1917: Why The Russian Revolution Matters

[Music] the fact that it matters for us shows that the revolution didn't succeed then it failed I think that's tragedy it's not something that we should therefore conclude well we should never try that again we should not use the Bolshevik Revolution or its degeneration as an argument against experimentation itself human ability to transform to to change is infinite and we should see it as that I think the historical impact the Russian Revolution is often underestimated or even ignored today it should be remembered and understood in its proper historical context as an event which changed the world everything that happened after in the 20th century is in one way or another a reaction to the Russian Revolution and the fact that it's now largely forgotten and ignored is a real shortcoming of our historical understanding and education Trotsky musing the bit later about the possibilities of the revolution said the point of the revolution was to unleash human potential to make people Aristotle and Goethe and Marx and to raise the ridge so that we could see over to the other side of what was possible or Viktor surge at the end of his trilogy the last book midnight in the century when the protagonist escapes from a Stalinist concentration camp he mows up two people in the cafe and says do you know who we are we are the possibilities of the future and that's why we should remember about the Russian Revolution and if I can misquote Rosa Luxemburg who made the point that the only successful revolution is the last one just imagine being or living in Russia or living in Europe in January 1917 or in December 1916 and the way you read the world and and the way you think about the future and just imagine that perception that you have in early 1917 - what actually occurs a few months later almost like the unthinkable takes place something that nobody expects and I think that what that shows us is that history itself is not simply a process that kind of moves along steadily but sometimes there are huge leaves that are taking where the present is transcended by very radical and very kind of transformative processes and it's that transformative moment which was gives you this sense of exhilaration not only express itself in the political sphere but also in the cultural sphere and in the social sphere because everybody was involved it was also the sense of many people who went there that famously John Reed the journalist Louise Bryant they were astonished at this level of activity it showed what human beings can do in difficult circumstances and it was so inspirational and I suppose is a really important point to emphasize today their ability to or willingness to take risks to experiment to do new things that have never been done before everything changed and you can see it all across the world in a very practical way because people start joining communist parties these new communist parties they've been in socialist parties before but the socialist parties had all joined in the war and so they'd thrown away their reputation that become patriotic and small-minded in Glasgow this great revolutionary upsurge all through 1919 you can see it in Germany in the revolution that brought the war to a halt they were inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution you can see it in Dublin you can see it all across Africa and the Middle East they can see that their conditions of existence are degraded and constrained suddenly have a model for doing a different thing and all across the world there's this great upsurge of radicalism activism a huge left press a great conversation about the future taking place [Music] I think one of the reasons why I look upon the Russia Revolution the way that I do is because I had the privilege of living through the Hungarian Revolution in October 1956 the October 1956 revolution had certain similarities with that of October 1917 and the main similarity was that ordinary people who a few months beforehand were overwhelmed by the struggle of everyday life and felt that they really had to deal with all their energies just merely to survive all of a sudden from one day to the next became interested in political life and public life and people began to read newspapers people began to go out on the street and talk to one another and all of a sudden all these individuals who were disregarded as being relatively unimportant because they were ordinary they were uneducated we're able to take matters into their hands and in Hungary they made a revolution and actually succeeded it initially to defeat the Russian army that was brought in to fight them and similarly in October 1917 yet a situation in a much larger scale and in a more durable fashion where the kind of people that really were the objects of history they were often disregarded as being unimportant all of a sudden took to the streets of Petrograd and other places and took matters into their own hands and and felt empowered and they felt strong enough to take charge of a difficult historical process and try to give it their own content and their own direction and to that extent with the Russian Revolution does show us is that in the people are not just simply the passive audience in the drama of history but sometimes rarely of course on occasions it cannot also be the main protagonist in that drama and I think that's an interesting insight into the way that the world works I'm interested in human freedom and how it be taken further and therefore the Russia Revolution its attempt to realize a grander more sweeping and more authentic vision of human emancipation is of interest to me and I think it should be the interest to everyone if you had any interest in politics from the late sixties onwards then you had to be aware of what I was said is the defining event of the 20th century and you had to come to terms with what happened and you also had to align yourself in relationship to organizations which took a view on this you can't avoid it its seminal as somebody who grew up in South Africa and witnessed apart it and attempted to try and do something about it somebody who was interested in justice and and and changing South Africa I was fascinated by all examples of change that has occurred the Bolshevik Revolution for me when I began to learn about it and read about it was an incredible inspiration it was something that I read furiously about you just remember that in South Africa at that time all these books like Lenin Marx and all they were all banned was like you know for children you say you can't do that so you go and do it so I was immediately attracted to that but the more I began to read around and the more I understood what that represented it kind of kindled my aspiration to to want to transform the world in the middle of the first world war the existing alliance system the existing geopolitical realities were fundamentally coming unstuck and they were coming unstuck throughout the world this is a period when many of the old empires are unraveling the austro-hungarian Empire the Ottoman Empire there are big revolts in the in the British Empire and not only that but the old regimes were in Germany or elsewhere we're losing their capacity to reproduce the system the thing about the Tsar and his court is he was like a weirdo freak the guy was so strange the more intense the struggle around him was the more kind of like mr. pooter he was like all mr. bean you know he was this odd fastidious man there's a diary he could read his diary and all these cataclysmic events going on and he's saying I shot a couple of birds today and had tea outside and you're thinking the whole world is changing and he's in denial it's a very royal attitude actually it's the essence of monarchy is that he's utterly indifferent to the mass you know in Tsar Nicholas is caught this is crazy Rasputin guy there's all this kind of weirdness people making shared loads of money from the war you know and they're living the high life while everybody else outside is miserable and starving and hungry and all hatred is basically is on the Czar so that when he does go there's a kind of hiatus it was a uniquely fragile and weak society that was curiously both extremely backward in terms of its feudal agrarian structures but in many respect is also very advanced its urban working class industrial base was fairly advanced and yet the tension that occurred within that society which meant that Russian regime was far less resilient far less robust in being able to deal with the challenges to true when you look at the life experience of ordinary Russians all of their lives were being turned inside out all the time over short periods like a generation millions had moved from the countryside into the town and that was a new experience for them they were working in factories that was a new experience for them all their social relationships or their human relationships were turned inside out and then they were changed again because after being dragoon din to the factories many many millions more would Ragunan into the army so first they were being bullied and pushed around by factory owners and then they were being bullied and pushed around by captains and Generals often shooting at them you know or leading them into gunfire so their lives were already in turmoil and then they decided to take control of that process let's try and understand the position of a working class area like the Vyborg one of the leading work and plus areas of Petersburg Petrograd of course there was a level of deprivation so there was an economic stimulus to revolt and this was particularly acute - given the experience of the war but my striking thing is that how very quickly although there were coherent trade union demands for an eight-hour working day and things like that how quickly the movement transformed itself from a trade union or economic discussion into a discussion about politics and about grasping a whole new world of control and of freedom and of power the crowd thus witnessed open exchanges of political opinions in the course of which opposing ideas were pitted against one another when their February revolution happened lots of people were surprised and they looked at the intensity of the social conflict was in Petrograd in st. Petersburg particularly in a suburb called Viborg it started and the people that were writing about in talking about afterwards were so surprised by the intensity of the conflict that they often would talk about it as a kind of a spontaneous thing one man would enter a discussion with another and passers-by would listen in it was physics you know that under pressure something had cracked as though they weren't real people that were doing this as though there were kind of an animal species that had have reached some kind of tipping point that meant that they would go off in some other direction but most people said that because they didn't know the people who were doing it and they're very precise events that led to the revolution there's a precursor to the February revolution which is in Petrograd there was a quite an intense level of argument and politics and political debate in the preceding period particularly in 1905 when there being a kind of a very powerful revolution that had failed but nonetheless had drawn many many people into the hard left groups that were leading the revolution and lots of people were taking part in both in trade union activism but also in what were called the Russian social Democratic and Labour Party they the left-wing of politics and arguing about politics and about Marxism and about revolution so it wasn't as if these people didn't know about politics were unduly political they were very very political the people who did this were not the most poor people in Petrograd they were the most organized people in Petrograd the ones with the highest aspirations a significant section you know not a tiny minority can galvanize and inspire the rest of the population and it doesn't have to be everybody it just has to be a crit mass and what really inspires them was the sense that they could be in control that's one of the things that Lenin understood better than anybody else is that people actually believed that they could run their own lives the Volturi revolution wouldn't have happened without the first world war that's a very important point to grasp the imperialist powers essentially were going to war with each other to try and defend their empires where the relationship between militarism you know patriotism nationalism and plunder and war and imperialist oppression all suddenly came together in a way that people have been denying that there was a inherent connection between you know military you know barbarism on a scale have never been seen before and the capitalists capitalist society itself through Lenin's analysis the fate of war and revolution had become increasingly tied together Lenin was the only major leading figure if not the only figure who was most committed to ending the war and he went even further he's thought that the revolutionaries and those who are committed to ending the war had to support the military defeat of their own governments the patriotic loyalty that the state could command in wartime had to be broken by resolute opposition to the state itself and his line was to convert the slaughter of the world war into a civil war that would overthrow the existing powers to be Alfred Comrie my grandfather fought in the First World War he was in the Army Ordnance Corps he was in the British Socialist Party at the time the British Socialist Party supported the first world war so he when he joined the war he joined it as a patriotic socialist and the family story goes that Alf was charged with looking after some German POWs whilst other units fighting units went forward to to defeat Germany and in those weeks whilst he was looking after those German soldiers their English was very good and they got into all sorts of political discussions and they said to him the workers of the world have no country this war is a war for the capitalists and a war for profit and we shouldn't be fighting each other and killing each other we should be supporting Lenin and his struggle for peace bread and land in Russia and when alfred count Comrie left the war he didn't leave as a patriotic socialist he left as an unpatriotic communist he went back from the war and he joined the British Communist Party as a founder member I've got a service medal here on the front there is an angel with with wings and on the back it says the great war for civilization 1914 to 1919 Alfa knew that it wasn't a great war for civilization he knew it was the mass sorter of working-class people when you look at the way the Russian army fought there's a massive preponderance of Russians they really ought to have swept up but they the relationship that they had with their officers was it was like dictatorship there was there was no respect they brutalized them they were rebellious and mutinous or truculent they were always deserting just people legging it and running away and whole platoons would disappear they'd run home to look after their starving families and to get back to the farm they'd run off because they hated the way that they were treated they'd run off because lots of them were had very quickly become very fervently anti-war and that meant that it wasn't any kind of effective army and one of the central features of the soldiers demands was to be treated as human beings to be allowed to come out in the light of day that they were equal they weren't they weren't subordinate to anything women were instrumental to the Russian Revolution right from the get-go and in fact the February revolution begins with a march of women workers on March 8th International Women's Day when their February Revolution happened all the textile workers tended to be women and the people in the metals factories tended to be men so the textile workers decided that because it was International Women's Day they wanted to have a protest and it seemed obvious to them from their previous experience the thing to do was to have a strike and the politicos you know the Bolsheviks and the Socialists weren't quite ready for that and they said well do you think that's wise you know we're gonna cause a problem is it all gonna drop on our heads but the women weren't really listening they were thinking we're gonna do something so they organized the strike then they said well we better get the men out too so they'd send people off to the metal factories and the engineering factories and struck them out the whole thing in about five days it blossomed really quickly into this huge conflagration and as the Marxists and the socialists feared the reaction from the authorities was going to be tough you know so they did get Cossacks to attack them and they got policemen and soldiers to attack them but on each occasion what would happen is that the strikers and the protesters who were on the streets milling around here demanding control of the streets tried to challenge the people that were sent to beat them up you know so the first were Cossacks you know Cossacks are owned their own horses they're not cavalry in the ordinary sense they're people of property so they're stolid conservative kind of people but an interesting thing happened where the crowd parted to make a corridor so there instead of charging through the crowd what happened was the Cossacks chose to go through the corridor and this happened three or four times meaning to say that the Cossacks were choosing not to have a straight-on fight and the crowd were encouraging them to say no don't do this and as this happened it became clear the Cossacks were winking at the crowd the crowd were waving at them it was a huge moment because just at the point when you were about to get battered the people that are supposed to batter you is listening to you say no oh yo these are people too and and choose not to but something goes wrong the army joins the people there's another famous confrontation between the the protesters and these soldiers in their Nevsky barracks and a platoon of the barracks have been out and shot at some of the protesters and the wives and the mothers went to the barracks and said what do you think is going on you know one of your platoons has been our shooting ass and at this point you would imagine that soldiers would say get lost but instead they didn't like this and they said they will go and fetch them so platoon was sent out to stop the platoon there's a great line in trotsky's history of the Russian revolutionaries talking about a man who is conducting the trance on the the main prospect and the trams have reordered so that they don't mess up a demonstration or a line of people coming across and Trotsky makes point he says you know the man conducting the trams have become a factor in world history and that's right because all of those things were conscious decisions that people made desires regime forms aan Kerensky a young lawyer is made Minister of Justice and a provisional government in which the February 1917 revolution which led to the fall of the Tsar and the establishment of the provisional government with the promise of Constituent elections was welcomed by many people in the West it was seen very much as a as an OK Democratic upheaval against a particularly oppressive regime I think nobody had any doubt that the Tsarist regime was an unusually backward and reactionary one a bit of an embarrassment to even to its allies and also many people hope that with the regime change in Russia in February that Russia will be more able to fight in the war and be an effective player in containing particularly the German advance they thought were great you know Kerensky he'll be a bit more like kind of Lloyd George carrot you know a liberal democratic government they thought like us and so they were very relieved and pleased that a more plausible leader was there to lead the Russian war effort and it allowed them to claim that they were standing for democracy in fact was a slightly bogus claim as in Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany they already had universal male suffrage which didn't exist in Britain and the provisional government which was one of the most liberal in the whole of Europe introduced freedom of press freedom of assembly and all kinds of civil liberties which had not existed anywhere in Czarist Russia and didn't really exist anywhere else in Europe Kerensky who issued the order of the day I call on the army 45 are the strength and spirit of the revolution to take the offensive people think oh great you know we got rid of the Tsar the revolution has succeeded they're not really thinking about what comes next and what came next naturally was what was underneath bazaar which was the Duma their parliamentarians lawyers and wealthy people it lacked a real base within Russian society and the Kerensky government was not really able to provide satisfactory answers to the to the real questions that faced both the peasantry and and the urban poor for example they had no solution to the agrarian question which was a really major issue within Russia they had no solution to the demand for food for bread and in particular I think what the korean suki government overlooked was this incredibly powerful aspiration within russian society for peace i think by that time the anti-war sentiments had become extremely pervasive today when we think of anti war we tend to think of being opposed to war means moral opposition to the consequences of war whereas the anti-war activism of the militants and radicals who were in the Bolshevik Party associated with Lenin Lenin's allies they took their anti-war position to the logical conclusion which they saw as political transformation and also hostility to not only to the enemy state but also to their own States and they saw their political responsibility as having to overthrow their own States as the result of their anti-war opposition it wasn't simply registering your discontent or a pacifistic opposition to war in general but that the only way to stop the war was to overthrow the ruling elites who were responsible for launching the war in the first place in a sense the idea that somehow the Korean Sukie government could have retained its power for any length of time it's fairly unrealistic very quickly the people that made the revolution in February saw that this wasn't the answer cards poured into the streets calling for peace prayer and freedom and for the overthrow of the provisional government usually when you look back upon history there's a tendency to exaggerate the roles of individual leaders but at the same time you know we have to remember that there are moments in history when somehow somewhere somebody has to give a lead somebody has got to have the ability to in a sense personify the aspiration for chain and I think that the considerable extent Lenny was uniquely placed in being able to do that let in had been a lifelong revolutionary firm a teenager as elder brother had been executed of his opposition to the Czar and Lenin had been someone who was devoted to developing a very coherent very disciplined but extremely rigorous theoretically and practically political party in a sense the Bolshevik Party which was a section of the Russian social democratic party was his party he was the one that determined its direction on one arguments and kept it attuned to the particular circumstances which were most importantly their response to the working class and how the working class could be made a major actor in political history Lenin's imperialism his book on imperialism draws out the inherent or intimate connection between capitalist the capitalist economy and militarism and war Trotsky was much less disciplined in a sense than Lenin but charismatic a wonderful orator major theoretician he only became a key member of the Bolshevik Party in the in the days between May and October of 1917 because we have to remember that both of them were in exile when the February Revolution of 1917 broke out Lenin had to come back from exile from Switzerland across a war-torn Europe he got back in early April which is significant Trotsky came back from Nova Scotia where he was in exile in North America and arrived I think in May it was Trotsky who became a key figure in the Soviet which was the key organ of working-class power in Petrograd Petersburg and throughout Russia having been leader of the Soviet in the 1905 revolution most of the Bolshevik Party was fairly reluctant about the possibility of building a socialist society the party itself had become fairly conservative it had become very pessimistic because of the experience of the first world war and the fact that a lot of labor movement activists became drawn into the war it did require someone like Lenin to basically see the opportunities understand that at that moment in time the only way that the interest of the people of Russia could be defended and taken forward was not just by marking time but actually seizing power and I think to that extent Lenin's role was quite unique ladyship is always important leadership is important but as long as it's sensitive to the actual conditions leadership when you just lead people over the top and there's no chance of winning then that's a no-no and in fact in July of 1917 Lenin was in a position where in a sense he had to try and hold back the working class in Petrograd who were triumphalist and were not quite in a position to move forward so there had to be an adjustment and it's this sensitivity this saying this is the time this is not the time so when he would hear from all the commissar Xin the factories and in the soldiers units what was happening he would be able to interpret it and send it back a two-way process an iteration process of knowing exactly what was happening and also being sensitive to the wider objective factors which is what is the right wind doing you know what are the moderates doing what's the state of the war what's happening in broader Russia so it's a systemic strategic overview and in that sense his leadership is absolutely crucial but it's crucial because he had the backing of vast numbers of ordinary people and that's demonstrable throughout this whole period people often portrayed Lenin as this kind of aggressive dictatorial guy but what he said was really quite common sensical he was saying there's no point in telling people what they already know you know so when workers are joining trade unions we don't need to be there telling them to make trade unions we need to be there to try and look beyond that immediate struggle and see what the next step is you know what's the next stage and that's the role he played the the notion of the iconoclastic need an inspirational leader you know the kind of Stalin Hitler you know someone who can get up on stage and shout loudly and people follow because they have got loud voices somehow they psychologically get into the minds of people and you know just just complete garbage in terms of what really happens here Trotsky also famously developed something which is largely misunderstood which is the theory of permanent revolution sometimes known as the theory of combined development and what this is in essence is that even though a country might be backward like Russia the general state of the world market in the world economy had reached a point where it was possible to over jump every single stage an in Contra distinction to many of the other Bolsheviks and some of the other revolutionaries he thought it was therefore necessary in order to actually move forward that you didn't have to go through a stages conception of revolution and this was particularly the case in a place like Petersburg Petrograd which had a high concentration of highly skilled workers who'd come together relatively quickly by European standards in 20 or 30 years and were very very class conscious and I think that's a point which I think speaks to many of the things which are misunderstood which was that we're not talking about a collection of conspirators operating behind closed doors like Guy Fawkes or modern terrorists we're looking at an organization which had deep roots in the working-class and both led a working class and was responsive to the working-class as soon as we are strong enough to defeat capitalism as a whole we shall immediately take it by the scruff of the neck [Music] if Lenin hadn't turned up for the Finland station in 1917 there would have been no Bolshevik Revolution when Lenin arrived back in April he formulated through what was became known as the April thesis the idea that now was the opportunity it wasn't a question of kowtow to the provincial government which was still linked with the autocracy had a large composition of a party called the cadets constitutional Democrats who were neither constitutional nor democratic and that other organizations even the social revolutionaries and the Mensheviks were subordinate to them he said look the power is there and he developed a slogan along with a minority of his own comrades of all power to the Soviets that the only way for was to keep power in the hands of the working class and to constantly put pressure on and look around for the opportunities for moving forward and this is crystallized in the April thesis so many radicals particularly Marxist inspired radicals of the time had this very mechanical doctrinaire understanding of social change where an absolutist feudal style government as the Czarist monarchy had been had to be replaced by a liberal Republican or constitutional form of government which then in turn in the fullness of time at some indeterminate point in the future would be displaced by a socialist socialist democracy of workers government and - Lenin's mind in the context of the world war this vision of social change became an excuse and a barrier to actually enacting the social change that was necessary at the time and that it was necessary not to hold into this fixed schema of sticking with the provisional government the bourgeois Liberal government that was still fighting the war but to overthrow it that's the characteristic that we should often remember about Lenin is he didn't have it his own way he had to constantly explain and explain and explain he had to win battles and win arguments even through to October there were voices against any form of revolutionary change I mean the biggest myths and it's point worth stressing time and time again is the idea that it wasn't a working-class revolution and in fact if it hadn't have happened Russia would have developed a wonderful liberal democracy we should not would not have been the case every single member of the of the Duma and the provisional government particularly under Kerensky were constantly pushing back the working-class and accommodating with forces to the right culminating in it almost a total counter-revolution in August which was stopped not by the conspirators in their room but by the mass activity of the working class tearing up railway lines as counter-revolutionary forces tried to move in on Petrograd that's the biggest myth it was a mass movement of ordinary people to transform their lives General Kornilov the commander in chief was not satisfied with the government's efforts to restore order and continue the war another example again from the July days and probably when they went over the top there's a wonderful quotation when a social revolutionary leader called Chernov went to talk to some workers to try and dissuade them from activity one of the workers screamed in his face seize the power you son of a when it's given to you people often imagine that a revolution has to be a direct reaction against some terrible acts of violent repression one of the interesting things is that by October 1917 Russia was probably a more liberal societies in in Europe but it wasn't enough to satisfy the Democratic aspirations of the Russian people the Soviets were workers and soldiers councils directly elected by people and they were a kind of form of direct democracy today we think about democracy as being about parliamentary democracy in state and revolution Lenin made the point that in order to have proletarian democracy you would definitely need representative institutions but you'd have to do away with parliamentarianism which might seem contradictory but I think what he meant by that was understanding that Parliament's were generally a kind of Democratic facade behind which the state continued to exercise power on behalf of a minority class the Bolshevik conception of democracy was rather that the democratic institutions of the people would actually exercise power themselves it was a Soviet revolution because the whole idea was to put the Soviets in power and called a dual power you know that the Soviet governments had existed alongside the parliamentary system but the dual power was just a way of saying one of them's got to go the question is who's going to survive is it the Soviets or is it the Duma what the Bostwick revolution means is that is the the Duma that will be swept aside they'll create a Soviet government a whole different idea of democracy from the one that preceded the kind of English model or the American model which was essentially the businessmen and lawyers would represent the nation and they would sit in a special place and talk about how to organize industry and capitalism to the best effect of property owning classes a Soviet government was different because it was about working people they weren't interested in making sure that businessmen have made their profits they were interested in making a government which served all the people the pro capitalists Pro Czarist parties were free to stand for election to the Soviets if they wanted to it was only after the Revolution in 1918 when the forces of counter-revolution tried to stage a coup that new rules were introduced which which listed those who weren't no longer allowed to stand for election to the Soviets which included employers businessman Soros and aristocrats the imperial government failed revolution reign the chains were broken and in violence was born the government of the proletariat normally in political language the words dictatorship and democracy would sit would be seen as polar opposites of the political spectrum if you think about the dictatorship of the proletariat as Marx and then letting talked about it however it's actually quite close to the original conception of democracy if we go back to ancient Athens the origins of the word democracy come from the Greek for demos the people the mass of the people and Kratos power or control so it's about the people exercising control over the society and I think the dictatorship of the proletariat is a different way of expressing that kind of democratic impulse of a popular control Lenin argued that in until the revolution Russia was dominated by the dictatorship the bourgeoisie which basically the way he saw it was the capitalist class who relied upon their institutions their sources of power to maintain and reproduce society and what Lenin argued was that even the implantation of workers democracy would still constitute a form of dictatorship yeah in this case the dictatorship of the majority of society is the way that he kind of put it the class domination of workers and peasants would have to be defended by force if necessary just like the class domination of the capitalist class beforehand contrary to the impression that's often given today neither Marx nor Lyon were in favor of state control of everything in fact they had a conception of what was Marx talked about as the withering away of the state they eventually after the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat of majority rule you could actually create a classless society in which state power they detectable one class over another would be unnecessary and wouldn't exist and that obviously is not something that ever came to pass and we instead the revolution turned into star on this tyranny but it was never part of a Marxist or Leninist conception that the state would continue to control society in the way that socialism and communism were talked about today [Music] I'm somewhat stunned by this argument I suppose I should take it seriously because it's so widespread but mob rule is when people without any coherent political position or one intoxicated by hatred go on a rampage such as the pogroms against the Jews the black hundreds or you might say a pointless riot fueled by alcohol without any direction at all none of that happened in the Russian Revolution it was it was discussed and argued for and it was built by collective organization and it's demeaning and irresponsible and misses out the entire point of the incredible discipline of the forces at work in that period people don't go out and lay their lives on the line because they're brainwashed is because they passionately believe in what they are doing there's a strong temptation to turn the Russian Revolution into a moral fable about the evils of attempts to change the world for the better and the terrible consequences that flow from that but that doesn't actually look at the processes that were at work or try to understand them in any meaningful or significant way so if we compare the violence of the February revolution say which was much more violent than the october revolution many hundreds of people died in the February revolution in Petrograd because you saw the disorderly collapse of the Tsarist regime the struggle to overthrow it and replace it whereas only a handful of people died in the october revolution reflecting by contrast the degree of discipline and organization that was brought to the overthrow of the provisional government and the popular support that the Bolsheviks enjoyed by that stage the categorical reality is that the violence of the Czarist authoritarian regime was preeminent thousands and thousands and thousands of ordinary Russians suffered death exile to Siberia persecution you can catalog this through the whole of the 19th century and in the 1905 revolution in the 1917 revolution in the period of the revolutionary upheaval let's say from February to October and slightly afterwards I would say the revolutionary forces were remarkably unveiling there wasn't the kind of massacres and bloodshed that often occurs and did later occur in this civil war because they'd really kind of won already you know they to organize the thing and when they stormed the Winter Palace you know famously they had when they were filming it they had to restage the storming of the Winter Palace because it was over quite quick you know you ran into the Winter Palace and you get there and everybody's scarpered but in any event I think it was kind of a much more jubilant optimistic kind of a mood you know bit like CLR James would have said you know every cook can govern and suddenly they were governing and they had lots of decisions to make and they were really pleased and excited and and there was a great mood of optimism you can see it in the arts and culture and in education where people were getting down to the business from making and use as I would attribute the acts of violence much more to the forces of stability trying to maintain their status quo rather than one's trying to change but to suggest it's the act of revolution which is violent is I think a nonsense it's also worth remembering that one of the main reasons for the october 1917 revolution was a reaction against the terrible violence and brutality of the first world war soldiers were in the front rank of the revolutionary movement they wanted an end to the violence of the war [Music] very difficult today to recall the fact that in 1917 1918 the Russian Revolution did captured the imagination of people all over the world molest in Europe but also in large parts of Asia or in large parts of North America Latin America people began to think that there is more than one way of organizing society and in particular you had a situation where the labor movement itself very much came under the influence of these kinds of sentiments were the intellectuals were very much drawn towards this kind of radical ideology that was coming out of Moscow and yet an incredible renaissance in filmmaking in the arts which tried to in a sense take a leap forward and to show the way to a society that wasn't just more the same it's changed international politics for example during the Treaty of Versailles and the conversations at the end of the First World War about the future World Order what was really going on was a debate between Wilson and Lenin Lenin wasn't at the table but the fact that the the Bolsheviks had put forward this idea of self-determination that this should be a principle that should be applied to all nations fooled Wilson and the big powerful States the elites with a huge amount of dread because they recognized two things one that there was a constituency within their own societies that actually looked to the Bolshevik Revolution as something that was something they should emulate and that they was had colonial empires that the people in the amp in the empires then their colonies were looking at the Russian Revolution and saying why shouldn't our country belong to us and they start asking and they start clamoring for exactly that same aspiration and of course this causes a huge amount of disruption because they now begin to fear that their ability to hold on to power to hold on to these areas of the world are now going to come under sea [Music] at the time of the Russian Revolution Western political elites were terrified I mean the Russian Revolution was a profound political social and economic challenge to Western capitalist States we don't have anything like that now but to be clear the challenge was not because of Russian foreign policies the challenge was domestically within Western States for one brief moment there was a real possibility that German workers maybe even some English workers would follow their Russian comrades and attempt to overthrow the political system almost immediately in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution yet governments and political parties adopting far more radical measures in terms of running their affairs than they would have done otherwise where he had centrist and even writing political parties all of a sudden calling themselves socialist Christian socialist or some kind of nationalist socialist or another in reaction to what happened in Russia state intervention in economic life becomes increasingly much more acceptable in order to preempt the rise of domestic radical movements you have the beginning of what would become the welfare state being created in the interwar period so much of what happens in political life in the post 17 period 1917 period is really a reaction to russian revolution to prevent it to preempted to evade the issues that were raised by it and that is very important for us to remember [Music] there's another book that I'd like to show you which is really interesting and it's called shop talks on economics it's basic Marxist economics it's addressed to working class people and trade unionists we know that labor power is a commodity like shoes or hats or stoves a commodity only has value exchange value because it contains human labor I think what's important to realize is that at that time these were discussions that people ordinary people were having mass movements were so threatening in Glasgow that the government of the day had to send in tanks and troops in order to quell industrial unrest even a fairly stable society like Britain was not immune to the new forms of working-class politics that was emerging and although Britain never had the revolutionary moment that for example Germany had and Hungary had never realized of the general kind of sense that what happened in Russia may well be a symptom of similar radical rewards of breaking out all over Europe another interesting thing that we found when clearing out my grandparents house were these bombs there was a stack of bombs so it was a way of raising money to support the new Soviet stay by working-class people they would buy a bond they would buy a share in this future and I just thought that that was really fantastic that ordinary working-class people would be buying these things and there and in that way supporting the revolution but now a genuine Civil War breaks out in Russia between 1917 to 1919 1920 you did have an incredibly bloody civil war being inflicted upon Russian societies the prospect of socialism of the emancipation of land for the peasants and of workers self-rule the hatred that evoked in the old aristocratic elites in the bosses the capitalists the factory managers of the time of liberals who were horrified by the prospect of being ruled by their social inferiors and of course of the extensive support that the and counter revolutionaries that the enemies of the Bolsheviks enjoyed from western states of the time with Western military intervention all of this contributed to the tremendous violence of the Civil War a very an acoustic way in which the Russian Revolution is seen as this kind of monstrous Act it very much overlooks the context of civil war where there was no legal negotiation there was no dialogue there was no debate where it was a question of whether or not the regime that will establish in October would survive or not and the only way it could possibly survive was by defending itself and I think at that point in time the kind of policy adopted by Lenin were arguably fairly defensive in informed they weren't an aggressive policy of expansionism they tended they were fairly defensive sort of character to it the Soviet government Bolshevik led Soviet government no doubt did use terror that's clear they were a government and they were being attacked they used force to repress those people that were attacking them it was a war when Victor surge says it's really a case of kill or be killed you can see what he's saying and it's right you know because they were confronted with the fact that they might be just wiped out and the reaction would win and all they were a prison would be the best that could happen to you one of the white generals the Baron Vernon Garn one of the most terrifying and depraved individuals to emerge from the Russian Civil War illustrates in many ways what was involved in the counter-revolution years before Hitler had taken control of the Nazi Party the Baron Vernon Garn was already proclaiming his determination to wipe out the Jewish race in its entirety and for instance led a utterly bizarre insurgency against the Bolsheviks in eastern Russia and Siberia supported by the Japanese state carved out the hearts of his captured prisoners and to sacrifice them to Tibetan Buddhist God's inspired by health Scrolls of Buddhist Scripture so a Buddhist version of Isis in the Russian Civil War in the 1920s led by depraved megalomaniac sadist gives some indication of the sinister forces that had been unleashed and the terrifying depravity and cruelty that was brought up in order to defeat the Bolsheviks and to crush them and to replace them with something infinitely more sinister and authoritarian in opposition to the idea of workers rule and land for the peasants the ability of the Soviet regime to survive almost certainly depended on terrifying their enemies and this is what terror is the white terror was much more vicious the Red Terror was a direct response to this remember that the the regime had got rid of the death penalty in night in as part of the October 17th settlement alongside toleration of homosexuality of equal rights for women and many other things that we almost take for granted now and no other regime would have countenanced and he and even the head of the checker the secret police of under the Bolsheviks Eugene insky was pained of course people would say oh yes but you know he would afterward be said there is too much blood on my hands you know I should be dead yeah there was a sense of that this that this was a terrible thing to have to do which you find nowhere in the responses of the white terror yes it was vicious yes it was terrible like any civil war whether it's in Spain or in Britain or anywhere but it was a response to every individual at that time had to settle their own accounts with both morally and politically and I'm really pleased that I didn't have to make those decisions [Music] allied troops fight to keep rushing in the war within months of the Russian Revolution the armies of Germany of France of Britain of America of Japan of Poland and Serbia had intervened in a vicious Civil War which drained a country already starving with famine and after the experience of three years of war all these great leaders of the democracies like Churchill like Wilson in America however liberal they were they were determined to crush Bolshevism and they sent the armies in straightaway the minute they wrapped up the European war they were going to wage war to overthrow the Bolshevik Guttman on the side of the people that work came to be known as the whites you know but they had the Red Army and so there was this counter army of all the reactionaries and generals and all the miserable people that were fed up with the whole thing they were determined to crush it so the White Army was rallied with the support of the Western democracies democracy's so-called the White Army had you know some success they caused a lot of chaos all across Russia Winston Churchill who referred to the Bolsheviks says Bolshevik baboon Orry and he said furthermore kill the bull she kissed the hand his old enemy the Germans they had to be allies against this terrifying threat to the international capitalist class this here is alfe's copy of the red paper on executions and atrocities committed in Russia by the Czechoslovak Sande Russian counter revolutionaries assisted by the Allies and what's interesting about this is that people tend to think of the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks and Lenin as bloodthirsty barbarians and what this pamphlet shows you is actually the really bloodthirsty atrocities committed by the white armies against the Bolsheviks and against the the revolution it's interesting to read some of the act here's one from August the 7th 1918 the letter written by one of the counter-revolutionary executions on the dawn the harvest was pretty good and every evening apart from the tribunal numerous Bolshevik prisoners were disposed of sometimes a hundred sometimes 300 and in one night 500 have been dispatched the mode of procedure was as follows 50 men dug their own common grave then they were shot and the other 50 men would cover them up and dig a new grave side by side and so on they're asked however so many of them that we have decided they're great discomfiture to turn the red guards into slaves pretty strong stuff the US commander in Siberia in the armies of intervention I think he's known as major general graves makes the point that for every one person killed by the Bolsheviks the white armies killed a hundred the physical cost of military intervention in Russia by foreign powers did cause a major of hebel and had a very very kind of destructive impact upon Russian society amongst other things it led to the death of a very large section of the of the Bolshevik movement and therefore by mere 1924 many of the leading farsighted revolutionaries were in effect dead so the party itself lost its its most important it's most dynamic section [Applause] a year after the October Revolution the German Revolution broke out in November 1918 beginning with a naval mutiny in the port city of Kiel the imperial monarchy of the Kaiser was overthrown a republican government was established and power fell into the hands of the right-wing social democrats the German Social Democrats and their hostility and suspicion to the popular energies that had been unleashed by the revolution and their determination to control and limit it led them to liquidate the left wing of the German revolutionary workers movement they organized the right-wing paramilitaries who murdered the anti-war left wing of the German workers moving the leaders of that who were karl liebknecht and rosa luxemburg the circumstances that conspired to bring about the degeneration of the russian revolution were in fact failures of politics of subjectivity in many other parts of the world so for example if you have an industrial power like Germany become Bolshevik you would have a different outcome and we wouldn't be talking about Stalin maybe we'll be talking about something else but the possibilities then of realizing the aspirations and the goals of what what that revolution was all about would have had much greater chance of survival so the paradox of the Russian Revolution is that its success would only have come from outside of Russia itself it would have looked close to what actually happened because you had mutinies of soldiers you had mass strikes you had all sorts of political tumult upheaval throughout the industrialized world at the time and if those struggles have been taken further you would have seen revolution break out in the industrialized core and that would have seen revolutionary states established in the West the reality is Lenin and many others never thought it was going to work the key factor for them was that it would be it would be initiating and part of a broader european revolution being so poor so agricultural so backwards war-ravaged and isolated the failure of the revolutions in Europe that the result would be that the revolution in Russia would collapse back into the old patterns of Russian history where you have national modernization led by ruthless centralizing bureaucrats so from that point of view I don't think Stalinism should be seen as a historical surprise trotsky's organization of the red army won the war but it also decimated that section of people and again on top of that we have famine we have the inability to get crops we have therefore a much more ambivalent peasantry because the peasantry is not the cohesive force that the working classes in the cities and they need to feed themselves and they're also under pressure then you have to look at how difficult it was to maintain a form of workers democracy in such an environment and then that opens the door for a bureaucracy and for an authoritarian regime within Russian society itself you had the crystallization or fairly conservative trends within the Bolshevik Party itself where in a sense the the new political bureaucracy and the state institutions converged around the leadership of Stalin and the problem from the mid-twenties onwards was that the the remnants of the political leadership increasingly under Stalin have pretended that this was not going wrong and the only voice against that after Lenin's death was Trotsky and trotsky's from the mid-twenties was the voice saying well this was wrong that was wrong that increasingly he was more divorced and in exile and then assassinated but the central feature was the fact that the bureaucracy spawns bureaucracy it spawns as a defense of its own interests and theoretically and in practical terms it also spawned a counter revolutionary idea the idea of socialism in one country in which the whole premise of Russia becoming a beacon for a wider world revolution was that everything was subordinated to the maintenance of the leadership inside Russia it's impossible in a world economy you cannot have evolution in one country especially a country as backward as Russia some of the more thinking critics the somewhere like Hannah Arendt talk about the movement from what they called the dictatorship of the proletariat to the dictatorship of the party as if it was somehow inevitable it was on something horrible something inherent within the idea that detected the proletariat that led to the detection with the party actually I think if you look at what happened historically you'd have to say that the movement towards the dictatorship of the party or the party bureaucracy under Stalin is really based on the defeat of the Revolution and usurpation of power by the starless bureaucracy who used the language of the tide ship of the proletariat to justify the control of the party machine in everyday propaganda a tendency to confuse the meaning of what Bolshevism is see Bolshevism as merely a variant of Stalinism whereas in fact there were some very fundamental difference for the Bolsheviks International's wasn't just simply a sign of sunday-school speechifying but it really didn't mean something very very important that internationalism basically meant that only when movements in Russia could count on the support and solidarity what our other governments and the labor mooned in other parts of the world could there be enough of a dynamic to change the world in in the right kind of way as as they saw it Stalin didn't actually stop using the language of internationalism but he basically betrayed its spirit by opting for a a very nationalistic approach where what really was important was building of the infrastructure and the end of institutions of of Soviet society in Russia you could argue that that's degeneration of the Bolshevik Party interests into the Stalinist clique destroys the revolutionary potential that existed particularly in the colonial world where the communist parties now simply just become the mouthpiece of this of the propaganda wing of this degenerate bureaucracy you can see this really clearly in South Africa you know where the Communist Party you know leading the struggle against the attempts by Britain to to change the color bar in industry where they come up with us incredible slogan which is workers of the world unite to keep South Africa white you know I mean who in their right mind would think that that had any kind of revolutionary other than reactionary consequences it lowered systematically lowered people's horizons away from a wider more universal model of human emancipation and social progress and change to one that was contained within Nations the one that was contained within countries to take an example of that when we see the British Communist Party supporting the war effort in the Second World War even to the extent of suppressing striking miners when miners went out on strike during the war in order to get the workers back into work as part of the overall war effort you see there the results of that fusion of radicalism and nationalism that is embodied in the Stalinist political project the fact that it happened is really the important thing not that we can live off that today because all of that I think has been destroyed I think today we're all obviously overwhelmed not by that revolution moment that occurred but the fact that it failed and I think one of the most fascinating features of the last hundred years is you have arguably the single most important event of the 20th century all of a sudden fading from memory to so so much that it leaves no legacy behind that you know a revolution and a movement the communist movement which haunted governments throughout the West and which provided the resources for a lot of the political conflicts that occurred in many parts of the world that movement no longer means anything it just simply has disappeared and that's almost historically unprecedented I think that too needs to be reflected upon [Music] we are in a society that likes to look at dates and to look at anniversaries the centenary of the Russian Revolution won't have the same popularity as the 50 years since Sergeant Pepper much as I like Sergeant Pepper it's probably a much more significant event it's shaped the whole history of the 20th century and also for good or ill the fact that the revolution did not succeed opens the door for the assumption that it could never have succeeded and everything that's gone wrong in the world since the Russian Revolution can be put at the door of the revolution and that's why if there is going to be any form of discussion about it it will be to castigate the revolution but the point we need to understand and we may sit in different areas about how to do it is that it represents a wonderful example of people taking control of their own lives and grappling with the idea of changing society I think today people are living in the present the past is the past that the past is just unimportant there's no sense of historical perspective on anything because we are so caught in the present moment there's no attempt to even look at the future and I don't think of you if you look at the future you have to take into account histories yeah because that gives you an enormous perspective on you know what's peculiar about the present and also what's not rigid about the present it is interesting that when you look at the commemoration of the revolution an extraordinary amount of the resources have been devoted to it or to do with the art of 1917 and you have to ask the question why that is and at first I thought it was perhaps a way of avoiding some of the more complicated difficult questions you know it's always nice to look at interesting drawings and paintings I'm going to sort an organ or a museum a look at Sir Lissitzky or or some other artists works but I think there's also something more to it I think particularly history that's to do with difficult issues has a growing tendency to become Disney find in the world that we live in and the many respects where we see is a process where the commemoration of the russian revolution becomes coterminous with the Disneyfication of the russian revolution where it acquires this kind of commodified very safe kind of form where the russian revolution is kind of treated as almost like an entertainment format that we can sort of appreciate in 100 years later I think if you look at the the art of the Revolutionary period it is very instructive and you can see it as a cipher or a metaphor for what was happening inside the Revolutionary period it demonstrates quite a lot of things the most recent exhibition in London illustrates the decline of the revolutionary potential a movement of hugely experimental exciting and innovative art being replaced by the turgidity of socialist realism but even that exhibition pales into insignificance beside one which was at the Heyward many years ago and it wasn't just the art it was everything is the design of teapots everything was infused with this potential in this excitement and I remember there was a huge banner going from the ceiling to the to the floor of the Haywood with a quotation from the Russian poet mayakovsky which went the streets are our brushes the squares are our palettes we are the armed Revolutionary Army about heroic and so it wasn't the leader it's the follower but it's emblematic of what was going on [Music] it's fashionable to view Russian history as one long continuum of Horrors really from the Bolshevik Revolution to the gulag to Chechnya to Putin but I would argue this is a very problematic view of history I think this has become a way of understanding most historical events it's a very a historical approach in that of course events are always a consequence of both local specific local factors and you know broader international trends I would be extremely worried if a historian in a Sixth Form College either went in bayson to say that this was everything was wonderful about it and I would be equally as worried if somebody said it was incredibly terrible you go to the sources you go to the arguments and you recognize its significance as a historical event you don't dress up as a peasant and try to plant potatoes in the middle of the winter in order to understand deprivation who in their right mind today would defend the Tsar maybe people appalled their monarchy in Britain today would what hold the hood defenders are but that's the whole point that whole order was destroyed and that kind of says to you that that order that was that point at I must might have felt to be the natural order of things was no longer the natural order that it was man-made it was historically specific and therefore the fact that the change means that perhaps you could change again and that's uncomfortable I think it should be taught as part of his the history of human civilization of the ambivalence that there is in human existence where things happen things change people change societies change societies go through transformations and we should teach this as a way of making a new generation of people comfortable with the idea that you know what we see in front of us is not solid it's man-made historically specific it can change it has been different in the past and it could be different in the future well I think we have to realize that today's V of history as leading from one horrible event to another is very much a functional of the way that we experience the world today I think there's a powerful mood of pessimism the powerful mood of misanthropy where we mistrust other people because of this side guys that we're going through there's a tendency to read history backwards this kind of history that begins in the 19th century moves on through Russian Revolution seamlessly becomes entwined with the Holocaust and the Nazi totalitarian regime and it all becomes wrapped up into this one package where the whole story is really a story of evil and malevolence and I think that kind of history that you know the history where everything is bad and negative very much reflects our own sort of imagination our own a historical or anti historical way of looking at things rather than anything and that sounds very much about what happened in the past history is full of lessons but the most important lesson is that you have to look at the specific circumstances and if I go back and look at the understanding of Lenin in particular and also of Trotsky I'd say the lesson is that you must understand your relationship to the your fellow citizens the lesson of the Russian Revolution is that people make history but not necessarily in circumstances of their own making [Music] [Music]

Channel: worldwrite

Views: 28,891

Keywords: Russian Revolution, Lenin, Trotsky, 1917, October, Worldwrite, Worldbytes, video, documentary

Id: 5c6YmHHbwHw

Length: 75min 57sec (4557 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 04 2021