Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin – Part One – Revolution

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Hello, welcome to Origin Story. In each episode we take an idea, figure or event from history, explain its origins and talk about how it influences political discourse today. I'm Tori Alinsky, author of Everything Must Go and the Ministry of Truth. And I'm Ian Dunst. I'm a columnist with the Iron Newspaper. And together we write the origin storybooks, still available now in all good booksellers.

This is our first ever three-part episode, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin. Like the Russian winter, it's a beast. As you will see from the long reading list across these three episodes, it required weeks of research. So now might be a good time to ask you to consider supporting us on Patreon and sending us a few pounds a month to help us do all this work and not just ask ChatGPT to do it.

Which is plan B. Also, the fucking emotional trauma of just like weeks of this stuff. Like, we're going to make it quite, you know, upbeat and dramatic. and full of sort of content which it is but of course when you're actually reading the book on this stuff it's also just like page after page of just like murder

And oblivion and the gradual death of all human hope. So I've got to say, as far as research projects go, it wasn't quite as bad as having to read about Russell Brand, but it got pretty close. Stalin, the Russell Brand of his era. He was. In many ways he was. In many ways he was. We're dividing this topic into three, revolution, power and terror. And in telling the story of Bolshevism from the late 19th century through to Stalin's death in 1953, we're asking some big questions.

Because what struck me is this period, obviously especially Stalinism, is the main weapon in the case against socialism. It is still brought up. And of course communism isn't the same as socialism and Leninism wasn't the only possible version of Marxism. And we'll be dealing with some of the mitre beans as we go along. But you can't deny that the version of Marxism that held sway over a third of the planet at its peak was violent, oppressive, corrupt, dysfunctional.

Not what you would want. And of course it ran parallel to fascism and the whole theory of totalitarianism is about the similarities between the two. But the big difference, which everyone acknowledged at the time and since, is that fascism was true to its goals. was kind of like, we're going to do some evil shit. And then they did it. Where Soviet communism...

travestied its aspirations. So like Orwell pointed out that like in the 30s, it was quite hard to find anybody like in literary circles who had a good word for Hitler. But loads. who would stick up for Stalin because they still felt like, ah, but the essential ideal survives. And so, so much of this is a story of denial and sort of not wanting to let go of your dreams.

God, that's such an unbelievably good point. Part of this is almost like the story of the psychological process of the left, as you get disappointment after disappointment after disappointment, just trying to kind of come to terms with it. And over the course of, I mean, just these episodes, you'll see two of those core disappointments. One of them was the First World War.

You know, which is not just disappointment of, well, actually, it turns out that national identity is far stronger than class identity and people will happily murder each other on that basis for years in extraordinary numbers.

But also that thing that also killed liberals at the time, which is the death of the idea of inevitable human progress, which socialists shared with liberals and which the First World War kills. And then you get the second way, which is after the war, kind of all socialists.

are expecting Germany to turn socialist, for there to be a communist revolution there. There isn't, and not only is there not, it eventually goes fascist. And that disappointment, which is kind of slightly forgotten now, just how deeply baked in that assumption would be. That disappointment really hangs over people's minds. They never quite get over that fact, what happened in Germany. And what we never get to see, because of the failure in Germany elsewhere, is an alternative...

socialist state during that period. And so the Soviet Union sets the model for all the post-war communist regimes to some extent. I mean, there's big differences between that and sort of Mao's China. But so many of the worst habits of the Soviet Union just get directly transplanted into, you know, Eastern Europe or, you know, Korea, Vietnam and so on. And a lot of the language.

You know, I kept coming across things where I'm like, so much of the language of that era, but even of the left to this day comes from this period. Even when they tried a different kind of socialism, you know, you constantly see sort of Eastern European countries try socialism with a human fate. So, yeah, more liberal, more humane form. Then the Soviets would just come in and crush them to make sure that they could not pursue that experiment. So it's not even that it was copied over.

It was that they made sure that they had a monopoly on the approach towards socialism and government, and they insisted that that took place in the most barren, vicious way possible. I'm fascinated by the longing.

on the left i think for a counterfactual ever since the 1930s communists and some socialists have imagined a better form of marxism if lenin had lived longer or trotsky had taken over instead of stalin all these revolutions have happened elsewhere in 1918 and established these alternative models

You know, and it's that line that's become a bit of a punchline, real communism has never been tried. How convinced are you by these? Well, I mean, we will get into it in a big way, but just initially, how convinced are you by these kind of... counterfactuals and moiter beans? Well, it depends on which one, right? So when it comes down to the personality, the Lenin-Trotsky stuff, let's just be clear about something here from the outset. Every single one of these men is an absolute piece of shit.

Okay? Like every single one of them. It is true that Lenin and Trotsky are not as much of a piece of shit as Stalin, but you can be a very terrible piece of shit and still not be as much of a piece of shit as Stalin. So this process that you see on the left, and I think that morally this has to be done because it's not complete. You'll still see it. When we spoke, you know, saying that I was in the SWP when I was younger, that is a Marxist-Leninist party.

Right. Now, to me, if someone now says, I am a Leninist, and people do, there's no real, I mean, you might be considered a bit kooky and eccentric, but I don't think there's a massive social stigma that you'd be chucked out of someone's house in the same way you would if you say, I'm a Nazi. If you're a Leninist...

you believe in terror and murder and dictatorship and totalitarianism. Because that's what Leninism is. That is what it is. Now, people then start putting their hopes on people like Trotsky. Trotsky is better. than Lenin. He's certainly wittier and he's a better writer. He's also an absolute piece of shit. So we are telling the story of people that are absolute piece of shit and this game of, oh, I wonder if this guy had been in power, maybe it wouldn't have been so...

It might not have been quite as bad as it was under Stalin, but Stalin was working on a continuity of the political principles and the organizational principles that had been established by the men that came before him. I think the Trotskyists have a better case. I'm more sympathetic to it.

up to a point, but then you see the kind of absurd hero worship of it. And it's really interesting that Christopher Hitchens, even in his later, more conservative years, he was still just in love with Trotsky. Really. Yeah, there was just an absolute sort of fascination with Trotsky because he was like, he became Stalin's main enemy. Yeah. And so he became the opposite of Stalinism. But when you actually look back at what he did at various points.

It's like they're not that different. I mean, we'll get into that. And so the person that I noticed that a lot of modern socialists will then turn to, and I think with a much stronger case. is rose luxembourg yes quite right who is uh not in the title of the episodes but um really quite an important figure because she does represent an alternative

And not a reformist, moderate socialism, still very radical, but much more humane and much more alert to the dangers of tyranny. Yeah, exactly. And then look, there are other kinds of actuals that are not personality-based.

We did that first episode on early socialism for a reason, right? Just to show that, you know, there's this wide expanse of different schools and different almost moods, you know, and different ideas that you could pick from. Now, it won't surprise you to learn that this story... has very little Fourier in it. You know, there's not a lot of salads and sexy times and very well-designed kitchens in this story. They are mostly the kind of school that all of these people are taking from is Blonky.

terroristic, street fighting, you know, man the barricades, vanguard of the working class, that militia idea of communism. That's where they're taking from as much as Marx. So for a start, you get the sense of it is not... What happens in the Soviet Union, what happens in this story is not necessarily about what socialism inevitably needs. You could easily have taken from a much kinder, more generous and more humane school of socialism. Then you think, is this where Marxism...

inevitably leads yeah and that's a more complicated question because in some areas you think you know what you know it just simply doesn't have to be this way there is no possible sense that you would read marks and think this is the kind of society that he is suggesting however There are other areas, particularly when we had a conversation in the Marxism episode that was about the inevitability of history.

and the reductionism of all power to just economic. So that once you take over the means of production, all power is gone. We have no capacity to assess power in any other critical way. Okay, so you get to do whatever you want. And what we'll see is that there are these areas. the flaws in the theory, which can sound quite abstract when you're just chatting about them at the time, when you implement them practically.

in a regime turn out to have very, very dangerous outcomes indeed. And so in those areas, there's some of it you think, no, you can ascribe this to Marxism. There's other parts that you think this does not necessarily have to follow from it. But whichever way you get to it, the narrative over these... three episodes it's the same right we start where we were at the end of the last episode with marx looking at the dictatorship of the proletariat as this idea of a universal class

you know that that means everyone essentially you know is in charge for everyone's benefit and that morphs under leninism to the dictatorship of the bolshevik party and then it morphs under stalin to the dictatorship of one man yeah from the universal to the to the individual That is the story that takes place here. And it's a very, very tragic story indeed. And if you would like basically to skip these episodes and just learn the story through the use of animals, George Orwell's Animal Farm.

is very good on this. We're so admirably concise. But we're going to be doing it with humans. In episode one, we're going to talk about Lenin and the Bolsheviks up to the Russian Revolution of October 1917. And one big question is how did the dominant form of Marxism go from the parliamentary socialism of Germany's social democrats, for example, to violent revolution and dictatorship? And the answer is basically one word, Lenin.

Now, I think that I remember to look up all my Russian pronunciations. So do I. But I would just like to say to any Russians listening... I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I know, I know it's a fucking barbarism what's about to come out of my mouth and I apologize in advance. Hopefully the names I'm going to get wrong are the names of dictators whose feelings I'm less concerned about.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov is born on the 10th of April 1870 in Simbersk, which is now called Ulyanovsk after the man himself. It's a port city on the Volga River in southeast Russia. He's the third of six children who survived infancy. Yet again, with origin story, it's always like many siblings, half of them died. His father is the school inspector and quite an important local dignitary, but never quite accepted by the elite. He's an outsider.

A precarious status. His parents are intelligent, hardworking, keen to avoid trouble with the authorities, and they drill ambition into their children. What they want is for Russia to become a modern European country through peaceful progress. They're quite kind of modern individuals. That's some poor parenting there, because that's not what their son achieves. So, Vladimir is a noisy, aggressive child and an extremely impressive student.

His schooling is very narrow but deep, which gives him this great intellectual confidence and stamina and clarity, but also perhaps an inability to consider elements of the big picture. In 1886, when Vladimir is 15, his father dies of a brain hemorrhage. The same year, Vladimir's older brother, Alexander, is recruited into a terrorist cell where he plots to blow up Emperor Alexander III. The plot collapses, they are all arrested.

Alexander has the wheeze of taking the blame and using the trial to publicize his revolutionary ideas. This has three results. One, he is hanged. Two, the Ulyanov's become social pariahs in Simbesk. And three, Lenin becomes a hardened revolutionary. I mean, I think if you are that age and your older brother is hanged by the Tsar. Yeah.

it would turn you that way. He hero-worshipped him as well, right? He really admired him. This actually reminded me of Netanyahu's story, weirdly. Yeah, losing the brother. Convinced that the Russian Empire is an obstacle to progress in Europe and has to be overthrown, he starts reading Karl Marx. And already as a young man...

You see the Lenin personality. He's very disciplined. He's a neat freak. He's obsessed with like neat handwriting, sharp pencils, regular exercise, cycling, really obsessed with cycling, saving money. Over the years, he gives up.

Anything that gets in the way of revolution, smoking, chess, ice skating, music, all these pleasures must go. If someone started smoking, he wouldn't tell them to stop, because I don't think you could do that in the late 19th century, but he would tut and open the window. oh wow he was ahead of his time he was a real ahead of his time pasag anti-smoker

And his uptightness may have been related to his chronic stomach problems, insomnia, headaches, and so on. Just like, just not a chill guy. Anyone who thought that Lenin was a chill guy, that's the first myth that we're busting on this podcast. So as we discussed last time, Marx originally thought that Russia was too economically backward for socialism.

But he came to think that extreme poverty and oppression actually made it the most hospitable country. You know, this was a country with no democracy, no trade unions, tight censorship, a very reactionary and powerful church, and a brutal secret police force called the Akrana.

So it's really that sense of oppression and injustice rather than how many people are working in industry that kind of can create that revolutionary energy. So at first, Russian socialists focused on the peasantry out of necessity. because they were about 85% of the population. There just wasn't a big urban workforce. So the agrarian socialists, or norodniks, believed that Russia could just jump from feudalism to socialism and leapfrog capitalism altogether. And they also liked terrorism.

quite a lot. And that was Alexander's crew. And this is part of the political DNA of Lenin, this fascination with terrorism as a tool. A leading neurotic was Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who Marx called the great Russian scholar and critic, I think mainly because he was one of the only people who endorsed his book Capital.

Like, because not many people were reading Capital and Chernyshevsky was really into it. So Marx was like, he must be a really good guy. And Vladimir read Alexander's copy of Chernyshevsky's 1863 novel, What Is To Be Done, which is a terrible novel. But very important for the politics of that time, neuronic politics. So between what is to be done and capital, Lenin had his sacred texts there.

But the real father of Russian Marxism was Georgi Plakanov. And he started off as a Narodnik, thinking, okay, you know, it's all going to come from the peasantry. While living in exile in Switzerland in the 1880s, he changed his mind. One thing I sense in the story that if you were around Switzerland in the late 19th century, you could not help but bump into exiled Marxists. I don't know if there's room for anybody else. It was just an incredibly radical...

country at this time. Okay, so that is a very distinct image to the one that I have of this country. It's always like they fled to Switzerland. So Klokhanov noticed that Russia was industrializing fast and building railways, exporting food to Europe. So he decided that actually it was already capitalist. Plus, he found the peasants disappointingly unrevolutionary, which is a big theme. So revolution would actually come.

from the urban working class, after all. In 1887, Vladimir studies law at Imperial Kazan University, but in his first year, he joins a student protest and he's arrested and expelled. So... He has to half-heartedly manage a farm for a bit, which he hates.

While he's educating himself, he learns English, he translates the Communist Manifesto into Russian. And revealingly, he really wasn't interested in talking to the peasants who worked on the farm. Like, he prefers books to people. And also, the family are not badly off, right?

This is all pertinent. I mean, I don't want to do that as some kind of cheapo look. All of these guys are all kind of middle class, really, starting with Marx. But it's also like, we will talk later about the kulaks, wealthy peasants. That is not so far away from the kind of things that Lenin is getting up to with a bit of money behind him running a farm. So it's worth putting a pin in it and remembering it when we hear some of his later rhetoric. He was a part-time Kulak.

So after that horrible experience, he resumes studying law at St. Petersburg University in 1890, graduates, becomes a lawyer in Samara, a city in the Volga region, which is suffering from a terrible famine. You literally got peasants. crawling into the city to seek food and dying in the streets. Some people obviously are trying to alleviate this, get them food.

Vladimir thinks that actually famine is an inevitable result of capitalism and bound to hasten revolution. So he opposes all relief efforts. He says the famine played the role of a progressive factor. And even his family is like... horrified by this because he's not really interested in morality, which he generally describes as sentimentality. If it doesn't serve the revolution, it's not interesting. Yes. There is an inhuman quality to him at times.

I think some of that is partly a result of the idea of the remorseless march of history that kind of Marxist inevitability. But once you're there, you just think like, well, this isn't... about morality anymore. This is about the wheels of history and anything that gets in, you know, gets in their way is bad and anything that doesn't is good. And therefore you end up with this very fractured, broken, sharp...

edged, jagged, moral sentiment within the scale. Because Marx obviously welcomed an economic crisis. I don't think he was ever just kind of like, you should not give starving people food. No. Because it will get in the way of the revolution. No.

So Vladimir returns to St. Petersburg in 1893, falls in love with Marxist activist Nadezhda Konstantinova Krupskaya, who becomes his wife. Local activists, though, are quite spooked by his connection to agrarian terrorism. It's quite a niche interest. And his severe fanatical manner. They nickname him the old man and joke that even as a child, he probably looks exactly like that with the little beard. He's only 23.

There's a rule, but they sort of say that he just always looked like that. Like how you think of Lenin, he just always looked this way. If you look at young Marx, we couldn't use a picture of young Marx for the first. Karl Marx episode, because it just doesn't look like him. No, he looks really dashing and kind of, you know, imperial. Yeah, and nobody would know that was Karl Marx, because everyone just thinks that he kind of like, sort of...

Came out of nursery with a giant beard. But Lennon just always looks like Lennon. He always looks like Lennon. There's also two aspects of him physically that people always comment on. One of them is the eyes. They love talking about these unusual piercing eyes. Adriana Tykova says, Lenin was an evil man and he had the evil eyes of a wolf. People, you know, even when they don't think of him, they're always just like, no, those eyes.

were an issue. And secondly is this idea of his skull. Obsessed with... Phrenology era, remember. Right. But it goes... I mean, this will go on way into Soviet history. Eventually, dozens of people will be employed in order to sort of...

study his skull, his brain, you know, and compare the folds in it to other people's brains to show it's like hyper dense and capable of thought. But they're obsessed with it very early on. So here's Commissar of Education, Anatoly Lunacharsky. The structure of his skull is truly striking.

One has to study him for a little while to appreciate its physical power, the contours of the colossal dome of his forehead, and to sense something I can only describe as a physical emanation of light from its surface. Already just that thing of like, he's just so smart, so intelligent that he's... almost godlike, almost like a kind of messiah. Well, obviously, anyone watching this on video will be able to enjoy a pair of hairless skulls celebrating at length.

The beauty of another man. Yeah, so you can study our craniums. So we talked in the Marx episodes about the Second International and the Golden Boy status of the German Social Democrats and their intellectual leader, Karl Kautsky. He's a really important figure. So they're revolutionary in theory, but evolutionary in practice. So what they believe in is internationalism and gradual reform leading to eventual revolution.

Like the real kind of reformist, revisionist wing are like, well, maybe you don't need revolution. Maybe you can just have the reforms. But the mainstream view is like evolution then revolution. So they stand in elections and they're very successful.

At this point, remember, there's no clear distinction between socialism and communism. And actually, the more radical alternative to this mainstream Marxism is syndicalism, which favors massive strikes and direct action by workers. I mean, it's connected to anarchism, basically.

Yeah, and then, you know, plays a role sort of later feeding into fascism. It's a very aggro strand of things. Right, right. And I guess we would hark it back really to that Bakunin-Marx split. This is almost like a continuation of that Bakunin-Marx split that we spoke about in the second episode.

So Vladimir forms the Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class and is immediately arrested by the Akrana, along with all the rest. One we'll come back to in the Union who is arrested with him is Julius Martov. So put a pin in that. In 1897, they're all sentenced to three years of exile in Siberia. Now, this is not like the Soviet Gulag. Yeah. I mean, it sounds awful, but it's actually quite comfortable, good for his health.

And he likes fresh air. And exercise, there's hunting, there's ice skating, there's lots of exercise, you're allowed to take paid employment, like teaching. So, I mean, it's a punishment, but it's not this kind of like... hellish prison camp than one might imagine. It's also worth mentioning that evidently security was very weak.

in these Siberian exiles because they all fucking escape. They escape multiple times. It's basically you're just sent there with no expectation that you will not escape and come back. Yeah, they didn't seem like guards. They're just like, we're going to send you over there and it's going to be too much hassle for you to get back.

I don't know, these guys are quite motivated, to be fair. So, Vladimir works on the development of capitalism in Russia, which he publishes in 1899 under the pseudonym Vladimir Ilin, not yet Lenin. So he's basically making Plakhanov's argument. Agrarian socialism is dead because there's no solidarity among peasants. You can't rely on them. In fact, the proletariat is exploited by the richer peasants called kulaks from the Russian word for fist.

the idea that they hold the poorer peasants in their fists. Russia is actually already capitalist, so it's not too soon for revolution after all. So Leninism at this point is Marx via Engels. via Plakanov. And we should probably say that the best way of understanding it at this stage is essentially bourgeois peasants.

So you've created this bourgeoisie category among the peasantry. This class that Marx said was kind of dying out, kind of irrelevant, if they're anything, they're probably like reactionary sort of semi-class enemies. You find, okay, so the Kulak is then the class enemy within a pre-existing potential... class enemy category. Yes. And it's really telling the language used by and about Lenin. Whereas we talked about, there was quite a lot of, you know, ambiguity in Marxism, you know, and Engels.

was saying well look let's don't over interpret this don't make it too kind of rigid lenin compares his theory to a single piece of steel And the writer Maxim Gorky, a socialist writer, said that Lenin's speeches had the cold glitter of steel shavings. He spoke with the physical pressure of an irresistible truth. Everybody says this. It is his...

His clarity, his firmness of purpose, his decisiveness, and this chilling and, again, somewhat sort of inhuman quality. That's beautiful. By the way, Gorky. Fuck, every time you read a line from him, you're just, I mean, it's hardly surprising, it's gawky, right? But you're just like, this is just beautifully, beautifully written and expressed. And here he is in, and also I think very incisive in his critique.

So here's another line from his on Lenin on the way that he can sort of like muster up the feelings of the crowd. Oh, yeah. Life in all its complexity is unknown to Lenin. He does not know the masses, he hasn't lived among them, but he found out in books how to raise the masses on their hind legs, how to enrage the masses' instincts easily.

To the Lenins, the working class is like iron ore to a metal worker. Is it possible, given present circumstances, to cast a specialist state out of this ore? Evidently not. But why not try? What does Lenin risk if the experiment fails? That thing, I mean, it's a cliched insult when people will say about certain socialists that they like the people in general, but they don't like...

People in reality. You know, which is sometimes unfair. But it's not really unfair about Lenin. That seems to be very much. He's like... So he leaves Siberia in 1900 with 500 pounds of books. It's a lot of fucking books to be carrying for Siberia. To join his family near Moscow, then he travels to Zurich to see Plakanov, already with the intention of challenging him as the leader of Russian Marxism. A very ambitious fellow, not yet 30.

So the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party formed in Minsk in 1898, but mostly active among the exiles because it was repressed at home. Straight away, there are divisions. There are always divisions. So some of them favor this Neurodnik-style terrorism. Some focus on trade union organizing. Others think that a middle class vanguard should lead the revolution and not the workers at all, the Blankist tendency there.

Robert Service, whose books I'm drawing on for some of this, I mean, he suggests the one reason Russian Marxists became so insular and addicted to arguing among themselves is they can't get anywhere with actual Russian workers. You know? Even in Russia, they can't, let alone in Switzerland. So it really is this very kind of closed shop of argumentation. So Vladimir moves to Munich to launch a Marxist newspaper called Iskra, or The Spark.

And he writes a crucial 1902 pamphlet named after his favourite novel, What Is To Be Done. And this is the first time he publicly uses the name Lenin, so I can call him Lenin now. I'm glad because it just felt a bit chummy earlier. Vladimir. Vlad. Vlad. Fladmate. So the pamphlet is effectively an advert for an autocratic leader like Lenin.

I mean, basically, he is more of a plotter than an organizer. His vision is a united, disciplined, centralized and secretive party where he has followers rather than equals. Really early on, he's established the mould here. Later in 1902, Lenin and Nadishter moved to London and they stay in Islington. Bloody lefty Islington.

And one day there's a knock on the door and there is 22-year-old Liev Trotsky, who's already a celebrated writer. And Lenin says, ah, the pen has arrived. So shall we meet the pen? Let's do that. So Trotsky's life is a lot like Lenin's, but running a decade behind. So Lieber Bronstein, born on the 26th of October, 1879 in Kherson province, Ukraine, the son of a successful Jewish farmer, the fifth of eight children.

Like Lenin, he became politically radical shortly before turning 16. The theme is because he'd moved to Nikolaev and he started reading radical pamphlets that had been left there by a previous tenant. Oh, wow. He joined a circle of socialist intellectuals, but was at that point quite sceptical of Marxism.

And early on, it was really obvious he wasn't that into this sort of pseudoscientific theory, but into this very striking, elegant, dynamic prose. He was a stylist. He was much more flamboyant than Lenin. Someone who knew him then later described his sharply expressed egotism, his overdeveloped confidence, his extreme and sickly vanity, his proclivity for extravagance in speech, writing and demeanour, a kind of teasing pedantry.

I think that's, I mean, it's not harsh on the personality, but I think it's harsh on the, I think he's an exceptional writer. No, he is, but I mean, the egotism, the vanity. Oh, definitely. Like Lenin, Trotsky is arrested by the Okrana. in 1898 along with his entire circle and sentenced to four years in Siberia, where he wrote some very spiky book reviews and played a lot of very competitive croquet. Are you fucking serious? Yeah.

So again, not quite the kind of icy hellhole one might imagine. And again, one of his fellow exiles was a Pole called Felix Zdzinski, who we will also meet, I think, in part two. So a lot of these kind of figures that were figured in the early days of the Bolshevik regime are crossing paths in these groups and in these exiles.

In 1982 Trotsky runs away from Siberia to Vienna then Geneva where he visits the Iskra newspaper. The obvious thing to do is go and see Lenin in London. In London, he has a debate with two very spicy anarchists and gets a reputation as the Iskra crowd's best speaker as well as writer. So because he's funny, he's sharp, he's tough, he's energetic and a talented organiser.

So he's basically dispatched to give speeches all over Europe and attack the party's new rivals in Russia. There's a new socialist party called the Socialist Revolutionaries. Confusingly, they are more democratic and less revolutionary than the Russian social democrats. So the rule is names are not helpful. I think everybody knows that about the Nazi party, right? everyone knows that they're not just national socialists

But it's actually true of lots and lots of other parties. Well, surely everyone, you know, as soon as the word democratic features in like a country's name, it's never a democracy. On the same basis, you should think this way too. It's just weird that the socialist revolutionaries weren't very revolutionary. I think that seems misleading. The Social Democrats' second Congress, crucial, takes place in Brussels in 1903. The Iskra group has already split after like a year.

Lenin's section is known as the hards, and they pride themselves on their rudeness and aggression. So it's not just their militancy, but actually on being obnoxious and bullying. I think a little bit of this comes from almost like adopting that Marx writing style. There's at least the trace germ element of it here. Here's one of Lenin's attacks. This is Jan Kotsky.

The Judas, the renegade, the swindler, the blind puppy, the sycophant of the bourgeoisie, the swine, the yes man of scoundrels and bloodsuckers, philistine, guilty of despicable tricks, foul lies, fit for a cesspit of renegades. This sounds like a Kendrick Lamar diss track. But there's a real like, I don't want to take this too far, but there is that thing that is so infuriating and tiresome.

in Marx's writing, transmits to Lenin. And it is part of a... The less funny part is it is part of this process of just demonizing opponents that ultimately does authorize you to just start doing some terrible fucking things to them. The gap between the words and the action is slim. than we sometimes think. Well, the thing is that it's easier to laugh at Mark's vituperative attacks because it's sort of like, well, nobody died. Yeah, yeah. No great harm done.

Whereas with Lenin's, you realize that what it's setting up is a demonization and a dehumanization, which does lead to people dying. So their behavior, the behavior of the hard... alienates a lot of delegates who walk out, including the Jewish socialist group known as the Bund. Because already people are just like, they're not taking to Lenin's style. The rules are rewritten to give Lenin and Plakhanov...

allies at this point, control over the whole party. Therefore, Lenin is able to rename the Hards the Majoritarians or Bolsheviks. And his former friend from Siberia, Julius Martov, calls his group... the minoritarians or Mensheviks. I just think it's perfect that this great divide is between two people who were in the same circle at St. Petersburg, who were in exile together. Now they're enemies.

So the Mensheviks are still revolutionaries, but first they want to work with liberals to bring down the Tsar, introduce universal suffrage, civil rights, things like that. Then there will be a revolution. I think that's the key. Like a lot of the time that you read about this, that the emphasis is on sort of almost tactics, that the Bolsheviks are keener on terrorism and, you know, attacks the borough and the Mensheviks aren't. Actually, the Mensheviks did dabble in that stuff.

The really cool distinction, I think, is just openness to working with others. It's like a more pluralistic assessment of politics. Are you prepared to cooperate? Would liberals be as other kind of socialist parties? Or are you really that bar of steel? It's only our way. We're the only ones that matter. And that seems like the really core conceptual distinction. Yeah, because when we're talking about the moderates here, whether that...

more moderate, you know, when that might be the Mensheviks or Karl Kautsky or whatever. They're not like the Lib Dems. You know, they still want a revolution, but it's like, well, when and in what form? Is that your second piercing insight? None of these people are really endemic. No, this is so weird because you'll come across later like the word centrist, and it's just not what we think of as centrism.

So Marx's phrase, dictatorship of the proletariat, as we said, not a major feature of Marx's writing. I think it appears twice. It's written into the party program. It is fundamental. to Lenin's version of Marxism. He is very good at sieving Marx and Engels for useful phrases, claiming that he is following them to the letter, when in fact, he's cherry picking to justify his own ideas.

And the Mensheviks also believe in a dictatorship of the Presbyterian, but in the Marxist sense, much more broad. So they disagree about what it means.

Immediately, pretty much, Blakhanov is so sick of Lenin that he defects to the Mensheviks. And the Iskra group just falls apart. The Mensheviks are also backed by Karl Kautsky from Germany and the Polish-German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg. who is probably the most useful contrast to Lenin throughout this part of the story because she believes in revolution from below and despises sort of tyranny and repression of free speech and so on.

Leninism, basically at this point, is the seizure of power by a vanguard party because the working classes can't develop revolutionary consciousness if they're left to their own devices because of... false consciousness right yeah this starts back to those ideas we had in the first episode you know what what is what are the series of logical conclusions which you must

you don't have to come to, but which you can come to if you believe that people are currently competitive and lacking solidarity and not seeing the true shape of history by virtue of the capitalist influence upon them. And it's like, well... You can very easily come to the conclusion of, well, you need some kind of leadership cast to usher their consciousness in the correct direction. And that is the kind of thought process that Lenin goes through.

And because, of course, he has his own preference for sort of centralism and secrecy and elitism. So it's the version that suits him. Luxembourg accuses Lenin of Blankism, which he rejects, but is obviously true. Now, Trotsky is dismayed by the split. He prides himself on his independence, doesn't care who he offends. This will not serve him well later.

And everybody agrees that he's really brave, smart, dynamic, but also vain, arrogant, insensitive, annoying. I mean, he is the most fascinating character, I think. A million times, yeah. So he moves to Munich and starts attacking Lenin in print. He compares him to Robespierre, calling him Maximilian Lenin. Not far off. And he actually nails Leninism straight away.

It says it leads to this. The party organization substitutes itself for the party. The central committee substitutes itself for the organization. And finally, a dictator substitutes himself for the central committee. I mean... That is a very accurate trailer for what's going to happen over these three episodes. Back in Russia, party members are also horrified by the split because they think, fools, the proletariat is meant to be united. That's not how it works.

And lots of Lenin's old friends think that he's out of control. So what Lenin does is he gets the Bolsheviks in Russia to recruit floating socialists to his ranks. There's a lot of people who are kind of, they're socialists, but they're not really sort of signed up. So it's a very good recruitment. effort he writes ominously even at this point the pressure exerted by the martyvites

that's the Mensheviks, needs to be answered with real pressure and not with tawdry whimpering about peace and so on. And the application of pressure requires the use of all forces. So he has no power over violence. at this point but already it's like it's a horrible contempt isn't it tawdry whimpering yeah yeah yeah um so you can see where this is heading

He loves strength and hate and would have that thing that, you know, Mussolini would share. Just, you know, debate and it's basically just this kind of... shameful waste of time, a sort of effeminate, you know, and what you need is just steel and terror and force. Well, remember, you know, Mussolini admired Lenin and some of the early reports of Mussolini in power, like, you know, he's the Lenin of Italy. Right. You know, right away they saw like a similarity in that language.

So the revolutionary opportunity arrives in 1905. There is massive unrest among workers, peasants, national groups. This is the thing. It's the Russian Empire. So there is a lot of tension. You know, Ukraine doesn't want to be part of the empire. You know, there's problems. all over, which is a consistent part of the story, made really bad by Russia's disastrous war with Japan. So Tsar Nicholas II is looking very wobbly.

On 9th of January, 1905, a peaceful march on the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg ends in bloodshed when troops shoot dead hundreds of demonstrators. This is so-called Bloody Sunday. I don't know when the first Bloody Sunday is. There's a lot, right? There's been a lot of sequels, unfortunately. This inspires strikes and demonstrations across the country and a real loss of control by the authorities. Eisenstein's classic film Battleship Potemkin is about a mutiny in Odessa in June.

The liberals form their own party of constitutional democrats, known as the cadets, who will be important later. And the first workers' councils, or Soviets, are formed. Trotsky races back to Russia in March.

And becomes deputy chairman of the Petersburg Soviet. And these will be, I mean, the Soviets will become, over the course of this, like this almost like alternative form of democracy available to revolutionaries. You know, there'll be liberals looking for what we normally think of as parliamentary democracy.

And there'll be communists that increasingly look to these Soviet institutions, literally in the original use of the word Soviet, as a kind of worker democracy where you can make decisions democratically, but outside of what are considered bourgeois structures. So Trotsky later admits, looking back to 1905, we too stood for terror, but for mass terror realised by the revolutionary class. It's like, oh, that's okay then. I was a bit worried when you started that sentence, but that sounds fine.

In December, the Soviets shut down as part of a crackdown, and they're all sentenced to lifetime exile for subversion. But as you said, security not so good. So Trotsky escapes in a deer-drawn sleigh, very Christmassy, and settles in Vienna. It just sounds like a great time to be a terrorist. I know. I mean, it's just like fun times. So we are sending you over there and we are trusting you.

To stay there. To not hijack some kind of sleigh. Or other deer-drawn vehicle and go to Vienna. Lenin, though, he won't... rush back to Russia because he's more interested in crushing the Mensheviks. He calls a party congress in London for like another showdown. And again, now he's talking again about a provisional, revolutionary, democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. A democratic dictatorship.

It's fucking an amazing bundle of words he's managed to slot together there. So he doesn't think about going to Russia until in October, Tsar Nicholas issues a manifesto promising a new parliament or Duma and universal civil rights. And Lenin finally feels it's safe enough to go home.

There's a real distinction there, you know, that Trotsky is just like, where's the action? Like a very courageous, somewhat reckless character. And Lennon's just like, well, I'm not going to go back. It's dangerous. So eventually, relationships between the Tsar and the Duma collapse. The Tsar violently reimposes control. Lenin has to flee again. The 1905 revolution ends. Now, this reminds...

a lot of people of the Paris Commune in 1871. Now, Marx and Engels thought that the Commune failed because it didn't inspire international solidarity. Remember, they were complaining about how useless the English were. Lenin thought it failed because it didn't use repressive violence. He wants to arm workers and students. They can plant bombs, rob banks, eventually mount an armed insurrection. And one of these bank robbers is a man called...

I'm so glad that you had to do the name so that I didn't. Yeah. Who will later become Stalin. Yeah, well, first will become Koba and later Stalin. They all love giving themselves these... kind of action hero names. Yeah, and when he's a kid, he's called Soso as a kid. Like, lots of names. I don't think Soso would have been as...

Scary. In his dictator days. Well, we probably shouldn't take on the names that they chose to give themselves, but I think that battle has been lost and we're not going to be able to re-establish it here. No, I think, you know the way that some people just like, every time they mention Tommy Robinson, they have to go, actually, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. And every time we mention Stalin, we should go, Ashley Joseph Varsaryanovich Jugashvili. Like, don't humour him. My trouble there is...

Primarily that I can't be asked and we'll get it wrong. And also secondarily that I feel the battle has been lost. He is born December the 6th, 1878 in the Georgian town of Gori in the far corner of the Russian Empire. At some point, he decides that he wants to be a year younger for his fucking Tinder profile or something. And for a long time, all the dates are one year later for his birth. We don't know why that happened, but it's clearly to do with him.

That is not when he was born. He was actually born in 1878. But it's interesting that even his birthday turns out to be a lie. You know, it turns out to be this process of mass fabrication of evidence. His mother is, I mean, he's genuinely, actually, of all of these people, he's probably got the most genuinely humble background. Yeah. His mother is a daughter of serfs. His father is a cobbler. The father leaves when...

when he's very young, he dies. And like a violent drunk, like a real fucking asshole. Yeah, I couldn't, there was an attempt in the books I read to try and work out just how... unusual that level of violence towards your family was at the time and and it was

It didn't have a clear outcome to it. Maybe there was just a lot of beating children and wives in this period, and almost certainly there was. But this is not a man you wanted as a father, and there was clearly a sigh of relief. Oh, right. So I suppose pushing back at the idea that somehow he was unusual. brutalized as a child and that's why he had to do the Great Terror. Precisely. There was probably a lot of brutalized kids in that area at this time. Who did not do the Great Terror.

His mother sent him to be educated as a priest, kind of the best form of social mobility available at the time. So he goes to a theological school, he learns Russian. In 1894, he goes to a theological seminary. really quite oppressive kind of regime within a unit. They're constantly searching their books. They're not allowed to read any kind of secular literature.

And that seems to have started. Oh, and also they punish any kind of sign of Georgian national identity. And this seems to have sparked this kind of youthful teenage rebellion in him. So he says, I protest against the outrageous regime. I was ready to become and actually did.

become a revolutionary, a believer in Marxism as a really revolutionary teaching. And he starts calling himself Koba at this point, who's this Georgian nationalist hero. Some of the students, perhaps before he gained full control, kind of chatted. shit about what he was like back then. This guy is someone who was devious, thin-skinned, and obsessed with winning. That doesn't sound like him at all. And avenging slights. Perceived slights. So...

You know, they start as you mean to go on. 1898 is really when he starts properly radicalising, like he's attending illegal meetings of railway workers, he joins a social democratic organisation. He's expelled from the Theological Seminary in 1899. And by 1900, when there's a wave of strikes followed by crackdowns, he's properly involved, goes underground. And at this point, he is a professional revolutionary.

He then goes through this, I mean, really, sort of 15 years or more of just that classic process. Takes part in an action, is arrested, is exiled to Siberia, escapes. comes back, is arrested again, happens in 1908, happens in 1910, on and on it goes. But he is rising through the ranks. He becomes a member of the Social Democratic Party's Central Committee at this point.

And he moves away from Georgian nationalism, starts to believe in a unified Russian party and against ethnic fragmentation. As part of that process, as he gives up on Georgian nationalism, he drops the name Koba. and becomes Stalin, as we would unfortunately refer to him from now on. We should say that he meets Lenin for the first time at some conference in 1905. So this is where all the characters are coming together. Although Trotsky is still on the outs.

Right. And, you know, even from a quite early stage, I think Stalin sees that Trotsky is just... like far more talented than him. Everything that needs to be done, whether it's oratory, whether it's organisation, whether it's sloganeering. Sloganeering is no small endeavour, you know, with these people. It is absolutely core to what they do. So he's obviously a big threat. Well, he's got quite...

a weak voice. He's got a very thick Georgian accent. He's got no sense of humour. One of the Georgian Marxists denounces his personal capriciousness and his tendency to despotic behaviour. He just does not have charm of any description. So we're in the aftermath of the 1905 revolution. The Mensheviks want their middle class revolution and civil rights. The Bolsheviks want their dictatorship of the proletariat.

Trotsky, meanwhile, continues to be a faction of one and denounces Bolsheviks and Mensheviks alike. And he's saying, look, you've just got to kind of, this split isn't tenable, you've got to get together. He launches a paper called Pravda or Truth, which is not the Pravda that we know. It's a popular name. His critics think he simply doesn't have any principles and can't pick a side, which I think is unfair. I think he does have, I think he has a point at this point. So the second international.

Gathers in Stuttgart in 1907, we talked about the first international that Marx was in charge of, the second international of all the socialist parties. It declares that in the event of war, all socialist parties should work together to oppose their own governments and demand peace.

This is quite a seminal moment, really, in socialist history, the Second International. Rosa Luxemburg makes two smart observations. She says to Lenin that this pact is delusional and when it comes to the crunch, nationalism will prevail and socialists will support. The war effort. And she has Lenin's number. She says, the ultra-centralism advocated by Lenin is not something born of the positive creative spirit, but of the negative sterile spirit of the watchman. She's just...

Fucking great, isn't she? She's very, very astute very early on. So now the Bolsheviks are arguing among themselves over whether there should be this mass revolutionary culture, which some still believe in, or this small disciplined Blankist elite. Now, of course, if you believe in a vanguard, you believe that you should lead it. You don't want someone else to be in the vanguard. So you can't separate Lenin's version of Marxism from his own desire for power.

Whereas you could say with Luxembourg, it's actually like her version is that she would like less power. And he is a great admirer of Machiavelli, the military strategist von Clausewitz, like all the theorists of power. This becomes quite a habit. This is the same for him. for Stalin as well. Gorky, on the money again, says of Lenin, his dispute about truth, in air quotes, is conducted not so that truth might be victorious, but so as to prove, I'm a Marxist. The world's best Marxist is me.

Basically, the best version of Marxism is the one that I believe in. So by 1911, the Bolsheviks have the upper hand over the Mensheviks and Lenin is dominating the Bolsheviks. His enemies are all in disarray. But his factionalism actually hurts the party in Russia because it... confused as ordinary workers. And they're constantly being arrested and exiled anyway. This is one dispute I don't want to get into. But it's literally a philosophical dispute about the nature of reality.

Which is of just no interest to anybody else outside the party. So membership actually shrinks just a few thousand. Lenin loves it though. He goes, this then is my destiny, one fighting campaign after another against political imbecilities, vulgarities, opportunism, etc. This has been going on since 1893. Oh, well, I still wouldn't swap this destiny for peace with the Philistines.

Very Marx-y, isn't it? God, I find him just exhaust. I mean, the best thing you can say about him is that he's exhausting. You just don't want to spend any time with him on the page or in any other capacity. And not to hand it to Stalin, but... He calls all this factional bullshit a storm in a glass of water and actually gets a reputation as a conciliator and a pragmatist. Well, it's worth sort of saying that at this point he's a much more moderate figure than Lenin.

Yeah. You know, much, much softer. He'll probably be called the phrase they use for moderation as a rightist, you know, later on, you know, he'll be on that wing of things. And it's the sort of like, well, hold on, just chill out a little bit. Although to be fair.

Pretty much everyone when they encounter Lenin is like, dude, just chill out, man. So Lenin launches his own Pravda, the famous one, as the party newspaper in 1912, and makes Stalin, who Lenin calls the wonderful Georgian, its first editor.

Trotsky, meanwhile, has been feuding with Lenin for almost a decade now. It's kind of amazing that they ever kind of got back together. They're really the Ross and Rachel of Bolshevism. I can't believe the shit that comes out of your mouth. It's fucking incredible to me. He says, the entire edifice of Leninism at the present time is built on lies and falsification and carries within itself the poisonous inception of its own dissolution. He becomes a war correspondent.

There's a 1912 war between Turkey and the Balkan League, which I'd forgotten happened, I've got to tell you, but it did. When you say forgotten, did you know that it happened in the first world? No, I remember reading about the causes of the First World War, do you know what I mean?

I totally forgot about this. Anyway, and he returns convinced that there will soon be a war between Austria and Serbia. Not wrong. Once again, Trotsky on the money. So we're getting to the First World War. And at this point... Stalin is out of the picture, right? Well, Stalin's been exiled, and this time he stays in exile. He gets exiled in 1913 to Siberia, and he's there for four years. It really is quite inhospitable. So when he gets there, it's like minus 37 degrees. He's really...

poor health, he writes to his party comrades saying, I understand that none of you have time for this, but damn it, I don't have anyone else to turn to. I don't want to croak here. He clearly does feel it's actually quite perilous for him there. He sort of enters into this kind of...

prisoner of war sitcom with Sverdlov who is the fellow revolutionary that he's been sent there with they have to live together he writes Sverdlov used to wash the dishes and spoons after dinner but I never did I would eat and put the dishes on the dirt floor and the dog would lick everything clean.

But that fellow had a passion for cleanliness. It's Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon in The Odd Couple, isn't it? The thing is, though, when you read this stuff, it's important to remember he has no sense of humour. So this is not, like, ironic funny. He is just talk... This is just... what he's fucking saying and he means it so he moves out and goes to stay with the para prig in her family

There's no parents there. It's five brothers and two sisters. They're all orphans. And it's important to remember when we talked about canes, we had an episode where we couldn't even mention... the fact that he invented GDP. There's just too many accomplishments. There wasn't even space to mention this one. Well, in a similar way, Stalin has so many... abysmal qualities that you could easily do an episode without mentioning the fact that he is a pedophile.

But he is a paedophile. So of the people in that house, one of them is Lydia. She is 14 years old. He at this point is 35 years old. They enter into a relationship or rather... The only way of describing that is that he rapes her. And it's not like there's some kind of, you know, different cultural understanding because the guard does try to intervene to prevent this from happening and fails to do so, actually, because of central command.

She is certainly pregnant once with his child, possibly twice with his child. He ends up just moving in with her. This is not the only time that he sleeps with very, very young women when he's obviously much older. Everyone then in the Bolshevik party just starts to forget about him, he's away for so long. Lenin at one point writes to his assistant, sorry, in 1915 he writes to his assistant, I have a big favour to ask, can you find out Koba's last name? We've forgotten.

And yet, Stalin is sort of perfectly content over there. He's got nothing to read, nothing to do. He's not involved in political activity. He doesn't seem affected. He's actually really quite docile. Trotsky writes of him. Later, any attempt to find traces of his spiritual life during this period of solitude and leisure would be in vain. So let's talk about what's happening with the First World War, while Stalin is busy being a paedophile.

So Marx predicted in the 1870s that a war between Germany and Russia would act as the midwife of the inevitable social revolution in Russia. One of his better predictions. So that ends up being true in the end, but initially it turns out that Rosa Luxemburg was right about the second international, and Lenin was wrong. Across Europe, nationalism trounces internationalism, socialist parties support the war.

The second international is dead. I think it's just completely dissolved in 1916. And you see these interesting splits going on. The Italian socialists, before Italy enters the war, the leadership opposes joining the war. So a pro-war guy called Benito Mussolini walks out to do his own thing. So the war has all kinds of different effects on socialist parties. You know when we said about Marxism that it doesn't understand... human belonging.

You know, that it just has this really rudimentary economic reductionist view of human belonging. And actually people think in terms of, you know, race and football and local area. Well, the first world war, the fate of the second international in the first world war is just a demonstration.

of that. Like it didn't understand national belonging and national belonging absolutely twatted on its arse. So Luxembourg finds this really tragic. Unlike Lenin, she sees the war just as a tragedy, not an opportunity. With her ex-partner, Leo Jogiches and Karl Liebknecht, he's actually the son of the founder of the SPD, the Social Democrats, they break away, they form the anti-war Spartacus League, with the result that she spends almost the entire war in prison.

for encouraging soldiers to mutiny. This is when she comes up with her famous line about the choice between socialism or barbarism. And what she specifically means by barbarism is war. People misuse this to mean whatever they like. Starmerism. Starmerism. But that's specifically what she means. She's just going, the failure. The failure that she frankly predicted.

So I'm not quite sure how she thought it was going to work out otherwise, but the failure of socialist internationalism has led to this disaster. So... Catch up with our guys. Like you said, Stalin is in exile in Siberia. Most of the Russian Bolshevik leaders are in prison or exile. When the war breaks out, Lenin's in Poland, Trotsky's in Austria. Both immediately flee to...

Guess where? Go on. Switzerland. Although Trotsky, after being kicked out of various countries, winds up in New York for a bit, where he becomes a celebrity on the American left. Lenin, meanwhile living in Zurich with hardly any money, increasingly depressed, he spends his days in the library reading philosophy, not to expand his thinking, but to cherry pick useful evidence that he is always right, even when he changes his mind.

Basically, even though he talks so much about theory, the test for him is praxis, like practice, not theory. If it works, it's good. So he's able to constantly kind of change, not on the fundamental idea of the kind of the revolutionary elite and the dictatorship of the proletariat, but he can change his mind on a lot of different things. And then he can always just find some justification for it in Marx and elsewhere.

He sees it, as does Luxembourg, the war as the product of imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, that basically economic expansion after a certain point is only possible. by having colonies abroad and then when everybody's got all the colonies it's only possible by seizing colonies so the war is essentially about growth and profit this is the marxist analysis which does make sense if you think back to that sort of that marxist

uh the viewing capital of like this real like sort of ceiling you know you're not creating any additional value because you're building all these new machines at some point you've got to go somewhere else to start finding and it's not like entirely incorrect but of course it does it does ignore all the other things that fed into that war and national rivalries. It's simply the economics. Now he-

His spicy take is he actively wants Germany to defeat Russia and says that all socialists should want their own countries to be defeated. Which doesn't make any sense because somebody has to win a war. So it's like, if you're defeated, then you're going to be ruled by the other guys' assholes. So I'm not quite sure how this is sort of meant to add up. I suppose how it adds up is if everybody's defeated. Revolution? I don't know how any patriotic Russian ever, you know, did...

could stand to be ruled by this man is beyond imagining. So just like that famine we talked about when he was a young man, the human suffering doesn't bother him at all if it brings about revolution. That's all to the good.

Trotsky thinks Lenin has just completely lost his mind and starts sketching out his own plan for a socialist United States of Europe. So Lenin is wrong actually about one very big thing. He's not convinced that the socialist revolution can happen quite yet. And he writes at some point, it might require a second or even third world war before the revolution happens. So...

We've talked about this before. People expecting something to happen, but not as soon as it does. Again and again. It's not like people didn't say something was possible, but they just didn't expect it to happen when it did. History rushes up on you. Oh yeah, what an interesting phenomenon for you to have spotted. Because we often talk about the people that expect something to happen and it doesn't happen.

We very rarely talk about the people that expect this time to happen and it does happen, but just not to their fucking timetable. Yeah, we'll talk about this later, you know, in the Second World War. I'm really glad that my interesting observation has made up for my... earlier crass pop culture analogies. To be clear, I didn't say that. No, I think... No, no, you're still 1-0 down. I think we're even.

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Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan, $15 per month equivalent required. New customer offer first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com. So when the end of the Tsar comes, it comes quickly. Russia's actually been facing strikes and protests since 1912, so it's not just the war. Obviously, the war's made everything worse.

Mass inflation, food shortages, worsening conditions, etc., etc., especially in Petrograd, which is the new, less German name of St. Petersburg. The revolution starts in Petrograd with a strike by women in the textile industry. and then spreads really quickly so that it's too big for the Ukraine to crush. They do love crushing. And the socialist parties come out of hiding. Everybody sort of, loads of people are rushing back to Russia because now they feel things are changing.

On 2nd of March, Tsar Nicholas abdicates and a provisional government is formed, initially led by the liberal cadets. We talked about them earlier, the Russian Liberal Party. There are two great moments, right, of... of kind of hope for Russia in the 20th century. The first one is like February 1917.

And then the other one is November 1989. And in both cases, there's just this moment that liberal democracy can take hold. And this is the moment, February 1917 is when liberal democracy could take hold. And the first time it's crushed by communists. That's the storytelling here. The second time, I think it's crushed by neoliberals who completely fluff the opportunity to create that kind of viable liberal democratic state. But those are the moments in that...

We always just think about the October 1917 communist part of what happens here. To me, that February 1917 story is so tragic and there's such a different outcome that we could be living in today. You know, when you think about what's happening in Ukraine, when you think about the way the world looks right now, if events had gone a different way. But you can also see, I'm maybe able to explain why it was sort of, it was unlikely to succeed. Oh.

well one reason obviously is is the bolsheviks lenin hates liberals and sees them as no better than the tsar yeah which is a classic it's the classic communist thing where you just You hate the liberals. But this is a very un-Marxist. I mean, the real thing there is that's a real break from Marx. I mean, that would not be Marx's opinion on this. This seems to fit the pattern perfectly for Marx. You want the bourgeois revolution first? Exactly.

Not for Lenin. So Lenin and Trotsky, they're both living abroad at this point, but they both tell the Bolsheviks, don't compromise with the provisional government. Stalin, again, the unlikely moderate. He's the only one of the big three who's actually in Russia. Not that anyone would have thought he was in the big three. Colleagues described him as a grey blur.

He returns... No wonder he was so pissed when he got barriers, like, you know what, I'll fucking kill you all, because all they've done is slag him off. So much of it was based on his resentment as a Georgian, as working class, as somebody who had been overlooked. So much of it was like...

this monstrous chip on his shoulder. So he returns from exile in Siberia with, not with his odd couple flatmate, but with Liev Kamenev, a really important figure, to seize control of the Bolshevik Central Committee. And again, he's a pragmatist. He's not moderate. He is pragmatic, which is different. He's not philosophically moderate.

So he just thinks you've got to work with the anti-war Mensheviks and the provisional government where necessary. Lenin hates this. And we'll hold it against him at certain points. And what will then happen really over these months is that...

Stalin will sort of spot that Lenin is ultimately where the authority is, it's where your chance of success is, and he will move towards the Lenin position from where he was. But already what you're seeing here, when I talk about the anti-war men's effects, is that the war is the big problem.

As long as the war goes on, the provisional government cannot do anything. It cannot improve conditions. It cannot make a clean break from the Tsar. That is an even bigger problem than Bolshevik opposition. And you could say that the government itself makes a series of... catastrophic unforced errors in order to end up in that scenario. So Lenin decides he has to go where the action is, unlike in 1905. But how is he going to do it? And then there's a little bit of a caper.

Well, these mad plans. One includes traveling by train disguised as a deaf and dumb Swede. His wife says that he will be caught talking about revolution in his sleep. Another one is chartering a plane across the Eastern Front until he is told it will definitely be shot down and he will die. So he eventually secures permission to travel through Germany by train with some other exiles, then take a ferry to Sweden.

where he picks up the famous Lenin cap. It's actually like a painter's kind of cap. Then a train to Finland and on to St. Petersburg. Quite a famous train journey. It is. It's also done... As far as we understand it, when people looked into the archives, with the full cooperation of the German state, of the enemy,

And that is an act essentially of treason. You know what I mean? There is no two ways about it. And it's also very revealing because it shows that Germany towards its military enemy thought, you know what, the best thing we can do is get this bloke who obviously wants his own country to...

lose and send them directly into the capital. Yeah, like not wrong. That's exactly what he wants. So on the journey, Lenin writes his April theses, calling for the Bolsheviks and other far left socialists, because there are other groups, not to collaborate with the government.

Arriving on 3rd of April, he climbs onto an armored car outside the station, tells a crowd of thousands the same thing. This is a bourgeois government. You know, we shouldn't be helping it. We should be trying to bring it down. This is... Obviously, where you get the title of Edmund Wilson's great history to the Finland Station. Immediately, Stalin moves to Lenin's position, as you said.

And he's quite smart. He reigns in his ego and he slips into the background and accepts this role of loyal and diligent bureaucrat who is acknowledged later as important. but not noticed yes exactly so the american uh communist john reid his famous account of the revolution 10 days that shook the world stalin's name is mentioned twice and one of them is just a list of names oh wow

which is why after Lenin died, it became rather hard to find a copy of 10 Days of Shoot the World until 1953 when Stalin died. And then apparently you could buy it again. Weird. But his personal assistant said that he was noticed by those who could distinguish real work and real diversion to the cause from chatter, noise, meaningless babble, and self-advertisement. Who do you think he means by that? So Trotsky reaches the Finland station on the 4th of May.

And he finally mends his bridges with Lenin, who persuades these very skeptical Bolsheviks, who, after all, have got used to Trotsky and Lenin not getting on for a decade, that he's all right after all. I do find this surprising. Given their big differences, given the criticisms, the way that he's just sort of welcomed back into the fold. Maybe just because it's an undeniable talent.

Yeah, but then also, I mean, you know, in the next episode, we'll see that Lennon starts doing this shit on an almost daily basis. You know, you're in, you're out, you're pushed away. But it's because it's mostly about power and how you're going to get there and does it advance. As long as you stop thinking about it like they have any sense.

of personal warmth or personal feelings towards other people at all and think everything is about the project, then all of a sudden it makes more sense. So Lenin initially scares quite a lot of people with this apocalyptic language of catastrophe and ruin.

Former Bolshevik says, Lenin's program is sheer insurrectionism, which will lead us into the pit of anarchy. These are the tactics of the universal apostle of destruction. It's all good, dramatic stuff. So he actually tones things down a bit. over that period in his articles and speeches. He dropped some of the stuff about revolutionary war and temporary dictatorship and seizing all the land and so on. But he's becoming more and more...

militant and sort of shrunken as a human being. He is just that piece of steel. He tells Gorky, and we mentioned this in the Shostakovich episode, that he can no longer listen to music. He says, it acts on my nerves. It makes one want to say a lot of sweet nonsense and stroke the heads of people who live in a filthy hellhole and yet can create such beauty. He says that heads need beating, not stroking.

This is incredible, isn't it? It's very revealing. As long as you can hear him try to kill anything decent that remains inside of his mind. Anything that is not the revolution. So... Things are moving so fast, everybody's rethinking their theories. You know, socialism can happen right away, and it will have to involve the peasants, because that's most of the population.

And, you know, Russia is the weakest link in the capitalist chain. And if you break that, all of the countries will fall. This is the thinking. So the Bolsheviks finally split from the Social Democrats. We've been talking about them as if they were a party. They were still the dominant wing of the Social Democrats. Now they become their own party. Their slogans are all power to the Soviets and bread, land and peace.

Their main policies, obviously, mass nationalization, giving land to the peasants, workers' control of factories, and crucially, an armistice of Germany. That's what people want most of all. So the provisional government is in a terrible mess. You know, food shortages, inflation, soldiers deserting the war, millions of refugees, all of the stuff that's caused by the war.

Then the coalition splits over whether to give Ukraine autonomy, which just feels like such a constant thing, isn't it? But in the next two episodes as well, a lot of this is sort of almost, it's not quite, but it's almost like the origin story of the current war in Ukraine.

So this leads to, which doesn't seem like it's the most important issue, but anyway, this leads to a split in the coalition and the liberals walk out. And in July, the killing of protesters sets off a crisis called the July Days. And Prime Minister Georgi Lvov is replaced by the socialist revolutionary Alexander Kerensky. And it's interesting that, you know, I'd always had in my head, I guess, that Kerensky would have been one of the liberals. He'd have been a cadet.

No, he's from the Socialist Revolutionary Party, but obviously insufficiently socialist and revolutionary for the Bolsheviks. His father was the headmaster of Lenin's school. Really? Yeah. He makes the fatal mistake of continuing the war and a war of expansion. It's not just a defensive war. He's literally talking about Russia seizing territory. This is really not what people want. This isn't terrible.

At the same time, he's cracking down on the Bolsheviks. Lenin is accused of being a German agent, which, as you said, like he is. So he gets, this is an amazing scene, he gets his moustache and beard shaved off. By Stalin? I mean, there's someone that has Stalin wielding a razor on his face. And he flees to a safe house in Finland. wearing at one point a wig and a face mask that has to be scrapped when the glue melts, thus creating some kind of horrific melting face scenario.

Anyway, when he's in there, after all his Whig escapades, Lenin writes this crucial, the key text of Marxism-Leninism at this point, The State and Revolution. He says, I'm just going to summarize. Karl Kautsky and the Second International have betrayed Marxism by making these peaceful, legal accommodations with the bourgeois state, like running in elections and so on. So he lays out the four stages he wants to see. Violet Revolution.

Dictatorship of the Proletariat, which if you do a little word search on an online copy, it's insane how many times he uses that phrase. Considering that Marx used it twice, it's like he's using it all the time. Then... Social and economic progress, thanks to the end of the class struggle. And then the state will wither away because without oppression and exploitation, people can govern themselves. Which is back to the sort of Marxist, you know, idea.

That more sort of utopian. Megalian, yeah, God's self-awareness. He writes, section of the population to another will vanish. Don't want to give anything away about parts two and three. This does not happen. So Lenin, as you notice there, calls the first transitional phase socialism and the end state.

communism so he's doing two things here he's cutting through this confusion which goes back to like what the 1840s between socialism communism social democracy anarchism people never quite sure which term is which and laying personal claim to communism You know, even though he hasn't yet attained communism. So it's why the country ends up being called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, but the party ends up being called the Communist Party. It's the aspiration rather than the...

the reality as he sees it. Okay, we're getting to the end. Exciting. In August, another crisis goes in the Bolsheviks' favor. Kerensky has to suppress a right-wing coup attempt by his chief general, Lover Kornelov. Lover... Wow. It's like some kind of Somerset romance. Yeah, Lover Kornelov.

This enables the Walter Fix to say that there is now a simple choice. It's a dictatorship of the left or a dictatorship of the right. It really plays into their hands. And membership has improved tenfold since February. People are flocking to the Bolsheviks as kind of the wave of the future. Lenin returns to Petrograd still clean shaven and wearing a bad wig.

Which just doesn't fit with the image of this really important meeting. On 10th of October, he speaks to the Bolshevik Central Committee for the first time in months. And there's a disagreement. So Grigory Zinoviev and Liev Kamenev... think the Bolsheviks will soon be invited to join the coalition and that the workers won't support a violent insurrection. So they should just sort of like wait a little while and then they'll be in the provisional government. And Lenin insists on revolution.

One of his opponents says he is heir to Bakunin, the brutal anarchist. Oh, wow. There's tension even here. There's a disagreement about what the revolution should be. He wins the vote. So they go ahead. Trotsky is tasked with kind of building up this like... militia in the Petrograd Soviet. On 24th of October, the government, which fully knows about this planning, is literally in the newspapers, shuts down Petrograd, shuts down all the newspapers to try and stop the revolution.

Does not work. The 25th full-scale uprising breaks out as troops loyal to the Petrograd Soviet seize key buildings, railway stations, telegraph offices. The naval garrison at Kronstadt revolts. And on the morning of the 26th, they storm the Winter Palace. But they're almost unopposed. It's not some violent clash with the forces of the state. It's literally like they've...

they just kind of walk into the Winter Palace. Yeah, it's basically there for the taking. Yeah. Kerensky is the only government minister not arrested, and that's because he's run away. So there's no, it's almost like, on the 24th, they're like, we can still stop the revolution. And by the morning of the 26th, they're just like, they've just forget it. It's over. It's kind of remarkable how quickly it happens. But then you do see this, right? Yeah. Again and again.

Well, the battle comes later. You go, well, why didn't the, you know, the Tsarist forces and so on fight back? And it's like, well, yes, there's a very long civil war to come. But initially it just seems to happen, you know, 48 hours.

So in his speeches at this point, Lenin quite candidly is not mentioning terror, war, or even Marxism, because he wants to kind of attract broad support. Right. But he does think that revolution is imminent across Europe, and he leads people to believe that. That's his message. This is just the beginning. They take a majority on the Congress of the Soviets.

where Trotsky taunts the Mensheviks and the socialist revolutionaries with a very famous line, you are pathetic individuals, you are bankrupt, your role is played out. Go off to where you belong from now on, into the wastebasket of history. And this is it, right? His face just coming stone cold as the Mensheviks dissipate outside. It is the way that someone behaves and talks when they have fully imbibed that Marxist idea of the inevitability of history.

For these guys now, you know, we're now, you know, decades after that Marx was doing the writing. But finally now, it's the first time socialists are in charge. properly taken over a country. And for them there, it's like this is happening now. The inevitable thing, the destiny, the fate that was always foretold is taking place. And anyone that's not involved in it is an irrelevance towards the historical juggernaut.

Yeah, because we talk about like the dustbin of history now. We're still paraphrasing what he said there, but we're not using it in a Marxist context, but it is Marxist. Exactly. It's like history has no time for you. So right away, there's no... There's absolutely no interest in building a kind of broad coalition of socialists.

The words broad coalition aren't coming up a lot. But foolishly, the Mensheviks and the socialist revolutionaries basically do what he wants and they walk out in protest. They don't sort of fight. So the new government consists basically of Bolsheviks and a few...

left socialist revolutionaries. So the people from that wing of that party, the junior partners, basically because they've still got more influence among the peasants. The Bolsheviks aren't very strong in the countryside. So it's a short-term tactical thing. And on that same day they stormed the Winter Palace, the Council of People's Commissars, or Sovnikom, is declared. Lenin is chairman. Trotsky is Commissar of External Affairs.

And Stalin is Commissar of Nationalities Affairs, which is interesting. It's a box he didn't like being in. He was, because he was from Georgia, he was always being told, it's like, oh, you understand, like. Yes. the nationalities you understand like the kind of ethnic minorities so you do that and it's not powerful enough i mean it's obviously you know it's basically like being made

you know, Justice Secretary. You're like, okay, thank you, but I'll take the Home Office brief. And it also reminds him that he is Georgian. It's basically like, it's basically just like, you know, if you... Saying to kind of your only female minister, it's just like, well, you can be in charge of women's affairs. And they might want that. They might want to do some good work there. But they're just like, oh, right. Is that all I am to you? Anyway, Stalin takes it on the chin.

And just lets it go. He's like, now I'm done. Let's move on. Now, look, most people around the world at this point thought the Bolsheviks were a bunch of incompetents who got lucky and they couldn't last. There were... many, many predictions that this was just going to, this was maybe not even as long as the provisional government. There was no way that they could keep control of this sort of vast empire, essentially.

They ended up lasting, obviously, for 74 years. And I think one of the things, the reason that they felt so fragile, so they had to give immediately impression of strength and intent. And it was this sense that they were...

very precarious, and that they had to act very suddenly and savagely. What do you think of that initial idea, I suppose, that they were lucky? Well, they were lucky, but I mean, everyone... is lucky when it comes to revolutions which is why we always think you know a regime it will never go it will never fall and then when it falls it falls very very rapidly you see that in our own time you saw that back then

So partly it is to do with circumstance. I mean, it clearly is. And just the situation being right for you for the taking. And it must be true that they felt the need to behave that way in order to shore up that sense of authority. But it is also true, I think, when you look at the things that these guys believe in and the kind of personalities that make up that government, it was always going to govern in a certain way. It was never going to have that much more plural, open approach to things.

guarantee people's rights or, you know, govern in a spirit of moderation and compromise. That's just not the kind of people that we're talking about. It is ultimately a bunch of terrorists who took over a government and they govern like terrorists. Yeah, we'll talk about this more in the next two parts. But I mean, that's the thing, because you can look at all of these things, which sort of had a radicalizing effect on them, you know, like the Civil War.

this kind of existential crisis straight out of the gate, like the opposition of most of the rest of the world, like, you know, vast economic challenges, which meant that they had to make big decisions, all of these sort of things. And yet, essentially, if you look at what Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin were saying and what was being said about them, you know, back in like 1903, it's like, this is who these guys are.

They were always up for terror and dictatorship. Their characters were seen to be formed very, very early on. And so it becomes very hard to just go, well, you know, if the rest of the world had just sort of embraced. Bolshevik Russia and went, let us know if there's anything we can do to help. And all of their internal opposition had melted away. It's like, yeah, maybe it would have been less harsh.

and less violent. But the harshness and the violence were kind of in the rhetoric for years in advance of 1917.

Cool, so we will resume just after the revolution in part two, Power. Thanks for listening to Origin Story. You can see all our sources in the show notes. You can give us feedback via the Patreon page or Blue Sky or a handwritten letter. We are on YouTube, on Instagram, on Blue Sky and on TikTok. We are basically on every non-far-right owned social media site that you can get. Although actually TikTok may be starting to phase away into that category as well.

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