Short History Of... - The Russian Revolution

Episode Date: April 17, 2022

In 1917, revolution changed Russia forever. Putting an end to 300 years of the Romanov dynasty, it made way for what ordinary Russians believed would be a fairer, more egalitarian system. But what sparked the rebellion? What was it like to witness the collapse of the autocracy? And once the smoke had cleared, what happened to the promise of a new socialist utopia?  This is a Short History of the Russian Revolution. Written by Kate Simants. With thanks to Dr Helen Rappaport, historian and author of Caught in the Revolution and After the Romanovs.  For ad-free listening, exclusive content and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Now available for Apple and Android users. Click the Noiser+ banner on Apple or go to noiser.com/subscriptions to get started with a 7-day free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's the 9th of January, 1905, in St. Petersburg, Russia. The sun is yet to rise on this bitterly cold Sunday morning, and the snow lies thick on the streets. On the outskirts of the city, a young Orthodox priest by the name of Father Georgi Gapon stands with a small group of colleagues, rubbing his hands together to keep warm. As the dawn lightens, he's joined by a family, then another. His organizing, he sees, has paid off.

According to the Church, Tsar Nicholas II is God's representative on Earth. But between the country's resources being drained by war against Japan and increasingly arduous working conditions, life here is hard. Father Gapon is determined to improve the lot of the poor, hungry and overworked peasants of St. Petersburg. Strikes have whittled the power supply down to nothing, public spaces have been closed,

and repression is fierce. So today, the priest will present a petition to the Tsar. Written in distinctively submissive terms, it begs the Emperor for a living wage, freedom of speech, and education. It's been signed by around 150,000 people. Despite the chill, the crowd swells. Families and the elderly stream in among the workers, many of them carrying icons, religious banners, even portraits of the Tsar. banners, even portraits of the Tsar. The mood is hopeful, respectful. Maybe today the Tsar will finally hear them, instead of listening to his deceitful ministers. Maybe today everything will change. Finally, at the agreed time, Father Gapon makes his way to the front, adjusts his black

vestments and cylindrical hat, and gives the nod. It's time to march. They move as one. As they edge towards the centre of the frozen city, Father Gapon leads the people in rousing choruses of religious song and patriotic chants. Cries of, God Save the Tsar, roll through the crowd. This is one of six converging columns of marches across the city. Between them, they number tens of thousands.

But as the priest leads them onto the Stachek Prospect, he sees the troops, rows upon rows of them, dressed in the near-black uniform of the Imperial Guard with red collars and cuffs, bayonets mounted. Beyond them, framed by the huge triumphal Narva gate with its colossal statues of rearing horses, are thousands of mounted Cossacks. The priest glances behind him, suddenly realizing the danger to this huge, unarmed congregation of ordinary people, many of them in their Sunday best. Just then a single bugle sounds. It's the order to open fire. The crowd erupts into panic. Parents lift their terrified children, desperate to escape. The Cossacks charge, their blades glinting as they thunder towards the panicked crowd. Bodies are felled in all directions, trampled underfoot by terrified civilians. Across the city, the same scene plays out with gunfire and even cannons.

By evening, what started as a respectful march to beg for help from a benevolent ruler has become a bloodbath. As night falls, around a thousand people are dead, including maybe 200 children. The day will come to be known as Russia's Bloody Sunday, triggering strikes and revolts around the country. Although the Tsar's autocracy will survive for now, it's also a dress rehearsal for a much bigger event, just over a decade away.

In 1917, revolution changed the shape of Russia forever. For hundreds of years, the Romanov Tsars held power in an empire spanning almost 7 million square miles and encompassing many hundreds of disparate ethnic groups. But as the 20th century saw the world locked in a brutal, miserable war, the dissent that had been brewing against the oppressive regime for decades finally reached its tipping point. In the end, it took just a few days to detonate the charge that brought down an autocracy. But what sparked the rebellion? What was life like for the people who lived through the chaos as the old system

collapsed? And once the smoke had cleared and the bodies had been buried, what happened to the promise of a new socialist utopia? I'm Paul McGann, and this is a short history of the Russian Revolution. By the late 1800s, the House of Romanov has controlled Russia for almost 300 years. But despite their ostentatious wealth and lavish lifestyles, the family have done little to improve the lives of its hundred million peasants. Most live under the system of serfdom, with little more freedom than slaves to the landowners. Slowly the people of Russia start to look westward. Industrialization and democratization is changing the face of Europe, And in the mid-19th century, the Tsar Alexander II abolishes serfdom.

Though it's a clear movement towards equality, to the growing number of dissidents, it's not enough. In 1881, as he crosses St. Petersburg in his carriage, he's bombed by a group calling themselves the People's Will. With a badly wounded abdomen and his face and both legs severely mutilated, he's taken by sleigh to the Winter Palace. As he's given the last rites, he's visited by his twelve-year-old grandson, Nicholas. he is visited by his 12-year-old grandson, Nicholas. The boy enters the room a second in line to the throne, and he leaves it one step closer. The experience will scar the boy forever, but it also rocks the house of Romanov.

When Nicholas' father, Alexander III, takes the throne, He comes down hard on the revolutionaries. Though Russia industrializes, many of the more progressive ideas are shelved or reversed. The planned creation of a Duma, or semi-democratic parliament, is abandoned. Meanwhile, the People's Will faction only grows. In 1887, a group of its dissidents plot to assassinate the Tsar on an anniversary of his own father's death. But they're outsmarted by the hated and repressive Okhrana secret police. The conspirators are arrested. Among them is a 21-year-old intellectual by the name of Sasha Ulyanov.

Although he's hanged along with four of his revolutionary comrades, it's not the last the Romanovs will hear from the Ulyanov family. The execution only adds fuel to the revolutionary flame burning in Sasha's younger brother. The 17-year-old, now known as Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, will, 15 years later, assume the pseudonym Lenin. The Tsar's reign continues. As a father, Alexander is disdainful of his heir, the Tsarevich Nicholas. Though he considers him childish, naive, unstatesmanlike, he intends to start preparing him for power when he turns 30. But Nicholas is still in his twenties when his father dies of kidney failure.

Now, Nicholas must fill the empty throne of the Russian Empire, ready or not. Nicholas must fill the empty throne of the Russian Empire, ready or not. Author and historian Dr. Helen Rapoport is the author of several books on Russia, including Caught in the Revolution and After the Romanovs. Nicholas II was only 26 when he unexpectedly became Tsar in 1894. And he'd always been in something of a state of denial at the prospect of becoming Tsar one day. But nevertheless, he should have had another 20 years or so in which to prepare for that eventuality.

He was thrown into complete paroxysms of fear by the onerous responsibility he was suddenly going to have to take on. And he actually said, I don't know what to do. I don't know how to be czar. I don't know how to speak to the ministers. I mean, till then, he'd been living a quiet bourgeois life, going to the clubs with his fellow army officers and friends and had not really been terribly politically aware at all. Just a week after his father's funeral, and with the court still officially in mourning,

Nicholas II marries. His bride is the English-born Alex of Hesse. She is a favourite grandchild of Queen Victoria, but a hidden quirk of this ancestry will later come to play a part in her own downfall. The new Tsar doesn't officially take the crown until May of 1896, according to the old-style Julian calendar, which will determine Russian dates until 1918. When the coronation does take place, it's beset with tragedy.

All of Moscow is invited to a festival in the city to commemorate the event, complete with free bread, sausages, beer and souvenirs. But as the sun shines and the crowd streams into the Koudinka field, a rumour takes hold that there's not enough of the complimentary goodies to go around. What follows is no less than a stampede and 1,400 people are crushed to death. The Tsar fails to respond with outward compassion. Though he privately wants to stay home and pray,

he's pressured into attending a reception thrown in his honour by the French ambassador. To the people, his response suggests he feels nothing of note has occurred. It's a misstep that his subjects will remember. By now, the younger brother of Sasha Ulyanov is becoming firmly established on the revolutionary scene. After producing a news sheet critical of the autocracy, Vladimir is charged with sedition and exile to Siberia. He will spend much of the next two decades away from his homeland, making connections with socialists around Europe.

At the turn of the century, a territorial dispute between Russia and Japan reaches a tipping point, and the young Tsar takes his country to war. But what he believes will be a victory grand enough to silence his detractors becomes a disastrous war of attrition. Russia clocks up maybe 50,000 casualties, with 75,000 men taken prisoner. Bloody Sunday sparks waves of revolutionary activity across Russia,

and the Tsar is forced to concentrate his efforts at home. After the American president, Theodore Roosevelt, mediates the terms of Russia's withdrawal, the humiliated remnants of the Imperial Army limp home. But they return to a country crippled by an unwinnable war. Even before the conflict, the cost of keeping up with the industrializing West fell to Russia's peasants. Now, there's also shortages of food, poor employment, and low wages. Despondent, the returning soldiers question just how far their loyalty to the autocracy

can stretch before it snaps. As the Okhrana are all too aware, criticism of the Romanovs has a volume dial, and the revolutionaries are only too happy to crank it up. In early 1905, when the peaceful demonstration of Bloody Sunday ends in corpses littering the streets of St. Petersburg, the rest of Russia becomes a tinderbox. But even with peasant uprisings igniting across the country, the Tsar fails to take the initiative to extinguish the blaze. It was a moment in time where if Nicholas had genuinely wanted to be a kind of forward-looking, reforming Tsar, he could have made compromises. And he missed his moment there because if he'd been willing to adapt enough to allow some genuine suffrage, some genuine democratic reform, Russia, which was already modernizing and developing quite a strong

economy, could have moved forward on a level with the rest of Europe. It's now in 1905 that the first workers' councils, or Soviets, are formed, firstly in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and later elsewhere. These local unions demand better working conditions and pay, and organize strikes. Amid the unrest, hundreds of their members and supporters are shot down on the streets. Loyalty to the Tsar among the largely reservist military starts to show cracks. Most famously, the sailors aboard the battleship Potemkin mutiny after refusing to eat the borscht, made with maggot-ridden meat.

The resulting funerals for those killed spark a city-wide riot in Odessa. As the year drags on, the threat of full revolution comes into focus. Nicholas realizes that if he wants to retain any kind of power, concessions must be made. Under duress, he ratifies the October Manifesto, which promises a constitutional monarchy and grants basic rights. It also pledges the creation of a state Duma, or elected assembly, though true representation is still a long way away. Almost immediately, the wind goes out of the revolutionary sails,

and peace begins to settle. Later, the events of 1905 will be seen by many as necessary steps towards true revolution. But right now, the hardliners, Lenin included, are horrified. They believe their one chance at revolution has been wasted, and have their suspicions about the strength of the concessions. As it turns out, they're not wrong. Right from the off, the reach of the Duma is extremely limited. Nicholas retains power to veto its decisions or even dissolve it altogether. Though it will return, the first Duma lasts just 75 days before Nicholas decides he's had enough. Believing it's safe enough, Lenin returns from exile.

His insistence on the violent overthrow of the government brings him into alignment with the Bolshevik ideology, as distinct from the more moderate socialists who advocate a smoother reform of society. It's now that he first comes into contact with Joseph Yugosvili, later to be known as Joseph Stalin. Though the Tsar outwardly fosters a more moderate regime, the dreaded Okhrana haven't changed a bit. Dedicated as they are to crushing dissent, they have agents everywhere, and Lenin remains of particular interest. Soon enough, when the Bolsheviks' fundraising techniques involve the robbery of post offices

and banks, Lenin is hunted down. He flees again, this time to Switzerland. It will be a whole decade until he returns. Life for the Tsar largely returns to normal. Wary of security, he favours a home outside of St Petersburg, where he fathers four daughters and a son, Tsarevich Alexei. But the heir to the throne has inherited the gene for haemophilia, by way of his British great-grandmother, Queen Victoria.

The slightest cut or even nosebleed could prove fatal. Bouts of bleeding leave him in agonizing pain. When even the best doctors in Russia can't cure him, his desperate parents turn to mystics and faith healers. Enter Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin. He was made into this monstrous, hideous scapegoat. He was the whipping boy for everything people hated about the monarchy, about czarism, about Russia at the time. And in fact, I think in general terms,

he's been the most demonized personality in Russian history. And it's kind of warped the truth of what really happened. The fact is that he became very close to the Romanovs. There were two strands to his involvement with the Romanovs. One was in terms of occasionally offering advice and suggesting how they deal with the child when he had attacks of bleeding. But also equally important to the Romanovs was the sage counsel and advice that he offered them on religious matters. They spent a lot of time sitting with Rasputin talking about

God and theology and the world and humanity and things unconnected with politics. And in many ways, Nicholas and Alexandra, because they were so insular and so untrusting of other people, invested perhaps too much trust in Rasputin. Alexandra wouldn't have a word said against him because she really believed in him as a kind of wise guru, as a soothsayer. Alexei's illness is alleviated by the holy man, who is now a trusted member of the Tsar's inner circle. But with the royals not wishing to disclose the precarious medical state of the heir to the Russian crown, Rasputin's presence provides endless fodder for the rumour mill. 1913 is the tercentenary of the Romanovs, and the monarch takes the opportunity to host

weeks of lavish celebrations. It's a propaganda exercise, intended to inspire loyalty and confidence in the autocracy, with free food, souvenirs and public holidays. Though the absence of the Tsarina fuels the perception of her as cold and haughty, the Tsar returns from his grand tour with his popularity soaring. But with the firing of a single bullet in 1914, 1500 miles away in Sarajevo, everything changes. Serbia is blamed for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne.

And with that blame comes the threat of war from Germany. Russia with its long-term plan for dominance in the Balkans, jumps to Serbia's aid The imperial forces mobilize against Germany And within days, the world is at war First of all, when war was declared, everyone rallied around Nicholas and the country And there's this huge surge of patriotism And for a while, the revolutionary movement completely took a back seat. But the problem for Nicholas was he had to have an army, and a lot of that army were peasant conscripts. And so a huge proportion of his army were illiterate young men, ill-trained,

ill-equipped. And as the war ground on and the initial victories turned into an absolute war ground on and the initial victories turned into an absolute disaster. The Russian troops got horribly bogged down in Galicia, a series of desperately bad losses. Largely conscript armies started deserting in droves. Back home, meanwhile, so much of the food and supplies and money were being pumped into funding the war on the Eastern Front, that there were inevitably serious food shortages and other shortages were developing in the cities, exacerbated actually by very bad logistics, very bad management of the infrastructure of the railways. You know, you hear stories towards the time when the revolution broke,

wagons full of food rotting in sidings because they hadn't been sent to the right place. With the catastrophic war with Japan still fresh in their memories, the soldiers' morale falls fast. They go without proper boots, being told instead to take them from corpses. Even bullets are in short supply.

The losses are devastating. Nicholas blames his senior personnel, then appoints himself commander-in-chief, despite his limited military experience and poor track record. Once again, the questions about his fitness to lead are growing louder. The rising animosity towards the Romanovs is rivalled by the hatred for the enemy, which sees St. Petersburg renamed Petrograd to avoid its Germanic connotations. With the Tsar fighting at the front, it falls to the unpopular Tsarina to take the helm

on the home front. And it's in her and Rasputin that these twin hostilities find their apex. And so rumours started flying around that she was a German spy, Rasputin was a German spy, they were in the pay of the Germans, they were plotting to bring Russia down. It couldn't have been further from the truth. Alexandra was an absolutely devoted patriot for Mother Russia. And she was very unfairly treated in that sense.

But the whole thing got so horribly blown out of all proportion. By December of 1916, a group of aristocrats takes matters into its own hands. Believing Rasputin's influence over Alexandra is a threat to Russia, they lure him to a palace. According to one source, two attempts at poisoning failed to kill him, as does shooting him in the chest. He eventually succumbs to a close-range bullet to the head and is thrown into the freezing river. When news emerges of his death, there is, for a time, a sense that his removal may just save Russia. The elation doesn't last for long. The war drags on, its popular support hitting rock bottom.

By the time Russia withdraws, millions of lives will have been lost. But back in the capital, life is hard and getting harder. Petrograd's population has increased from two to three million thanks to an influx of soldiers and their families moving west. Even without them, the infrastructure is falling apart. By 1916, only a quarter of the supplies needed to feed the city is getting through. Wealthy families employ servants with the sole duty of standing in queues for food. Those less fortunate must do it themselves. Prices triple, shelves empty, horses are requisitioned for war, and sons, fathers and brothers are

conscripted, many of them never to return. But for the rich, it's almost as if nothing has changed at all. There was this bizarre kind of parallel universe in Patrograd where, you know, the poor people were all queuing around the block in the freezing cold for food. And yet the aristocracy, talk about the dancing on the edge of the volcano or fiddling as their own bands. They were dressing up in the evening, going off to the ballet, to the Mariinsky Theatre or to the opera. But the basic rye bread that the people needed was in short supply. So while the aristocracy is still dining out and enjoying champagne and lovely suppers in the clubs and restaurants of Petrograd,

the poor were starving, the workers were starving. And there was this crazy sense of unreality. Resentment among the working classes swells, metastasizing with every passing day, and everywhere there's a sense that something, soon, has got to give. By the old-style calendar, it's the 23rd of February 1917. A woman, a textile worker at a Petrograd factory, is leaving a rickety wooden house that she shares with four other families. She fastens her greatcoat, pulls an extra woolen shawl over her thin shoulders, and heads out into the cold to meet up with her

workmates. But they're not going to the factory. Today is International Women's Day, and they are marking it with a march in the city. Passing horses, carts and workers, they walk quickly but carefully on the compacted snow. With their husbands all on the front lines, a broken ankle now could easily lead to a whole family starving within a few weeks. Closer to the city center, more and more demonstrators appear. Some unfurl banners demanding suffrage, and workers' songs drift above their heads.

It's minus nine degrees and gloriously sunny, but when the woman lifts her face to the blue sky, and gloriously sunny. But when the woman lifts her face to the blue sky, something catches her eye. There are machine guns mounted on the roofs of some buildings that she swears were not there yesterday. There are some who say a revolution is coming. As they approach the Leteni Bridge, the singing turns to angry shouts, for bread, jobs, an end to the war, but police have cordoned off the access across the river. Carried by the tide of protesters, the woman finds herself scrabbling down the frost-hardened bank of the Neva and out onto the thick ice. Climbing up the other side, she rejoins the throng. The police struggle to

hold them back, and the mounted Cossack regiments are brought in. The woman stumbles as they charge, but though their customary long, shining lances are in hand, they're careful not to make contact. The crowd starts to cheer them as they pass, and the Cossacks take off their hats, waving, fraternal. Up ahead, there's the sound of smashing glass. A cheer goes up, a bakery is being looted, and the secret stores of white rolls intended for the aristocracy are handed out. The marching lasts all day, but the next morning the woman and her friends go out again. Overnight there's been an official order banning gatherings, but the crowds are even bigger, louder, more ebullient.

Traffic comes to a standstill. Soon 300,000 people join the demonstration and this time when the crowd becomes too much to control the police open fire. Protesters are charged by mounted officers and the police manning the machine guns on the rooftops are dragged down by mobs and beaten to death in the street. By nightfall bodies litter the frozen surface of the river and some of the busiest streets reek of blood and disinfectant. By Monday the 27th of February, there is pandemonium. Additional forces are brought in,

but they start to mutiny alongside the Cossacks. After a government armory is stormed, random shooting dominates, with even schoolboys wandering around fully armed. Lawless mobs tear through the streets, they topple Tsarist monuments, wrench imperial emblems from buildings and shop fronts, and enact their fearsome bloody revenge against anyone suspected of sympathizing with the old regime. The district court and palace of justice, seen by the common people as the seats of oppression, are set ablaze, and the prisons, full of political dissidents, are not overlooked. The Criesti, which is a huge prison in Petrograd, which was very easily broken into by the revolutionaries and the rebels,

and they let all the prisoners out. Now, the unfortunate thing about that is the Criesti had a lot of political prisoners who'd been rounded up and locked away in 1905. They'd been in jail for 12 years, but it also had a lot of really serious hardened criminals, and they didn't differentiate. They let them all out. So you've got all these hardened criminals on the streets.

What do they do? They go around looting, mugging, vandalizing, raping. With all these prisons on the loose, then everything becomes even more anarchic and violent. And no one can control it by then. anarchic and violent and no one can control it by then. In the hospitals, nurses work around the clock dealing with victims of the violence. Patients are moved under their beds when the constant gunfire draws too close. Forty police officers are found hiding in the basement of a cathedral and are dragged outside and shot. Some rioters though see an opportunity for a party that they're not going to let slip through their fingers.

The first thing many of the revolutionaries headed for when the revolution started and they started breaking into the homes of the rich and the Swiss restaurants and hotels, they headed for the wine cellars. They absolutely drunk themselves into complete oblivion. There are descriptions of them lying in the gutters, licking the wine from broken bottles in the gutters. But there were a few very conscientious revolutionists, the more Puritan ones. They said, no, no, no, we've got to stop this. And they confiscated a lot of the alcohol and smashed it before the mob could get at it. But there was a huge amount of drinking going on. In fact, more than one eyewitness noted

how you could smell the booze on the air for several days because of all the smashed bottles everywhere. On the fifth day, the temperature has dropped to minus 26, and a sort of calm descends on the city. The Toride Palace has become the de facto base of what will soon become the Provisional Government. But the Duma, which up to now has lasted a record five years without being dissolved, is in disarray.

Soldiers round up any missing ministers and bring them to the palace where, along with the leaders of the Petrograd Soviet they work out what to do next. Hundreds of kilometres away the Tsar finally accepts that he's run out of road. On the 2nd of March 1917, Tsar Nicholas II abdicates. He names his younger brother,

the Grand Duke Michael, as his successor. But Michael demurs, stating that he would only accept the throne following the agreement of an elected assembly. Three centuries of Romanov rule come to an end. The Tsar and Tsarina, along with their son and four daughters, will spend what is left of their lives under armed guard, prisoners in what only weeks ago was their empire. Estimates of the casualties of the revolution range from 500 to 10,000, though most agree a figure somewhere in the middle is most likely.

On March the 23rd, the Petrograd Soviet holds a mass funeral for its fallen comrades. Winter has not yet lifted, so dynamite must be used to break up the ground, ready for the coffins. In the shadow of the gilded, bulbous rooftops of the Church of the Saviour and spilled blood, a million mourners congregate on the field of Mars to pay their respects. Songs of the Orthodox Church mingle with the revolutionary songs of those heady days of a month previously, and every time a coffin is lowered, a shot is fired from the Peter and Paul Fortress just across the Neva. Now there's a power vacuum to fill.

A provisional government is formed out of the remains of the Duma, and to begin with, grand promises are made. The death penalty is abolished, women over 21 will get the vote, and there is freedom of expression without fear of reprisals from the despised okrana. People gather in parks and streets for rolling programs of speakers, thrilled by this new apparently unlimited free speech. But beneath the grand chandeliers of the Toride Palace, it's clear from the beginning that any government will have to work with the powerful Petrograd Soviet.

And the chasm between the ideologies of those seeking power makes true progress almost impossible. No one really knew what kind of government they were going to get. There were vague promises of, oh, you know, we're going to have an election, we're going to have a constituent assembly, we're going to properly elect a new government. That might have happened if the provisional government didn't completely fall apart. But you see, they were still trying to fight a war. And this was a big distraction because they had all the disturbances in Russia, in Petrograd, and across the country. I mean mean it was happening across the country and they were still trying to remain loyal to the allies and fight the eastern front and things were

getting desperate all the time watching from the wings is a man who has dreamed of revenge on the autocracy since its agents executed his brother well Well, Lenin was stuck in Zurich when he finally heard news of the revolution. Of course, he was absolutely hysterical almost to get back because he was mortified that after sitting in exile for 16 years, the blinking revolution had happened without him. Seeing a chance to further destabilise Russia, the German government arranged secure rail transport for Lenin and his entourage. In disguise, Lenin travels north through Germany, up to Sweden and the apex of the Baltic, and then back down through Finland.

He arrives at Petrograd's Finland station in early April. What he finds is a country led by a chaotic government, locked in a furious stalemate. What Russia needs, Lenin thinks, is a leader. He makes no bones about his feelings towards the more moderate elements in the Provisional Government, calling them traitors to socialism. He advocates a true socialist revolution to compound the sea change of February. He leads his campaign with the slogan, Bread, Peace and Land, and the ranks of the Bolsheviks swell. When the similarly exiled Leon Trotsky returns in May,

he doubles down on those promises, whipping up some righteous fury with every public appearance. Their rhetoric hits the bloodstream of the poor like a drug. Soon working people are making wild demands for higher pay and shorter hours. In July, the cracks deepen. Despite the increasing unpopularity of the war, the Provisional Government's leader Alexander Kerensky directs a new offensive on the Austro-Hungarian border. It includes new all-female combat units known as the Women's Death Battalion. It's hoped that the sight of these determined, patriotic recruits will inspire national pride.

But despite the propaganda exercise, the assault is a fiasco. The regular soldiers no longer recognize the authority of their generals. Even the formality of addressing superiors with the V pronoun, like the French Voo, has been abolished. The government's already weak support reaches a critical low. At the same time, back in Petrograd, the Bolsheviks test the resilience of the government with an armed uprising. The disturbances, which will become known as the July Days, see the people of the city taking to the streets again, under the slogan, All Power to the Soviets.

Though they fail to contain the violence, the government uncover evidence of German funding of Lenin's activities. He had to do a disappearing act in July because a tighter public opinion turned against him when the Bolsheviks were discredited. And he had to sneak out of Petrograd in hiding and go and sit in Finland. And he came back just in time for the October Revolution.

The turbulence of the summer fizzles out, but within the government, the rot has set in. Exhausted, Kerensky sees that the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet can't play nicely and separates them. The former moves to the Winter Palace, while the Soviet creates a base at the Smolny Institute, formerly an elite academy for the daughters of aristocrats. Beyond the corridors of power and further into Russia's heartland, the discontent has taken hold.

and further into Russia's heartland, the discontent has taken hold. The thrill of Lenin and Trotsky's promises of land collides with resentment born of years of oppression. Peasants burn down the manor houses of their former landlords. Even cattle are reported as being killed in the revolts. Back in Petrograd, civil society is barely surviving. As autumn turns to winter, the electricity supply is only available from 6pm until midnight, and even then it's not reliable. Kerosene for lamps has long been used up, and all that's left are tallow candles.

Worse still, food is becoming perilously scarce. Trains bringing supplies are plundered before they even get inside the city, and for hours at a time, women queue for bread in plummeting temperatures. With a complete absence of street lighting or any functioning police force, crime skyrockets. Robbery, rape and murder become common occurrences. Little by little, by October 1917, the Bolsheviks gain ground in the Petrograd Soviet, even with Lenin still in hiding. It's expected that in the upcoming All-Russia Congress of Soviets, there will be a vote

to transfer state power to a coalition formed of its various socialist parties. Though the apparent absence of Lenin is a relief to Kerensky, the current chair of the Petrograd Soviet is hardly a calming figure. At the helm is Trotsky, clad always in his trademark black leather. Wherever he goes, his vitriolic speeches electrify his audiences. As one American journalist reporting at the time put it, Trotsky was the king of agitators. He could stir up trouble in a cemetery. Lenin returns to the city disguised as a railway worker.

Concerned that the coming Congress would dilute the power of the Bolsheviks and rob them of their chance, he convenes a secret meeting of the party's central committee. On October 10th, he forces through a decision to seize power ahead of the conference. Trotsky, who wants to have the mandate of the people behind any coup, abstains. Late at night on the 24th of October, Lenin enters the Smolny Institute, this time disguised with a bandage across his jaw as if he has toothache. Once again, a storm is gathering fast over the streets of Petrograd. It's nearly midnight on the 24th of October 1917. In the Smolny Institute, a young soldier of the Red Guard hurries along a corridor, carrying a message.

What used to be an elegant school for wealthy young ladies is now a noisy, messy hive of political activity. Tomorrow, comrades from all over the country will congregate for a critical meeting. But according to rumours, it's tonight that something really big is going to happen. The young man hurries along the parquet corridor. He tries not to notice the filth on thefoot, cursing himself for even considering such a bourgeois notion as polishing a beautiful floor. As he heads to the back of the building, the ubiquitous aromas of cabbage soup and baking black bread drift from the kitchens. He stops at a door, knocks and waits, and when he's admitted, he sees that the gossip was right.

The back room is as thick with smoke as it is teeming with people, but he could make out that face anywhere. Perched on a desk, his bald head bowed as he holds a telephone receiver to his ear, is Lenin himself. The note is taken from the soldier's hand, and he is dispatched back to his ear is Lenin himself. The note is taken from the soldier's hand and he is dispatched back to his unit. He has barely time to register his orders before they are grabbing their weapons and heading outside into the cold. Behind the building a fleet of armoured cars is waiting.

He jumps in next to a friend and the vehicles head off into the night in convoy. Headlights illuminate the street of bright snow ahead of them. The city is ghostly, near empty. It's long become dangerous indeed to be out at night. They follow the river west until they come to the enormous turquoise and gold facade of the Winter Palace. Within minutes, the Red Guards have it surrounded, rifles ready. Opposite them, protecting the grand entrance on Palace Square, are other soldiers. But these are cadets, boys barely out of childhood. Further along there are the soldiers

of the Women's Death Battalion, their hair cropped and rifles gleaming. Their faces are set, but they are massively outnumbered. The soldier's finger quivers on the trigger. He can't see these women and children as his enemy. A strange quiet descends, the troops stamping their feet against the cold as they wait for developments. The soldier moves with the team to the back of the building, where, a little after two

in the morning, a sound makes everyone turn. Steaming up the river is the immense naval cruiser Aurora, as tall as the palace and accompanied by three destroyers. At a deathly pace, the Aurora slows, drops anchor. All along the broadside, her enormous six-inch guns train directly on the iconic building, home to the Tsars for centuries. Several of the cadets drop their weapons and tear off along the street, running for their lives. But for now, the guns stay quiet.

The soldier settles his rifle on his shoulder. If this is how the Bolsheviks do a revolution, without the horrifying bloodshed of the spring, then he is proud to call himself a Bolshevik. By the early morning of the 25th of October, detachments of Red Guards have taken control of the Central Telegraph Office, the Post Office and the Telephone Exchange. Several train and power stations fall next.

There is almost no resistance. Hearing of the coup, Kerensky escapes to the American embassy. The city wakes up hardly realizing what has happened. The day passes, the shops open, the queues reform. For the wealthy who remain, even the Mariinsky Theater prepares to open for the ballet. But at 6.30 p.m., the Bolsheviks demand the surrender of the Provisional Government. When the deadline passes, the Aurora's guns start to do what they do best. The bombardment of the Winter Palace carries on for hours. Directly across the Neva, the Peter and Paul Fortress joins in, pummeling the stucco walls with shells.

By the early hours of the morning, it's all over. The provisional government surrenders. Trucks distribute leaflets to the people of the city, informing them that power has passed into the hands of the Petrograd Soviet. October was effectively a low-key coup, a walk-in. The provisional government was in such disarray by then. Everything was falling apart economically in Russia. It was anarchy, you know, mismanagement left, right and centre, hunger, suffering.

All it needed was a stronger group of any kind to take power. I mean, czarists could have snatched power back if they'd been organised. When the delayed Congress meets, several leaders walk out, appalled at the illegal power grab. An election of the new Constituent Assembly is planned for November. For Lenin, though, democracy is a bourgeois invention, and sure enough, when his party take under 25% of the 40 million votes, he refuses to recognize the result. Before the assembly has even been established, Lenin sets about instituting

his vision of a new socialist order. He proposes withdrawal from war, the abolition of private property, the redistribution of land. Banks are nationalized and an eight-hour working day is promised. The use of titles and ranks become an act of sedition. Now everyone is simply comrade. He also bans political meetings of all kinds and outlaws the free press. Charged with rooting out political dissent, the secret police force known as the Cheka is established, a forerunner of the KGB. Although the fall of the Okhrana was met with delight, the people of Russia start to discover just what it cost.

Talks to decide Russia's exit from the Great War begin in December, but Russia's peace deal will not be formalized until the next spring. As for the Constituent Assembly, it meets for just 13 hours in January 1918, before a disgusted Lenin shuts it down, locking its doors for good. They really expected things to change when the Bolsheviks seized power in October. But in fact, the awful thing about the revolution, I think, is that it got much, much worse. thing about the revolution, I think, is that it got much, much worse. Because for the following year, through that winter 1917 to 18, levels of brutality, the murder, the repressions, the arrests, the terror, the hunger, the hunger got even worse than it was in February. And you get this sense of this terrible, dawning horror, not just among ordinary Russian people, but all the foreigners there, the diplomats, the residents,

Brits, Americans, French there, saying, my God, what have they done? This is worse than the Tsars. They've exchanged one repressive system for something much more hideous. What follows is civil war. Bitter fighting erupts as the Bolsheviks, or Reds, try to establish control against the loose alliance of their enemies, known as the Whites. But as violence grips the entire nation, there's still the small matter of the Romanovs.

The former Tsar and his family have spent the last year under armed guard. They've been moved a few times, but in July 1918 they're in Ipatiev House, Ekaterinburg, 2,000 kilometers from Petrograd. The Whites are closing in

and taking cities along the Trans-Siberian Railway. What the Bolsheviks fear is the Whites freeing the Tsar, using him as a figurehead to bolster their support. And that is not a risk that Lenin will take. On the night of July the 16th, the family awoken by their guards and ordered to ready themselves for relocation. Along with four servants, they dress quickly and hurry to the cellar to await a truck.

Nicholas asks for chairs for Alexei and his wife, and shortly after his request is granted, a group of men, including officers of the local secret police, enter the room, and they're armed. The order for the execution of the entire family is read aloud and the men open fire. Though Nicholas dies immediately, the family's execution is not swift.

Pads of jewels sewn into the clothes of his children protect some from the first onslaught of bullets. After the initial volley, the room fills with dust and smoke, and the executioners have to wait for it to clear. In the end, bayonets are deployed as well as revolvers. The whole ordeal lasts twenty minutes. But once it's finished, the Romanov dynasty has been wiped out. The youngest of them, Alexei, was just 13 years old.

With the revolution behind it, Russia's problems are far from over. With civil war exploding across the country, the economy collapses. The agricultural breakdown that follows triggers a famine that will kill millions. Western states like Latvia, Lithuania, Georgia, Ukraine and others break away, though for many their grasp on independence is far from assured. Conflicts over sovereignty await resolution to this day. 72 hours after Lenin's death in 1923, Petrograd is renamed Leningrad. But his legacy extends far beyond the city. The violent fall of the autocracy filled the working people of Russia with a renewed optimism. But what came next? Hunger, purges,

hundreds of millions of lives lived under the shadow of absolute dictatorship could hardly have been what they hoped for. Out of a desire for freedom from poverty and inequality came one of the world's most horrifying regimes, legacy of which dominates headlines even now. When people come together and say, no, we're not going to put up with this, even if they're not trained armies and they may not even have weapons, it's the power of resistance, the human spirit. And that's what happened in February

with the ordinary people coming together and saying, we've had enough, we're hungry, we want political change as well. That's one of the tragedies. And I do think things could have been different in Russia in 1905 if Nicholas had really agreed to proper constitutional reform. But it's still riven with this terrible legacy of oppression and suppression and lack of civil rights, the lack of ability to speak out. It's still happening in Putin's Russia. Continue to listen and follow for free wherever you get your shows. Or subscribe to the Noiser Network on Apple Podcasts and listen ad-free to Noiser Originals,

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