The Animated History of Russia

this video was brought to you by my streaming service nebula if you want to get access to the original version of this video which I made like 5 years ago at this point you can still find it in the vault as a perk for supporting the channel on patreon link is in the description [Music] below [Music] at just over 17 million squ km or 6.6 Square American units Russia is easily the largest country on Earth what Churchill once called a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma which is fascinated us for centuries it's no mere accident being so large Russia was built by its geography and its autocracy autocracy means rule by one and is usually maintained with a network of corruption to hold it all together take away one card and the whole house collapses examples of which are actually pretty common the link between Russian autocracy and vodka for example is not just a stereotype but an important piece of maintaining the power relationship between the society and its ruler every time you hear vodka used as an example in this video apply that to almost every other product or resource Russia Today ranks 136 on the world corruption index higher number is worse one for alcoholism rates lower number is worse and at the bottom of it all is Russian serfdom a system which allowed it to build one of the largest land empires in history today it's at its smaller size in centuries easily dwarfed by both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union so why is it expanding now after all these years perhaps now is a good time to demystify Russia Russian statehood has its origins in a medieval Princeton called the Kevan Rose I had to cut out a lot of this video for the sake of time but if you want to know more about the roof I would suggest checking out these videos here for those that can't be bothered the Slavic tribes of antiquity migrated to the Eastern European Plain from the Eurasian steps which functioned as a sort of Highway for nomadic tribes and their Empires many of these formed turkic and URC carnat which had a major cultural influence on the Slavic ethnogenesis the Eastern European plane offered the slaves protection from the West due to the fact that it was mostly flat and shaped like a triangle any invading Army would have to spread out thinner and thinner to occupy the land straining Manpower and supply lines the slaves could easily Retreat into their vast lands and Ambush the enemy from all sides like some sort of sadistic parking inspector which is why historically invasions from the West have usually failed the Ruth name comes from its rulers Nordic Tradesmen and Vikings who established commercial links to the Kazar and the Byzantine Empire the half of the Roman Empire that just kept chugging along they reigned as Orthodox Christian princes Orthodox being the key word here since the church was Caesar a papist literally Caesar above the patriarch meaning Roose princes lacked much of a Divine check on their secular power it was the branch of Christianity that was centered on Constantinople the one centered on Rome what became the Catholic Church however was far more politically and socially tied into Western politics and the two cities were kind of going through a divorce at the time so picking aide was kind of important geography played a really important role here because as you can see Russia is just phys physically much closer to Constantinople than it is to Rome not to mention the fact that the byzantines were a lot richer which is an attractive quality to Vikings you might be seeing a lot of annotations on screen to fill in the blanks here because there is a lot to cover [Music] here the Roose princes fought each other a lot mostly due to their inheritance system which awarded land and titles based on seniority and age the highest of which was the Grand Prince of Kiev this both prevented long-term growth as well as laid the foundations of what would become Russian serfdom to outrageously oversimplify Russian fortified towns aimed to be as self-sufficient as possible each Town's Prince parceling out its surrounding lands called appanages to its allies for good service eventually becoming a noble class of boas with that land came those who farmed it now the way this differs from say Western feudalism is that surom lack the oath of falty that an already established class of land owners gave to their Monarch those land ERS eventually became Lords and The Peasants that lived and farmed their land did so in exchange for military protection a so-called social contract instead Russia's nobility were far more tied to the power of their prince for it was thanks to him they owed their land in the first place this made an appage basically like a bribe for loyalty and provides a clear incentive to acquire more land kind of like a mafia when it expands its Turf the boas probably formed the earliest State councils called the Duma sometimes compared to a parliament in English but with much less power for what should be obvious reasons as Roose princes warded with each other for the throne of keev their lands disintegrated into a feudalistic mess of fragmentation leaving them ever more vulnerable to nomadic invasions that is except in novarad novarad had held on to a long practiced Council system of the Slavic turkic and finic tribes called a veter which ruled the city and its dominions as a kind of Republic as a trade partner of the htic league it never collap collapsed into the same Anarchy of the South and thus was in a much better position when the roost were invaded by the Mongols the Mongol Empire of the golden horde easily conquered the bickering Rose Kingdoms in 1240 which would become the most consequential event in Russian history through a campaign of Terror cities were burned armies crushed and peasants enslaved leaving a destructive scar in the collective memories of the Roose but what made the Mongols who the Roose called tartars different from the invasions of the past just like many step societies the Mongols didn't have their own state or religious structures to impose on others so over time they generally assimilated into whatever was the dominant culture hey how do you do fellow Roose man but no because the Roose princs were so fragmented they instead became vassals a somewhat nicer term for subjects who paid tribute or risk more death and destruction the Roose who generally weren't fans of death and destruction thus became cut off from all cultural and political ties to Europe generally viewed by the West as a land of backward barbarians the northern cities like nograd were fareless affected by these conquests which again shows how important geography was to Russia's development this caused a population shift toward the north helping preserve Russian customs and culture and the rise of Alexander nki who was handpicked by the KH himself as Grand Prince to collect tribute on his behalf he defended the land from various Catholic Crusaders who've never really been good at telling the difference between an Orthodox Christian and a pagan but Russian statehood was not born in novarad but rather a tiny unknown Backwater town called Moscow an appage in Alexander's family but it was their princes who realized how powerful and Rich they could become by getting handpicked as Grand Prince setting quite the precedent for corruption as Rivals began conspiring bribing and murdering each other all over again Ivan kolita whose Monica literally means money bags became especially successful at this new game centralizing his rule as the Shady mob boss of Moscow of course all that money came from the Surfs who were being increasingly mistreated and with far simpler inheritance laws the city Only grew even becoming the center of the Orthodox church so without the dynastic family struggles things were improving for the Roose right wrong the Mongol Empire had linked vast sades of the Earth's population into a network of prosperous trade that facilitated the movement of goods and people by land and sea and with it came an unwelcome microscopic guest that hitched a riot in the hulls of ships and Caravans the deadliest pandemic in human history the Black Death resulted in the demise of up to a third of Europe's population which as you can imagine had a profound impact on the collective historical trajectory of the entire world in Western history this is largely what we remember as being the Catalyst for European modernization as Farmers became increasingly scarce so too did Western Law Lords gradually abandoned feudalism in Russia this had almost the exact opposite effect musite princes took a page out of the Mongol book raising their own armies which they usually paid with land to violently extract the taxes from Surfs if they weren't productive enough remember they themselves face the Wrath of the Mongols if they didn't any surf that couldn't pay was permanently bonded to their land and more importantly their debt was passed to their children which kind of makes it slavery soon Moscow became the unquestionable military power of the Rose and started testing their strength against the Mongols Dimitri donsco even defeated them twice and built the Moscow Kremlin to better fortify the city but they weren't the only kid on the Block sticking it to the tatars the lithuanians were themselves lapping up tons of Roost territory including keev mcow really didn't like this seeing themselves as the rightful inheritors of ke's Legacy a claim that was hard to press though because of the musite Civil War War this was a war with about as much murder and blood feuding as you've probably come to expect from the Roose as well as an awful lot of blindings the important part is that Vil the blind won the war by out bribing murdering and blinding his cousins allowing Moscow to conquer all remaining Roost lands and throw off the tartar yoke once and for all lining up on opposite sides of the UGA River the muscovites and the tartars just kind of stared at each other and went home sometimes things end with with a whimper not a bang centralized rule though was here to stay and Ivan the third confiscated all remaining aages giving land to his armies instead becoming Russia's first autocrat Ivan put advisers clerks translators and diplomats to work administering his realm stripping the boas of even more of their power before this the boas and Regional princes had known many of their subjects by name but afterwards the Russian Administration became a faceless and impersonal bureaucracy kind of like the tax office or Ticket Master learning from the Mongols that there was as much power in controlling money as there was in horrific violence the only way to get ahead now was to serve the grand Prince as the grand Prince had once served the Khan in effect you could say it was the Roose who had assimilated into the Mongol way instead of the other way round also the Kremlin walls were originally white which just feels wrong by the year 1453 Moscow was the only remaining truly independent Orthodox monarchy the rest of which had Fallen to the Muslim Ottoman Empire including its oldest Ally Constantinople Ivan married the niece of the last Byzantine emperor symbolically inheriting the title of Moscow as The Third Rome and the center of the Orthodox Church awkwardly bringing the total number of new RS to three with Newfound religious fervor he styled himself Grand Prince not only of Moscow but of all the Roose including those within Lithuania much of Ivan's law went about solidifying what he had built dividing land owners into three classes which met together in the zsky saour but of course the real power was in Ivan's Army who answered directly to him and what better way to use that power than to establish a monopoly on vodka he used that Monopoly to significantly drive down the price of vodka making it cheaper to buy than to produce at home which gave Moscow a steady stream of Revenue and an easy way to pacify the Surfs corruption and oppression once again furthering the Russian State's interests in other words state sanctioned alcoholism Zia Ivan IV is known as the terrible which although is not an accurate translation certainly fits him perfectly as Russia's second major autocrat he took the title zah meaning Caesar you know because Third Rome keep up he wared constantly with the boas with his own private militia secret police called Arina who assassinated spied on or terrorized his enemies and began a dramatic territorial expansion like most muscovites Ivan was terrified of another Invasion from the tartars so he conquered their rump States but to ensure his security Russia would need to go all the way East and control the very Highway of the steps that brought the Mongols to them in the first place the cacs were semi-nomadic adopters of steep life in the Lawless Borderlands or more literally the wild Fields many of whom had done so by fleeing musite and Commonwealth of Germany and surfed them they brought with them old kinship based tribal governance from before the rurikid princes ruling themselves in a semi-democratic way in a stark contrast to the muscovites they fled these cacs had gotten really good at fighting tartars which made them perfect for Russia's push East but after Ivan's Unexpected death one of his own ambitious U Niki Boris gnov seized the throne bypassing the last of Ivan's Sons Demitri who died in mysterious circumstances boris's son fodo II was then murdered and a presto the time of troubles begins Poland and Sweden both invaded hoping to put one of their own on the throne not to mention not one but three false demetries all claiming to be Ivan's son who was somehow still alive the war culminated in a conspiracy of seven boar who opened moscow's gates to the Polish faction and angered the city's common people concerned with the possibility of a Catholic Zar being elected two volunteer armies were raised the latter of which finally defeated the polls to put an end to the chaos the zsky saor decided the new Zar would need to be rushed Orthodox autocratic and For the Love of All Things good not named Demitri to please everyone in 163 that was mikale of Romanov the state Doomer had lost much of the people's confidence and their influence bringing Russia one step further to absolutism so what did the cacs have to do with any of this in the backdrop of this entire conflict the Russian Don cacs led by gak ovich began the brutal conquest of the carnate of SAA from which Siberia gets its name and then kept going plunging deeper into the vast Wilderness to subjugate any group that could ever threaten Moscow again the vast majority of these tribes were peaceful it's worth noting administration of Siberia was awarded to the nobility while indigenous tribes were forced to pay a tribute to the Zar as the Mongols had once done to them those that refused were massacred what's most interesting to me about this is that we don't really think of Russia as one of the major world Empires like Spain or Britain even though they built their Empires around the same time heck they even got to North America for a while this means that the romanovs inherited a realm that was orders of magnitude larger and more diverse than Ivan the Terribles and Regional officials had used New Wealth from the East to become even more corrupt this eventually led to a major economic crisis and two major riots in Moscow under Zar Alexi to which he responded by playing a game called blame the Surfs add adding more restrictions Alexi was far more prepared for the second ride which he violently put down hunting down its conspirators with his secret police exiling them to the Wilderness of Siberia which soon became a staple of the Russian penal system with the East under their control zy Alexi could now finally focus on expanding to the west and gaining access to its Seas the black and Baltic Seas were clear priority targets because the Pacific was a hell of a long way from Moscow and they still fell asleep every night dreaming of one day retaking the Roose lands around keev Russia began to see itself as the sole Orthodox power in a region surrounded by Catholic Protestant and Muslim empires giving a religious as well as a geopolitical motivation to what would become the northern Wars there were actually eight of these conflicts in total six of which are confusingly called The First Northern war but luckily most seem to agree on the date of the 2 in which Zar Alexi would set a major precedent of expansion through Ukraine by allying with the ccs of Poland Lithuania this is also a particularly dark chapter for poles lithuanians and Jews who suffered horrible massacres and looting the most sea focused zah by far was our third major autocrat Peter the Great who had something of an obsession with all things Western like many young men in their 20s he embarked on a whirlwind tour of Europe but instead of partying he brought back to Russia a small Board of reforms to make Russia more European remember they had been isolated from Europe for centuries which Peter hoped to end by connecting his Empire to the world through the Seas which was currently controlled by the Ottomans and the swedes Peter began the Great Northern war against Sweden hoping to challenge its hold on the Baltic but he may have bitten off a bit more than he could chew because the young talented Swedish K the 12th defeated every Army that engaged him so instead Peter used Russia's geogra graphy luring the swedes into the vast empty Countryside and burning the fields as they went Peter finally defeated the exhausted and demoralized Swedish troops at pava and no longer was Russia a backward land of Barbarians but the Undisputed military power of the East Peter took the title Emperor and began construction of a new imperial capital on the Baltic funded with vodka and built with the blood of thousands of Russian surfs called St Petersburg because I guess his ego wasn't big enough yet one thing Peter wasn't a fan of though was Western parliamentary democracy he replaced the powerless dumer with a senate whose members were appointed by himself to prevent it from becoming anything of the sort say there friend I couldn't help but notice your hat looking a little worse for wear did you know you could upgrade it by becoming a Sweeney Channel member no I had no idea in fact the longer you pledge the increasingly fancy the hat gets and you get to use these awesome exclusive Emoji in comments or live premieres along with other perks well I do like a good fancy hat also if you were a member you'd have gotten to see this very video a whole week early which with our upload schedule is a huge benefit wait what video and if you sign up to the Lord or King tier you can get huge discounts on merch I would know because I'm a king oh I get it that's pretty clever simply hit the join button below this video or use the link in the description the price works out to be like less than $1 us for the peasant tier so pretty sweet deal wow something about this Viking helmet just feels right ah see my boy what value for money right there well I'm off the plunder Russia uh no wait come back this new Western looking Russia started taking a much bigger role in European politics at home it began a period of profound cultural Revival especially during its string of noteworthy empresses and followed briefly by the infant Ivan the six but as a parent of an infant I can confirm that babies are in fact useless at ruling Empires Peter's daughter Elizabeth thought so too so she overthrew him and is famous for not executing a single person during her Reign which is a weird thing to brag about but also a sad relic of the past I'm just kidding Putin please don't kill me now the Western Europeans were all big into this philosophy called balance of power originally as a way to stabilize religious differences between States but soon evolving into the idea that no single nation should be allowed to hog all the toys and not let the other kids play and as a consequence of Russia's expansion they were now sitting at the adults table and so became involved in numerous Continental Wars especially as German influence was on the rise due to the Kingdom of Prussia this became a bit of a problem when immature unpleasant and german-born Zar Peter who despised Russia took the throne bringing with him German influence to his court his Reign lasted only 6 months before he was deposed by none other than his wife Yak Catarina who although she was German herself wasn't in enthusiastic adopter of her new home she is better known in English as Katherine the Great our fourth major autocrat Katherine's Reign is shall we say controversial generally admired at the time for her enlightened wisdom her Reign is actually one of the most oppressive Russia has ever seen to finally put the issue of the old Rose lands to rest she initiated the three partitions of Poland which wiped the Commonwealth off the face of the map then she conquered the crime incarnate all of which presented a new set of issues for Catherine Russia's European core around Moscow had always been relatively ethnically homogeneous but now it had just annexed millions of non-russians into its territory bringing with them new political philosophies like liberalism which argued for among other things the end to absolute monarchy these ideas were largely absent from the mostly illiterate Russian surfs critically they were also now home to the largest population of Jews in Europe who had settled in the Commonwealth when fleeing political and religious persecution seeing this as a threat to her autocracy Katherine instituted policies We Now call [Music] rfication1 simply it wasn't a great time to be anything other than an orthodox Russian in Catherine's Empire vodka Revenue made up nearly a third of Catherine's entire state income money she funneled into Wars with the Ottomans allying herself with its various Orthodox nationalities in the Balkans and planting the seeds that would inexorably lead Russia into ever more destructive Wars so yeah leave a comment below if you've ever learned about Catherine from a strictly good or bad perspective especially if you're from somewhere in the former Empire Empire I'm really curious okay you're probably noticing a theme here every new monarch did something to either increase their power exploit the Surfs or expand the Empire's borders because that is what keeps Russian autocracy going paval the first tried to deviate from this Playbook through reform and found himself assassinated leaving Alexander the first to deal with the effects of an Ever modernizing World thanks to the French Revolution as well as Napoleon bonapart disastrous invasion of Russia the French revolutionaries were all about that liberalism you see up until this point Napoleon had established effective control over most of the continent and invaded Russia for its refusal to honor the Continental trade embargo against Great Britain nearly half a million troops of the grand arm gave Russia its greatest challenge yet saved again thanks to their enormous geography which swallowed up the most powerful Army in Europe with every Skirmish Siege or Advance through the burned Fields the French lost thousands of men they simply couldn't Replenish by the time Napoleon reached Moscow which the Russians had set Ablaze he did so with only 100,000 left he was forced to retreat back across the same scorched Earth as a harsh winter began thousands died from cold disease and starvation with only 10,000 left by the campaign's end this astonishing Victory left Russia in a powerful position at the peace negotiation and what were their demands the same thing they always wanted more control of Poland and the black and Baltic which they achieved by annexing Finland and Bess Arabia rfication1 point5 million cirians but balance of power works both ways it was getting too powerful annexing more and more territory and exerting a major influence over the Orthodox Christians in the Balkans this really concerned France and Britain who teamed up with the Ottomans to knock them down a peg in the first conflict of the early modern era the somewhat disastrous campaign of the Crimean War this had an immense internal consequence within Russia itself the defeat left the military and the elite totally humiliated Zar Alexander The Liberator believed the country was on the brink of violent revolution and so enacted some of the widest reaching reforms to try and save the Empire the most wellknown of these was the release of more than 23 million surfs from bondage with the emancipation of 1861 as well as similar freedoms for Jews but was the era of exploitation truly over of course not most of You Realize by now that the exploitation of the poor working class was the core to the entire system they couldn't just let it go although they were freed on paper most of their restrictions remained in place which prevented them from rising too rapidly in Russian Society this was one of the major reasons why industrialization was so slow and for those that did manage manag to migrate into the factories and cities they did so in absolutely horrendous conditions kind of like Amazon Alexander also violently suppressed the Polish and Lithuanian January Uprising leaving thousands dead and enacted martial law that would last another four decades so yeah Alexander The Liberator maybe let's rethink that name huh One reform that did end up being quite effective was a relaxation on sensit media allowing this poverty-stricken workingclass to be exposed to the teachings of Marxism some start to argue for the overthrow of the entire zaris regime Revolution was a lot closer than Alexander could have ever known France's defeat by Germany in 1871 allowed Russia the space to reassert its influence in the Balkans helping liberate Orthodox Christian nations from the Ottoman Empire this is arguably the beginning of Russia's collapse helping Nationalist and religious separatists in the Balkans while simultaneously suppressing pring those within its borders is not a good look Alexander was assassinated in 1881 which would leave a deep paranoia on both his son Alexander III and his grandson Russia's last Zar and Emperor Nicholas II Alexander II for his part became swept up in the wave of increasing anti-Semitism in Europe blaming the Jews for orchestrating his father's assassination this caused a violent reaction of pgms and murders of Jewish citizens followed by the M laws that R them of all their limited freedoms of course this did absolutely nothing to stop the unrest let alone the food shortages terrible working conditions Corruption of State officials and separatist agitators this was a simmering pot ready to blow so when Zar Nicholas came to the throne he didn't help himself much by stubbornly clinging to his autocratic power Amit every opportunity to reform as we shall soon see reform was very unlikely at this point anyway in 1905 the Russian Revolution erupted Ed after a humiliating defeat in the Russo Japanese war the people took to the streets begging for a constitution and a parliament to bring Russia into the Modern Age but this is probably not the revolution you're thinking of Nicholas gave token guarantees to the angry mob to revive the state dumer that he had no intention of keeping stripping it of most of its powers before it ever got off the ground burying his head in the sand in a move of unbelievable shortsightedness rumors started to circulate that he must be being controlled by his mysterious magical advisor gregori Rasputin but this was far more than part of the course for Russian monarchs the Siberian Mystic had indeed gotten close to the royal family in the late days of the Empire mostly due to his perceived ability to heal Prince Alexis's hemophilia historians believe these abilities were greatly exaggerated so he probably wasn't a wizard nor was he especially close to the Zar in terms of state affairs although you can kind of understand where the people were coming from since he was just generally kind of a creepy guy which means mean that he would last as an enduring symbol of Imperial corruption after the Zar walked back his promises the working class began organizing councils of labor unions to try put pressure on the Zar through Collective action these councils called Soviets have a lot of their roots in the early councils of the slaves novgorodians and the cacs the word Veta and Soviet even having the same eological origin some Soviets particularly in St Petersburg were connected to an underground network of marxists like the Bolsheviks led by Vladimir L who lived most of his adult life in Exile as well as Leon trosky and a young Joseph Stalin their Collective albeit nebulous goal was the complete overthrow of the entire class based system as they saw it beginning with the Zar and ending with What KL Marx called Capital you know like the book The exploitation of the working class it was not however these Bolsheviks that would first rise up against the Zar but rather the system of complicated alliances that triggered the first world war the the Orthodox Serbian Ally that Russia had planted deep political and religious ties to was invaded by the Central Powers of Austria Hungary Russia began mobilization against them and as more military alliances were honored to maintain the balance of power so too did the war become ever more complicated its focus soon shifting to the extremely powerful German Empire this was a war that Russia simply was not ready for with millions of men shipped off to the front lines to die in an economy already in crisis many blamed the Zar for the failures and in February 1917 the people had had enough for a second time they rose up against him demanding his abdication and an end to the war this February Revolution is still not the one you're thinking of it's goals were largely successful in removing the Zar and bringing about the end of a monarchy that lasted more than a thousand years but the vacuum in St Petersburg now petrograd was filled by the provisional government and the Soviets which engaged in a rivalry for months in in which time the war dragged on Lenin and Trotsky finally returned from Exile in this time aided greatly by German agents who hoped to Fan the Flames of Russia's collapse and boy howdy did that work they stirred up the Bolsheviks into the third and most enduring October Revolution a Revolt of the proletariat against all things capitalist Imperial and exploitative the Soviets soon took over the city now Leningrad raised a Red Army to bring the revolution to the of Russia and with it the Russian Civil War again I've had to cut this short for time but the Russian Civil War was incredibly complicated in its early years it not only involved the Bolshevik Reds against the super diverse group of anti-bolshevik whites but also a variety of nationalist Independence Wars revolts of minor ethnicities both the Central and onon Powers still engaged in the first world war Ukrainian anarchists who sought to dismantle the entire concept of the state the green army peasant rebellions who fought literally every everyone and even a division of the czechoslovak Legion that captured the entire Trans Siberian Railway yes this map was extremely difficult to draw and yes I'm sure there are mistakes so yeah Civil War in Russia is never simple because Russia itself isn't simple the Red Army eventually won this war thanks to overwhelming support and the terror they Unleashed with the secret police violently suppressing any opposition and exiling millions to Siberia an imitation of the Tyranny they fought to overthrow somebody should write a book about this so the first successful Communist Revolution had just taken place with the old Empire transformed into various ethnic constituencies together forming the union of socialist Soviet republics they did however lose quite a bit of their Western territory to those separatist Wars but hey I'm sure they'll be fine without all that but here is the catch an important contributor to the stunning victory of the Bolsheviks was the ease of which Lenin's centralized Communist party and its policy divisions slipped into the void of the old autocracy the poit bureau as it later became known was a small Council of only the very highest ranking Elites and exercised nearly complete control of the Supreme Soviet if you only take one thing from this video it should be that no matter who occupied the top of the house the rest of the cards remained largely the same this is why every so-called reformer that came before failed and the Communist Party had to deviate quite drastically from Marx's Theory to avoid doing the same instead of abolishing the state as Marx had predicted they became the state seizing control of the whole economy and using it to build a loyal party aristocracy in a way that was not much different the Soviet economy actually grew a lot in the first few years while the West entered into a huge depression in 1929 so while it can be tempting to view the Soviet collapse of the '90s as a failure of socialism there is clearly a lot more going going on here that untangled the web of corruption as decades went by to be successful the Soviet Union needed to cooperate with the corrupt Administration long enough at least to replace every member of that Administration with loyal members of the party this is exactly how Russia's most famous autocrat and Tyrant Joseph Stalin came to power rising in the ranks of the Communist Party he used his role as general secretary to surround himself with supporters in key jobs exiling Leon trky and anyone else that threatened his rule after the death of Lenin as a rufi Georgian Stalin detested all of Russia's nationalities and Jews and enacted harsh policies to rufy the Soviet Union the most infamous of these was the Hol demore a deliberate famine which caused the genocide of 8 million mostly tatars kazaks and particularly ukrainians when violent right-wing populism began sweeping over Europe Stalin became progressively more paranoid using the nkv D secret police to round up anyone he even mildly distrusted for execution Exile torture and imprisonment in forced labor camps called the gulag after this Great Purge of between 300,000 and up to 1.2 million people Stalin commenced building a cult of personality around himself when put into context it's easy to see the similarities between him and the autocrats of the [Music] past like those autocrats Stalin had always had expansionist visions of the future and began striking secret deals with Nazi Germany to divide Europe into two spheres of influence and regain former territory of the Russian Empire Adolf Hitler and Stalin clearly shared at least some geopolitical interests but the fact that they were ideological enemies meant that a non-aggression pact signed in August 1939 was a surprise to basically everyone as was their joint invasion of Poland a month later which began the second world War there is no more clear an example of how the Soviet Union inherited the territorial Ambitions of the Russian Empire Control as much of the Eastern plain the Baltic and the black Seas as you can the usual focus in the way we teach this is on German aggression due to the overwhelming nature of their crimes but we cannot ignore the fact that the USSR was a co-belligerent of this conflict which committed numerous atrocities massacres summary executions and imprisonment in the gulag fullscale invasions took place in Estonia lvia Lithuania malova and Finland in the Soviet sphere all of which barring the latter were annexed as Soviet republics to Universal condemnation I'll bet you didn't even know that the Soviet Union even briefly attempted to formally join the Axis powers which shows the lengths they were willing to go to to cooperate with the Nazis but as we know in hindsight Hitler and his party despised the Communist Soviet Union and had already devised plans for its invasion after which he would enact his so-called final solution to the Jewish question with the Holocaust Hitler viewed Eastern Europe as a land to be claimed for lean's realm living space for the Aryan race and to do so its population of unman and Communists would need to be enslaved or eradicated based on Nazi racial hierarchy emboldened by his early military successes in the western northern and southern front Hitler ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union in 19 41 to carry out these plans the Red Army were completely unprepared for what would be the largest land Invasion on record lacking proper leadership due to Stalin purges and lowquality weaponry they were driven back to the outskirts of Moscow within a few short weeks as the verar Unleashed destruction on the Soviet people captured PS were sent on death marches or intered in concentration camps resulting in the loss of approximately 2 to 3 million lives loss of civilian life too was unusually high following closely behind the German Army the iners group and division of the SS murdered millions of mostly civilian Jews by gunshot the first stage of a genocide which claimed the lives of 1.5 million Soviet Jews a further 1 million at least would later perish in death camps 5.7 million non-jewish civilians were also targeted for extermination as the war dragged on but as we have seen time and time again Russia's geography simply is not conducive to an invasion from the West the Axis powers had to create an increasingly larger and thinner front expanding into the vast empty nothingness supply lines became increasingly strained as mud bugged down the German armor long enough for the campaign to be halted for winter with one last renewed offensive in 1942 the German Army again plunged deeper into the steps advancing no further than the Strategic city of Stalingrad by some measures the large largest single Battle in History unfolded there two tyrants faced off neither one willing to give up ground funneling hundreds of thousands of reinforcements into subzero temperatures for the city that bore Stalin's name after 2 million combined deaths the German Army was finally surrounded and captured and the Soviet forces began pushing the vak back uncovering the horrors they left in their wake the Soviet Union was devastated 8.7 million total military casualties and more than 20 million civilian the USSR accounted for the highest total wartime deaths of any country in both categories among the reasons was Stalin had refused to evacuate many cities of their civilians believing that the soldiers would fight harder to defend their families Leningrad in particular was under siege for nearly 2 and 1/2 years in which about 800,000 civilians lost their lives mostly due to starvation during the the early stages of operation Barbarosa the Red Army had employed a scorched Earth policy while fleeing the German Advance which too resulted in the deaths of their own civilians this is why it's not always useful to think of war in terms of good guys and bad guys because although the Soviet Union increased its cooperation with the Allies after the Tran conference that cooperation whitewashed a lot of Soviet aggression and the reported war crimes to make it more palatable but this facade was mostly just that a facade because the allies and the Soviets both secretly really distrusted each other which again makes sense they came from drastically different political ideologies and the Allies definitely knew about many of the reported war crimes that distrust of the Soviets would eventually escalate into a so-called Cold War as the advance of the Red Army to Berlin was a lot quicker than anticipated fearing Stalin's obvious Brazen desire to expand Russia's borders the Allies understandably became concerned for his plans and he be became increasingly hostile to the US in particular after their use of the atomic bomb on Japan so to ensure his own security Stalin used the nkvd extensively within occupied territories to form socialist puppet States while the rest up to almost the exact line agreed to with Hitler in fact were annexed into the USSR an iron curtain descended across Europe orchestrating one of the largest series of forced migrations within occupied territory tens of millions of civilians were moved all over the continent within the union about 3.5 million ethnic linguistic and political minorities were forcibly expelled from their homes much of which had already suffered huge losses to Nazi Genocide most of those lands were in turn repopulated with ethnic Russians and thus Stalin arguably achieved more lean's real for Russians than Hitler ever did formal International alliances formed around NATO and The warsa Pact and a nuclear arms race began between the Soviets and the Americans the world's two remaining superpowers but the diplomatically isolated Soviet block was never able to match the economic growth of the West because of its corruption and its lag behind in infrastructure thanks to zarus policies this is the True Result of autocracy it is conservative in nature because it not only benefits the status quo it is the status quo progress is its antithesis the Russian autocrats knew that after the consequen death of Stalin Nikita CRF foresaw the dangers of his insane cult of personality and went about on a pretty aggressive D stalinization campaign but neither kushev nor any of his successors were able to stifle the nation's corruption the party had ultimate centralized control but were limited within a framework which again only works if it's corrupt as Soviet people lost faith in the revolution alcoholism Rose to an all-time high as numerous mismanaged disasters unfolded such as the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown president Mel gachev was the Soviet Union's last major reformer desperate for economic growth he began a policy of glasnost and perista some Market reforms and a relaxation on censorship which unraveled the whole veil of the party's competence to govern and as we have seen many times in this video for those that break with this General Trend centralized rule often meets with some less than unfortunate ends gachev may not have died but the Soviet Union certainly did completely unraveled into its constituent republics in 1991 and with it the entire Soviet experiment the territory of the former Soviet Republic became the Russian Federation with President Boris yelton overseeing the nation's transition to a western style liberalist economy it's easy to see the enduring nature of the system that tied Russian statehood together in the rise of the Russian oligarchy and our sixth major autocrat Vladimir Putin as a former KGB agent the successor to the nkvd Putin had always looked upon the Soviet collapse as a tragedy he cultivated close ties to Boris yelton in an era that Russia was experiencing an identity crisis selling off its state assets in an economic shock therapy to who would become the first Russian oligarchs shock therapy had disastrous implications for Russian state Ood which had effectively handed over immense amounts of power and wealth to a handful of billionaires who exerted an enormous influence over government policies that benefited them this tipped the scales dramatically in the favor of the aristocracy in relationship to the Russian State Putin came to power instead the more traditional Russian way leveraging his position as prime minister to put his own people in key government roles easily slipping into the old autocratic mold and clawing back controlling shares in thousands of Russian companies yes including vodka this is a major Testament to the strength of Russian autocracy Putin was able to restore the traditional subordination of the elite to the Russian state in just a few short years stripping the first oligarchs of their influence and reestablishing a second oligarchy entirely dependent on him as so many autocrats had done in the past the technical name for this phenomenon is called Democratic backsliding but Russian democracy has always been a fiction and like the autocrats of old Putin is engaging in chillingly similar behaviors espousing expansionist rhetoric stoking a rise in Russian nationalism suppressing ethnic minorities in Chia while supposedly supporting those in Georgia these took the form of horrendous Wars that put simply were about maintaining control over Russia's border regions in the Caucasus mountain ranges and their location near the Black Sea Russia does not tolerate descent in its border regions what we are seeing today with the invasion of Ukraine uses the pretext for war laid centuries ago there is a fantastic miniseries over on my streaming service nebula called modern conflicts made by fellow Creator Joseph from real life law that takes an in-depth approach to analyzing this very topic with an episode dedicated to both the cin and Georgian Wars and perhaps a more currently relevant series on the war in Ukraine Joseph takes a deep dive into the conflicts that have affected the past few decades some forget that Putin has led Russia in some form for more than 20 years at this point here's a video on the Soviet Afghan war and another on the war in Syria all just ready and waiting for you to binge like I have now in case you're not aware this channel Sweeney has a stake in nebula myself and dozens of other creators joined forces with the mission to create a streaming service that we control ourselves the result is nebula you may have already heard about us from when over Productions extra history or the Great War Channel my analytics literally tell me that you watch watch those channels so what's in it for you firstly all of my videos are on nebula without the intrusive ads risks of demonetization or sponsor reads like this one meaning that the viewing experience is a lot better than here on YouTube and because signing up for nebula helps the brand directly fund me as a Creator you'll also get to see my content early like you would as a member or a patron this video was up on nebula a week ago but that isn't even the best part nebula also hosts loads of exclusive content that you can't see anywhere else just like the modern conflict series realtime history is the same team behind the Great War Channel and they've just made an incredible series called red atoms covering the entire Soviet nuclear program from the first atomic bom to the Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown in 1986 and nebula is the only place to watch these and loads more rumor has it that yours truly is also working on something great for nebula just in case you needed yet another reason to sign up for our awesome platform we're living in a time when online streaming subscriptions are getting a lot more expensive these days but if you choose to sign up for nebula using my link or by heading to go. [Music] nebula.com feature for a little while now to cater to those of you who want to go a a little deeper we're calling it nebul classes which wasn't available on previous deals in which we creators teach you how we well create you'll get to see a peek behind the curtain into how a few relatively unknown aspiring creators got started what changes we've had to make along the way and maybe even get some ideas on how to be a Creator yourself or if you just rather get to know us a little better that's great for that too just look at Tom Nicholas here showing off his Superior methods of re researching like a true scholar I mean the guy is literally a PhD both nebula and nebula classes are a platform that we truly believe in and if you're hungry for more content from high quality creators then head to my link in the description to sign up those who were surprised at Putin's Brazen invasion of Ukraine have not been paying attention the three major territorial choke points of Russia have not changed but its access to them has become increasingly strained many of the former warso pact have joined the EU and NATO which now threatens to enlarge to Ukraine and challenge Russia's access to the Black Sea Putin has actively meddled in Ukrainian politics for decades and now he is in the process of completely invalidating the idea of an independent Ukrainian identity in its state-owned propaganda the first step of rfication1 of Moscow the zadam of Russia the Russian Empire Soviet Union and the Russian Federation all territorially ambitious Russian autocracies this is by no means an argument that change is not possible in Russia everything is capable of change but change requires understanding and once the history books are put down and the guns are picked up the situation becomes far more delicate and dangerous we don't benefit a single Shred by continuing to keep Russia a riddle in a mystery in an enigma [Music] thank you all so much for watching this is current Day James here just with a quick message and some updates this video may feel a little different to ones I've done in the past and that's because I wanted to try and introduce a little bit more like political Theory and sociology to sort of shake it up as well as the visual style at the same time um if you liked it please give me a thumbs up and comment down below that would be greatly appreciated I also found a ton of great resources on this video that I'll have listed down below um this one really only scratches the surface of the history of Russia it's a real Behemoth and also let's address the elephant in the room where have I been so this is by far my longest video if you're new to the channel you know that my content went from being like 5 minutes to however long this video ended up being so that just kind of takes a lot of time and I'm sort of animating and editing everything myself it's a oneman army takes a lot longer than it used to but there's also been some things in my personal life that have slowed me down pretty substantially that I thought I'd just like to share firstly since my last upload I welcomed my first beautiful baby girl into the world and I took off some time to be with her and my partner which has been just such an amazing Wild Ride any new parents out there I'm sure you know the feeling and secondly me and my family ended up having to do a pretty unexpected move from our previous home not long ago it was somewhere that we'd Liv for a while and we're pretty comfortable and because of a few reasons outside of our control we ended up having to pack up everything and move and this was all right before a trip that we were doing to introduce the family to the new baby so it just delayed the project multiple times over I just want to say thank you so much for your patience and understanding I know it's been a heck of a long time nobody wants the videos out more than me believe me a special thanks to patrons and members who have sent some really nice messages and also the hundreds of comments I've gotten wondering where I've been it took a lot of the stress of the money out of it after not putting out a video for so long if you'd like to support the links to both of those are down below I've made a few changes in there for the patreon as well as the memberships to hopefully entice more people to sign up I've been trying for years to figure out the best way to do crowdfunding and I've taken a little bit of inspiration from other channels that I would like to support and who I do support and what makes me want to engage with them as a Creator so I've added a few new perks in there and also reduced the prices so hopefully now you get more for less if that makes sense all right I think that's all I should probably get back to working on the next video which is probably right now thank you all again until next [Music] [Music] time

Channel: Suibhne

Views: 793,825

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Id: c9jUHtx1VM8

Length: 54min 3sec (3243 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 20 2023