The Real History of Communism: The Russian Revolution

Tammy regularly hauls stuff to her kids at college. That's why she shops at BJ's Wholesale Club, saving up to 25% off grocery store prices. Beef jerky, microwave meals, laundry pods, even they can't screw up. Have you met my kids? And with BJ's gas, she gets there for less. They call me the road warrior. This is your home, road warrior mom. Home of the Save. Join for just $20 at bjs.com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months. Open soon. Limited time offer, new members only. BJ's. Home of the Save. Imagine a country where a small group of resentful, unpopular left-wing radicals seize power and then use their power to deliberately destroy the family. Crush the church. Unleash criminals on the streets. Legalize abortion. Implement no-fault divorce. Enact insane economic policies. Institute affirmative action. Persecute their political enemies. And so on. Show chaos to expand their control. Sounds familiar, but I'm not describing America. I'm describing Russia in 1917. You've probably never been to Russia and you probably weren't alive during the Bolshevik Revolution, but let me assure you, you'll recognize it. And that's because the totalitarian left has not changed its playbook in a century. Their tactics, motives, and goals don't change over time. In this episode, we'll break down the eight rules of a communist takeover one by one and survey how those rules overlap with what's happening in America today. We'll do so by surveying the history of Russia from 1899 to 1918, a period rarely taught in great detail in American schools despite, or perhaps because of, its obvious relevance to today. To the extent communism is covered in schools at all, it's either in the context of World War II, in which, in fact, it's not covered in schools at all, the communists are presented as the good guys, or, in rare cases of honesty, it's about the horrors of communist regimes, gulags, famines, death camps. Now, those things matter, but they miss the more important point, which is, how did communist lunatics take over a massive empire in the first place? That question is the central question of our times because those same tactics are being run again right now. As the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana warned, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. And that's the point of this episode. So we don't repeat it. That's why we're doing this. This is the real history of communism, the Russian Revolution. We're obligated to start this episode by acknowledging that the Russian Revolution, the subsequent civil war, and the rise of Soviet communism are some of the most complex and intricate subjects in history. The shocking levels of betrayal and intrigue, the complicated Russian names and improbable events illustrate how a country like Russia produces literary geniuses like Dostoevsky or Tolstoy. The country's history really is like a complicated Russian novel. And to make this episode accessible to a large audience, we can't possibly provide every single detail, and every single aspect of these major world-changing events. What we can do is describe in broad terms what happened and feature specific events that directly relate to our own situation today. And that's what we're going to do. The lessons you'll learn hold enduring truths about humanity that are relevant far beyond politics. If you follow the citations throughout the episode, you'll find books and essays that are good starting points for a more in-depth understanding of what happened. And I highly recommend you check them out. And I highly recommend you do that. Now, like a lot of history, this story begins with a bad idea. The idea that history is a dialectic centered on a class conflict between oppressors and the oppressed. In the words of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, solving the class conflict could be done only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. This meant the abolition of money, of eternal truths, of nations, of the bourgeois family, which Marx said would "vanish as a matter of course" and of private property. Under Marxism, you would "own nothing" and be happy. Marx's ideological pronouncements were radically at odds with how he actually lived, a pattern you'll recognize from leftists today. For example, Marx actually hated industrial workers. According to Sean McMeekin's book, "To Overthrow the World," when Marx visited factory workers in the summer of 1845, he was not impressed with the workers' intellectual acumen. And when a tailor explained to Marx that they were organizing workers into collectives to negotiate better conditions with their employers, an angry Marx was seen pounding on the table with his fist before shouting that "ignorance has never yet helped anyone." Marx sustained his lifestyle by taking handouts from his friend, Friedrich Engels, and collecting inheritance money from family members and wealthy supporters. He called for the abolition of inheritance, of course, for everybody else. Marx employed servants to help his wife with housework, lived in a spacious and comfortable dwelling in Modena Villas in Maitland Park in London, and threw a formal ball complete with gold-rimmed invitations, liveried servants, and a dance band, just as he was seizing the reins of the International Working Men's Association. Marx was a prolific writer and a major person in the political world. He was a major public intellectual, known for his journalism and political organizing. His books, like Das Kapital, were published in multiple languages and printed throughout Europe. By the 1880s, Marx realized that it was in Russia, home of the strongest autocracy in Europe and also the most baroque and violent political radicalism, that his book was more read and appreciated than anywhere else. Czarist censors let Russian translations of his book slip through the cracks, because they thought it was a bad call. The book sold very well. On February 8th, 1899, St. Petersburg University students, mostly upper-middle-class children of the Russian intelligentsia, planned to celebrate Tatiana Day, the traditional anniversary of the university's founding. According to the historian Richard Pipes, the university's rector banned those celebrations by decree. Students booed the rector for 20 minutes straight and then started to riot. The students pelted the police with snowballs and the officers hit the students with whips, things spiraled out of control, and the students announced a strike. St. Petersburg University socialist groups ignored the situation at first, but quickly realized what an opportunity it was. They could co-opt the riots for their own purposes. And so they did. Radical left-wing strike leaders brought in the aims of the unrest, moving it from a protest against university administration to opposition against the entire political system. They convinced many students that the entire system of government had to be burned to the ground. Within days, all major institutions of higher learning in the empire were shut down. 25,000 students boycotted class. The government arrested the strike leaders, but university officials started making concessions for the students, and this led to a tit-for-tat cycle of protest, repression, and concession. For decades, Russian universities had been incubators of extremism and radical ideology. This period was defined by radically escalating political violence, often committed by students. One former student who had been expelled from various universities decided to exact vengeance on behalf of his comrades. His name was P.V. Karpovich. On February 14, 1901, Karpovich entered the reception area of the Ministry of Education, where the education minister was addressing the public. Karpovich shot the minister in the neck with a revolver, mortally wounding him. The next year, in April 1902, a former student turned out to be a socialist revolutionary named Stepan Balmeshev, assassinated the minister of the interior, triggering a drastic expansion of police powers. As a contemporary academic named Prince E.N. Trebetskoy put it, the student strikes of 1899 marked the beginning of the general crisis of the state. Russians didn't realize it at the time, but the old order was coming to an end. This was the start of the Russian Revolution, and its immediate cause wasn't an uprising, of starving peasants and industrial workers, but of radicalized, privileged young students driven by political ideology and resentment of the system that created them. Now, the lesson is obvious. By failing to take the student protests seriously, university administrators and the czarist government allowed them to spiral out of control and into something different. This is the first rule in a communist takeover. Any revolution can become your revolution. You should never allow the government to choose your vegetables. There are other lessons, obviously, to take from this conversation, but that's an important one. Fortunately, Balance of Nature allows you to handle this matter yourself. Their fruit and veggie supplements make it easy to add more whole fruits and veggies to your routine without reorganizing your entire diet. It's simple, it's convenient, and crucially, no government agency is involved. Right now, Balance of Nature is giving my audience 35% off the first subscription order. Go to balanceofnature.com, subscribe to the Whole Health System, use promo code WALL for 35% off your first subscription order. That's 35% at balanceofnature.com. Code Walsh. When the student protests first broke out, one Russian radical was reading about them from afar in Siberia, having been exiled for revolutionary activities. He was an intellectual, smart, highly disagreeable, highly motivated, and had no attachment to society as it existed. His name was Vladimir Lenin, and like Marx before him, he was an idealist. His goal wasn't just to create a new political and economic system, but to remake humanity itself. Lenin had a privileged upbringing. His father had noble status under the czarist regime. As a child, Lenin idealized his mother and loved to read. His favorite book was Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. The family was comfortably bourgeois, highly religious, entirely apolitical. It wasn't until after the sudden death of Lenin's father that his brother, Alexander, was radicalized at his university and then executed for plotting to assassinate the czar. These events were transformative for Lenin, who, curious about his brother's radicalism, started reading Marxist literature, but also witnessed his mother's social status collapse because of her oldest son's execution. This triggered Lenin's descent into radicalism and resentfulness. Just before the student protests began in 1898, Russian Marxists founded their own political party, called the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. Their core belief was that Russia's path to revolution ran through the industrial working class. The party was very small and drew its membership mostly from educated, radicalized professionals and unemployed college students. They saw themselves as the vanguard of the working class. The actual working class wasn't interested in the new party, for the most part. Though small in numbers, party members had big disagreements about strategy. According to a Russian-born, aristocrat named Serge Obolensky, one faction "wanted to ally the Russian labor movement with the reformers and socialists of Europe and to break with the terrorism and political conspiracies of Russian revolutionists." These members were called the Mensheviks, and they were relatively moderate, or at least didn't want a violent revolution to change society. And they were led by a man named Julius Martov. The other faction was led by Lenin, who "wanted a small, conspiratorial party of dedicated revolutionists." They were called Bolsheviks, and they had no problem with violent tactics and were not moderate at all. Obolensky's tutor, who was a party member, described the Bolsheviks as "disciplined and organized." "They are stronger, they are ruthless, and mind you," he said earnestly, "if there is any catastrophe, there is going to be a terrific socialist movement, and eventually the Bolsheviks will win." It was a prescient prediction. In 1905, Russian discontent accelerated after the country's humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese War. The war was sold to Russians as a quick and easy victory against an inferior Asian nation. Russia was, in fact, completely humiliated. After sending its Baltic fleet on an 18,000-mile voyage to the Pacific, the Russian navy was routed by the Japanese, losing 21 of their 35 ships in just two days. Things were worse on the ground. Russia suffered 300,000 casualties in battles with the Japanese. Their supposedly impregnable fortress at Port Arthur was forced into surrender. ♪♪ This led to organic mass protests in Russian cities. On January 22, 1905, hundreds of thousands of industrial workers and their families marched through St. Petersburg holding icons and pictures of the Tsar. ♪♪ They wanted better working conditions, but to be clear, most of these protesters liked the Tsar. They believed that he was benevolent and would provide for them. ♪♪ The Tsar didn't take the march, seriously at first, which, as you'll see, will become a pattern. He departed to his country residence for the weekend, confident that everything was under control. Nonetheless, Cossacks, a group of semi-nomadic frontiersmen known for their martial skills, who were often employed by the Russian government for crowd control, and Imperial Guard troops, were put under standing orders to keep the palace safe from any potential intruders. ♪♪ Ultimately, they fired into a massive crowd in St. Petersburg, killing 200 people, and wounding another 800. The event ignited months of escalating protests. ♪♪ What mattered was that the event destroyed the foundational myth that the Tsar was some sort of unimpugnable religious leader. He was increasingly seen as a political actor who could be criticized and even coerced into making concessions. The mass protests and ensuing terrorist campaign forced the Tsar to issue an October manifesto to restore order, allowing the first-ever Russian parliament, or Duma, to convene, and even legalized labor unions. But rather than restore order, those concessions inspired the dissidents to demand even more. Like the student protests, the Tsarist regime treated the 1905 protests as a manageable outburst rather than a systemic crisis. By granting limited concessions and then clawing them back, it ensured that the next explosion would be much worse, and that's exactly what happened. To be clear, none of this was provoked by the Communists. Lenin himself wasn't even in Russia for these events, but they did lead him to one of his most important conclusions: that these patterns of unrest could be turned into a political program. Because of the 1905 revolution, Lenin understood that national humiliations led to periods of great turmoil. If he could subvert his country's war efforts, it would diminish the credibility of the old regime and create the conditions that he needed to start a civil war, which he would use to take power. Under such an approach, according to McMeekin, quote, "Russian revolutionaries would crow after a government endured military setbacks and openly undermine its military effort." Lenin was arguing for mutiny, organizing mutiny on a scale large enough to poison and ultimately destroy a country's armed forces. Now, this approach became known as revolutionary defeatism, and it worked by intentionally destroying a country from the inside to create a revolutionary environment. In the context of Russia's upcoming military campaigns, this meant turning an imperialist war into a civil war. This is the second rule in a communist takeover. Never let a crisis go to waste. Let's take a brief capitalism break. Suppose you start a business, the business succeeds, you make money, you would now like to make even more money. Under our current system, you're allowed to do that. It's wonderful. And if you need capital to hire people, buy equipment or inventory, or take advantage of an opportunity, there's Cardiff. If you want bank-level rates without the bank-level delays, you need to check out cardiff.ca. cardiff.co/walsh. The application takes less than five minutes, and qualified businesses can potentially receive up to $500,000 in same-day funding. Build your business, make a profit, enjoy it while it's still legal. Go to cardiff.co/walsh. One sign that the Czar was losing his grip on power was the sheer amount of political violence in Russia in his final years. In her book, Thou Shall Kill, Anna Geifman notes, acts of terrorism became so common that newspapers stopped running in-depth reports on each incident. Instead, they published daily rundowns recapping all the political violence and the theft that had taken place over the last 24 hours. After the 1905 revolution, the Czar and his team were able to briefly stabilize the situation in Russia. A lot of this was due to the Czar's interior minister, a man called Pyotr Stolypin. He took a hard-nosed approach to the revolutionaries. He created a system for fast executions for terrorism, arrested some legislators for their contact with the terrorists, and even dissolved parliament when it refused to cooperate with his efforts. Stolypin was undeniably tough, but he also balanced this with pragmatism. He worked to solve the underlying problems that might have made the public sympathetic. He implemented limited land reforms and tried to expand the middle class. The idea being that once regular people had something to lose, they would fight to protect it by supporting the government and stability. By cutting the revolutionaries out of the conversation through his zero-tolerance approach to terrorism, Russians started calling nooses "Stolypin neckties." But by still making reforms that improved the quality of life for most Russians, he created a new lane for addressing the country's problems, while mitigating the risk of immediate revolution. However, his reforms and aggressive style infuriated large landowners and conservatives in parliament, eventually forcing him out of government, and left-wing terrorists assassinated him in 1911 in revenge for his crackdown on terrorism. Russia's decline was accelerated by its entrance into World War I in 1914. Bread lines became commonplace, Czar Nicholas II, took personal control over the military, which further weakened his prestige with news of every setback on the battlefield. Inflation spiked more than 300% from 1914 to 1917, causing real wages for factory workers to plummet by roughly 50%. The main issue, which probably sounds familiar, was money printing. Within days of the war's outbreak, Russia abandoned the gold standard and began printing rubles. On February 23, 1917, international women's day, female textile workers in St. Petersburg, which was then known as Petrograd because St. Petersburg Petersburg sounded too German, walked off the job to protest their deteriorating quality of life. That winter was one of the coldest on record. Factories were routinely shut down due to lack of fuel, and the number of protesters quickly swelled up to hundreds of thousands. This might have been Lenin's moment. Once again, he was not in Russia, and his party, which was small and dwindling, was heavily infiltrated by Tsarist secret police. But it was still an opportunity for the revolutionary left and critics of the Tsar. Russian troops were extremely demoralized by the social and political chaos that had overtaken the country. By 1917, more than a million had already died in the World War. Major cities were filled with huge numbers of poorly trained and low morale draftees awaiting transfer to the front. On February 26, the Tsar called in the army to deal with the protests. Only for two inexperienced trading companies to fire into a crowd of protesters, killing 40 and wounding a similar number, which unleashed a mutiny that spread like wildfire through Petrograd garrison. Hundreds and thousands of soldiers deserted, sold their weapons, commandeered vehicles, and ran up the red flag, or joined the milling grounds. The Minister of War wanted to execute all of them, but the general in charge of securing St. Petersburg, Sergei Khabelov, decided to arrest only the ringleaders. It was, as Pipes notes, a fatal loss of nerve. This is a critical lesson on leadership. Leaders who hold power but shrink from using it decisively at the critical moment rarely get a second chance. A fire needs only oxygen and fuel to become unmanageable. Mass movement opposition needs only time. One of the hallmarks of the February Revolution was total hostility to the police. Nikolai Rangel, witnessing the events in St. Petersburg, noted in his memoirs that the revolutionaries launched a war of extremism. It was a war of extremism against the police. Angry mobs murdered police officers on site, harassed their families, and even regularly killed random people, claiming that they were undercover officers. Although the violence eventually subsided, the police had basically been abolished. This is how the historian Sean McMeekin described the February Revolution. Quote, police stations were overwhelmed and some of them were torched to the ground, though usually only after inmates were freed. Freed inmates were often the ones doing the torching. Uniformed policemen were lynched, shops and markets raided, and the main city arsenal looted of weapons. Baron Nikolai Rangel described how leftists unleashed the criminal population on society as the media cheered, writing, quote, the prisons containing those detained for political offenses were thrown open. And then for the sake of consistency, the prisons were ordinary criminals as well. A flood of convicts in their gray clothes with the convict's yellow square on the back streamed out. These excellent fellows plundered the. confectionery shops, changed their clothes in the street, and good citizens once more mingled with the crowd. I saw this incident myself, and it was not very reassuring. On that day, a large number of crimes were committed. Nobody felt safe, especially as the authorities, including the police, had disappeared. But liberty had been won, and now we were all free men riding in cars. At any rate, the papers were unanimous in saying so. Unleashing the criminal population on middle-class families is a hallmark of communism. By early March, half the Petrograd. Garrison had mutinied. High-level military officials, who had already lost confidence in the monarchy and were looking for ways to change the political situation, told the Tsar, who was unable to even return to Petrograd amid the disruptions, that he had no choice but to abdicate. His first move was to attempt to hand power to his 12-year-old son, Alexei. But then he changed his mind and tried to give the throne to his brother, Grand Duke Michael, a liberal who immediately gave his new power away to the revolutionaries. The Tsar and his family were no longer in power, and he had no other choice but to leave. The Tsar, at the end of his life, was given a new name: Nicholas Romanov. Everyone thought the left would moderate. That never happened. The third rule of a communist takeover: let your enemies defeat themselves. The power passed to a provisional government, formed from members of the existing parliament, a fragile coalition of liberals and socialists, who found themselves ruling a country in the middle of a catastrophic war. It was headquartered in the Winter Palace, a symbol of the monarchy it had just replaced. But from the beginning, the provisional government was forced to share power with the Petrograd Soviet, a workers' council which managed the workers and rogue soldiers who controlled the streets. Russia had achieved a power vacuum, and Lenin was on his way, back from exile, to fill it. The key here was the workers' councils, or Soviets, which became a kind of shadow government. The Soviet government was the only one in the world who had the power. The Soviet government was the only one who had the power. The Soviet government was the only one who The Soviets were mostly urban socialists and would hold votes on matters of public interest. They enforced decrees with riots, mob violence, and strikes that herald public infrastructure. The Soviets projected their power by using organized industrial workers, known as Red Guards, and defected soldiers to patrol the cities, enforce their dictates, and engage in mob violence, much like modern-day Tifa. They often lynched police officers, looted businesses, and assassinated their enemies. Through these intimidation tactics, the Petrograd Soviet became incredibly powerful. On March 1, 1917, the same day the Provisional Government was forming, the Soviet issued Order No. 1, a military order that transferred control of the military from officers to elected soldiers' committees. Soldiers were supposed to follow the Provisional Government only if their orders didn't conflict with those issued by the Soviet. One radical sailor noted at the time, "Educated folk will read it differently, but we understand it straight. We understand that the Provisional Government is not the same as the Soviet Union. We understand that the Provisional Government is not the same as the Soviet. came from Germany. From the party headquarters in a mansion in central Petrograd, the Bolshevik military organization started dispatching commissars to army and navy units to convert enlisted men to the cause. The Bolshevik plan was simple-- create chaos that would lead to military defeat and collapse the government. Intimidation tactics, ruthlessness, and a major mass media blitz helped the Bolsheviks rise in Russia's biggest cities. Provisional government's failure to take them seriously allowed the Bolsheviks to gain support from more industrial workers and soldiers. And in turn, they used this support to call for additional strikes and riots and other forms of public disorder that paralyzed life in Russian cities. The Bolsheviks' tactics of belligerence and aggression, which successfully cowed the provisional government and other socialist parties, helped them gain credibility. This led to major defections, including Leon Shrotsky, who was, until then, aligned with the Mensheviks. After Shrotsky joined causes with Lenin, he called on the Bolshevik party's militant wing to kill the leaders of the provisional government, saying, down with the minister capitalists. Around the same time that Shrotsky gave that speech, a marching mob of 10,000 Bolsheviks gathered outside the Torid Palace in St. Petersburg, along with thousands of Red Guard sailors and other mutineers. It seemed like the Bolsheviks' moment had come. But it was too much, too fast. Lenin refused to address the mob, the provisional government leaked information from an investigation into Lenin's German connections. They blanketed the city with a newspaper headlined, "Lenin, Ganetsky, and Company Spies." According to Meakin, when Lenin saw the headline, he told Shrotsky, quote, "Now they're going to shoot us before shaving his beard and going to ground in the Finnish countryside." Abandoned by their leader, the Bolsheviks could only watch as the Pravda printing press was smashed and their headquarters raided by loyal Russian army troops, who arrested 2,000 Bolsheviks and swept up a mother load of intelligence. 11 Bolshevik leaders were charged with high treason and organizing an armed uprising. Shrotsky was arrested. Lenin was in hiding. Forces loyal to the provisional government machine gunned Bolsheviks in the streets. No one seemed to care that the Bolsheviks who terrorized everyone else for so long were finally being crushed. It was all but over. By the summer of 1917, it seemed the Bolsheviks would never control Russia, but they never admitted defeat. And very soon, their fortunes were about to change. This is the fifth rule of a communist takeover. Nevertheless, they persisted. History class is supposed to teach us not to repeat the same mistakes, and yet every September, we do exactly that. We set earlier alarms, fill up the calendar, and assume we'll function perfectly well on the same lousy sleep we got all summer. But the second week, the results of this experiment are usually in, and one part of the routine you can actually improve is the mattress you sleep on. I've been sleeping on a Helix for the last few years. I sleep better. I wake up feeling more rested, which makes an early alarm considerably less offensive. Helix's quick sleep quiz matches you with one of more than 20 mattress models based on your sleep position, firmness preferences, and support needs. They also offer cooling upgrades for those September nights that haven't gotten the message that summer is over. Your mattress ships directly to your door with free US shipping, a limited lifetime warranty, and the Happy with Helix guarantee. Plus, Helix has extended its sleep trial from 120 nights to 365 nights, giving you an entire year to make sure your mattress is right for you. Go to helixsleep.com/walsh for the 20% off site-wide for the fall savings event. That's helixsleep.com/walsh for 20% off site-wide. helixsleep.com/walsh. As we documented in chapter two, the end of the Czar's reign was marked by incompetent leadership, military failures, deteriorating domestic conditions, hyperinflation, and most importantly, extreme indecision. But what we didn't mention was that Russia's ruling class at the time, including the Czar's own family, joined in with the mob. On March 1, 1917, the same day the Petrograd Soviet issued order number one, which functionally ended discipline within the Russian army, the Czar's first cousin, Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich, marched his elite team of imperial guards to the state Duma wearing a red ribbon, effectively declaring his support for the revolution. The Czar's brother, Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich, didn't support the revolution, but pleaded for his brother to make concessions to the rioters. When his brother abdicated and made Grand Duke Michael the new Czar, he issued a manifesto telling Russians to support the new provisional government and effectively ended the family dynasty. Once a leader acknowledges that change is necessary, he is forced to take action. The brakes usually come on. The government that followed the Romanov dynasty, it turns out, was even more incompetent and ineffective than its predecessor. By July 1917, it seemed they'd crushed Lenin and his movement, but they still managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. This is how they did it. After indicting Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders with treason and with thousands of the Bolsheviks' foot soldiers in prison, the provisional government, which was led by a lawyer named Alexander Kerensky, began to assemble evidence for a treason trial against the communists. As before with the university protests, the 1905 revolution and the February revolution, there's a clear point here. When you get your chance to crush your enemy, you must take it. It seemed like the provisional government was going to. Kerensky had appointed a Russian military leader called Lover Kornilov to restore discipline in the military's ranks and quell domestic uprisings. In August 1917, Prime Minister Kerensky and General Kornilov were communicated through an intermediary named Vladimir Lvov. Here's how it went down. General Kornilov had a pre-existing agreement with Kerensky that he'd send in troops to restore order in the city if and when that became necessary. But Lvov went to General Kornilov, claiming to represent the prime minister, and asked, "What would it take for you to be a temporary dictator to stabilize the situation?" General Kornilov didn't want to be a dictator or to accept responsibility for leading the country, but in response to the hypothetical, he gave a list of conditions for taking power. Then Lvov went back to the prime minister, Kerensky, and stated that General Kornilov had a list of demands that must be met. The prime minister, Kerensky, was startled. He'd just received a list of demands from a top general, which sounds a lot like a coup attempt. But rather than reach out to the general directly to see what's going on, Kerensky started impersonating him. So Kerensky, pretending to be Lvov, sent telegrams to various military officers with vague questions like, "Are you ready for action?" His goal was to try to detect whether a coup was underway. But because his message was so vague, his military leaders responded with responses in the affirmative, making it seem like a coup was in fact underway, even though it wasn't. Kerensky concluded that his own general was marching on St. Petersburg, so he issued an arrest warrant for General Kornilov, which greatly confused the general, who in turn concluded that the arrest warrant must be because a coup had already happened. Otherwise, why would Kerensky, or maybe someone claiming to be Kerensky, want to arrest him? And this convinced Kornilov he needed to head to St. Petersburg with his soldiers right away. But General Kornilov's troops didn't get far. One of his commanding officers shot himself, and the railway workers wouldn't let the soldiers use the trains. This was a decisive moment in human history because Prime Minister Kerensky, thinking General Kornilov's troops were approaching to depose him, opened the jails and released the thousands of bullshits who were awaiting trial for plotting to overthrow the government, including Trotsky. Immediately upon release, they seized 40,000 rifles from a government arsenal to defend the city against the provisional government's own army. It was Kerensky's last-ditch effort to have every man on deck to fight the army he believed was trying to remove him from power. By all accounts, this was a pivotal blunder. At precisely the wrong moment, the government freed its greatest enemies from prison, and the government, at the same time, infuriated the military by mistreating Kornilov. The soldiers and the army's officers weren't going to be much help in putting down a rebellion. This debacle became known as the Kornilov Affair. The Bolsheviks were now free from prison, heavily armed, and the conservative elements of the army that opposed them were now either imprisoned or in disarray. Lenin returned from exile. Trotsky began to plan the actual coup. Plans for the coup leaked, but Kerensky adopted a policy of no enemies to the left and began to fight. He began suppressing conservative military officials and political associations. Rather than call out radicalism on the left, he tried to side with them to protect himself. By mid-September, the Bolsheviks were sweeping to power in Russia's biggest workers' councils with huge majorities. They were in control of the most important Soviets. Within a month of taking control of the Soviets, the October Revolution took place. It was a coordinated takeover by the newly freed Bolsheviks, not a spontaneous worker uproar or uprising like the February Revolution. When the prime minister announced a plan to close Bolshevik newspapers, the Bolsheviks saw the move as a pretext to openly revolt. On the night of October 24th, they seized the banks, the power stations, the bridges, and post offices, mostly without any resistance. Russia's most important city was theirs. Kerensky fled in disguise. By November 1917, when an all-Russian Congress of Soviets met in Petrograd, it was clear the Bolsheviks were the triumphant faction. The Bolshevik control of the Soviets in Petrograd and Moscow had given them a huge majority at the convention. The Russian left had failed to contain its most extreme elements. The less radical leftists, who were upset at the growing Bolshevik violence, walked out of the conference, ceding any remaining power they might have had. As they left, Trotsky shouted at them, You are pitiful, isolated individuals. You are bankrupt. Your role is played out. Go where you belong from now, into the dustbin of history. Trotsky told the Soviet in Petrograd that the provisional government no longer existed. Lenin delivered a speech in which he declared, We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order. And indeed, that's exactly what happened. Lenin took Russia out of World War I and ceded enormous amounts of land to Germany. And almost immediately, the Bolsheviks, who still lacked majority support, turned to ruthless violence to enforce their rule. Lenin's takeover of the left and of St. Petersburg happened with astonishing speed and came seemingly out of nowhere. When Lenin arrived in St. Petersburg on April 16, 1917, after the February Revolution, he had almost no popular support and was viewed with suspicion even by his fellow Bolsheviks. By July, he was in hiding in Finland. His movement was in disarray, with most of its supporters in prison. By mid-September, he was the triumphant figure on the Russian left. And by October, he had overthrown the government. The new one formed in its place was to be called the Soviet Republic. He had turned the Imperial War into a civil war. As it turns out, revolutions happen faster than you'd expect. This is the sixth rule of a communist takeover. Act quickly, so the enemy doesn't have time to respond. Just weeks after the Bolsheviks announced their new Soviet Republic, it became apparent just how unpopular they were. That November, Russia held the first free elections in its history. Considering the circumstances, the election went well. 41 million Russians voted. There was also a clear repudiation of Bolshevism. Roughly three-quarters of Russians voted. Voted against Lenin and his party. The top party, by a long shot, was the one former Prime Minister Kerensky belonged to. The Bolsheviks disregarded the outcome. They banned rival political parties and claimed a popular mandate anyway. It's worth noting that the word Bolshevik means one of the majority. The Bolsheviks presented themselves as representatives of the people, as populists whose platform reflected the national will. From their seat of power in St. Petersburg, the Soviet Republic, which had no legal. and was recognized by no one, including left-wing political parties, rejected the election results. According to McMeekin, they refused to ratify the results as legitimate, postponed the convocation of Russia's long-awaited Constituent Assembly, until electoral abuses could be investigated. They then convened their own rump parliament, full of party loyalists, which cemented Lenin's authority. The seventh rule of a communist takeover: Claim a popular mandate, even when you don't have one. Now, one reason the Bolsheviks seized power, is because they thought it would be a waste of time. One reason the Bolsheviks seized power, is because they thought it would be a waste of time. despite being highly unpopular, as we demonstrated earlier in the episode, weak and disorganized opposition. Writing about how the Bolsheviks expanded their power beyond Petrograd, Sergei Abolensky observed, quote: "The entire incident remains as a clear warning of what can happen to a government, like Kerensky's, whose members are afraid to shoot to defend their parliamentary system or fight for their constitution. After all, it was only a Bolshevik minority that took over St. Petersburg with mob violence. This minority then consolidated, and then, in the end, the Bolsheviks were forced to leave. One of the remarkable facts of life in the earlier Soviet Union is how the Bolsheviks enlisted their supporters to rat out their neighbors, rat out their neighbors which they did with enthusiasm in his memoir titled always with honor general peotor wrangle a future general in the white resistance forces that gradually formed to oppose the bolshevik reds described being forced out of his home at gunpoint by bolshevik sailors after one of his former servants accused him of being a counter-revolutionary he and his wife reached the pier which was crowded with people a torpedo boat was moored there as soon as the crowd saw us they began to yell look out here come the blood suckers to the water with them to the water there were bodies floating in the water as wrangle walked out to the ship former officers members of the nobility people with a little bit of money anybody who had attracted the bolsheviks attention wrangle was put on trial quote-unquote by a bolshevik judge who had no idea what wrangle was even accused of there was no crime no evidence no defense wrangle would have been killed if it weren't for the quick thinking of his wife who refused to leave his side and eventually talked the bolsheviks into releasing him one of the grisliest deaths at the hands of bolshevik forces was the former ruling family the ramanovs when the provisional government first put them under house arrest it was generally understood that the former czar and his family would be able to leave the country in exile that never happened england's king george v ramanov's cousin revoked an asylum offer because he was concerned that bringing the czar to britain could set off a socialist revolution in the uk by july of 1918 bolsheviks in the town of ykaterinburg were concerned that they might lose control of the ex-czar and his family accordingly with approval from bolshevik leadership a commandant named yakov yorovsky woke the ramanovs around midnight on july 16 1918 he told them that because of combat operations in the city they needed to move to the basement for their own safety shortly after they arrived in the basement a death squad arrived and blasted the family with gunfire so intense they had to wait for smoke in the room to clear in order to confirm the children were dead as sean mcmeekin writes and to overthrow the world quote the finale was gruesome because the four ramanov daughters wore special corsets in which diamonds and other jewels have been sown the girls survived the initial machine gun volleys it had to be finished off with bayonet thrust then in yorovsky's clinical recollection the detachment began to undress and burn the corpses to prevent the nearby czechoslovak legion and anti-bolshevik force from discovering the bodies yorovsky had the romanov remains dumped into the nearby four brothers mine only to realize it was not deep enough the bodies were lifted up and tossed into a ditch along the katerinburg moscow road doused with sulfuric acid and covered with sticks and branches yorovsky's men drove over the makeshift grave with a gun in their hands in order to destroy the bodies of the four brothers the bodies were lifted up and tossed into a ditch along the katerinburg moscow road doused with sulfuric acid and covered with sticks and branches yorovsky's men drove over the makeshift grave with trucks to mangle everything beyond recognition and it worked the romanov remains were only discovered with identities confirmed by dna testing in 1989. the executions of the romanovs though horrific were just a prelude to the truly massive organized political violence that would soon follow on august 30th 1918 a high-ranking leader of the bolshevik secret police called the checkout was assassinated in petrograd that same day lenin was shot in the middle of the night several times he was shot multiple times unlike the indecisive czar and the incompetent leaders of the provisional government lenin cracked down with total ferocity terrorism became official state policy martin latsis a high-ranking bolshevik and czech official wrote the following message on november 1st 1918 quote we are not fighting against single individuals we are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class and indeed that's exactly what they did we are fighting against the bourgeoisie as a class and indeed that's exactly what they did we are not fighting against the bourgeoisie as a class and indeed that's exactly what they did we are fighting against the bourgeoisie as a class and indeed that's exactly what they did we are fighting against the bourgeoisie as a class and indeed that's exactly what they did we are fighting against the bourgeoisie we are fighting against the bourgeoisie as a class and indeed that's exactly what they did we are fighting against the bourgeoisie as a class and indeed that's exactly what they did we are fighting against the bourgeoisie we are fighting against the bourgeoisie as a class and indeed that's exactly what they did we are fighting against the bourgeoisie The war, according to McMeekin, cost the Army 237,908 casualties. The Bolsheviks went after the Christians too. The historian Richard Pipes describes some of the violence in Russia under the Bolshevik regime. "Most of the violence against the clergy took the form of lynchings and arrests by the security organs. There exist harrowing tales of torture and maiming of prominent clerics. Archbishop Andronik of Perm is said to have had his cheeks hollowed, his ears and nose cut off, and his eyes gouged. Thus disfigured, he was driven through the city and then thrown into the river to drown. Bishop Hermogen of Tobolsk is reported to have been drowned with a rock tied to his neck. Tikhon said in 1920 that, to the best of his knowledge, 322 bishops and priests have been executed since 1917. Targeting entire groups for what amounted to ethnic cleansing. The Cossacks, the Circassians, and ethnic Germans. Upon Lenin's death, Stalin completed the job against the kulaks. When they weren't committing mass executions, they were forcing people to move to Siberia at gunpoint. The eighth rule of a communist takeover: exterminate the opposition. The country we described in this video was a place where a small minority of radical leftists, whose ideas were born from idealistic academics, but rooted in deep resentment, successfully took over a country using nothing but sheer willpower and total brutality. They followed the same rubric as all the others have done since. Provoke a crisis, take advantage of the crisis, seize power. Then, crush your opposition. Thanks to a hapless opposition, consumed with conspiracy and infighting, they seized total power, which they used to prosecute and intimidate their political enemies. They forced people to believe absurd things. Elevated freaks and intentionally wrought chaos. They used intimidation tactics to terrify the majority, who never supported them, into submission. Their first policy priorities upon taking power included unleashing criminals on normal people, instituting lunatic economic reforms, intentionally wrecking families by instituting no-fault divorce rules, legalizing and subsidizing abortion, persecuting Christians, and instating a policy of affirmative action for minority groups. The fact that people were willing to adore their rule, for seven decades, is a testament to what humans are willing to put up with. The country we're describing, of course, is the first years of the Soviet Union. But it's also the United States. The reality is that the forces that drive the totalitarian left don't change over time. Nor do their tactics. If you defeat them once, they come back in a different form later. Preventing them from achieving power requires constant vigilance. One must match them in their vigor, intensity, and perseverance. If you don't, they win. For most of American history, we've managed to keep them at bay. But to be fair, there have been many, many close calls. In some cases, we got lucky. What would the world look like today had Franklin Roosevelt, one of the great benefactors of Soviet Russia, whose White House was deeply infiltrated by Soviet Communists, had lived through the war? One wonders. There are two points worth noting as we draw the parallels between the history of Russia then and the history of America today. First, the events of 2020 bear remarkable resemblance to the upheaval we described in this episode. You need to remember that Bolsheviks took nearly two decades after the first student protests to seize power. There were numerous bursts of leftist disorder in Russia's power centers before they finally seized it. Just because we survived 2020 doesn't mean that they're not coming back with a vengeance. They will. They already are. And second, when talking about communism, conservatives spend a lot of time pointing out that communist economic policies don't work. And sure, that's true, and there may be a point to that. Our school system today barely teaches kids anything about communism. Roughly one-third of millennials think George W. Bush killed more people than Joseph Stalin. At Yale University, communist groups routinely disrupt classes and occupy buildings. But you're not going to convince them to change their minds because of your economic arguments. Communists don't care that the economics cause untold human misery, mass starvation, and millions of deaths. They actually support it. Suffering is the point of their economic policies. Communists aren't communists because they care about the working man. Lenin resorted to mass surveillance and extreme propaganda because he knew the workers did not support it. They're communists because they hate you. Their radicalism is rooted in their resentment, a feeling much more powerful than charity. They don't want to build something beautiful. They want to tear it down. And that's exactly what we need to remember. ♪♪ Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is, ironically, one of the most vocal critics of colonialism in modern American politics. Colonized people. Colonization. Colonization. But does she realize her last name is literally Cortez? Whether she's related to Hernán Cortez or not, he's a hero. And that's why we decided to center our latest episode of Real History on Cortez's incredible and unlikely conquest of Mexico and how he took a small Spanish army of 500 against hundreds of thousands of native soldiers and won. My Real History of the Conquistadors. Coming soon to Daily Wire. Hank joined BJ's Wholesale Club the day he became a father of 30. I coach football. Now Coach Hank saves up to 25% off groceries store prices. 30 pounds of pasta. Three cases of protein bars. 75 sports drinks. And that's just pre-game. He knows teamwork. And BJ's knows savings. This is your home, Coach. Home of the Save. Join for just $20 at BJ's.com/Mosquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months. Open soon. Limited time offer. New members only. BJ's. Home of the Save.