 1930s? My answer to that is that for the purposes of the Revolution's podcast, we will wrap things up around about 1922, 1923. That's the end of the Civil War, the founding of the Soviet Union, and the incapacitation and death of Lenin. That seems like a pretty good place to say, the Revolution, is over, and now we're moving into early Soviet history on our way to totalitarian Stalinism.

Now, we'll talk about those things, and I anticipate three or four episodes at the end of the series rounding things out through the death of Stalin, but the really detailed narrative events will be over at around 1923. Well, then the question is, where do we begin? And there are many ways to answer that question, and none of them are really right or wrong. But I decided that what I wanted to do first is establish some connective tissue between events and personalities that we have already talked about. So yes, of course, there will be an organic history of Russia, but the series will actually open with a kind of quasi-prologue because in the latter third of the 19th century, Europe was teeming with professional revolutionaries, theorists, journalists, journalists,

socialists, anarchists, communists, all of them still reeling from the cataclysmic failures of 1848. These guys were aimed not just at the Tsar in Russia, but also capitalists in the UK, bonapartists in France, reactionary neo-absolutists in Austria and Germany. And these revolutionaries now spoke not of national liberation and democratic rights, but of social and economic justice. They wanted to take down not just the lingering vestiges of ancient feudalism, but also the new bourgeois capitalist oppressors who had replaced the old aristocracy. But after 1848, these revolutionaries were first. few in number and scattered across Europe, finding refuge where they could in relatively tolerant enclaves in Switzerland and Belgium, London, and Paris, always trying to stay one step ahead of a deportation order. In 1864, a group of the socialist, quasi-socialist and socialist

adjacent leaders came together in London and founded the International Working Man's Association. And that will be the subject of episode 10.1. That is where we are going to begin. Known to us today as the First International, it was conceived as the single organization that would link working class activists, organizers, and revolutionaries from across Europe, and allow them to work in tandem towards their allegedly shared goals. And it is via the First International that we will then be able to move on to a discussion of the life and theories of its two most prominent members.

Karl Marx and his scientific socialism on the one hand, and Mikhail Bakunin and his anarcho-collectivism on the other. And oh yeah, I should mention at this point that I'm going to be butchering a lot of Russian here, so just get used to that. The First International, of course, also proved how easily it is for these kinds of broad left-wing revolutionary alliances to break down. The personal and doctrinal disputes between Marx and Bakunin led to the fracturing of the First International in 1872. This was the first great divide between the red and the black. The formation and rupture of the First International, though, would set the stage for the next generation of revolutionaries to stake out their own ideological territory and then compete with each other, not just for the opportunity to burn down the castles of the enemies of the working class, but also to be the architect in charge of building the new castle that would be built on the ashes. For me, the Russian Revolution is not a narrow story about how Lenin and the Bolshevik seized revolutionary power in Russia in 1917.

That is just way too simple. Because as we have seen so often here on the Revolution's podcast, revolutions are a mess. But what usually happens is that whoever emerges victorious from this mess gets to have the line to their victory trace backwards and called history. while the losers are treated as mere foils or inevitably overcome obstacles. There was nothing inevitable about the Bolsheviks. They were, in fact, a pretty small minority in a sea of liberals and Mensheviks, left SRs and right SRs, anarcho-collectivists, anarcho-communists, yes, there is a difference.

And that is to say nothing of the constitutional royalists and czarist absolutists who wanted to turn back the revolution completely. There's no reason 1917 couldn't be just. another 1848. When the Tsar fell, any number of different things could have happened. Nothing is inevitable. Everything is chaos and chance and luck. Everyone fights in the present over the remnants of an exhausted past to build their own preferred future. That is the true nature of revolution, and that is the true nature of the Russian Revolution. And starting next week, I will tell you all about it. Thank you.