Rethinking the 100th Anniversary of the Russian Revolution - Nikolas Gvosdev

you [Music] good afternoon my name is Maya teri Lee and I'm a research fellow at F PRI and I manage the Eurasia program I am here to introduce our next speaker Nick positive dr. Kostov is a senior fellow with with FP r i0 Asia Program he's also professor of national security affairs holding the captain Jeremy levy chair in economic geography and national security at the US Naval War College in Newport Rhode Island he was formerly the editor of the national interest magazine and a senior fellow at the Nixon Center in Washington DC dr. Kostov received his doctorate from st. st. Anthony's College Oxford University where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar a frequent commentator on Russian and Eurasian affairs his work has appeared in such outlets as Foreign Affairs the Financial Times the Los Angeles Times and Orvis and he has appeared as commentator on CNN Fox News MSNBC National Public Radio and BBC so please join me in welcoming dr. Nick Vaz death [Applause] good afternoon everyone as my I mentioned my day job is with the US Naval War College and while I don't think the US Navy has any official position on how the Russian Revolution ought to be taught I will issue my standard disclaimer that my comments this afternoon on my own personal opinions and do not reflect any official position of the US Navy or the US government also happy for I have my email up if anyone after this presentation would like more information more material feel free to contact me I'll be happy to connect you with anything that I have that may help you in teaching this period of Russian and Eurasian history I was very useful to have Steven this morning set the overall frame and particularly his notion of Eurasia as an illiberal project the lands lying between Western civilization and sort of Chinese East Asian civilization and that this concept has an illiberal bent to it certainly the events the 20th century that we are commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the revolution helped to contribute to the illiberal strain that we see in the lands particularly that made up the former Soviet Union and then Michael's presentation very usefully brought us right up to the modern era right up to the point of the collapse of the great empires so I'm going to pick up the narrative from him with looking at what will happen what happened in 1917 it's important though as we go through this and I think that you may have seen this when you teach this period to students and others is that there can be a very deterministic view when we one looks at the Russian Revolution of 1917 but it had to happen this way that the rise of the Soviets was preordained and more important than we often telescope the events that happened during this period so that the person on the street often thinks that Vladimir Lenin is the one who overthrew the Tsar right that the revolution is just compacted down to basically one event the fall of the monarchy and the rise of the Soviets are kind of brought together and which loses out the fact that the rush revolution and in fact we calling it the revolution disguises the fact that there's a series of very disjointed events that happen between the fall of 1916 and the winter of 1917 1918 followed by a three three and a half year civil war within the territories of the former Russian Empire between multiple sides that ultimately leads to the Soviet victory and the creation of the Soviet Union and so it's important for us not to read back into the events of the time a sense that this was pre-ordained of course Soviet propaganda Soviet historiography wanted to make it seem like it this was the only way it could have turned out and you know Lenin arriving at the Finland station when he returns from exile as that well there was no way it could have ended other than with a Soviet victory and with most of the territory of the old Russian Empire brought together under Soviet control we also tend to read the future back into the past this is one of my favorite examples of Soviet photoshoping techniques because the Soviets pioneered of this in a pre-internet age so this is a photograph of some of the demonstrations that are taking place in February of 1917 and then the Soviets went back and took blanket banners and commercial signs and then impose with slogans that they wanted people in February of 1917 to be espousing even though that necessarily wasn't what they were espousing they wanted to take their vision of what should have happened and make it so by in this case changing historical artifacts in order to produce this tableau of course the Soviets have a long history of in changing inconvenient historical facts whenever possible you know so that you look at some of the early revolutionary cohorts nicely packed photo and then later version as Lenin potted plant potted plant minor figure potted plant and people are removed but that is also a tendency now we look back and we say well again this is the only way things could have unfolded because that's the narrative that we choose to to bring forward something that's also very interesting about reading the future back into the past is how the Russian government today is dealing with the hundredth anniversary of these events of 1917 and the Russian government essentially is downplaying them because there are so many different versions of heroes and villains of the events of 1916 1917 that if you try to put forward a narrative of well here were the good guys and here were the bad guys you create problems in modern Russian politics because Vladimir Putin has created in essence an unstable synthesis of Imperial and Soviet images and tendencies and it's kind of trying to blend them together and can use certain things World War two as a unifying figure the great war against Napoleon of 1812 as a unifying thing 1917 though is a very divisive point not only in Russia but also in other former Soviet republics now independent states because they have to grapple with the legacy of what this means and whether you're in Ukraine or Belarus or Central Asia or Georgia or Armenia you will find that there are different readings of who are the heroes and villains of 1917 based upon the outcomes that you would have liked to have seen happen or that did actually occur so what I propose to do is the title that I created for this presentation is I want to go back and look at the events of 1917 as they unfold through the eyes of four people for historical figures contemporaneous and looking at how they are assessing what is happening in the russian empire on the eve of the revolutionary period and then as the revolution breaks out so the first the first prophet is to Grigory Yefimovich about sports in we often refer to him and as a rasp uten won't keep going back and forth between Russian and English pronunciations so since we know I'm in the West is Rasputin I'll stick with that peasant mystic advisor to the imperial family played a very critical role in the politics of the late russian empire in some cases unintentionally as we're going to see but the first of the prophets that i am putting forward second prophet of course of LEDs email enough better known under his revolutionary nom de guerre yin yin lenin as we anglicize it so our two prophets the assassin someone not as well known in the west would Zema to put ask image a reactionary russian politician one of the organizers of the so-called black hundreds usually described in now as essentially europe's first real fascist politician that he was the first to begin articulating many of the political ideas that would ultimately flower in europe in the mid 20th century he's a precursor of that he was in essence the one of the main organizers of the plot to assassinate successfully assassinate Rasputin's a member of the duma and then finally the renegade also someone usually not as well known in western circles sergei Mislav ski who are we now under his revolutionary name that he adopted mr. Slav ski a member of the Russian officer Corps came from a line of Russian officers but broke with his class and his caste to become one of the early leaders of the social Revolutionary Party in Russia is not one of these later officers who then joined the Bolsheviks I think some people are familiar with that phenomenon of and Steven mentioned it this morning of the Bolsheviks have put the Russian Empire back together so we were servants of the Empire now we'll become servants of the Soviet state he was someone who in fact was a true revolution at Rue believer not a Bolshevik not a Menshevik not a Marxist revolutionary but the social revolutionary movement the agrarian socialists in Russia who panned a very unfortunately not very well-known in the West a very interesting memoir five days it's called he picks five critical points in 1917 and chronicles what happens as the revolution unfolds so he's my fourth person to observe through this and I titled him the renegade and you'll see why as the narrative continues so these are the people this is my sort of scene setter for us and now to proceed to our conversation I want to start with the first of the prophecies and actually go with my second prophet with Lenin so Lenin as January 1917 unfolds is in exile in Switzerland he has been it's not safe for him to be obviously in the Russian Empire but unlike previous periods of exile where Lenin had found refuge in London he is now persona non grata in any of the Allied countries because in 1914 he was agitating for an Allied defeat in the First World War he believed that an Allied victory would be bad for the cause of revolution and therefore he wanted to see the Allies defeated in that in that war in order to provoke revolutionary uprisings in Russia and elsewhere in Europe so he is not welcome in England or France or any of the other allied countries he had spent time in exile in London before he had a period of exile where he spent time in the British Museum like Karl Marx before him doing research and writing but after the war breaks out he will not be welcome in any any allied country and that's an important factor to keep in mind as we see how events turn out he is by this point a somewhat marginal figure in Russian politics because he's out of Russia he's not on the ground the Bolshevik Party ostensibly in Russia is responsive to him but he it's difficult for him to communicate with them they have adopted as well as all of the other socialist parties in Russia a kind of were war and while the war is on we will we're not necessary going to give our full-fledged support to the government but we're not going to be involved in any active revolutionary uprisings against it this was also based on an assessment that Imperial Germany was a bigger threat that as much as the Allies might be booze waka capitalists the Kaiser was a worse threat and therefore for the sake of the future of Russia and of revolution in Russia a German victory might not be something advisable so Lenin is is in Switzerland he's cut off he's asked in January of 1917 by the Swiss comrades if he will give a address to on the 12th anniversary of Bloody Sunday so the 1905 workers protest in st. Petersburg which security forces loyal to the Czar had fired up upon in which helped to provoke the unrest and uprisings across the empire that we know is the revolution of 1905 so Lenin comes to give an address to the Swiss comrades and he lays out on the one hand he's you know he has his ultimate faith that ultimately the revolution will triumph he says that you know this war as it continues is going to lead to further unrest it shows the corruption of the existing system but if you read between the lines of that address it's essentially an admission of failure it said yes we had these revolutionary uprisings in 1905 1906 but the Tsar a system still has life in it it was able to recover Michel noted in his talk previous to lunch that in nineteen after 1905 Russia gets its first constitution there's a limited land reform largely the imperial family gives up millions of acres of land to be redistributed across the Russian Empire so there's a partial accommodation of the land hunger of the of the peasant farmers not enough as we're going to see but at least a start to to land reform the Russian economy does recover after 1905 you have a period of about seven years of growth prior to the start of the war and so when in say yes you know the war is going on it's terrible you know the workers will rise and then he ends this address in Switzerland where he says but we have the older generation will not live to see the decisive battles of the upcoming revolution the approaching revolution we're not going to be around to see it ironic given that a little more than a year later Lenin will be walking through the gates of the Kremlin to inspect buildings in the Kremlin for use by the Soviet government where the Soviet government will establish its offices inside the Kremlin so this is a case where Lenin the Prophet is wrong he looks forward and does not immediately see that there is a revolutionary situation that will bring him and his party to power there may be uprisings there may be unrest but he sees this as a long-term process that will take many decades and he doesn't assume that he necessarily will be around when the final revolution happens about four weeks prior to Lenin giving this address our friend Rasputin pens supposedly pens what's known as his last will and testament this is a contested document because the version that we have now can only be dated to the early 1920s in the writings of Rasputin secretary Semenova CH and so some people say it's a spurious document we do have contemporaneous letters but Rasputin's writing in 1916 though indicating that he does think he's going to die and he's going to die relatively soon and that an apocalypse is about to break out over Russia but I do want to stick to the last will and testament because even if it turns out that it wasn't the actual document he wrote it so tied up with his legend that it's too good of a story to to leave behind so let Rasputin writes this last will and testament he sends some communication to Tsar Nicholas and to Empress Alexandra as well which has not survived was not found among their papers with the belief that it was burned or destroyed after it was received but the document that Summa Norwich records is very interesting recipe and it writes and he says I don't think I'm going to survive to 1917 I will I will leave life before the 1st of January 1917 by the way just a note on dates I'm because Russia doesn't shift to the new calendar until 1918 I'm still operating with the old calendar so all my dates are the old not going to convert it to the dates in Europe so he says before you know so I would be January 14th 1917 in January first in Russia would be January 14th in the West so he says by January 1st meaning our perspective January 14th I'm not going to be alive then he says well I'm going to be murdered and if I say she's writing in this testimony he was writing to Nikolas so he says to Nikolas is if I'm killed by ordinary people and especially if I'm killed by peasants the assassins who kill me are over the peasantry you have no worries you will survive your son will sit upon your throne your dynasty will endure if I'm killed by people of the noble class the nobility are involved in the shedding of my blood he says they will not be able to wash my blood off their hands and there will be a terrible civil war Nobles will be Russians will kill Russians Nobles will be exiled there will be no Nobles left in the land of Russia then he says to the sorry says if you hear the bell which tells you that Gregory has been killed and if a member of your family is complicit in my death then I tell you this within two years you will lose both your throne and your life so if I'm killed and any member of the imperial family has been involved in my death it's the oh you're the dynasty is over you will die your family will die and the monarchy will be overthrown even if we think that Simon ovitch in the 20s is embellishing this in this version then he says and then for 75 years there will be the rule of Antichrist over Russia so from 1917 through to 1992 the Antichrist will rule so even if semen ovitch is riding a knight is forging this in 1923 he at least got something right for how long the Soviet Union will last and as I said there were other extant letters that Rasputin is writing during this time saying the apocalypse is about to break over Russia so it's interesting to compare Lenin from Switzerland looks and says the zora system is under stressed but it's gonna last for awhile Rasputin is saying we're on the verge of of collapse of course he is going to be murdered he's murdered on the 30th of December put asked avek is one of his murderers but the other two that are critical for our story Prince Felix Yusupov who is related to the imperial family is married to a Romanov and then Grand Duke Dmitry who is Nicholas the second nephew so those elements of the prophecy are connected that in fact there are members of the imperial family that are implicit in the death of Rasputin so Rasputin's is looking at what's happening and saying we're on the verge of something disastrous happening to Russia and coincidentally put a sceva CH who is one of rasputin's assassin agrees with that assessment so when we think about the start of the Russian Revolution it's actually from the conservative side of the Russian political establishment that is takes the first steps to head off what they see as the impending crisis because by 1916 Russia is in Russian empires in a state of collapse and when we we throw these terms around today we say oh well you know like Russia under sanctions has had a couple percentage points drop in GDP and you know Ukraine after the Maidan and seizure of Crimea and the dawn bas has seen 10% or so contraction and we think of these as major changing events by 1916 the Russian infrastructure breaking down so that they can't get food and fuel reliably into the cities it's not a question of a little bit of hardship today we're you know in Moscow I can't get mozzarella from Italy and suddenly all the mozzarella and Moscow's from San Marino because it's not part of the EU and there's a implicit deal between the Russians and the Italians that sanctions and counter sanctions no I'm not notwithstanding that you know you have products coming in from Europe that aren't EU members of San Marino or Andorra or other places it's not just a matter of some hardships and we're talking about collapse the Germans and the Turks have effectively blockaded Russia's Baltic and Black Sea ports so there's no imports coming in and Stephan talked this morning about you know Russia's dependence historically on imports of technology from the West Machinery goods and services none of that is coming in the rail system is breaking down the casualties of the war up to this point some more than a million Russian Imperial soldiers have already been killed in the matter of World War one so you have massive losses you have the pressures that conscription is now beginning to bear all of your patriotic idealistic officers and enlisted that were gung-ho in 1914 to fight the war are dead and now you have people saying where is this going there's discontent there on top of that you have a government in Russia that is no longer the technocrats who saved the Empire after the Revolution of 1905 so when you look at what happens in Russian history after 1905 1906 Nicholas very reluctantly extremely reluctantly turns to a series of technocratic effective government ministers count vit a purist eben and others who say we are gonna have to we're gonna have to have reforms we're gonna have to do things differently Nicholas hates it he sees it as an infringement on his autocratic powers he tries to claw back some of that and then we enter Rasputin enters the picture so Rasputin effectively gets introduced to the royal family after the Revolution of 1905 1906 after the birth of the czars son Alexis who I think as everyone knows because of the genes passed on from Queen Victoria as a hemophiliac at this point we don't have treatments for hemophilia so the risk of the hemophiliac is that you bleed to death if you get cut or something happens to you Rasputin is introduced as part of the circle around the imperial court that is very interested in faith healing he's presented as someone who can not necessarily cure hemophilia but can prevent the effects from killing but savage becomes very close to particularly then to Empress Alexandra also feeds into this Nicholas's perception of well you know the real rusher of the peasants right these bureaucrats and people in st. Petersburg who want reforms they're not the real Russian against even talked about that this morning of you know westernizing class at the top and Rasputin really represents the purity of the peasant masses that love their autocratic czar that see him as the little father and so Rasputin gets introduced into this circle what happens is that you have both in church and state people who look and say who is this guy how come he has so much influence and they're worried about that influence so you have a reform movement in the Orthodox Church which is going to be stillborn in part because you have people in the church who questioned Rasputin's religious credentials he's a faker he's a charlatan he's not really a mystic his power is everyone admit he had tremendous hypnotic power tremendous influence but you know the some in the church were saying that's demonic it wasn't from True Religion I mean you have ministers saying how why is this guy have access to the imperial family it's negative we have to get rid of him now what you see after 1912 because this is the year that said eh Alexis almost dies he has an incident at the Imperial hunting lodge and Spalla in Poland and essentially almost dies and Rasputin is the last person to come in and and from that point onward Alexander believes that the fate of her son rests in his hands that he will not survive without Rasputin so when people come and say he has to be banished he has to be removed from the court mutant said well this is a danger to me obviously if you have ministers and bishops and others saying get rid of this guy so he begins to react in political self-defense which is if there's a minister who's trying to get rid of me all appeal to my imperial patrons and get the minister replaced so by 1916 you have it what people are referring to you have the Imperial government and then the procurator of the Church and other officials and they use this analogy of the people at the trembling hands right these these non entities because for Rasputin's purposes nonentities aren't a threat to him non entities are not going to come to him saying you know he needs to be banished from the imperial court the trembling hands motif of course shows up again in the 1991 coup against Gorbachev that that is the producers at tell at the state TV that don't can't officially go against the coup for the 72 hours one of the things they do is to focus in the press conference and the trembling hands of the coup leaders so there's an image in Russian history of you know ineffective leadership at the top and so by 1916 people are saying we have this ineffective leadership Nikolas has gone on a somewhat messianic rollies he had by this point is dismissed his cousin the Grand Duke a very effective commander-in-chief has taken over personal command of the army Alexandre effectively is running politics back in st. Petersburg as the regent of course she's a German by birth and so now you have people saying we have this German princess as the Empress and is she really loyal to Russia so people like pootis kovitch are looking at and they're saying look russia is going down the tubes the Russian government is going to collapse at the rate it's going so the first strike actually comes from the conservative side so put a scare in the Duma and others begin talking about we need a change and this of course is a classic Russian political move the coup plenty of times in Russian Imperial history where you get rid of the Tsar Catherine does it after the death of Peter the Great when they want to put Peter the second nope we need her as an experienced hand Empress Elizabeth Catherine the Great herself Emperor Alexander all came to power as a result of a coup now there's a sense that a coup against the Tsar himself in wartime may be very difficult to pull off so the thinking is if we eliminate Rasputin as a factor in Russian politics and eliminate him physically eliminate him not banish him somewhere but he's dead one of two things will happen either this spell that he's exerting ickis will wake up right it'll be I'll wake up and I was under the spell of this peasant mystic and now I can think clearly and you'll see decisive leadership or Nicholas and Alexandra will be so overcome by the death of Rasputin that they'll step aside they'll bring the Grand Duke Nicholas back or though they'll step back from government and they will allow competent ministers to return to control and so the decision put asked Evek gets in touch with your soup off than others and says we need to figure out a way to eliminate Rasputin and this is seen as a prelude to some degree of a coup there is some evidence also at the British and French ambassador's looking at kind of Russia's performance in the war or beginning to think this is not a reliable allit we need to change so rest Putin is killed won't go into great details again part of his legend the sense that he can't be killed he's shot doesn't seem to work he's poisoned doesn't seem to take effect he's stabbed doesn't seem good you know he's wrapped up in a carpet and again the carpet wrapped up and he shoved into the river and supposedly has freed himself in his swimming and finally drowns because you know in the sense that he was you know unstoppable I mean the fact that the cyanide they used was probably expired that the guys were drunk that were shooting at him and probably missed a number of time but the legend of course was that he was he was almost indestructible so he dies his body has found several days later they start the investigation and of course none of the expected things happen so Nicholas and Alexander both going to very fatalistic okay he's dead he said he was going to die apocalypse is about to break so you have that there's also a sense to of Nicholas's growing impotence that this murder has occurred and he can dispatch Grand Duke Dimitri says okay you have to go to the Persian front ironically that saves his life when the revolution happens because he's now outside of Russia you soup off is banished in one of his estates in central Russia where he begins to also gather up his goods and you know particularly as moveables so that when the second revolution breaks out he's able to get out put his cabbage is supposed to be sent somewhere but ultimately they don't get around to it and you have the phenomenon of a member of the Duma who's committed this famous murder walking free the streets of st. Petersburg and that again sends a message of the growing impotence of the imperial government if you can't detain murderers and you can't feed people and the system is breaking down there must really be a crisis February of 1917 you started to hit the breaking point and just like the the start of the Arab Spring in Tunisia and December of 2010 its unravel it's something you don't think of that sparks the revolution it's it's a protest women workers because of course just as happened in in World War two more men being conscripted to the front you need to fill those jobs so more women are coming into the work force but there's no food there's no fuel so you start you're starting to have protests marches you know we need to be fed the prices are too high so you have one of these protests timed with International Women's Day as it occurs on the Western calendar occurs and the imperial government in st. Petersburg doesn't know exactly how to deal with this protest so the usual response of course is send out the Cossacks send out the guards problem is is that by 1917 these aren't your well trained fanatically dedicated servants of the Czar that they were three years ago these are your second and third rate conscripts many of them who don't want to be in the military have grievances themselves and so you get the worst of all possible responses which is a half-hearted attempt at repression so some people are shot there's some struggles but it's not enough to crush these protests but it's enough to get people angry and so you have essentially a leaderless revolution breaking out in February of 1917 and so bringing in our fourth figure mister Slav ski who is chronicling all of this mr. Slav ski is against social revolutionary at this point the socialist parties had agreed to a certain ceasefire with the government there had been after 1916 the creation of what were called industrial committees which was how can we keep factories working for war production so owners and workers representatives and you had these movements there and mr. Sawatzky says you know he has this great turn of phrase where he says you know the revolution caught us the revolutionary leaders asleep like the foolish maidens of the Gospel story in other words these disturbances start to break out and we are completely unprepared for it no none of the revolutionary parties were agitating there was no expectation but what begins to happen is the imperial government in st. petersburg starts to collapse so our trembling hands friends don't know what to do military units start to desert they start to either in some cases execute officers or their officers come over with them and say we share these grievances they take control and then of course what happens is these disturbances in st. Petersburg and you can chart how it spreads out it spreads out over the rail and telegraph lines so you start to have collapse of authority in st. Petersburg and then the word begins to spread along the rail and telegraph lines and then in other cities and towns and Garrison's people say oh this has happened in st. Petersburg so you have more operating spontaneous uprisings taking place the Conservatives the monarchists believe that actually they they're the first ones to try to use these disturbances for their benefit because they use them to go to Nikolas at the army command at Stavka in Pskov and say you have to abdicate all right the country is breaking down you have to give up power you can't stay in power there's no you know the soldiers are deserting we don't have reliable military or security forces so you have to abdicate this is one of these first of the what ifs because the military officers who come to Nikolas with a proposal for his abdication or assuming that Nikolas will abdicate in favor of his underage son Alexis Alexis still has a degree of popularity he was seen as a unifying figure the thinking is is well we'll have this Regency but of course we will form an effective governor right the twelve-year-old is not going to be running Russia so you'll need an effective government of military and of technocrats and they'll take power in the name of the of the heir Nicholas says no I'm not going to give because he realizes that if he abdicates he and alexandra will be separated from alexis right there's no way that having abdicated that they'll still be allowed to be parents to their to their son so Nikolas says no I'm not going I'll abdicate but I'm not gonna abdicate in favor of my son I'm an abdicate in favor of my younger brother Michael and some of the plotters and this say let's Michael just isn't gonna resonate with people there's no he has he's not charismatic he's not a figure Michael you but Nicholas says nope that's all abdicate in favor of Michael they proclaim michael has no impact then because people say well Michael why should we rein in favor of Michael and Michael to his credit when they come to him with the abdication of his brother says I will not take the throne unless I'm offered it by a Constituent Assembly of the Russian people I won't and kind of harkens back to the original Romanov dynasty in 1613 which was the throne was offered to Michael Michael Romanoff by an assembly and some ii michael says you know i'm gonna follow that precedent so bizarre advocates now you don't have and there's no successor in st. petersburg mr. slansky notes us and it's kind of like that french revolutionary figure who said you know the people i have to the people are out running i have to go find where they're going in order to lead them and that's a similar thing that's happening in st. petersburg so the liberals the liberal factions the socialist factions are trying to figure out how can they get a government and how can they control what is going to be happening in russia in the empire and here we run up against several other interesting russian political features and one of them is the continuing divide in russian politics between people who understand power and people who are intellectuals because for a lot of the Socialists in February of 1917 they're saying it's too early we can't have a socialist revolution Russia hasn't gone through a phase of late capitalist development bourgeois democracy we can't take power it's too early for us it's too early for a socialist government so we don't want power all right we need that we need the blue jersey to take power for a while and then later on we'll we'll transition to a true socialist government so you'll have a reluctance there and you have in the Duma of the elected parliament leaders trying to organize a provisional government except they have no real way to we A's with the workers and and particularly the military units so someone like mr. slovsky's becomes very important because of his former military background of how can we connect with the various units can we connect with these factory representatives and so the decision is well we're gonna use the duma to form a provisional government which will hold power until such time as a Constituent Assembly meets but will also organize going back to the 1905 revolution will organize a Soviet a council so every factory in st. Petersburg and every military unit in st. Petersburg will send a representative to the Soviet will ask for all throughout Russia every community should organize their own Soviet the st. Petersburg one will kind of act as the Soviet for all of the Soviets and then from time to time we'll have a Congress of Soviets that will meet and the provisional government says fine Duma was meeting in one of the palaces known as the tavernita palace and the duma says fine we'll give you one of the wings of that palace for the soviet and so you have mr. Slav ski with this great turn of phrase he says so you have the provisional government it says it's the Russia of the ruling classes which has lost power but doesn't know it and then you have the Soviet which is the Russia of the toiling classes which has power and doesn't know it coexisting under the same and you you try then to forge some degree of a working government between these two two groups and the thinking is as well thus most of the socialist parties say well we will continue to support the provisional government as long as it begins reforms Constituent Assembly and so on all right now we come back to Lenin Lenin is sitting in Switzerland and you know three weeks after he says I'm not going to live to see the decisive battles of the forthcoming revolution the Tsar is out of power in Russia and now it's how do I get to Russia well the problem is is as a enemy alien I'm sorry is a undesirable alien there's no way that he can get passage through France or Italy out of Switzerland the Allied powers are not going to allow someone who is an avowed enemy of the Allies to traverse their territory no airplanes of course at this time so only one way out and that's to Germany German generals staff is looking what's happening in Russia and German intelligence which has been monitoring infiltrating different Russian revolutionary movements German intelligence had established a link by way to Rasputin as well very interesting side story of German German intelligences ability to try to penetrate and understand what's happening inside of Russian using whatever they can to weaken Russia as a posed a tin the war well the Germans make a fateful decision not unlike the fateful decision I think that you see in Israel in the 1980s when it came to Hamas and the PLO which is yeah there's this extremist guy in Switzerland well let's let's introduce him into Russia because you know he'll do more damage there but we don't think there's any long-term threat to Germany by having this guy come back to Russia so the German German emissaries contact Lenin and essentially offer him safe passage they'll give him with the famous sealed train that he can traverse German territory and be delivered to neutral Sweden and then from Sweden he can slip across the border into Finland and from Finland to to return to Russia proper and so that occurs and Lenin arrives and Lenin initially there's this as we see from some of the paintings those are authentic he comes back he's greeted as you know prophet is a revolutionary leader but then you get people saying well you know the Germans helped you are you in the pay of the Germans and the like and he also comes back and he was shaking up he says you know this is this is a really bad idea that socialist parties are cooperating with the provisional government and this is an important factors that Lenin well he's a theoretician and a student of Marx is not ideologically as bound to Marx the way others are and he says we don't need to wait for Russia to go through a developed phase of capitalism if we can take power now we should take power and so he comes in and begins to swing the local bolt because at this point the Bolsheviks are cooperating with the provisional government he starts moving through and making the case now we should move into open revolution against the provisional government forget this sharing of power this dual power arrangement we have the Soviet should seize power on its own the provisional government of course is working through its you know it's got many different factions liberal factions Democratic factions different socialist factions and the like and it's trying to on the one hand establish order it makes the fateful decision of continuing to prosecute the war which some people now feel was a major mistake that if they had kind of said we're out of the war just do an armistice with the Germans so that we have time to to consolidate the other problem is that the Duma had a inordinate amount of lawyers because Russia had a very well-developed legal system and tradition of law and these lawyers and particularly a lot of Russian lawyers had been influenced by the writings of godunov skee who is a 19th century conservative liberal so they're very big about proper procedure and so they're saying things like you know the peasants are saying we'd like to be able to take land now right we will want land and people are saying we want to see things transferred in the Duma says we have to wait we can't do anything until there's a Constituent Assembly and we have to draw up a constitution and we have to draw up the proper laws so just keep waiting and we're not we're not prepared to hold elections yet and they keep putting off the date of the when the elections are gonna be held and then they say nothing can happen until the elections and then the Constituent Assembly will meet and then everything will be resolved so there's a lot of pent-up frustration with the provisional government as long as most of the socialist parties are still supporting the provisional government and by the summer we have the ascendancy of the Socialists in the provisional government led by Alexander Kerensky the who was the Minister of Justice in the first provisional government becomes the prime minute during the second provisional government of we're going to you know hold the line prepare the ground for the Constituent Assembly Lenin comes out and says forget that can forget waiting for this peasant should have land now peace now power to the Soviet now and again Lenin's ability to recognize that people weren't going to wait for long complicated treatises and legal procedures that there were pent up demands and his vision was let's just appeal to those demands get people swung over in July of 1917 Lenin decides to see whether or not you can test the strength of the provisional government and so the Communists the Bolsheviks make their first attempt to try to take power it is beaten back it is beaten back by what remains of the army but also the other socialist parties turn against Lenin on this he has to flee into hiding and Swettenham Finland but it also reveals a great deal of division within the provisional government there's now different forces pulling at people and particularly among the Socialists because and Michael mentioned this with regard to the Armenians is you have a number of the socialist leaders are now being torn between do you want reform for the Russian Empire and to move the Russian Empire towards a more liberal Republic or is it time for the Russian Empire to start segmenting into its constituent parts so Baltic polish ukrainian georgian armenian leaders in saint-petersburg socialist leaders are now feeling the push and pull between the all russia empire we want to reform and kind of keep the empire together or is it time for our parts of the empire to break off and be there our own sense and there is also the sense - of who are these leaders and so mr. slansky in his memoirs records he was actually the the leader of the delegation that went to secure Nicholas the deposed Nicholas and Alexandra when they were arrested and held under palace arrest at the Alexandra Palace and this is one reason why I term him the renegade he goes and the count Beckendorf who is the former chief of the imperial court knows him knows his family and when he comes to arrest bazar and empress and he describes us in his memoirs and he's in the leather jacket and you know kind of revolutionary attire and Beckendorf says you know if only if your father could only see you what a disgrace and then he says why are you with these people why are you with these skeins and it says and ish varies why are you with them they're not you know and it's an early appeal to you know they're not Russians ethnic Russians why are you with them mr. Slovak II says you know this is the revolution we're gonna move forward we're gonna make a new Russia but you're starting to see those tensions build up as well which is Russian Empire Imperial identity Eurasian identity or is it time for different pieces of this Empire to break apart and for people to to do that alright so you have Lenin first attempt fails then in August the Conservatives put asked avek you now get this wing of the right so the former monarchists very few partisans by that by this time of Nicolas right almost no one wants and back they all blame him for what has happened so even people that were monarchists we're not agitating for his restoration so monarchists conservative liberals and a faction within the army says this this disorder can't continue and so they persuade only Russians they persuade they they find an inherent in the commander-in-chief of the of the Russian army General Kornilov Lava Kornilov that essentially in order to save the Russian state there has to be a military coup you have to basically stop fighting the Germans for a while turn units around march on Petrograd because of course st. Petersburg was a German name you find Germany so Petrograd nice and Slavic march on Petrograd dispersed the provisional government set up a military dictatorship and stabilized the situation so korniloff and kornilov is not a monarchist Kornilov was had detained Alexandra right after the February Revolution happened he was in charge of the military detachment that secured secured the the Empress so he was not someone who was a bleeding bleeding heart monarchist in fact you had this group within the russian army of a group of officers who had risen on the basis of merit who were law and order but not necessarily died in the world monarchists they would be happy just to have a strong state that was their big lodestone and so Kornilov begins to move to disperse the provisional government soviet historians always assert that Kerensky was in on this that he was the he was instigating this in order to disperse the Bolshevik so if that was his plan than what he actually did was counterproductive because he releases the Bolshevik leaders from jail he allows them to rearm the Red Guards he says I need you to help me fend off this coup against that's coming against me they get the railway workers to cut the rail lines so that Kornilov s-- forces can't get to Petrograd so the korniloff coup fades put a skivvy to plays a role on this man with a bunch of lives still never jailed for anything has not been jailed for Rasputin's murder has not been jailed for his instigation potential instigation of a coup against the provisional government but there's the sense now that Kerensky well we thought he might be someone on this as you get this from the army in particular maybe this guy was going to be someone who was going to be a law-and-order person but he's not he's just another socialist agitator like the rest and so Kerensky begins to lose his base of support lenin comes back from Finland the Red Guards are now armed Kerensky says okay a crisis is over turn your weapons back in and the Red Guards nope we're not we're not surrendering our weapons we're gonna maintain our separate military units provisional government is breaking down the non socialist parties are leaving there's a great deal of discontent on what we might see is the conservative side of the spectrum that you know this is becoming a lawless country Lenin still has opposition there are still members of Lenin's own inner circle that don't believe and of course this is something that will be used against them in Stalin's purges in the 30s and all of you have come enough and others that they were insufficiently revolutionary Lenin in September and early October saying this is now the time we need to push for power disperse the provisional government and he again comes up with one of his critical phrases history does not forgive revolutionaries who procrastinate if we can seize power let's do it so at the end of October prior they're going to be convening the Congress of Soviets so all of the Soviets of Russia will be sending delegates to st. Petersburg or to Petrograd and Lenin's view is let's present the Congress with a fait accompli when the delegates arrive we will say the provisional government has been dispersed and we will now create a Soviet government they begin the uprising in Petrograd surprise-surprise Kerensky's on the phone military I need help military is like well what's left of it is you didn't want our help in August when we were prepared to disperse these movements we're not going to help you now other than the famed women's battalion the woman's death battalion in the as it was known in the Winter Palace is pretty much the only unit that continues to defend the provisional government and again we have the trembling hands phenomenon at the end of ministers doodling on pads until again the palace was not stormed it's later Bolshevik moviemaking we have this image of people running across it was essentially people walked in the woman's death battalion said are you coming you know all right we're we're not going to fight we're gonna just disperse and they arrest the ministers of the provisional government finally put a scare that ends up in jail for his you know but he will be released because he has friends among the Bolsheviks who admire him for having killed Rasputin's so Bolsheviks take power and st. Petersburg and then what begins to happen is this three four five way struggle over the next couple of years other socialists some are brought into the Soviet government the left social revolutionaries form a coalition that helps to disperse that it's not just the Bolsheviks taking power so they find these useful allies and some of the other socialist movements that help them some movements other socialist movements decide that they will fight the remnants of the monarchists and then of course the National movements so you have by the end of 1917 the takeover of power by the Bolsheviks in st. Petersburg is the mechanism by which now other parts of the Russian Empire declare independence Ukraine Georgia Finland Poland once the provisional government is dispersed they say there's been a legal takeover of power in st. Petersburg we now declare formal independence and try to create their own States and then of course in these parts of the Russian Empire you'll end up with three four-way conflicts between local socialists conservatives particularly in Ukraine anarchists and then pro-soviet Bolshevik forces competing for power the Bolsheviks testimony to Lenin you like him don't like him you have to give him credit for being an organizer and understanding the uses of power and understand the uses of terror organizing an elite force crushing opposition and being able to reconstruct the old Empire as much as he could bit by bit putting it back together so that by 1921 pretty much all of the exception of Poland Finland and some parts of Western Belarus and Ukraine and Moldova are back under the rule of a single entity but this time happening to be a red one not a white one and so you end up with the Soviets in power we just they just conclude because this has come up now the uses of history so people today say well look at Russia today a hundred years could you have another revolution there's always black swans something could happen but when you compare what happened 200 years ago to what you happen today you don't have the economic collapse you have discontent you have nothing near the economic collapse that you had a hundred years ago like it or don't like it you do have competent people running the government today these are not the nonentities Rasputin appointees who don't know or are not willing to to make decisive moves and finally one of the impacts of the revolution is in particularly in Russia and the way that the Russian media has covered revolutions in other parts of the former Soviet Union over the last 20 years a lot of people are very skittish now of I may not like what I have now people didn't like what they had in 1917 either look what they got they got things a lot worse and that's a very powerful force in contemporary Russian politics of people saying I may not like things today I certainly didn't like what happened after the fall of the Soviet Union and so maybe I shouldn't risk we shouldn't risk what we have to pursue a revolutionary change that may end up a lot worse and I think that's ultimately the real lesson of the hundredth anniversary that the Russian government current Russian government has been sending out which is you know revolutionary feeling may be fine look at what revolutions bring you and what you get from them which is usually not something good so stick with the status quo rather than then take the change all right so I think we got some time for some questions [Applause] Paul Bo from Norwood high school and Silver Spring Maryland I was wondering if you could sort of elaborate on the process that the Bolsheviks used to spread power out from Petrograd after they had seized power from there one of the things that the Bolsheviks were very good on this again is Lenin's tactical genius understanding the importance of the Vanguard party understanding the importance of a tightly connected discipline party elite so when the Bolsheviks power in Petrograd and having seen how the first revolution in February had spread of course one of the first indeed was take control of the Telegraph exchange so that they could control information coming in and out and then the second thing was the tactical alliance with the railway workers unions to make sure that they could move on the railways and that their opponents could not that they could then say block you know if there's troops coming in block them from from doing that so after the seizure in Petrograd the word went out to cadres do the same thing in other cities Moscow was in fact not a bloodless takeover it was several weeks of communist Bolshevik forces attempting to take power the army fighting back the Kremlin was damaged with Kremlin was shelled by pro-soviet forces to try to dislodge the the forces still loyal to the Constituent Assembly in some parts of Russia what happened was the Bolsheviks essentially came in and said look Soviet government will take over you particularly other socialists don't worry we'll broaden it out you know we're it's not just gonna be us we're gonna bring you in so don't oppose it and then in some places with the Soviets the Bolsheviks were very good at is is saying you know this is a Hobson's choice for you go with us or run the risk of reaction and particularly for the peasant you know until Stalin's collectivization the Bolshevik message was always take the land will ratify it and you know until Stalin said you know I'm gonna take plant away from you by which point so that that's spread out it ran into problems obviously in one of the first areas that ran into serious problem was in Ukraine because what happened after the fall of the provisional government in Ukraine was first the Ukrainian socialists took power as a ukrainian state and then the germans installed they led a conservative reaction with hetman Skoda pod ski so that was an attempt to try to blunt the the takeover the Baltic states by this point kind of were in play Finland was also moving out and then the real battles then for the Bolsheviks beyond that was they were able to take power in Moscow southern Russia they did not and then in Siberia and there what they did was to essentially rely on the fact that the anti-communist movements could never coalesce into a single unified entity so they played movements off against each other so that they could say well you know this is everyone is anti Soviet but you know that group wants the Czar back and this group wants socialism and this group is Buju aa democratic and so they were very good at playing that off and also again making Lenin had no problem making tactical deals so the creation of the Far Eastern Republic has kind of a non Soviet Russian entity in the Far East which allowed for elements of the old Constituent Assembly and of the provisional government to regroup for a while you know the Soviets were prepared to you may let it survive for a couple of years so as long as it was you know don't bother us what we're doing here we'll let you run your own affairs and the Maritime Provinces to the east so a lot of divide and rule but also the Bolsheviks were just more - they had a disciplined cadre they'd built up a party organization and they did that finally the appeal to Russian nationalism that particularly to the army officers right you don't like us for our so and our atheism but you like a powerful state and also cultivating this idea that you had in the 20s right of what was known as the radish right we may be red on the outside but slice us and we'll be white on the inside so the appeal to enough members of the old Imperial military that the best bet for you moving forward was to line up with the with the Soviets so all of those were factors you use the work just now illiberal and at the beginning of your talk and I'm a little bothered by the word because it seems to be assigned as if it's a political Dogma or a political teaching and you suggest that the Bolsheviks had in a liberal view which fair enough but isn't Lenin's organization really fitting in with an a liberal political culture which makes me much less inclined to use it as a negative term that is if you have in Eurasia people who are inclined to a certain kind of regime then attributing liberalism to an ideology or to a person doesn't seem to be really understanding the problem correctly and I use it primarily just as a descriptor right that these are movements and so when you look even at the anti Soviet movements and some people argue what you now have in Russia today is a hundred years later the whites of one because much of what characterizes the ideology of the Putin regime is what most of the white thinkers we're thinking right which is you're not looking at Western individualism you're looking at the primacy of a collective you're looking at the primacy of traditional values and the like and you're looking at a leadership structure which is responsive to the popular will but doesn't work on the mechanisms of competitive elections to to determine what that popular will is so for the Soviets obviously it was we rule on behalf of the working class that was Lenin's one of his idea is was that we don't you know we understand what the proletariat needs and so we we are we are democratic because we were ruling on behalf for the whites it was this idea and that particularly pretty sketch is interesting I'm he's an extreme but this you know idea of kind of the nation that there is you know ruling for the benefit of the people but that doesn't mean that you check in with the people and you have to have a bunch of rules and how that is done so you did have genuine Democrats in in the Duma and in the in some of these movements in the in the white movements but they generally were subsumed after a while and then the feeling that again the failure because Kerensky I think would be someone you would say as a genuine Democrat when you look at his writings you look at what he abolished the death penalty as Minister of Justice said that no one in Russia should be put to death for any crime wanted elections wanted all of that and then people said yeah partly they argued yeah he was someone who didn't understand the environment he was in that if he had either just been a stronger figure and ruled with that iron fist he could have prevent if he'd let Kornilov do the coup then you know Russia would have avoided the Bolsheviks all together but because he was you know a liberal small-l he failed and that's why he ends up at Hoover Institution at Stanford rather than as you know statesmen in Russia so that is part of that but yeah you do see that that among and that's also why in the 20s you had this reconciliation expense all you have this reconciliation of reaching out put a scav it's not one but some of the other people who had been active in the black hundreds move into the into the Communist Party you know they were reactionaries in the night 1905 and suddenly in the 20s and it's this idea of you know proletariat Russian nation all kind of the same thing and you know this is just Russia under another name again Stalin kind of up ends a lot of that but at least in the 20s that also helps the Soviet regime consolidate itself okay thank you hi I'm Christina compra snitch out of high school in Long Island and I guess I mean just listening to you and it you know I'm fascinated great storytelling and I'm wondering about the role of Rasputin because the way that you've just portrayed it if I've understood it correctly contradicts how I teach it in the classroom so now I'm going Ono you know so when I illustrate the causes of the Russian Revolution you know we talk about the political social and economic discontent we have an autocrat with 2/3 of the population who are suffering the failures of the Great War and all this and I do tell the story of Rasputin because it's too good not to but I say but that's kind of insignificant like if we remove that from the equation you know would much have really changed right and so I'm just a little bit surprised to hear it again if I'm understanding this correctly you you attributing him to having such a large part in this so I don't know I I think we have to acknowledge his role not that he had a political vision himself necessarily but his role in blocking people from being in government he was a vowed opponent of Stolypin even though as a peasant you would think he'd support the land reform and in fact one of the things that catapulted him further in the eyes of Alexander was he predicted steepens death he said death is following this man right before he gets assassinated in Kiev and so the sense that Rasputin is kind of you know it's like the the dog and the ox fable right the dog doesn't eat the hay but he prevents the cattle from coming in I would portray Rasputin's not himself organizing Russian politics in a way because he has a vision but because of his immediate need to make sure I don't have a prime minister who's telling the Czar to get rid of me I want to see nonentities in these positions and I'm reinforcing Nicholas's existing and get me even Alexandra's existing predispositions to say Reformers are bad they're trying to take away my holy autocratic powers and reinforce because Alexander particularly always saying well but Rasputin is the real Russia right these guys in saint-petersburg they're not Rupp they're not the real Russia they're just bureaucrats and and others you know he is the Russian masses and if he doesn't want these reforms he kind of so the it's not in the sense that I would agree if you don't want to makes me say that Rasputin is maneuver in Russian politics because he is doing it as a political actor he's doing things though as a intimate of the imperial court which then have these political impacts and particularly in blocking or because alexandra one of the things with recipe that's important alexander was starting to send candidates to him so someone would say you should appoint this person as minister of food and they'd said well you have to go see Rasputin and he would have meetings and then he would say things to oh well you know i don't sense that he's a good man god is not with him and so she would be okay as guys off the list and that's partly why assassinating him was such an important thing particularly for the conservative members of the duma which was this guy had a not again not because he's playing a political role because he wants his own people or things but because he is seen as someone who is reinforcing Nicholas and Alexandra tendencies to pick the wrong people and not to listen to advice so he I would then say you have to treat him as a political factor that if he was not there and again goes back to personalities because people knew I mean Nicholas was Nicholas could be dominated by the people around him and when he was younger he was dominated by his father's advisors so people like count Vita who were you know the architects of Russia's industrialization and kind of when he broke out of that and then had these other people around him and then closed off other advisors out so certainly that's why you have that plot to remove him because this sense that he is a negative force thank you join me in thanking Nick revival you [Music]

Channel: Foreign Policy Research Institute

Views: 18,970

Rating: 4.5068493 out of 5

Keywords: Russia revolution, History, Bolsheviks, Eurasia

Id: unWsJ-TpkM4

Length: 72min 13sec (4333 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 26 2017