The Real History of Communism: The Russian Revolution

Imagine a country where a small group of resentful, unpopular left-wing radicals seized power and then used their power to deliberately destroy the family. Crushed 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 chaos to expand their control. Sounds familiar, but I'm not describing America, I'm describing Russia in 1917. You probably never into Russia, 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. The tactics, motives, 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 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 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? My question is the central question of our times, because those same tactics are being run again right now. As the Spanish-American philosopher George Santeana 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 those they ask for 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 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 odds with how he actually lived, a pattern you'll recognize from leftists today. For example, Marx actually hated industrial workers. According to Sean MacMekin'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. 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 Whiteland Park in London, and through a formal ball complete with gold rimmed invitations, liveried servants, and a dance band just as he was seizing the reigns of the International Working Men's Association. Marx was a prolific writer and a major public intellectual known for his journalism and political organizing. Marx's 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. Zorist censors let Russian translations of his book slip through the cracks because they thought it was basically unreadable, turns out that was a bad call. The book sold very well. In February 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, screaming 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 PV Carpovich. On February 14, 1901, Carpovich entered the reception area of the Ministry of Education, where the Education Minister was addressing the public. The Carpovich shot the minister in the neck with a revolver mortally wounding him. In the next year, in April 1902, a former student turned socialist revolutionary named Stepin Balmachev, assassinated the minister of the interior, triggering a drastic expansion of police powers. As a contemporary academic named Prince E.N. Trebetzkoye put it, the student strikes of 1899 barked 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 Tsarist 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 WALCH for 35% off your first subscription order. That's 35% at balanceofnature.com code WALCH. In 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 these artist regime. As a child, Lenin idealized his mother and loved to read. His favorite book was Harriet Beatrice 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 Tsar. 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 was an 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, quote, "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 revolutions." These members were called the "menchivics," and they were relatively moderate, or at least didn't want a violent revolution to change society. And they were led by a man in Julius Martav. The other faction was led by Lenin, who, quote, "wanted a small conspiratorial party of dedicated revolutions." 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, quote, "disciplined and organized." They were stronger. They were ruthless. And my knew, he said, earnestly, if there is any catastrophe, there's going to be a terrific socialist movement. And eventually, the Bolsheviks will win. It was a pressure 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 that 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 editions. But to be clear, mostly these protesters liked the Tsar. They believe 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, Cosics, a group of semi-nomadic frontiers men 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 wound another 800. The event ignited months of escalating protests. What mattered was that the event destroyed the foundational myth that Tsar was some sort of unimpunable 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 were 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 communist. 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 Mika in quote, Marxist revolutionaries would crow after a government endured military setbacks and openly undermined its military effort. Lenin was arguing from 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 that spent turning an imperialist war into a civil war. This is the second rule in a communist take-home. Never let a crisis go to waste. 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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 Tsar and his team were able to briefly stabilize the situation in Russia, a lot of this was due to the Tsar's interior minister, a man called Piotr Stalepin. It took a hard-nosed approach to the revolution. 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. Stalepin was undeniably tough, but he also balanced this with pragmatism. He worked to solve the underlying problems that might have made the public sympathetic to the radicals. 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, Russia started calling nuces Stalepin net ties, 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. Breadlines became commonplace. Zar Nicholas II took personal control over the military, which further weakened his prestige with news of a very 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 sounded to 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. Now, 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 Zara's secret police. 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 training 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 than 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 Kabelov, decided to arrest only the ring leaders. 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 extermination against 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 MacMekin described the February revolution. "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. Uniform policemen were lynched, shops and markets raided, and the main city arsenal looted of weapons. Bear in 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 convicts yellow square on the back streamed out. These excellent fellows plundered the confectionary shops, changed their clothes in the street, and good citizens once more mingled with the crowd. I saw the 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 equipping the police had disappeared. But liberty had been won, and now we were all free men writing in cars. 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 this R. was unable to even return to Petrograd amid the disruptions, that he had no choice but to abdicate. His first move was to attempt a hand-power to his twelve-year-old son, Alexey, 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 R and his family were imprisoned at the summer palace, with nothing to do, he shoveled snow and lived under 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 Windsor Palace, a symbol of the monarchy that 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. Soviets were mostly urban socialists and would hold votes on the matters of public interest. They enforced decrees with riots, mob violence, and strikes that hailed public infrastructure. The Soviets projected their power by using organized industrial workers known as red guards and defected soldiers to controlled cities who forced their dictates and engaging mob violence much like modern Latifah. 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 number one, 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, quote, "educated folk will read it differently, we understand it straight, disarm the officers." Revolutionary politics and the Russian military were now directly linked. And this, as you'll see, would create a direct line for communists to subvert the military from within and help them accomplish their goal of turning the Imperial War into a Civil War. This is the fourth rule of a communist takeover. It's easiest to destroy a country from within. You know, a lot of people are switching away from the big legacy cell phone carriers. Apparently, the country is catching on and a survey of more than 120,000 wireless customers, Pure Talk, was the only company to earn five out of five stars for coverage, support, value, and data. Make the switch today, then tell all your friends, go to puretalk.com/walsh for Pure Talk's best unlimited plan for just 29, 95 a month for life. The offer is extremely short lived and will never come back. So go to puretalk.com/walsh to switch to my wireless company, Pure Talk. Taxes and fees are not included. Some restrictions apply. See puretalk.com for details offer ends on November 15, 2026. It's worth noting that at this point, late winter, 1917, it didn't seem like the Bolsheviks whatever run Russia, or even a small part of it. The Soviets were run by their rivals, mostly socialists, but also some mencheviks. The Bolsheviks were a fringe party, disliked by nearly everyone, and their leader was thousands of miles away across enemy lines. Taking over Soviets, let alone the Russian government, would require discipline, dispatch, and ruthlessness. Three things Lenin was distinctly capable of. But first he had to get to Russia, which required traveling through an active war front, or across Germany, which was a hostile nation. It turns out, much like how both Baptists and bootleggers supported prohibition, Lenin found common cause with German intelligence. Both sought to overthrow the Russian government and end their participation in World War I. Who better than a charismatic leader who literally said that he wanted to overthrow the government and the war and as a bonus, provoked a civil war that would cripple Russia for years. The Germans didn't care about Marxism or Bolshevism. The Germans were solely interested in getting Russia out of the war and having them see it as much territory as possible to Germany. The plan to get Lenin into Russia was led by a German diplomat named Arthur Zimmerman. He might recognize his name. He's the same guy who offered military support to Mexico to retake Texas in his famous Zimmerman telegram, which infuriated Americans at the time. Zimmerman worked through intermediaries to transport Lenin along with dozens of other revolutionaries from Switzerland through Germany into Petrograd as quietly as possible. It was a foreign subversion plot, probably the most successful one of all time. When Lenin arrived in Russia, his party was almost completely irrelevant. To the extent they had any support at all, it was an urban industrial centers and on military bases full of low morale draftees far behind the lines. The party's elected officials at the time had mostly been exiled to Siberia, but where there's a will, there's a way. Lenin's first move was to start a media operation. In February, they hadn't produced any printed propaganda. By the month of June, they had printed 85,000 copies of their new newspaper, called Pravda, along with 75,000 copies of a soldier's newspaper, plus a paper for front line troops. They'd achieved a circulation of about 100,000 in a country of 125 million. By early July, the Bolsheviks press was pumping out 320,000 copies of printed propaganda in various formats, along with 350,000 pamphlets and broadsheets. It was a massive media operation and inexpensive one. According to historian Richard Types, both such organizational and publishing activities required a great deal of money. Much, if not, most of it 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, healthy Bolsheviks rise in Russia's biggest cities. Visional governments failure to take them seriously. Allow the Bolsheviks to gain support from more industrial workers and soldiers. And in turn, they used this support to call for additional strikes, 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 Trotsky, who was, until then, aligned with the mention of it. Trotsky 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 Trotsky gave that speech, a marching mob of 10,000 Bolsheviks gathered outside the Torrid 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 headline, "Lenin Genetsky and Company Spies," according to Nekin, when Lenin saw the headline. He told Trotsky, quote, "Now they're going to shoot us before shaving his beard and going to ground in the finished countryside." Abandoned by their leader, the Bolsheviks could only watch as the provd 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. Eleven Bolshevik leaders were charged with high treason and organizing an armed uprising. Trotsky was arrested, Lenin wasn't hiding, forces loyal to the provisional government machine gun Bolsheviks of 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. 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Go to helixleap.com/walls for the 20% off site-wide or the Fall Savings event that's helixleap.com/walls for 20% off site-wide helixleap.com/walls. As we documented in chapter 2, the end of the Tsar'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 Tsar'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. Bazaar's first cousin, Grand Duke Carillo Vladimirovich, marched his elite team of imperial guards to the state and doom of wearing a red ribbon, effectively declaring his support for the revolution. Bazaar'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 Tsar, 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, the brakes usually come on. The government that followed the Romanov dynasty 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 inditing Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders were treasoned and with thousands of the Bolshevik's foot soldiers in prison, the provisional government, which was led by a lawyer named Alexander Karinsky, started to assemble evidence for a treason trial against the communists. As before, with the university process, 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. Karinsky had appointed a Russian military leader called Lover Kornelov to restore discipline in the military's ranks and quell domestic uprising. In August 1917, Prime Minister Karinsky and General Kornelov were communicated through an intermediary named Vladimir Lavov. Here's how it went down. General Kornelov had a pre-existing agreement with Karinsky that he'd send in troops to restore order in the city if and when that became necessary. But Lavov went to General Kornelov, claiming to represent the Prime Minister, and asked what would it take for you to be a temporary dictator to stabilize the situation? General Kornelov 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 Lavov went back to the Prime Minister of Karinsky and stated that General Kornelov had a list of demands that must be met. The Prime Minister of Karinsky was startled. He just received a list of demands for 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, Karinsky started impersonating it. So Karinsky, pretending to be Lavov, sent telegrams to various military officers with vague questions like, "Are you ready for action?" This goal was to try to detect whether a coup was underway. But because his message was so vague, his military leader responded with responses in the affirmative, making it seem like a coup was in fact underway, even though it wasn't. Karinsky concluded that his own general was marching on St. Petersburg, so he issued an arrest warrant for General Kornelov, which greatly confused the general, who in term concluded that the arrest warrant must be because a coup had already happened. Otherwise, why would Karinsky, or maybe someone claiming to be Karinsky, want to arrest him? And this convinced Kornelov he needed to head to St. Petersburg with his soldiers right away, but General Kornelov'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 Karinsky, thinking General Kornelov's troops were approaching deposition, opened the jails and released the thousands of Bolsheviks who were awaiting trial for plotting over to the government, who didn't shot. 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 Karinsky'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 Kornelov. 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 Kornelov 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 Karinsky adopted a policy of no enemies to the left and 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 take over by the newly freed Bolsheviks, not a spontaneous worker 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. Karinsky fled into skies. By November 1917, when in 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 of 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, seeding any remaining power they might have had. As they left, Trotsky shouted at them, "You are pitiful, isolated individuals. You are bankers. 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 [BLANK_AUDIO] socialist order, and indeed, exactly what happened. Lenin took Russia out of World War One 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 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, they became apparent just all in popular they were. That November, Russia held the first free elections in its history. Considering the circumstances, the election went well. Forty-one million Russians voted, it was also a clear repudiation of Bolshevism, roughly three-quarters of Russians voted against Lenin and his party. The top party, by a long shot, was the one former Prime Minister Karensky belonged to. The Bolsheviks disregarded the outcome of a banned, rival political parties, and claimed a popular mandate anyway. It's worth noting that the word "Bolshevik" means "one of the majority." A 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 authority and was recognized by no one, including left-wing political parties, rejected the election results. According to MacMikhan, they refused to ratify the results as a legitimate, postponed the convocation of Russia's long-awaited constituent assembly until electoral abuses could be investigated. They then convened their own ramped 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. One reason the Bolsheviks seized power, despite being highly unpopular, as we demonstrated earlier in the episode, we can disorganized opposition. Writing about how the Bolsheviks expanded their power beyond Petrograd, Sergei Abelensky observed quote, "The entire incident remains as a clear warning what can happen to a government like Karensky'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 into the North and then did the same thing over again in Moscow, and so on throughout the cities of Russia. After that, there was no one stopping them. It was a brilliant technique. Much of this expansion happened because of the Bolsheviks' sheer ruthlessness. Within their first month in power, Bolsheviks sailors bayoneted the former head of the Russian military, Nikolai dokenin, to death, the next month they murdered other officers in Odessa, hurling their bodies into the water after the shot. In January 1918, they murdered 300 officers on the Crimean coast by breaking their limbs and dumping them in the ice-cold water alive, was open season on anyone who might be a threat to the Bolsheviks. One of the remarkable facts of life in the earlier Soviet Union is how the Bolsheviks enlisted their supporters to rat out their neighbors, which they did with enthusiasm. In his memoir, titled "Always with Honor," General Piotr Wrangold, 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 Bolsheviks sailors. After one of his former servants accused him of being a "counter-revolutionary," he and his wife reached the pier, which was proud of the people. The torpedo boat was mowed there. As soon as the crowd saw us, they began to yell, "Look out, here come the blood suckers to the water, to the water." There were bodies floating in the water as Wrangold walked out to the ship. Former officers, members of the Newbility, people with a little bit of money, anybody who had attracted the Bolshevik's attention, Wrangold was put on trial, quote unquote, "by a Bolshevik judge who had no idea what Wrangold was even accused of. There was no crime, no evidence, no defense. Wrangold would have been killed if it weren't for the quick thinking of his wife, who refused to leave his side and eventually talk the Bolsheviks into releasing him." One of the grisliest deaths at the hands of Bolshevik forces was the former ruling family, the Romanovs. When the provisional government first put them under house arrest, it was generally understood that the former Zard's family would be able to leave the country in exile. That never happened. England's King George Thith, the Romanovs cousin, revoked at asylum offer because he was concerned that bringing the Zard of Britain could set off a socialist revolution in the UK. By July of 1918, Bolsheviks and the town of Yekaterinburg were concerned that they might lose control of the ex-Zar and his family. Courtingly, with approval from Bolshevik leadership, a commandant named Gekav Yorovsky woke the Romanovs 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 at the basement, a death squad arrived, and blasted a family with gunfire soldiers, they had to wait for smoke in the room to clear in order to confirm the children were dead. As Sean MacMegan writes, to overthrow the world, quote, "the finale was gruesome because the four Romanovs daughters wore special corsets in which diamonds and other jewels have been sewn, the girls survived the initial machine gun volleys, and had to be finished off with bayonet thrusts." 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 Romanovs' remains dumped into the nearby forebrothers' mind, only to realize it was not deep enough that the bodies were lifted up and tossed into a ditch along the Ekaterinburg 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 Romanovs' 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 30, 1918, a high-ranking leader of the Bolshevik secret police, called the Czecho, was assassinated in Petrograd. That same day, Lenin was shot multiple times. Unlike the indecisive Tsar and the incompetent leaders of the provisional government, Lenin cracked down with total ferocity. Terrorism became official state policy. Martin Latzis, a high-ranking Bolshevik and Czecho official, wrote the following message on November 1, 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. Summary executions and concentration camps were each legalized by decree, with a particular emphasis on commissars and soldiers who were alleged to have deserted their posts. In September and October 1918 alone, the red terror claimed 15,000 lives, according to Nick Nekin, quote, "more than twice the total number of prisoners of all kinds executed in the entire century of Tsarist rule before 1917." That's not bad for a political party that started the revolution by banning the death penalty. Among the various targets the Bolsheviks systematically slaughtered, one notable group was the Kulaks. Middle-class Russians, similar to self-sufficient, rural, small business owners in America today. The kind of people American leftists called deplorables. Kulaks had the most salutes and were a frequent source of resistance to Bolshevik requisition policies, which caused mass starvation. During one of their rebellions, Lenin sent a telegram, calling for the Kulaks districts to be ruthlessly suppressed, adding an example must be made. Hang, absolutely hang, in full view of the people. No fewer than 100 known Kulaks, fat cats, blood suckers. Publish their names, seize all grain from them, do it in such a fashion that for hundreds of first Russian unit of measurement that's roughly two-thirds of a mile, around the people, see, tremble, no, shout. The blood-sucking Kulaks are being strangled and will be strangled. Telegraph the receipt and implementation, yours, Lenin. He added at the end a call overriding objections, advising his team, quote, "PS, find tougher people." When thousands of starving peasants tried to raid a building where the Bolsheviks were trying to store grain, the Red Army opened fire repeatedly on the Enraged Crowd. When war communism caused the deaths of millions of innocent Russians, according to the Bolshevik mouthpiece, Probda, 25 million people were starving in just one region, including 7 million children. The Bolsheviks went to war against their own peasants, who fought back with pitchforks and farm tools. The war, according to the Mekin, caused 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, quote, "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 Andronic Aperm has said to have had his cheeks hollow, 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 Promotion of Tobelus is reported to have been drowned with a rock tied to his neck. Teacon said in 1920 that to the best of his knowledge, 322 bishops in 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 cross your opposition. Thanks to a hapless opposition consumed with conspiracy and infighting, they seized total power which they used to prosecute and intimidate the political leaders. They forced people to believe absurd things, elevated freaks and intentionally rot chaos. They used intimidation tactics to terrify the majority who never supported them into submission. Their first policy priority is 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 minorities. The fact that people were willing to endure their rule for seven decades is a testament to what humans are willing to put up in. 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 detallitarian left don't change over time. They'll 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 if they're fair, there have been many, many close calls, in some cases, we got lucky. What the world looked 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 protest 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. There they 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. They still 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 them. They're communists because they hate them. Their radicalism is rooted in their resentment, feeling much more powerful than their charity. They don't want to build something beautiful, they want to tear it down. And that's exactly what we need to remember. Alexandra Cazer-Cortez is, ironically, one of the most vocal critics of colonialism in modern American politics. But thus she realized her last name is literally Cortez, whether she's related to her non-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. Now, we took a small Spanish army of 500 against hundreds of thousands of native soldiers, and one. My real history of the Conquistos. Coming soon to Daily Wire.