History vs Lenin - YOU be the judge! | A History Teacher Reacts

hey youtube i'm mr terry high school history teacher welcome back to another history teacher reacts video all right in today's video we're checking out a video from ted ed so these are the people that do ted talks and other educational content and one of the cool kind of video formats they have is they put somebody from history on trial so they you know get to defend themselves or give their points of view but then you have like a prosecutor that goes after them and the format is pretty cool and there's a bunch of videos out there but this is one i had not seen yet and i really wanted to watch it with you and it is history versus vladimir lenin so i think this is great to talk about vladimir lenin a member of the bolshevik party that led to the rise of communism in what's going to be the soviet union so it'll be interesting to see the different kind of perspectives of what vladimir lenin did and his beliefs and if you don't know or you think you do know much about vladimir lenin you're going to want to watch this i think because a lot of people don't distinguish you know vladimir lenin from like karl marx's beliefs and also vladimir lenin from joseph stalin so let's learn a little bit more about vladimir lenin and i'm going to add my perspective as a teacher and what i know and i think we can learn a lot together now at the end of this video after the court case i want to see what you think about this about this case versus vladimir lenin what do you think let's see those comments down below all right let's get started [Music] [Music] all right you're on trial mister he was in the most influential figures of the 20th century forever changing the course of what is real name by the way largest countries but was he a hero who toppled an oppressive tyranny or a villain who replaced it with another man it's time to put lenin on the stand right away just so i mean such a divisive figure i mean there's a lot of people that are very inspired um by what he did with the russian revolution um and then also people that have villainized him and put him at the top of lists of uh people that are people that people hate um among the top of the 20th century so let's see history versus lenin order order now wasn't it your fault that the band broke up what your honor this is vladimir ilyich ulyanov aka lenin the rabble rouser who helped overthrow the russian czar nicholas ii in 1917 and founded the soviet union one of the worst dictatorships of the 20th century right away i mean there's a long time between the russian revolution in 1917 which had two phases one of which which took down the actual monarchy which was seen as very oppressive for a long long time and was very unpopular by a lot of people especially of the lower classes but then also the creation of soviet union then there's going to be a brutal civil war um for a few years and then you get really the stability i guess if you want to call that and really the kind of the i guess real implementation i guess at the beginning of the soviet union uh in the early 20s was a bloody tyrant under whom the mess is toiled in slavery i serfdom had already been abolished in 1861 right and replaced by something worse the factory bosses treated the people worse than their former feudal landlords and unlike the landlords they were always there russian workers toiled for 11 hours a day and voted the lowest paid in all of europe but yeah so what he's trying to explain there that was a big criticism was yes serfdom was ended years before this however living conditions did not change and that's more important than anything is not what the uh to those russian people which was not the definition of what it is is it serfdom or um whatever but um it's about the the the life right uh maybe some peasants some serfs you know end up going into factories which russia was trying to catch up on industrialization uh to the rest of the world which they had fallen you know behind on mightily and but the working conditions didn't improve so going from serfdom and having some kind of legal obligation to a landlord uh did not you know the the conditions stayed very much the same even afterwards that's what the case would be there czar nicholas made laws to protect the workers he reluctantly did the bare minimum to avert revolution and even there he failed remember what happened in 1905 after his troops fired on peaceful petitioners yes and the czar ended the rebellion by introducing a constitution and an elected parliament the duma while retaining absolute power and dissolving them whenever he wanted yeah it wasn't a very powerful organization the duma they're kind of first parliament if you want to call it that because they've elected you know has elected officials in it there would have been more reforms in due time if radicals like lenin weren't always stirring up trouble your honor lenin had seen his old that wouldn't hold up in a court case right you can't do hyperbole okay conjecture right so someone would be like objection i don't know exactly how it works but brother alexander executed by the previous tsar for revolutionary activity lenin's family reforms had a long history continued the same mass oppression and executions as well as the criminal behavior that costs russia so many lives yeah world war one context is so important here because a lot of people say that was the kind of final straw um that propelled the working conditions and the political i guess makeup and everything of of of russia here and put it to its edge right they were the war was not going well up to that point in 1917 seen some earlier successes but it wasn't going very well and uh a lot of people put blame in in um czar nicholas's leadership at that time of why the war was not going well and uh so that ended up becoming um quite uh uh for for for some some members anti-revolutionaries um a part of their platform which was to try to pull russia out of the war but we'll see if they get to it um even after the revolution um they still fought the war for a little bit at least until like vlad lenin really came power after the october revolution doesn't sound like such a case february and october 19th your honor maybe nicholas ii did doom himself with bad decisions but lennon deserves no credit for this when the february 1917 uprisings finally forced the tsar to abdicate lenin was still exiled in switzerland that's true so who came to power the duma formed a provisional government led by alexander karensky an incompetent bourgeois failure he even launched another failed offensive in the war where russia had already lost so much instead of ending it like the people wanted it was a constitutional social democratic government the most progressive of its time and it could have succeeded eventually if lenin hadn't returned in april by the germans to undermine the russian war effort and instigate riots yeah so yeah the story of lenin coming back to russia is so fascinating during the war and just in brief you didn't know um again lenin and his whole family had long had uh issues with the government and had been in trouble and stuff like that they were very much high profile that way and lenin was exiled and yeah went to switzerland and the germans saw um during this during the war to get him back into russia would be something beneficial right because they knew about his uh anti-monarchy stance and uh possibility of him wanting to uh you know not supporting the war and getting russia out of the war and germany saw to getting him smuggled and i could use that term because they snuck him in on a train back to russia with money to basically and and i think weapons um to basically get a revolution started it was kind of like planning a bomb inside of russia to help it blow up and for all the gambles that germany made in world war one which there are so many this was one that kind of in the short term paid off in the fact that it worked i mean the revolution happened that eventually um the new government is going to to uh to negotiate with the germans to pull them out of the war which then led germany to not have to worry so much about a two front war i guess in the long term you could see it as a negative because you're gonna have world war two where the soviet union will be successful against the germans and leading to you know the fall of that germany which is you know a different germany in a lot of ways because it's uh one led by nazi party rather than the german empire so slander the july days were a spontaneous and justified reaction against the government's failures and karinsky showed his true colors when he blamed lenin and arrested and outlawed his bolshevik party forcing him to flee into exile again some democracy it's a good thing the government collapsed under their own incompetence and greed when they tried to stage a military coup then had to ask the bolsheviks for help when it backfired after that all lenin had to do was return in october and take charge the government was peaceful overnight so in february of that year 1917 a revolution to take down the monarchy was successful and it was a provisional government right it was um you know heart it continued a lot of policies and the fact that it uh it could they continued the war through the rest of that year but then you get like a second revolution or second version of a revolution that's like the communist revolution because the first part of the revolution again in february was more about taking down the monarchy but the second one was more about the establishment of you know eventually communism and the soviet union socialism those types of things depending which terminology because the you know they they use the term like socialist at the beginning and then they're going to use a bigger term communism later on but um definitions of those words and things check out some of my other videos uh you can see of socialism communism um see a little bit more if you need to understand the differences between those terms but what the bolsheviks did after gaining power wasn't very peaceful how many people did they execute without trying really necessary to murder the czar's entire family even the children obliterated attacked by foreign imperialists trying to restore the tsar any royal heir that was rescued would be recognized as a ruler by foreign governments it would have been the end of everything that people had fought so hard to achieve besides that's another both both cases there you know that they're bringing here are doing a lot of what-ifs or if you know time had done if this had happened then this would happen you saw the prosecutor doing that a lot well the duma needed more time or alexander you could have or nicholas could have you know needed more time to improve working conditions but now the defense here of lenin is also saying things like hey if they hadn't i guess brutally massacred every single one of the romanov family then a foreign government would then you know see to see to any surviving family member of would restore the monarchy and that stuff and that's all what if stuff too and those things don't you know those are all just things you can sit there and debate about but how can you prove those sort of things especially if you're trying to do like a court of law which is what they're they're doing here those things just don't work lenin may not have given the order but it was not only imperialists that the bolsheviks killed what about the purges and executions of other socialist and anarchist parties their old allies that was true the tambov rebellion where peasants resisting grain infestation were killed with poison gas or sending the army to crush the workers in kronstadt who were demanding democratic self-management was this still fighting for the people the early years they tried to have something far more democratic and actually in those early years something more capitalistic and the fact that having uh uh private owners for things was ownership of land and things like that was still you know something that people were um a lot of people were supportive of and they tried to do that even under lenin's years he tried to do things again there was a lot more capitalist intentions actually in the early times but then that didn't that didn't last very long so again that was the problem i feel like with the the russian revolution was it meant different things to different people at different times right what happened on uh february of 20 or uh 1917 is not what happened in uh in october of 1917 and then the civil war that's gonna bring out it was a lot more divisive and non-unified and really just going to come out to which faction is going to which individual faction is going to arise and which one is going to be the most powerful in the end it will be the bolshevik party because there's a lot of different groups yes the measures were difficult but it was a difficult time the new government needed to secure itself while being attacked from all sides so that the socialist order could be established and what good came of this socialist order even after the civil war was won there were famines repression and millions executed or sent to die in camps while lenin's successor stalin established a cult of personality and absolute power i mean they're going to bring in the stall and stuff i mean vladimir lenino's deathbed basically said don't let joseph stalin have power i mean he by the end was really untrusting of him i mean stalin was lenin's goon he's the guy that you can get to do the dirty work right but lennon did not want to see that guy in a leadership position um and he was right about uh what he feared about stalin was his tyrannical behavior and um personality was not something yeah that lenin wanted did not want to see that but as you'll see when lennon dies uh stalin is going to be able to maneuver his way into power eventually that wasn't the plan right lenin never cared for personal gains even his enemies admitted that he fully believed in his cause he lived pretty well and working tirelessly from his student days until he's too early he saw how powerful the officials lived pretty well tried to warn the party but it was too late right and the decades of totalitarianism that followed after you can call it that but it was lenin's efforts that changed russia in a few decades from a backward and undeveloped monarchy full of illiterate peasants to a modern industrial superpower with one of the world's best educated populations unprecedented opportunities for women and some of the most important scientific advancements of the century life may not have been luxurious but nearly everyone had a roof over their head and food on their plate which few countries have achieved this is this is just now devolving into a uh pros versus con things or and were there enough pros and cons in the future soviet union but if we're gonna start again focus on lenin in other words things um you know his party was uh advocating for women's rights a lot more a lot of people say that the soviet union with lenin and later on with women um having more rights and more access to cert to things as compared to a lot of uh western capitalist nations that's always been something that you'll see supporters of this system and what happened in the soviet union you'll see them talk about that quite a bit but these advances could still have happened even without lenin and the repressive regime he established yes and i could have been a famous rock and roll singer it's true it sounded like what he said but how would i have sounded uh oh we can but to avoid the mistakes of the past we must always be willing to put historical figures on trial i like that all right so here's what i want you to do i want you to be the jury here now i didn't necessarily see they really necessarily see what like what what is the what is the crime i guess committed so i guess we have to just kind of uh um arrange this in a way of uh just vladimir lenin as an analysis right what's your analysis of vladimir lenin based off of what you saw here the case that supported what he was doing and then the cases against uh what the means were that maybe vladimir lenin and his supporters took to to establish their goals and that sort of thing and if you want i guess bring in the if you want to look at it in hindsight because that's that's something i guess we're going to be doing is post len and that's hard to do a lot um uh if you're going to use that case but i guess we can decide whatever we want to do do we want to again talk about the effects of vladimir lenin or just talk about the the person themselves so in a way i guess you could put two different rulings on that but nevertheless i want to hear what you think so put down in the comments what do you think about this case versus vladimir lenin i'd love to read it and see what you have and uh with that i think this was a lot of fun if you'd like to see more of these because they have a few more of these like cases of history versus people let me know because i think it could be really fun and i'd love to interact with you all and give you all a chance to interact back and give your ideas hopefully in a positive uh meaningful way and make sure you're nice to each other down in the comments all right again video link is down below if you'd like to check this out uh you definitely should support the originals and with that we'll see you next time bye [Music] [Music]

Channel: Mr. Terry History

Views: 17,949

Keywords: react, history, lenin, ted ed

Id: 80XmcGuh5xo

Length: 17min 58sec (1078 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 16 2022