The Russian Revolution of 1917: The Bolshevik March to October

Hello everybody and welcome back to RevLeft Radio. All right on today's show we have on my friend and comrade Daniel from the Sickle and the Hammer podcast to do a deep dive into the year of 1917, primarily between February of 1917 and October of 1917 in which what we know as the Russian or the Bolshevik Revolution took place. I think this it's really important to not only cover this history but to do it in a very detailed way and Daniel is really really good at making that detailed history accessible and compelling and allowing people with little knowledge, maybe no knowledge at all to follow the historical events as they unfold showing very clearly how you know they are connected to one another. So it's a super accessible way into the really the detailed minutia of the revolution and it is really only through that detailed analysis of a world historical event like the Bolshevik Revolution that we can truly understand the ups and downs and the intricacies and nuances of revolutionary rupture because the October revolution is not something that happened spontaneously. It is not something that happened overnight, it had months and months of immediate acute build up and decades of more generalized build up leading to that moment and it took courage and attachment to the masses and the organization of the Vanguard Party and to the brilliance of the leaders of the Bolshevik Party as well as the resilience of the workers and the soldiers and the masses that made up the Soviets and made up the Bolshevik Party and made up the Russian Revolution that created the possibility for it to be successful. So this is a fascinating insight and even if you are a veteran Marxist right even if you know this history pretty damn well I guarantee you you will learn many new things by listening to this wonderful wonderful episode on the Russian Revolution and as always if you like what we do here at RevLeft Radio you can support us at patreon.com/revLeftRadio in exchange for bonus monthly episodes as well as access to our RevLeft situation room where we as a community come together and wrestle with big political events when they unfold and a bunch of other bonus material as well including sometimes access to our Buddhist song that we run together as a community and if you don't want to join the membership you can shoot us over a one-time donation at buymeacoffee.com/revLeftRadio I'll link to both in the show notes your support means the world to us and as always RevLeft is 100% listener fund it always has been always will be all right without further ado here's my fascinating conversation with Daniel on the Bolshevik Revolution establishing the world's first socialist day. Enjoy. Hello everyone my name is Daniel I am a Marxist Leninist communist from the American Midwest and earlier this year I started a show that is called the sickle in the hammer a socialist history of the Soviet Union I wanted to do this show because as a Marxist Leninist but also as kind of a Russian and Soviet history nerd I realized that there's a lot of really good information that is not making it out to the the American left the international left and there's a lot of kind of lies and obfuscation and distortions about what actually happened in the Soviet Union and what its stated goals were what its policies were what the effects were and I just kind of wanted to set the record straight so I've started my show it's I just wrapped up the period on the Russian Revolution I have two kind of retrospective episodes that are coming out soon I'm working on those scripts I'm hoping to have those out I don't know if they'll be out by the time this comes out but if you go to a sickle in hammer on any podcast platform spotify apple amazon whatever you should be able to find it right away and I also have a patreon page it's patreon.com/sovietpod if you want to sign up and support the project I would love to have you but you can also just listen to it for free on the podcast because I don't really want to keep this information I think everyone needs to have it so you know go go listen to it I hope you enjoy it absolutely and I'm honored to have you here love bringing up like new voices on the left and those putting out content like this on the left I love using RevLeft to kind of boost them and give them a little step up to our listenership and I think what you know you're doing is important work especially covering this revolution in extreme detail from a Marxist Leninist perspective I think is very helpful and there's obviously an infinite amount of things to learn about the first ever proletarian successful revolution in human history and so even though people will you know have some basic idea of how the revolution went I think we've structured this conversation to kind of really get into the nitty gritty details of the revolutionary period itself in a way that you know I don't think on this show in RevLeft we've covered in this way before we've covered the period more and more much more broad strokes I think and so this will be much more detail oriented and I also think there's lots of interesting parallels right we oh I think it's important to study the lead up to these revolutionary ruptures as well as the revolutionary ruptures themselves because in so many ways we're living in a time of multiple crises stacking on top of each other a time of widespread delegitimization and I can only imagine what would happen to this already decaying roddings you know society if we had a catalyst like another great depression or another world war put pressure on the already decrepit pillars of American society especially with somebody like the Trump administration in power who almost certainly would would handle the crisis in the worst way imaginable and so as we're going through this we're not only learning proletarian history we're going to be I'm sure implicitly and explicitly drawing certain connections to our own time and lessons that we can extract for for those of us living at this precarious time as well before we get into the first question which is about the kind of pre-revolutionary contradictions of late czarist Russian society just on a personal note how did you come to to Marxist Leninist politics and how did you get an interest in history more broadly yeah so I was raised in a religious household I was raised Catholic but it was the kind of workers Catholic tradition and my parents on particularly my father but also my mother but my father was like the one having us go to church they really instilled in me this sense of caring for other people and of not judging and that we are here to serve other people to help in any way that we can I eventually you know I grew up I left the church I haven't gone to mass in decades now and I'm don't have any plans of going back anytime soon but those lessons really stuck with me and as I went through high school and then college I just started learning kind of more about history I developed this really deep fascination specifically with Russian history something to do with all the snow and the darkness and the weird accents and stuff but then once I finished my kind of formal my formal education I started to really get interested in like the inner workings of specifically the Soviet Union because if you think about it in the United States and this kind of makes sense because you know most of us listening we're Americans and or you and I speaking are Americans and so like we get taught civics class and we know at least on paper like how the Constitution's supposed to work what the three branches of government are what elected representatives are supposed to do all like all that kind of stuff I'm not saying it works that way but we at least were taught this but when I got out of my education about the Soviet Union I realized well I don't actually know what the Soviet government how it was structured I don't know how it functioned all I know is like Stalin was a dictator and murdered a bunch of people and then the economy collapsed and so it's a bad idea don't try it so I started looking for ways to fill in those gaps in my knowledge and I eventually just started like reading Lenin and then I realized well if I'm going to understand Lenin I got to read Marx and I just I read some Marx stuff I read some Lenin stuff and it just really started to make a lot of sense to me and all the pieces kind of started to fall in the place with historical materialism and you know the analysis not only of what was going on in Russia but just all over the world throughout all of history I came to realize that I think dialectical materialism is a very very powerful analytical lens to examine history and human society through and and at that point I it started to resonate with me because I realized that Marxism, Leninism is so if if if you're serious about trying to lessen human suffering you have to move past capitalism but if you're serious about moving past capitalism you have to embrace Marxism, Leninism and I'm not trying to poop who other revolutionary trends I have anarchist comrades like mad respects to everyone engaged in the struggle I just realize for me personally like no the bourgeoisie the capitalists will kill you if given the chance if you threaten them in any way and you have to be able and willing to fight back and Marxism, Leninism is how you do that it's historically been proven the most effective way of fighting off counter revolution and building societies that count that the challenge the hegemony of capital so I've been a communist I call myself a communist I'm an ML whatever you want to call it I've been like this maybe for about 10 12 years now but really my journey kind of started much earlier than that in just a basic interest in wanting to be of service to people realizing that capitalism is an impediment to that and then understanding what we have to do to get past it yeah beautifully said and I think that resonates with a lot of our listenership it certainly resonates with me and in my own experience and I always like sort of think about like for me the two greatest elevations of my consciousness right that the two most revolutionary upward movements in my understanding of the world and the inner world was Buddhism and with the outer world it was Marxism and Marxism and Leninism in in particular they've just you know completely radically change the way that I see the world in a more true way right like that's the that's the that's the crucial part is like you could have radical shifts in consciousness and learn new things but it's like this actually helps me apprehend reality much more clearly and and so that there's like a dignity in having your consciousness elevated in those ways and then you know you go about the work of of trying to make the world a better place and as you said like at the end of the day everything that you know I try to do politically is geared towards the ending of unnecessary human suffering and that is a core moral and existential and in some way spiritual goal of of my life and and I think a lot of our lives we would not be in this sort of politics if we did not care about other people and we did not care about making the world a better place and so here we are it's a pleasure to have you on my friend yeah thank you very much a 100% I'm very familiar because I've been listening to you for a while with your conception of the bodhisattva revolutionary I find that to be very compelling I myself am not a particularly religious or spiritual person but I don't begrudge anyone their own spirituality just as long as you know they're not being fascist about it exactly and I've also been thinking you know this isn't really apropos of our conversation but just a little note here I've been thinking a lot lately about how the younger generation and you hear all these things online about how like oh they're turning to fascism they're becoming super reactionary and especially young men and they're falling into the manosphere and all this other crap that is really scary if you stop and think about it and I think about when I was young when I was younger in my late teens in early 20s and searching for the answers to questions about human society and human existence and what is my role here and everything just to anyone listening I will say that I found a socialist theory to be incredibly comforting and providing the answers that allowed me to not become a reactionary well for lack of about its term a reactionary douchebag like like if I hadn't found Marxism or Leninism I fear that I would have potentially fallen into the manosphere so I think having these ideas out there and understanding the history like you said it helps you engage in your own mind and your own existence but it helps you engage in the external world in a non-destructive way and that's I think super important right now because at least American society but global society more broadly is really feels to a lot of people like it is teetering on the edge and we're trying to find ways to pull back from it and you know I think socialist and communist theory and understanding our own history is one of the big keys to doing that totally and the last thing I'll just mention very briefly is that your point about the manosphere and young men being sucked into that sort of algorithmically constructed pipeline to reaction the saddest thing about all of that is that I mean those things will never solve their problems right the reason that you get sucked into the manosphere all the problems in your life that you turn to reactionary politics to solve actually only makes them worse what is for example if you go to the manosphere because you're having a hard time dating women or finding women and then all that does is make you a hundred times more repulsive to women in every way yeah or you turn to reactionary fascist politics to solve the fact that you can't build a life for yourself much less create a family and provide for one because you have no real economic opportunities and you turn to the violent arm of capitalist restoration to try and navigate those contradictions and they only make the problems worse which is why reactionaries and fascists even when they get what they want they're never happy they're never satisfied it never actually comes to any satisfying conclusion much less anything like solving the problems that they ostensibly would like to solve and what's left in the void of actually solving problems hatred and anger and bitterness and it's like okay if I can't solve the problems at least I can hurt the people that I blame for them exactly that is all that fascism ultimately offers yeah I mean last thing on the manosphere just ask yourself when was the last time you heard of someone who followed the advice coming out of the manosphere and wound up happily married with a happy family like it just doesn't happen exactly it's horrible advice it's super reactionary um and it it along with all other fascist ideology just leads the masses astray absolutely all right my friend that's a that's a great little prelude to this conversation you know talking about contemporary issues before we get into historical ones um so we're going to talk mostly about the revolutionary period of the Bolshevik revolution or the just the broadly conceived Russian revolution however you want to phrase it because there's many different factions at play here um but I'm interested in the lead up to it right so before 1917 what made the Zara's order unsustainable like can you speak to peasant land hunger after the 1861 emancipation uneven but explosive industrialization and petrograd and Moscow and the devastation of course of world war one on workers and soldiers and how they all kind of played into the collapse of the social order absolutely uh this is one of my this is one of the reasons why I find the Russian revolution to be so fascinating because if you look at the lead up to it you find exactly what Marx predicts and describes in his own conception of historical materialism that a system will function until the contradictions inherent in it can no longer be effectively managed and then the explosion of the tension between those contradictions is the revolution so if you go back so the revolution starts in February 1917 if you go back 50 years before that you just see one after another after another of all of these uh problems not being properly addressed and the system is unable to properly address them uh for a whole host of reasons i'll talk about here in a minute but that's what leads up to the explosion of 1917 so it's just it's like the perfect blueprint of historical materialism in in my mind anyway um so you know I tend to think of the starting point of the prehistory of the revolution to be 1861 so that is when the Russians are Alexander the second uh finally passed the emancipation of the serfs uh russia had had surfed him at that point for about 200 years it was i think one of if not the only uh country in europe or that was considered to be part of europe that that still had surfed him at that time um and for a whole host of reasons everyone knew that surfed him had to be abolished um it was horribly inefficient in the agricultural sphere um there were like with slavery in the United States and he had abolitionists there were plenty of people in russia who just said hey you can't treat people like this you can't treat people as property in part of the land their individuals and they deserve their freedom um so in 1861 Alexander the second finally passes the emancipation proclamation the problem is it is a half completed social and economic revolution what it's supposed to do is free up the serfs and um open up the door to agricultural modernization but what it actually the the issue is it doesn't give the serfs what they need to actually survive outside of serfdom so when you're a serf you're part of the land you're you're tied to the estate of the landowner but the landowner has certain uh legal responsibilities to you they're supposed to allow you to feed yourself and house yourself and you can have your community you work for the the landlord then the landlord provides you with protection and municipal services and all this other stuff so when you get when russia gets rid of serfdom uh it changes the legal status of the peasants but it doesn't actually give them any land they don't actually have any control over their resources and in fact um one of the more grotesque aspects of this uh emancipation of the serfs this emancipation proclamation is it imposes a tax on the serfs so that they must pay for their own freedom so uh the details aren't really important but what ends up happening is the serfs are on the hook for the next 49 years making redemption payments to the landlords for the quote unquote privilege of having been freed so you have this entire class of people you know hundreds of millions of people over the last two two and a half centuries that have been have had their labor exploited and had their surplus value extracted and when that system finally no longer works you impose a tax on them so that they still have to pay to not have their labor be exploited and their surplus value beics it's this really grotesque failure of the entire system um and of of the entire reform um coincidentally the reason that happens is because it is the landed aristocracy that advises the czar on how they would like to have this process unfold if you can believe it no peasants were asked how should we proceed with the abolition of serfdom it was all just the landed gentry and wouldn't you know it they said well if you if you make them pay us for half of a century then fine we'll call it even which is you know brilliant classes what are you going to do um so so you have this this land problem now one of the reasons why this is important though is because um Russia recognizes that it has to industrialize it is one of the most industrially underdeveloped nations in Europe at the time it actually one of the things that was kind of the direct catalyst to realizing and setting getting on the path to emancipate the serfs was Russia got its ass kicked in the Crimean War in the 1850s just absolutely humiliated and it was because they were not an industrial power but France and Britain were and they just got completely crushed in the war so you free up the serfs now you have this giant underclass of reserve labor which is kind of starting to sound like the prerequisites for capitalist development right so the state the Russian bureaucracy the direction the czarist bureaucracy starts to invest in capitalist production and is able to pull from the now hundreds of millions of serfs who have been have lost their ability to provide for themselves because they no longer have legal access to the land so in about the 1870s 1880s you start to see this explosion of um capitalist production drawing from the peasant class the peasantry starts to become the proletarian class of the Russian empire um a really kind of funny interesting uh anecdote about this is there was this Russian he's kind of considered the Russian father of Marxism a guy named Georgi Plechanov and he was kind of the first Russian Marxist of the period and he had studied Marx and then brought back the teachings and and the texts to Russia and this was right this turned out to be right on the eve of the explosion of uh industrialization on the Russian empire so everyone's reading all these texts from Marx and Plechanov's like see man this is it this is what we need to be paying attention to but there's not really any large scale industrialization in Russia so everyone says what are you talking about this is crazy but within a couple of years that script has been flipped and now everyone thinks that Plechanov is this like genius and what I think is funny what I think is funny about that is I kind of think of the analogy of like if you are going if you know the math you can accurately predict a solar eclipse if you don't know the math someone telling you that the sun is going to be blocked out seems crazy and then when it happens you're like oh my god this person's a sorcerer they have such divine knowledge but really all it is is they have an understanding of how astrophysics and the math works and they're just able to apply it and that's kind of what happened here Marx had at this time he was still alive and he had but he had started to publish capital volume one and he was working on the other two volumes um he had kind of developed the inner workings of capitalism he had developed an understanding of the inner workings of capitalism and so all that happened was he looked at it he studied it and he described what he was seeing and that's was experienced in Russia as almost kind of a a uh divination of of what was going to happen it was seen as almost like a miracle um because there was no materialist understanding of the progression of history in Russia at the time not even among the intellectuals and that speaks to the the scientific aspect of historical material exactly really this is genuinely scientific attempt to understand something that is fallen outside the purview of you know science proper which is the development of societies through history um and in the same but in the same way that we still have people who deny you know Darwinian evolution or people that deny the efficacy of vaccines science denial happens all the time and in some ways the denial of historical materialism and the the the historical evolution of societies through time is still very much alive with us of course because it's it's needed to defend the current system um that that that that that is uh currently in power but we know from a historical materialist perspective that regardless of what comes next capitalism imperialism is an ephemeral stage in the development of social history and one way or another it will pass and we hope that it passes through revolution onto a better world but it could also you know collapse in on itself it could also I mean in the worst absolute worst case scenario lead to something like the extinction of the human species um but but we know that it will pass because it is ephemeral but anybody that defends capitalism has to on some implicit level assume that this is the end all be all of modes of production and maybe we reform it maybe we have to still get it just right but basically and this is what Fukuyama was arguing it's the end of history and we we know implicitly because of Marxism that that's that's a force yeah I was just going to bring that up it's the whole idea of well this is all we can do this is the best we can do so we got to make do with what we can within the system and uh the beauty of historical materialism and dialectical materialism is it very sublimely describes how everything in the universe down to from the atoms all the way up to stars all the way up to black holes everything is constantly changing and morphing and nothing lasts forever um so and constantly morphing and changing in radical relationship to everything else around it exactly yeah yeah yeah that's that's the dialectical part of dialectical materialism right it's that all the composite components of whatever system it is that you're looking at are interacting with each other and through that interaction they are being changed and changing everything else nothing is is static so um anyway okay so getting back to 1870s 1880s so industrialization starts to take off and the pro the the new proletariat class is going through the ringer at this point um Lenin actually had I think I want to say it was 92 1892 but I don't know it I know it was the 1890s one of his very very first works was a history of development of capitalism in Russia so you can go there if you want more details but you know all the stories that we've heard about the horrors of horse industrialization and industrialization uh in Britain and France and the United States and also in colonies around the world same thing is happening with the Russian proletariat they're living in squalor they're being they're you know they're living in company towns whatever pay they get is barely enough to survive on and they their families are suffering um you know rushes much farther north so the winters are much more brutal so they're also just constantly cold all the time for like seven or eight months out of the year um and the proletariat class instinctively without at this point really having any leadership to speak of the proletariat class in Russia is becoming very very combative they are not happy with the situation as it stands um so we'll we'll put a pin in that and come back at that later and then moving on to the world war one so um you know world war one generally was a horrific war I think a lot of people think of world war two as the kind of worse war because of the Nazis and then the genocide of the Jewish people in Europe um you know the the fight against fascism all of that is horrific I'm not trying to take anything away from that but I think world war one is understudied for how much of an impact it had on everything for four years everyone in Europe just called it the meekrinder because the casualty rates were astronomical um the battle lines hardly ever moved because it was the the defenses were much more uh established and much stronger than the offences so you would just send soldiers across no man's land to just get mowed down on the like they they they would fight over just a couple miles in one direction or another and very quickly it becomes apparent to all the combatants and all the soldiers that uh this war is is a terrible war they should not be fighting this war no one wants to fight it anymore specifically in Russia what the Russian Empire starts running into is the the limitations of its failure to industrialize ahead of the war the infrastructure of Russia's the Russian Empire starts to collapse um agricultural production starts to collapse and as this starts to happen you have the proletariat in the cities who are getting angry or an angrier at this point they've actually had socialist uh uh parties like the the Bolsheviks the Mensheviks the socialist revolutionaries we'll talk about all those guys in a little bit more detail later but there has been some agitation there has been some raising of class consciousness in the early in the first like 15 years of the 20th century in Russia so the workers are becoming more class conscious and more combative but the peasants are also starting to starve the peasants are the ones who are providing the soldiers so they're getting very angry that uh they're having to send their young men their sons and brothers and fathers to fight in this war and become horribly mutilated or just outright die and the drain of labor power from the villages as they're sending these young able-bodied men to the front it means that the villages are no longer able to produce what is needed to both sustain the war effort and keep uh domestic production at a level to keep everyone fed so the entire system just starts to uh sputter and really begins to collapse in on itself what what you're basically talking is like two generations leading up to 1917 revolution and all of these contradictions building up piling on top of one of one another the the the the conflict around surfdom and the emancipation the fallout of that just like in the US after slavery was officially abolished problems certainly remained um in so many different ways the failure of reconstruction etc do you have the rush of falling behind other european powers and industrialization and seeing that other countries are ahead of them uh in some cases well ahead of them in that regard losing conflicts with other european powers because of it and in the rise of course of world war one just adding a pressure cooker uh to the already existing contradictions in in Russian society and and and i always i never failed to point out the the the Bolshevik revolution and the chinese revolutions came in the wake of world wars and i i think there is there is something to be studied and thought carefully about how these catastrophic explosions of the social order the international social order um are the the wildfire that clears the ground in some sense for these revolution that create the the doorways the possibilities for revolutionary ruptures that's not to say that they're good or that they should be desired but but it is to say that they are the natural outcomes of a broken social order a broken international order compiling compiling compiling compiling building up pressure until it explodes and in some ways they are the the death nail uh to previous social orders and that death nail of course creates the conditions to build something to build something new and that's what we see um in the many many decades leading up to 1917 now the rest of this conversation and i think what makes this conversation unique even though we we may have covered um you know the Bolshevik revolution in the past with much broader strokes the rest of this conversation is is literally going to be focused on February 1917 and go all the way through october 1917 we're going to study this in detail in a similar way as we did with um with China with Ken Hammond we have a seven hour episode on like 200 years of chinese history that we go through the revolution in detail and we have one on the french revolution where we really got into the nitty gritty of how the revolution unfolded and this will be the Bolshevik version i think of those detailed deep dives into the revolutionary process itself so with all of that said um we're going to move up now to the February revolution and the construction of dual power and this is February of 1917 so how did the February revolution actually unfold on the ground and why did soldiers mutiny's you know kind of prove decisive in that unfolding and also and i ask these questions because we're going into great detail so my questions are detailed how did this event produce dual power between the provisional government and the workers and soldiers soviets big question take it however you want sure sure um so yeah by february 1917 um the russian people are fed up they hate the participation in the war um the czar has actually taken direct command over the russian imperial army the thing is uh germany is kicking russia's ass because germany is one of the most industrially advanced nations in russia at the time and so the czar by stepping in and making himself the commander in chief of the russian imperial army ultimately all that does is he is signing his name on all of the catastrophic defeats that are mounting up throughout 1916 and leading into 1917 so the people don't want the war the aristocracy is mad that the war is going so badly um everyone's probably heard of goody gore russ puttin we're not going to get into him but his presence in the capital during this time has is another reason why the aristocracy around the czar and the czar's family are starting to abandon them and and getting very angry at them because the way they handled russ puttin and his all of his scandals uh just really alienated a lot of people um so so what happens is on uh mid-favorite i think it was like the 21st or the 22nd oh i i should say actually and this is the disclaimer i have this on all my episodes this is the disclaimer everyone who talks about this period uh is kind of obligated to give and that is the uh different calendars that are used to date these things long story short russia at this time was on an old calendar called the julian calendar it is 13 days behind the calendars that we use now um the bolsheviks modernized the calendar in february 1918 but at this point um when we say the february revolution that's because it was february on the russian calendar but if you look in a lot of modern sources they will give you the dates as having happened in march even though it's called the february revolution is same with october it happens at the end of the october calendar in russia but it's on the november calendar in the rest of the world um and so there there is that discrepancy just in case anyone feels like going out and doing their own research which i obviously support and encourage if you come across that i just don't want anyone to be confused thanks um so anyway so um the czar leaves petrograd the capital of the russian empire to go to uh place called magellov which is army headquarters and on february 23rd female textile workers who are enraged at the new rationing system being imposed in the city they go on strike now they were not the first workers to go on strike there had been strikes happening throughout most of february at this point um but the female workers were the first workers to have explicitly political demands such as down with the czar and end the war and so that's the first time that we see this fusion between the economic necessities of trying to provide for yourself and your family with the political necessity of we have to move past this system this system is not working for us it is actually making it impossible for our political demands to be met so february 23rd is kind of considered the start of the february revolution because of the explicitly political nature of the demands being made by the women workers there and the strikes basically just snowball from there for the next day or two up to half a million workers have abandoned their stations and their factories uh and they're out in the streets and they're demanding not only a rise in wages and an end to inflation uh because the wartime inflation is is out of control at this point just another uh way that the system is squeezing the average person um but they're tying it to the political demands because the czar is out of the city he has to rely on the reports of people back in the city and he so he is slow to respond to what is actually happening um he he understands that there are disorders happening and so he orders a general a guy named hobalov um to basically put down the strikes and just force everyone to go back to work so hobalov orders starts to order the soldiers who were stationed in petrograd to go out into the street and do just that and this is where we start to see what i think is one of the really inspirational things it's a motif that we see throughout the russian revolution time and again when you have two classes whose interests actually overlap what bridges the gap between them is direct communication so the workers are out on the street but the soldiers who are again they're drawn from the peasantry the soldiers are being told well you had to get the workers to go back to work but in physically occupying the same space in order to force them back to work the workers start explaining to the soldiers hey our brothers this is why we're doing this we're not out here for selfish reasons we are literally starving and freezing we cannot close ourselves we don't have fuel to keep ourselves warm um our our money is worthless we are fighting for our lives and i believe it's by the evening of february 26th the soldiers when they're back in their barracks that night start to talk among themselves and they kind of all independently not all of them but many of the the regiments uh independently start to come to the conclusion that they actually don't want to be doing this they are on the side of the workers the demands that the workers are making seem completely reasonable totally understandable and hey the workers also want an end of the war just like we want an end of the war so on the morning of the 27th the soldiers end up basically mutating against the petrogate garrison um and general habalov and defecting to the side of the workers and when that happens that's basically the ballgame because now you have half a million workers joined by 200,000 soldiers of a lot of them are armed and you have no one else to send in to combat that you there there are no reliable troops everyone is either at the front or they're so disgruntled by the war that even troops that you could send in who's to say the same thing as it's just going to keep happening and then they're going to also defects to the side of the revolution um so the demands start to build for the Tsar to go and by march first um the the writing is on the wall and the and uh Nikolai's ministers uh the Tsar Nikolai his ministers come to him and say look you got to go we we have we have no way of ending this crisis and leaving you in power and Nikolai hesitates but he does advocate he advocates first in favor of his brother Mikhail but then Mikhail understands that it would be suicide to take the crown right now because they do not want a czar it's like a opposite of right exactly like how how is he supposed to unscrew this pooch so uh so he says no i'm not going to take the um i'm not going to take the crown uh and he defers to the constituent assembly which is something i imagine we'll talk about a little bit later um but basically it's this is the point where sardom in russia ends because the tsars recognize that the people do not want them the people have rejected them both in the army and in the factories in the streets of the cities and out in the countryside and uh so they the tsars leave and in their place is i guess we'll talk about it now is this supposed to be this constituent assembly which is this idea that okay we will eventually have a a a common together of the russian sort of post czar government um so that's kind of how uh tsardom ends in russia and that's kind of the the culmination of the um the the february revolution now the dual power aspect comes into play here because two things are happening at the exact same time between february 23rd and march 1st you have the leftovers of the russian du ma and then you have the workers and soldiers spontaneously organizing themselves so the russian du ma what it's kind of like the russian parliament um it had been in session during this whole time but it had been powerless to do anything about it because they're just ministers they also don't have control over the soldiers so what are they going to do so once the tsar abdicates um certain ministers and uh deputies from this du ma starch uh they declare themselves to be the provisional government of russia so they say okay we were elected why i think it was like a the year before something to sit in this du ma so we will take over governing of the country um no one elects the provisional government they just declare themselves to be the of the provisional government but their claim to legitimacy is that they were voted into the du ma in the last series of elections along with that though you have the workers and the soldiers who start organizing themselves into the Soviets now the russian word Soviets um or as i say Soviet in english it literally just means council both in the sense of giving someone advice and also in the sense of a council of people coming together to discuss issues and make decisions so the Soviets are literally just councils of workers and soldiers that spontaneously start to form so that they can come together and discuss the issues that are important to them um the Soviets had actually first appeared there's a revolution in 1905 we're not going to get into it but that was the first appearance of the Soviets the Soviets had then gone away after that revolution but they've come back here and they are as we know now the embryo of what would become uh popular democracy and workers power in the Soviet Union they are they are resurrected right now in february 1917 now the dual power nature of this is neither of these institutions at this early stage of the revolution are powerful enough in and of themselves to take over total control of the russian empire so the masses are very clearly with the Soviets but the masses are also and so that the Soviets are by extension as well uh very inexperienced they were not expecting to step into this role and their immediate concerns are okay how do we feed and close ourselves how do we take care of our families how do we end this war um the provisional government has this veneer of officialdom because it comes from the duma but they're not really supported by the masses now that means that the provisional government if they were to try to break up the Soviets they would uh incite a reaction against them that would very likely leads to a civil war because the masses are with the Soviets and the Soviets start popping up all over the country but it's not just in petrograd they're in all the cities in a lot of the villages Soviets just start popping up everywhere so the provisional government is not strong enough to just do away with the Soviets altogether and the Soviets are not experienced enough and they're not class conscious enough at this point to understand that they don't actually need the provisional government they are capable of running things by themselves so you have these parallel tracks of political power being exercised over the next eight months and the story of the Russian revolution is very much the story of these two tracks that start out parallel starting to curve into them into into each other and heading on a collision course and that's what ends up happening in October. Yeah well the first thing I want to say is just like kind of stepping out of the narrative just talking like how good you are at creating an accessible and compelling narrative that doesn't lose the listener like sometimes when people go through the morass of these historical details it's very easy to get bogged down and take detours and kind of lose the narrative thread you're kind of hopping all over the place or bringing up things that people don't know about or kind of confused about and so it can be it can be hard to tell history in this hyper detailed way and I just wanted to give you your props of of how good you are at it and you know that speaks to the quality of your podcast the sickle on the hammer which of course I'll link to in the show notes people can check it out so you know hats off to you for that but also want to just kind of reiterate this the importance of these Soviets right of these councils this is the locus the embryo as you said of proletarian democracy this especially coming out of Zara's to Russia represents this radical extension of democracy and with that community autonomy right the the ability for bottom up democratic democratically organized communities workers to come together and make strategic decisions especially in a time of extreme crisis and I was trying to think like what is the closest thing that we have in the modern America to that and I would say it's something like unions but when they're when they're on strike right when unions go on strike and they're out they're out and out in open class conflict with the bosses and they are now no longer being paid right so now meeting the workers material needs through strike funds and mutual aid becomes necessary having alliances perhaps with other elements of the community other trade unions becomes more and more important and and then the strategy of how you deal in this really hot house environment of hostility and conflict with negotiations you know what your red lines are in that context unions are really forced to kind of you know in a miniature in a miniature version kind of play the role of what a Soviet is and in both of these cases although the Soviets to a much greater extent and these entities have been present in multiple socialist experiments these are this this is really important to remember that these are the the route beds the seed beds out of which socialist and proletarian democracy can emerge in flourish and of course there's a bunch of complications with the Soviets down the road and plenty of criticism to talk about but just highlighting how beautiful and relatively rare these formations are and how they really are in so many ways at the at the center of our socialist politics I think is is worth doubling down on and just reminding people of yeah absolutely you would say that you think maybe the closest approximation that we would have in the United States today is labor unions that just brought to my mind so Lenin in 1902 wrote what is to be done which was basically his theory of the vanguard party and why it was necessary and all that stuff and he points out in that work the very real limitations of unions unions are great they're very necessary they are the first line of defense for workers against capital and the the bourgeoisie trying to squeeze them for all of their worth but they are insufficient the in and of themselves for overcoming capitalism entirely if you want to know why go read that book I don't want to get into it right now because that will derail this entire conversation but you can think of Soviets as the next evolution or the next step in workers powers in workers power you have unions that are focused on individual maybe workplaces or industries but then the Soviets are where those unions start to come together so that you have the the brick layers union and the coal miners union and all these other workers from all over the country coming together and that's where they can recognize their common class interests in the unions they're mostly limited to their own industry and the immediate interests in their struggle against the specific owner of the mine or the factory or whatever it is the Soviets are how you kind of universalize that struggle beautifully said and yes of course we have an episode Allison and I on our on our sister podcast red menace on the text what is to be done by Lenin where we both ciferously explain the limitations of trade union consciousness and articulate what a vanguard party actually is and some of the smears against you know the distortions about what it is versus what it really is the role of the professional revolutionary in Lenin's of verbiage et cetera and and importantly when I you're 100% correct that the Soviets are a maturation and and a level of above of what unions are and I was even articulating the the particular aspect of unions during a strike because they're you know unions outside of a strike context are even much the ceiling is even lower and and having recently joined a trade union and obviously I don't have super a lot of experience but I've been to meetings and I talk with my co-workers about the union it's awesome in a lot of ways right there's lots of class class consciousness there's lots of outright hostility towards the bosses they kind of know where they are in the whole thing but there's also deep deep limitations and as my experience unfolds within one of the bigger trade unions in North America I'll have episodes where I kind of from a first person experience I get to explain the this of your limitations of trade union consciousness because they certainly are there but yeah all all interesting thoughts for real I'll link to that show that episode on that we did on what is to be done in the show notes as well for people because I do think it's perhaps one of the most important texts that a Marxist could read and understand in depth for the level of organization needed to confront capitalism and imperialism but with all that said let's go ahead and and now move forward in the narrative so coming out of the February revolution the dual power situation we move into April and this gives rise to the April Theses and accusations of Lenin being a German agent so when Lenin returned in April what was qualitatively new about the April Theses right peace land and bread verse all power to the Soviets or and all power to the Soviets how should we understand the German agent accusation like historically as a bourgeois smear and what evidence do we have about what really mattered which is the Bolshevik alignment with mass demands something you've alluded to throughout this narrative already so when February happens it catches the established political parties completely off guard they've been suppressed by the Zara's regime for you know a decade or more at that point so Lenin and a few other Bolshevik leaders along with leaders of the Mensheviks and even the SRs have have gone into exile so they're in I think it's Zurich when the February revolution hits other leaders like Kamenev and Stalin are in exile in Siberia so once the Zara is overthrown everyone starts to make their way back to Petrograd whether it's coming from Siberia or coming from abroad Lenin because so if he's in Zurich that means that he has to travel across enemy lines to get back into Russia because if you look at the map in between Zurich Switzerland and Petrograd Russia or St. Petersburg today in Russia is Germany and Germany is at war on both fronts they're fighting France and they're fighting Russia so Lenin basically comes up with the plan of going to the German high command and asking for safe passage back to Russia now this is a calculated risk because he knows what's going to happen when he does this but he does not see any other way for him to get back into the country he knows that he's not that everyone's going to read about Lenin working with the Germans and he knows that he's going to be smeared as a German agent but again there there are no choices there are no other ways back into Russia and the the deal that he hatches with the German high command is they'll put him on a train and those will send him you know across the eastern half of Europe back into Petrograd the reason the German high command agrees to this is because they want what Lenin wants in this very very narrow sense their interests align both Lenin and the German high command want Russia out of the war Russia Germany wants Russia out of the war because they are losing they even though they're kicking Russia's butt in the war they're fighting on two fronts and they understand that they cannot keep this up for forever so they need one of the fronts to be closed and the way they think that they can do that is if they can send Vladimir Lenin into Russia as a destabilizing force in order to force Russia to withdraw from the war so that's why the German high command agrees to this Lenin wants to get back into Russia in order to advocate and and do his work in the revolution including ending Russia's participation in the war but he wants to do it for two reasons one because the war is horrific and he knows that the Russian people are suffering and he knows that the working people all over Europe are suffering and he wants the war to end if you go back and look at the documents he puts out like in the April theses but also there are just a whole bunch of like proclamations and decrees and all this stuff at no point are the Bolsheviks or Lenin or even the Soviets calling for an end of the war only with Germany they are constantly appealing to all belligerent nations and though the working classes specifically of all the belligerent nations to end the war because they want the war overall to be finished so Lenin takes German money he takes German resources and he takes a train back into Petrograd he arrives I believe it's April 4th or maybe this is a third but anyway it's early April so like I said Lenin knew that he was going to be smeared as a German agent and he is because he is such a radical advocate for immediate workers power we'll get into that with April theses in a second but just to wrap up the the German agent smear one of the most telling things about how this is purely a political smear and just a label that's being thrown on Lenin is Lenin is not the only Russian revolutionary who takes up the German high command on this deal there are Mensheviks there are SRs there are anarchists and there are other Bolsheviks who take these trains they're actually three successive trains they all get on these trains and they they make their way back into Russia none of them other than Lenin specifically and the Bolsheviks generally are smeared as German agents even though they all did the same thing so that to me is kind of the the biggest proof that it is because Lenin and the Bolsheviks immediately start to advocate for an end of the war for transfer of power to the Soviets that they come up with this smear the Mensheviks and the SRs are not doing that they are Lenin ends up calling them the collaborationist parties they are working together with the provisional government so they don't get this smear because they're they're not quote acting in the interests of Germany they want to continue the war so yeah so that that's the German agent thing it's it's something that persists to this day I actually when I was I was looking I went on like a a Russian Federation government website two day that was talking about their own history and even today the Russian federal the Russian Federation the government has the line of Vladimir Lenin was a German agent it's kind of crazy because it's like dude this is your guy but they're they're no longer you know obviously they're no longer socialist they've been capitalist for 30 some years so they're going to join in the party so um okay so what does Lenin do that incurs the wrath of the bourgeoisie and the provisional government and the other socialist parties well when he gets off the train in Lenin grad I'm sorry in petrograd he immediately like on the platform as he is greeted because people know that he's coming and everyone's excited to have him come back he's got Bolshevik comrades coming to to greet him but also just workers and people coming to see Lenin come back in Russia he on the spot starts talking about the need for the the revolution to now proceed from the first stage the overthrow of the czar to the second stage the overthrow of the bourgeoisie um most people think he's crazy uh common ev one of his closest colleagues even though common ev uh ultimately ends up being a very kind of right wing Bolshevik um so he ends up disagreeing with Lenin on a couple of really key important points but he's still a Bolshevik common ev basically says to everyone hey we're really sorry about this we didn't know he was gonna say this don't please don't like get mad at us for this this is just him um and of course the the bourgeois press is that's when they start uh hurling the German agent smear uh the bench vix the sr's everyone is just like Lenin's out of his gourd this is a crazy uh the next day april 4th Lenin gives a report um that is known as the april thesis there's an official name I I didn't write it down I don't remember what the name of the report is but we all call it now the april thesis and in the thesis he lays out his argument for why uh power should now begin to transfer to the working class and why uh the revolution should proceed from a bourgeois revolution that overthrows the monarchy to a socialist revolution that overthrows the bourgeoisie now to be fair to the bench vix and sr's they call themselves socialist I don't really buy it because you are what you do and the bench vix and socialist uh never support the working class they never support the Bolsheviks they try to oppose them at every turn um but they call themselves socialist and they they claim to profess at a historical materialist understanding of the progression of society and they their argument is that look we just had a bourgeois revolution to overthrow the monarchy uh russia is not industrialized we have not had a prolonged period of rule by the bourgeoisie you can't skip over this stage is essentially the argument but and this is kind of the the brilliance of Lenin Lenin sees the Soviets and he immediately as we were saying recognizes that they are the embryo of actual uh political power being exercised by directly by the masses um you know before the Soviets have shown up Lenin actually has subscribed to that general understanding of the progression of historical materialism first you have the rule of the of feudal lords and the kings and then you have it got to get rid of that and then you got to have a period of bourgeois rule and then you get to to Soviet rule or i'm sorry you get to to socialist rule but in seeing the Soviets start to pop up and the masses start to spontaneously organize themselves he recognizes that this is actually the perfect opportunity for russia to become the leading force in a worldwide socialist revolution one other big aspect of this is the international dimension so we were talking about world war one uh we don't need to get into this too far but essentially the Bolshevik uh line on world war one is that it was an imperialist war it was the imperial core countries of britain france russia germany austria hungry uh the ottoman empire um these countries were going to war to try to divvy up the imperial pie better more specifically germany wanted to get a bigger piece of the pie because germany like russia uh germany had unified later and had industrialized later than britain and france and so by the time they got to a point where they could start go out going out and colonizing uh the rest of the world most of the choice pieces of colonial meat had already been claimed by the british and the french so the germans were like the only way to get them to give us their colonies is to fight a war with them so uh kind of what we were talking about before about these cycles of crises the Bolsheviks to recognize that world war one is a global crisis of capital imperialism and so lenin says look here is the chink in the armor if capitalism is a global system here in russia the soviets have shown us how we actually can move the entire world past capitalism you don't need to have capitalism have a uh the the bourgeoisie have a prolonged rule in any one country before that country becomes socialist if you look at the totality of capitalism as a global system this is the chink in the armor this is how we can get them if we can utilize the soviets to first affect a socialist revolution in russia we can then turn around and affect that revolution across europe and then that will trickle down to the rest of the world so the idea that lenin has come up with is uh yes history progresses in stages but it's not a rigid first a then b then c then d formula um he's applying his uh dialectical materialist analysis of the situation in real time and that's how he identifies the soviets as as we keep saying the embryo of workers power and the motor for a worldwide socialist revolution and i think you hit the nail in the head when you emphasize the dialectical approach as opposed to this much this you know they're both operating from a historical material both sides of this argument could be operating from an ostensibly historical materialist perspective and making arguments that seem in line with it but the more dialectical perspective i think is lenins and that's what eventually won out and there is a deep brilliance there i mean there's a to to to go against the the current in such a bold way to the point where even your comrades are like i don't know he must have lost his damn mind um and to see that with such clarity and to apply um of a dialectical and historical materialist framework in real life living breathing evolving conditions as opposed to this more stultified um static conception there's like this deterministic conception of we have to go through this stage and then we have to go through this stage you know there's something that there's something dialectically lost in that in that rigid perspective and in both lenins case and in mous case they creatively and uniquely and successfully applied the the historical and dialectical materialist framework to their own conditions in such a way that they allowed it to be a living breathing strategic approach to things as opposed to a stultified dead dogma just being copy and pasted on to society right yeah i could not agree with that more that is the brilliance of uh uh let an in and the Bolsheviks is um they exactly that they are uh they are adhering to the spirit of dialectical materialism not the letter the letter says a then b then c then d but the spirit says examine how all the composite parts are interacting with each other and then draw your conclusions of the strategy from that and that's what the Bolsheviks are doing that's what Lenin does and that's what uh ultimately leads them to victory and i should say um when these these are first put out the higher ups in the Bolshevik party and you know all the other people that we talked about they're all disavowing him but there is one group that immediately latches on to this idea and would you at all be surprised to learn it is the workers and soldiers who immediately start to say yes actually why don't we start why don't we transfer power to the Soviets we're ready to have it in the intervening what month and a half two months since february i'd mentioned before that they weren't particularly class conscious enough and politically mature enough to take power directly in the wake of the overthrow of the czar but this is where they start to recognize that actually maybe we can run things by ourselves now it's still a process we still got six months to go until october but um what i want to impress here is that Lenin is not uh kind of like Christopher Nolan style accepting the planting this idea in the minds of the working class he has actually determined that due to the the material conditions on the ground this is possible and necessary and because that is an accurate reflection of the needs of the masses the masses start to resonate with that message and that's where you start to see this really radical shift within the Bolshevik party because when Lenin comes back and puts out these theses within just like a week or two it becomes the official line of the party because the rank and file workers and soldiers of the Bolshevik party are voting for it and they want it and so it is a textbook example of the theory of the vanguard party from what is to be what is to be done that we talked about where you have the vanguard party that is uh doing the analytical legwork necessary for the working class but they have to find their their reflection and their roots in the working class and that's what's happening here. Absolutely and it would almost be regressive or tailless to try to prevent or put a ceiling on what the Soviets are developing and Lenin saw that that um you know to go with this more stages approach would be to abandon the very real development that has been expressed through the Soviets themselves at this point and the alignment of those Soviets with the masses much more broadly so it's actually quite a beautiful thing and the brilliance of course comes in Lenin's clarity of insight and his application of theory to the moment and of course his I mean this is a hallmark of Lenin and of Marx and Mao and and others as well which is just this this confidence right this confidence that that I'm that this is actually the right move even though it might fly in the face of orthodoxy even though it'll certainly ruffle some feathers and make other people you know get really concerned about where this is going this is right I feel it I see it and we're going to pursue it and history has proven Lenin correct on that front yeah exactly so after so now we're we're getting out of the spring moving into the summer from spring into summer 1917 how did the Bolsheviks kind of orient tactically right in factory communities garrison Soviets to win majorities without propping up the provisional government because there's a way you can win majorities that simultaneously lends extreme credence to the provisional government as such so how could you win them without doing that and what organizational practices discipline agitation clarity of line proved essential here Lenin returns at the start of April by mid April his DCs have been adopted as the platform of the Bolshevik Party independently of that in the provisional government a crisis is brewing because the one thing that everyone knows is that the masses want Russian participation in world war one to end full stop however the Russian minister of foreign affairs a man named Pavel Miliukov sends a diplomatic note to Britain and France in which he promises that Russia will not in fact be withdrawing from the war and in fact we are going to double down and we are going to win this thing and we will join you guys as we cross the finish line the problem is that note gets leaked and people are furious the Bolsheviks are furious the masses are furious even the the Mensheviks and the SRs claim that this is a betrayal of you know the revolution that the the provisional government must suffer some sort of consequences for this and it causes a shake up in the provisional government up to this point all of the official posts in the government have been occupied by holdovers from that rump doom a session that i mentioned before but now we enter what's called the first coalition government where the provisional government invites socialists from the Soviets into positions in the government the Mensheviks take them up on this and the socialist revolutionaries take them up on this the Bolsheviks do not they recognize that working with the provisional government is only going to dilute their message and will eventually lead to falling into the trap of opportunism which is well an enclass collaborationism so i would say that's one of the first things that the Bolsheviks do at this time they recognize that they should not be working with the bourgeois government and in the end this is this position is vindicated because they remain the only mass party that is not tainted by participation of the government because we have coming up to fail jun offensive and repression after the july days and the corneal of a fair we're going to get to all that soon but um yeah uh by not entering the government the Bolsheviks kind of keep their name clean um in terms of starting to win majorities in the Soviets uh really it's just very consistent uh messaging you know they have the slogan peace land bread which speaks to the kind of the three groups of the masses peace for the soldiers land for the peasants bread for the workers um they they alternate between the slogan of all power to the Soviets after the july days they abandon that slogan and we can talk by that why later uh and then they bring it back um starting in september um but it is by consistently advocating for what the masses themselves are saying they want they want an end of the war and the workers need a little bit of breathing room they are starting to experiment with um their own kind of uh direct control over factories because the bourgeoisie and petrograd and other cities across the country um are so weak and everything is so disorganized at this point they're setting up factory committees to start to have influence over their own working conditions um and the Bolsheviks by consistently supporting the masses start to win more and more of the masses so the Mensheviks and the socialist revolutionaries join the government and then their message starts to get diluted the workers start to see that maybe these guys aren't actually serious about giving us the things that we want but the Bolsheviks are because look at what they're saying look at what they're fighting for and that's really what draws everyone into the Bolshevik party yeah fascinating fascinating history there and just just incredibly well played and the strategy there is is essential and we see in our own time to a very different degree but still one that resonates to some extent um the capitulation that occurs when you try to change the system from within or trying to work within the democratic party or work as a work as an uh even an aspect of the coalition even you know even though we're kind of hostile to the party but we're still going to work as it's left flank you know of the coalition and and what happens in that process and so um I think that was a really another brilliant move that and really like the odds of that the odds that the Bolsheviks have to overcome right the the consecutive right decisions that they have to make to be able to turn this thing in the direction that it ultimately played out it it's like a a domino where every single domino has to fall more or less right and um and they're doing it and it's it's because of the Vanguard party it's because in some aspects of the the brilliance of Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership more broadly beyond just Lenin um and their ties to the masses and their ability to creatively apply theory in real time um so let's go ahead and move forward and this is an aspect that of the revolution that doesn't get talked about a lot I think it's obviously kind of washed out with the February revolution in the October revolution but you know this is I think is a really important part of this process which is the July days right why do why do you characterize the July days as a premature uprising what actually happened right how did the Bolshevik leadership respond under massive repression Lenin going underground Trotsky and others getting arrested and what strategic lessons about timing and discipline should revolutionaries more broadly take from these heady and to mulch you as days so first off what were the July days so um a little bit of backstory here so I mentioned before that there was a June offensive so even though everyone was really ticked off at the mill the miliukov note about russia continuing the war and they formed this first coalition still by mid-June the russian government is insisting that they are going to put forward a an offensive against germany to kind of reinvigorate the russian war effort so turns out bringing socialists into the official government organs does not actually get the workers and the soldiers what they want um the thing is the russian army is on its last legs and for a whole host of reasons again we don't get into it I do go into quite a bit of detail on my own show so if you want that you can go listen to it there but the russian army is just falling apart and the June offensive completely stalls and is a major major embarrassment um now this happens at the end of June on july 2nd the first machine gunner regiment stationed in petrograd some of the members of this regiment are so ticked off about the June offensive and everything else that's going on that they start to agitate for immediately overthrowing the provisional government they're there in petrograd they have the weapons why don't we march down there and just arrest these bastards kick them out and take over for ourselves so this agitation kind of continues throughout july 2nd and 3rd at this exact moment Lenin is taking a much needed break outside of the city because he came back on april 3rd he has not had a day off since then he has been running around doing all the necessary revolutionary work in organizing and agitating and developing his own theories and all that kind of stuff and he just needs a breather he happens to take that breather right as this crisis starts to unfold so he immediately hops on a train and gets back into petrograd as soon as he possibly can he arrives uh you know mid-morning of july 3rd uh he immediately goes to uh the Bolshevik headquarters and there is this crowd of workers and soldiers who are basically awaiting marching orders and Lenin goes out in front of them and basically pleads to them do not do this this will not work you have to be patient this is not the time and this kind of baffles a lot of people you know the workers and the soldiers that are assembled there because wait a minute weren't you just saying in your april feces that the whole point is to take over power from the provisional government now these uh insurgents are correct that they could there's nothing stopping them from going down and arresting um the uh the provisional government but what Lenin realizes and what he argues with the other Bolsheviks and why he's pleading this particular line with the masses is petrograd even though it is the capital and it is the seat of the government is only one city the rest of the countryside and it is a big countryside we all know how big Russia is the rest of the country is not necessarily unified behind the idea of overthrowing the provisional government so what Lenin uh what Lenin is worried will happen is even if they successfully overthrow the provisional government if the rest of the masses around the country are not behind them that's going to leave an opening for say the army or some other uh you know someone from the provinces that's in the provisional government to come in and uh lead the army back into petrograd and then crush the revolution for good um he's kind of worried about uh the history of the Paris commune repeating i i'm sure some of your listeners are very familiar with the history of the Paris commune uh the relevant point here is um as wonderful as the commune was in many ways the commune only existed in one uh in one city that was Paris and so the rest of France did not come to Paris's aid when the French army marched back into Paris to to slaughter all of the communards and Lenin is like hey man it happened to them this will happen to us you cannot do this now uh because of this the July days are not nearly as big of a fiasco as they could have been i and many other Marxist Leninists and many other historians generally agree that Lenin was almost certainly completely correct in this there's almost no chance that the Bolsheviks would have actually been able to hold on to power or the Soviets I should say would have been able to hold on to power had the uh the July days resulted in overthrowning the provisional government only in petrograd so there is a little bit of street fighting it's not nearly as bad as it could have been um and by the skin of their teeth the Bolshevik party uh survives this premature kind of adventure in overthrowing the government but in the aftermath of this the government immediately starts to smear the Bolsheviks again their German agents but now they are they are traders because look what they're trying to do they're trying to incite riots and and overthrow of the government a crucial detail here is that the Bolsheviks themselves did not incite the masses to this insurgency um that came that was a spontaneous moment that came about within the masses because people are hungry and desperate and just very very angry about how things are happening so when you have a volatile situation like that no amount of party discipline is going to account for you know the the spontaneous expressions of anger and and frustration that are present in the masses at this time it's it's it's like a natural event like a natural disaster it's like the spontaneous uprising of the people it can't be controlled or even sometimes predicted and certainly can't be disciplined in the moment but there's a lot of energy there that needs to be harnessed afterwards exactly and if you want to take the analogy of the forest fire uh the Bolsheviks realized that hey we actually need to put this fire out so the Bolsheviks are doing what they can to try to restrain the masses but wouldn't you know it that's not the story that the government ends up telling the government blames everything on the Bolsheviks Lenin and his comrades in Novia have to go into hiding so they flee to Finland which at this point is a part of the Russian Empire um it's pretty close to Petrograd but it's far enough way that he's kind of off everyone's radar and a lot of other prominent Bolsheviks and uh just regular workers and soldiers including uh they have Trotsky at this time they are arrested um and and held in prison for their involvement in all of this or there are at least their supposed involvement in all of this so now that their leaders have been either run underground or placed into arrest the idea is hey the Bolsheviks aren't going to last very long right people are writing articles and they're talking openly about how ha ha the Bolsheviks are done because they tried to overthrow the government and they couldn't and now they're paying the price but rather unexpectedly throughout the rest of July in the first couple of weeks of weeks of August when this kind of reaction to the July days is at its height and you know uh the government is suppressing workers movements and strikes and and really trying to persecute the Bolsheviks and passing all of these rules and laws about uh you know against strikes and disarming the workers and all those stuff the Bolsheviks are able to survive i think for two reasons one because the government is not actually as powerful as it keeps telling everyone that it is independent of the July days just on the eve of the July days the first coalition falls apart for reasons we don't need to get into but it falls apart so when the July days happens there is not actually an official functioning government in Russia at this time and so this disorder makes it nearly impossible for the new soon to be officially named prime minister a man named Alexander Kerensky who I know I believe a lot of your listeners probably know who that is so Kerensky is not actually able to follow through with his persecution of the Bolsheviks because he lacks the institutional capacity to do so but also the workers do not abandon the Bolsheviks there is no mass exodus from the party you might think that oh well now they're all these smears and the Bolsheviks are being persecuted let's get out of dodge while we still can so we don't wind up getting you know taking down arrested persecuted ourselves but that doesn't happen the Bolsheviks have built up a lot of street cred with the workers across again Petrograd but all over in all the industrial centers the Bolsheviks have been gaining a lot of momentum through their strategy of consistent messaging and really having a very direct organic relationship with the workers a very direct and organic connection so there's no mass exodus from the party and the government is actually not able to persecute the Bolsheviks to the extent that they would like to the workers especially in Petrograd are still armed and the government whatever you know whatever interim government is functioning here at this time before a second coalition is named towards the end of July recognizes that hey they didn't overthrow us this last time but if we actually start to like physically try to take away their weapons if we actually start to go after the workers we could have another July days on our hands and that one probably is going to end as well for us because now when it's not even here to tell everyone to calm down like they're they're going to be very pissed and that fire is going to get out of control very quickly so it's this very interesting dynamic of the government being weaker than it made everyone think that it was and the Bolsheviks being much more resilience than everyone assumed and that resiliency comes from the connection with the masses beautifully stated and yes so and what we're going to go into next is kind of the the inversion of that so if the July days was unfairly and unjustly and cynically put on the Bolsheviks in an attempt to delegitimize them in a way that didn't work this next event kind of had the opposite effect right of sort of allowing the Bolsheviks to kind of gain prestige and thus even more influence than they already have even though they are so you know deeply tied to to the masses and that is of course as you alluded to earlier in the around late August that the Cornelaw affair I think that's how you pronounce that you you have better pronunciation than me with these Russian words but what was Cornelaw attempting and how did mass action defeat the coup why did this moment discredit both the military reaction and the provisional government and thus accelerate Bolshevik influence among workers and soldiers in it's pronounced in Russian code in the law but Cornelaw is fine totally fine so from Nebraska I'm out here in Nebraska so Cornelaw is you're totally fine I'm also from the midwest before I actually took a Russian I don't know how any of these names are pronounced so the Cornelaw affair is for my money one of it is second only to October as the most inspirational moment of the entire Russian revolution because of what happens and how the masses respond okay so what is the Cornelaw affair by my dot by mid august karensky who is now officially become the prime minister of the of Russia um recognizes that he actually needs help if he's going to get rid of the Bolsheviks and he approaches a general by the name of lava Karanelov or Cornelov Cornelov is the commander-in-chief of the Russian army at this time so he's in charge of the entire war effort um they strike a deal where they're actually going to use a tactic that the right and the forces of reaction and the bourgeoisie have been using for well over a hundred years at this point they're going to set up a bunch of false flag operations are across petrograd in order to have a justification for Cornelaw sending in troops from the front to quote put down the rebellion now the interesting thing is everyone knows that these are false flag events but it doesn't really matter the government is going to do what ever the government wants at this point right so they're on this path to send in troops to deal with the Bolsheviks and the workers movement because Karansky cannot do that on his own um through a very uh funny series of unfortunate events that I'm not going to get into but it is just a a choice example of how ridiculously inept Karansky as hell as a politician if you want the details check out the episode uh of my show I go into them all of them there but basically Karansky falls backwards into uh breaking with Cornelaw because he is all of a sudden very afraid that Cornelaw is going to arrest him Karansky and execute him uh we don't know if that was actually going to happen probably wasn't going to happen but either way at the eleventh hour Karansky breaks from Cornelaw the thing is Cornelaw is already starting to send troops in anticipation of the dates on the calendar which I believe was supposed to be the 27th of august for when the false flag events were going to take place and then they would send in the troops and do what they were going to do so Karansky now isn't a bind he thinks that Cornelaw is coming for him personally what does he do to protect himself um the only thing he can do is appeal to the masses now he spins some bull about how he's really the instant victim in all this he of course immediately does not mention that yes I was plotting with the military leaders of the the army to crush the workers movement he spins it in a way that makes himself look better all of this comes out later which we'll get to in a second the masses do very quickly realize that Karansky is lying to them but uh nonetheless this presents the the very real choice that they must make do we stop Cornelaw and how do we do that because whether or not Karansky is lying the truth of the matter is Cornelaw is sending in his forces and they are going to slaughter us just like what happened in the Paris commune so we need to form our own popular defense this is at this point centered mostly around Petrograd and some of the surrounding areas the small towns around there and everything um now at this point the Bolsheviks are again the most popular party amongst specifically the workers and they are the most militant party and so everyone turns to the Bolsheviks and says hey guys will you help us fight off this military coup and after a very brief moment of debating whether or not they should do that because some people are saying hey man let let these fuckers fry they they walked into this they get to hang but then the counterargument to that is well first them then us so what are we going to do about this we we can't that's not the correct line to take and very quickly the Bolshevik party realizes yep okay we got to do this we hate having to help karensky but we got to help ourselves and if that means saving karensky's bacon fine we'll do it so they start to organize um well actually i should say so the Bolshevik party puts out the word that they are going to fight off this basically invasion from Cornelaw the really fascinating thing and this is the part that's so inspirational to me is that there is almost no time to organize actual defense of the capital because the troops are already on the trains and the next 24 to 36 hours they will start arriving at the various train stations around the city and the troops are going to start pouring into the city and then it'll be too late so there isn't any time to debate strategy and tactics and you know have some sort of central authorities start to delegate tasks to everyone instead we have a bottom up uh totally organic um uh coordination of resistance to Cornelaw uh so you have uh red guards uh which are like armed soldier armed attachments of workers going out into the city and trying to find the uh the officers the army officers in the city who were going to stage the false flag operations and making sure that they don't stir a trouble uh you have uh the printing presses starting to send out messages to to get the word out to all the people in the city in the surrounding area that this is what's happening and we need to to defend against this um on their own accord workers start taking care of uh you know securing supplies and foodstuffs for the city in case they have to go through a very long siege you have soldiers start to train uh the workers on how to fire our artillery and how to handle weapons and all this stuff the masses of petrograd on their own independent from any sort of higher coordination start to come together to uh resist this invasion um really really super crucially the uh the railway workers union um they recognize that okay well if they're coming down the trains why don't we just tear up the tracks and then they can't come in so they go out of the city and they literally just tear up the tracks so that when the trains bringing the troops get to this point they can't go any further and then the troops have to disembark and then they have to march several miles on foot into the city so that slows the troop movement down amazing yeah it's like brilliant uh you know strategic thinking so when that starts to happen though when the soldiers start to disembark from the trains well now the soldiers are no longer the the coronal officers soldiers are no longer in this bubble because they've been told hey the revolution is under threat in the capital we need to put down these disorders so that we can quote defend the revolution it's a bald face lie but that's the lie that coronal oven his officers have been telling all of their troops and they're the army officers in charge of this coup attempt have not been allowing communication uh into and out of the regiments well once the people actually get out of the train you have the attachments of soldiers and workers from Petrograd who just walk up to them and like I said in the February revolution you know it's it's actual physical contact between the mat the the different uh groups of masses that leads to the fusion of the revolutionary potential of all of these groups into one movement as the workers and soldiers from Petrograd are coming out and physically talking to the soldiers they're explaining to them hey you've been lied to everything's cool this is not a problem there's no threat to the revolution we're doing great and you're being sensed in to actually destroy the revolution and when the rank and file soldiers under coronal officer command get this message they themselves start to spontaneously form uh committees and Soviets and start to declare that okay we're not going to listen to our officers anymore we're not going to do this we're 100% on the side of the workers and the soldiers of of the capital that we like them want to defend the revolution so those two aspects are why I think the coronal of affair and the way that the masses handled it are so inspirational you have on the one hand totally organic bottom up uh organization of the masses where everyone gets just a general message we are under attack and everyone immediately starts doing whatever it is that they can to prevent this and then on the other hand you have the direct communication between the people in the capital and the troops that are coming in and that's what defuses the entire crisis because at the end of the day coronal of and his officers they're just a handful of men with guns sitting in army headquarters in another city you know 50 miles away or 50 kilometers away whatever it is um they don't actually have any power and so the defeat of the corn the coronal of affair is this catalyst within the workers movement and even the revolutionary movement because now the masses have actually seen this is what happens when we join forces we can even stop an invading army if we trust our own power and my interpretation of these events is this is where you get on the fast track to October and there's still a couple of stops along the way but this this is like the rehearsal for October first they fight off this right wing uh military attempted coup and then they turn on the bourgeoisie that tried to set up to coup in the first place yeah i think this is uh this is a this is a chapter in the story that is under emphasize i think you're right it's incredibly inspirational it shows how the actual practical activity of revolution uplifts and educates in its own right you know this was uh this was a fundamental educational experience for all involved that that did set the foundations or elevated understanding and coordination to the levels that made October even more possible than it might have been without this and to think about all the shit that you know the the Russian workers and soldiers and and masses had to deal with before during and after this revolution we won't even get into the civil war that happened after the Bolshevik uh revolution the October revolution um and you know just the years and years of just conflict and drudgery and concerns about even if we're going to be able to eat tonight and you know attempted coup and civil war and world war one it's just absolutely amazing and jarring and inspiring um that despite all of that that this was still successful and in the process of making it successful um you know regular working people regular soldiers the masses themselves uplifted themselves out of zarism out of semi-futalism and into you know the greatest period of industrialization and advancement for the russian people in russian history so it is truly profound and yeah I do think these these middle days in the summer the July days and the Cornelaw affair they don't get as much emphasis in the story as as they might otherwise should you have to kind of really deeply dive into that history to to engage with that on a serious level and you did a great job explaining all of that well thank you and and yeah I think you're exactly right that um October makes sense if you actually study what happened between February and October because if you don't know you could very easily fall prey to the accusation that well there's the February revolution and then they kind of had a government and everything was going great and then the upstart Bolsheviks just got power hungry and and ruined everything and that is so far from the truth of what happened as we are seen and we'll discuss the last little bit here in a minute um the masses are taking control over their own destinies and that's why October happens yeah and the anti-Soviet smears their cartoonish once you actually understand the real history and so much anti-communism anti-socialism anti-intellectualism or broadly it's just rooted in profound ignorance if you can just buy into a simple lazy sloppy you know bullshit line that um you know some right wing influencer fed you about the Soviet revolution or what Jordan Peterson said happened or whatever you never look into it yourself you can be put on a conveyor belt to anti-communism anti-socialism in reaction and fascism but but you know I always I always say like the first thing that socialist revolutions tend to do when they take power is get the literacy rate to 99 percent right and that's the door doorway into education and understanding um and and even just listening to this just listening to this actual narrative and informing yourself on the actual events that happened uh we'll just act as a life like a lifelong vaccination against blazy sloppy anti-communism smears about this revolution in particular um yeah absolutely so after they defeat this right wing reactionary coup they are then and even aligned somewhat with you know karensky and and the quote unquote moderate center liberals whatever you want to call them now they kind of come to an impasse with uh with the moderates themselves in this era of the democratic conference the pre-parliament uh movement so how did how did moderates try to stall the revolution via the democratic conference and the pre-parliament and why did lending insist by you know september early october on preparing an insurrection and finally how did the petrograd soviet's military revolutionary committee legalize and organize the subsequent struggle for power in the wake of the uh cornello affair uh the masses are now starting to turn against karensky they maybe don't know the details but they know that he had something to do with instigating the crisis in the first place and after having successfully um you know beaten off the uh the attack from the the military and the coup the masses start to understand what their real power is as i was saying before now in order to kind of uh i guess prolong the inevitable and uh karensky builds this democratic conference as a way to bring the quote the democracy of russia together to so that they can have a better say in the goings-on of the provisional government um basically it's a way to try to placate the masses and prevent them from turning on him uh all you know 100 percent so he calls together this conference um the uh the bolsheviks do end up participating in the conference the conference is not really very effective though because kind of from a from a materialist standpoint you know what we were talking before about how uh the the revolutions happened because systems are uh incapable of resolving the contradictions which arise within them what we see here is that bourgeois democracy is actually not capable of solving the problems that are that are facing it um the bourgeoisie can't pull out of the war um for a whole host of reasons but the biggest one among them is um they need the war as a way to try to uh distract the masses from the the revolutionary tasks at hand they're also being pressured very heavily by uh britain france to stay in the war um and you know the the russian bourgeoisie's allegiance is more to the bourgeoisie of other countries than it is to the population of their native country as is the case with almost all bourgeoisie classes so the democratic conference doesn't really resolve anything but it does come up with what's called the pre-parliament uh the pre-parliament ultimately becomes a consultative body for cadensky in the pro the provisional government going on kind of behind all of this there's a party that we haven't had a chance to talk to a whole about a whole lot it's the cadet party the cadet party are basically they're the constitutional democrats that's where the name comes from coday and russian the cadets uh they are the liberal party the thing is the cadets went all in on uh coordinate love and so when that failed they became one of the most hated political parties in in all of russia however they are the biggest uh bourgeois party in russia at this time cadensky even though he styles himself as a socialist and i believe he is technically a member of the socialist revolutionary party is a petty bourgeois through and through and so he is incapable of breaking with the bourgeois party so once the democratic conference ends before the pre-parliament is supposed to meet cadensky unilaterally declares that he is sending a delegation of the cadets to the pre-parliament now he's not supposed to do this they voted not to have the cadets part of this because again everyone hates them and the cadets uh backed cornilov just a few weeks ago but cadensky does it anyway and this pisses everyone off but it doesn't piss off the bunch of x and the sr is enough for them to actually back out of the pre-parliament they grumble and and and gripe about it but they ultimately stay and they are like fine we'll work with the the cadets the bulshaviks do not once again we see the bulshaviks recognizing the importance of not taintine themselves with too close of an association with the the bourgeois government and the importance of establishing and maintaining an independent workers party as a way for the workers to exercise their own power so the bulshaviks pull out of the pre-parliament and it's right around this time that Lenin makes his way back into Petrograd because he recognizes in the wake of the cornilov affair that now's the time to actually overthrow the provisional government in july he was saying the timing's not right because the rest of the country was not favorable to the idea of the provisional government being abolished what has changed though is the working class saw what happened in Petrograd they understand the prevent that the provisional government is against them there's also the dynamic that we have not really had a whole lot of time to go into but is a very important dynamic which is the peasant movement out in the countryside the peasant started way back in march in april thinking okay fine if we're going to have a provisional government fine if you guys want to give us the land we'll give you a chance to do that as the summer wore on and the provisional government did not end up solving the issues facing the peasantry the peasantry became more and more aggressive and combative and militant and by the end of the summer by the end of august and going into september the countryside is in some cases well it is figuratively but in some cases literally inflames like the peasants are just going around confiscating grain confiscating livestock unilaterally declaring that they are going to take control of this plot of land or that plot of land or whatever some of them are burning down the houses of the more hated landlords and because of that Lenin recognizes that the dynamic has shifted it's only been a month and a half or two months or whatever it is at this point but now's the time now we can overthrow the provisional government he starts making this argument in september but because he's not on the scene he can basically be ignored without a whole lot of consequence he is sending in article after article and letters with comrades and he is just begging and pleading for the Bolshevik leadership still in petrograd to seize the moment and when they won't do that he decides you know what I got to do it I got to get back into petrograd there's still a warrant out for his arrest so he still has to stay hidden this is where he shaves his beard and don's a wig with a cap it's a very famous there's a very famous photo of Lenin out there clean shaven if you've seen the photo if you go google it it's a photo of Lenin from this period this is Lenin trying to go in cognito but yeah so Lenin makes it back into the capital and now that he is on the scene he is able to attend in secret parties meetings of the Bolshevik party now that he has a direct line to the rank and file because he's physically at the meetings here and in the meetings with the central committee which is the kind of the leadership organ of the Bolshevik party they can't ignore him anymore and he starts to win people over to his side now the the military revolutionary committee or as I call it the MRC the military revolutionary committee comes about because Kurenski not only instigated a coup from the military that blew up in his face not only is shoving the cadets down everyone's throats and making them all choke on them which everyone hates he also now gets it in his head that he has to transfer the soldiers that are in Petrograd that are actually members of the Petrograd Soviet he needs to transfer them out of the city to the front from his perspective this makes a lot of sense one these soldiers have been in nuisance for months now and fine I have to get rid of them he only didn't do it before because after the February revolution the provisional government had promised that they were not going to quote punish the soldiers that had mutinyed against the Tsar by sending them to the front and the soldiers took this promise very very seriously so this entire time he's not been able to transfer the troops out of the city without it being blatantly nakedly apparent to everyone that he's doing it in order to weaken the revolutionary movement in Petrograd but there is a second factor that allows him at least a modicum of cover that's happening connected with the war the Germans are now starting to approach Petrograd they took I forget which city it was but they took a city in the Baltic states I think it was Riga which is well I don't know which present day city it is so the Germans have taken the Baltic states and they are approaching Petrograd this is in fact a huge threat to the revolution Kerensky's solution is to say hey this is why I need to transfer these soldiers out of the city the problem is the soldiers don't want to go they haven't wanted this war for for months now and they take it upon themselves to simply refuse this order but the question is well how do we refuse this order and the solution is the Petro Soviet at the behest of the Bolsheviks who at this point are now the majority in the Petro Soviet just as they are the majority in a lot of Soviets all across Russia the Petro Soviet establishes the military revolutionary committee the MRC is basically tasked with finding a way of keeping the soldiers in Petrograd from being deployed outside of the city I think that's probably enough for now but I will just say the reason the MRC is important is because very quickly the soldiers and the Bolsheviks and the members of the Petrograd Soviet who are a part of the MRC realize that at this point there is only one way to achieve their goal of keeping the soldiers from being deployed and that is overthrowing the provisional government they need to overthrow the government in order to sign a peace with Germany in order to end the war that's the only option left to them they do not immediately orient themselves to overthrowing the government but after just a couple of days of of being in existence and Lenin recognizing that okay the MRC is actually going to be the launch pad for the final assault against the provisional government from the Soviets it within just a couple of days they are suddenly orienting themselves to this goal and that brings us to the doorstep of the October revolution in some ways the culmination of decades and decades of political events and upheavals in conflicts and contradictions world wars all of it abdications right all of it coming to a head here and when we can see now what led us to this moment we can see even just this history of 1917 the step by step procedure that got us here the strategic decisions that got us here the victories the you know the defensive orientations against outright you know attempts at coups and false flags etc and here we are in October 1917 a world historical moment can you walk us through October 24th through the 26th right the seizure of bridges stations telegraph telephone the winter palace and the convening of the second all Russian Congress of Soviets and why is it historically accurate to describe this as a transfer of power to the Soviets and not as many anti-communist and anti-soviets still declare some sort of a coup right given the Bolsheviks not only their their mass base of support but their clear majorities yeah so just like the February revolution actually unfolded over a series of days very often when we think about the the October revolution we think of it as just the one day October 25th is the day that we all circle on the calendar I will say again remember the calendar discrepancy it's October 25th on the Julian calendar on our modern calendar this is November 7th but anyway so people will circle October 25th as the date of the October revolution but what happens on October 25th is actually set in motion several days earlier so the MRC is founded and they start to orient themselves toward overthrowing the provisional government the first step in this is to challenge the provisional government's authority over the Petrograd garrison so I believe it's on the 22nd they hold a meeting they they make a decision and then they march to the Petrograd military district which is the headquarters of the the leadership of the Petrograd garrison from the government side and they basically tell them hey we don't recognize your authority anymore the soldiers have given us their the soldiers have entrusted authority over them in us so you are no longer in control of the Petrograd garrison we are the commander of the Petrograd garrison at first laughs in their face and says yeah right get out of here so they leave and they go back to their their offices and then they start to have a discussion with with among themselves of okay well if they're not going to respect our authority how do we make them respect our authority if they're not going to recognize that the soldiers will not follow them we have to make them understand that the soldiers are not going to follow them so they the the MRC puts out a circular basically publicly declaring that they are the authority over the Petrograd garrison and this is the first direct challenge to the authority of the uh provisional government because everyone knows one of the defining features of any government is control over the armed forces if you don't have control over the armed forces the question starts to come up are you even actually a government so because and then the the MRC uses the rejection from the Petrograd military district as a justification for now going around to all of the separate regiments and all the different uh you know actual physical barracks where the Petrograd garrison is located and unifying them around the MRC so once the Petrograd garrison closes ranks then they move to the Peter and Paul fortress this happens on the 23rd of October um there's a a day full of debates going back and forth about whether the petro the Peter and Paul fortress should declare for the MRC by the end of the day of the 23rd they have done that this is huge because if you look at a map of St. Petersburg called St. Petersburg today Petrograd back then uh you can see that the Peter and the Paul fortress is about 500 yards across the the river that flows through Petrograd directly across from the winter palace and the winter palace is where the provisional government sits so you've got this military fortress armed to the teeth with cannons and machine guns and soldiers that are now directly staring across the river at the provisional government and so the tensions start to ratchet up even more throughout the the the rest of the day of the 23rd and the 24th of October uh the MRC and Red Guard units start to actually take over the literal infrastructure of the city so the occupy all of the train stations uh the occupy the the telegraph the posts the telephone centers they occupy the electrical stations that provide power across the city um and it's it's this really uh kind of banal and yet crucial step in the subversion of the power of the provisional government and the transfer of the power to the Soviets because the infrastructure is key and even today even though our infrastructure and the 21st century is radically different from what it was a hundred years ago the infrastructure is still key whoever controls say the computer servers just like the Soviets took control over the telephone lines whoever controls the computer servers and the satellites think about how much they control if they have that control over the the infrastructure so the streets the infrastructure of the city are methodically being taken over by the Soviets and the uh military revolutionary committee the thing is Lenin who is in the city but still in hiding is starting to grow in patient the reason he's growing in patient is because a congress of uh Soviets has been scheduled to open on October 25th the congress of Soviets obviously it's for the Soviets all over the country but he recognizes that if they're going to overthrow the provisional government it has to be before this congress opens because even though the Bolsheviks are on net a majority in the Soviets across the country the Mensheviks and the SRs are still a very active large minority within the Soviets and if they are not presented with a fate accompli if they're not presented with the fact that the provisional government has been overthrown and instead they are presented with a decision should we now overthrow the provisional government the Mensheviks and the SRs are going to muck everything up they're not going to go for that they are going to protest they're going to muddy up the waters and that's going to cause the entire revolutionary moment to lose all of its momentum so he's like look we got to get this done before midday on the 25th so late in the evening on the 24th he leaves his hiding spot and he makes it across the city to the Smolny Institute which is where the Petro Soviet the Military Revolutionary Committee and the Bolshevik Party all have their headquarters once he arrives he again starts to push forward this idea that we have to get everything done before the opening of a congress and if you look at the documents and the records you start to see that like like Lenin arrives somewhere around midnight or one o'clock in the morning on the 25th at Smolny if you look at the orders that the MRC is sending out to detachments around the city the orders are very much you know hold your position a way further instructions by two o'clock in the two o'clock three o'clock in the morning the orders that are going out across the city are prepare for movement we're about to do the thing so we don't know exactly what Lenin said and did once he got to Smolny but it would seem that he really kind of lit the final spark that pushed everyone past the point of no return in this regard so now we're on October 25th and again this has been a culmination of the last couple of days it's been the Soviets through the Military Revolutionary Committee led by the Bolshevik Party have been methodically taking over control from the provisional government now the only thing left to do is to actually go into the Winter Palace and arrest whatever's left of the provisional government the ministers and whatnot news comes in that the Baltic fleet which is the the part of the Russian Navy based in what is now Helsinki back then was called Helsingfurs but it based in Finland and if you look at the map that's right across the Gulf heading right into to St. Petersburg they say hey we're going to send ships and we're going to send sailors and troops to the capital to help secure the revolution to help make sure that this succeeds and then you've got the crunch dot naval base which is on a very large island in the Gulf that has also been very right or die for the Bolsheviks they have been Bolshevized for almost this entire year now and they too say okay we are also sending ships and supplies and troops to join in the effort to overthrow the provisional government it is at this point that Kyrnsky realizes okay I think I'm about to lose here so he secretly high tails it out of Petrograd he tells everyone in the Winter Palace hey I'm going to go leave to find loyal troops to bring back into the city and to be fair he does try to do that a few days later even though it fails miserably but really I think he just knows that the jig is up I've lost I got to get out of here so with the help of the Americans who lent him a car he gets out of Petrograd no one knows that he's left though until later in the evening so as the sailors and troops from the other military installations outside of Petrograd start to arrive in the city they basically just surround the Winter Palace now there are a couple of forces that the provisional government is able to rally to its defense but they are very meager and as the day wears on you kind of have this like standoff where you have the forces of the the Soviet surrounding the Winter Palace and then in the encirclement you have the forces of the the the provisional government and as the day wears on and more and more forces start to arrive on the side of the Soviets the troops for the provisional government are like yikes we better get out of here because this is not going to end well for us so as the day wears on these troops start to leave and they are allowed to leave peacefully because there hasn't been any fighting yet and the Soviets are actually really hoping that if they wait long enough there won't have to be any fighting they're hoping that just the overwhelming display of force is enough to get the provisional government to surrender now unfortunately this doesn't happen the ministers are misguided and or stubborn take your pick but they refuse to to capitulate so by late in the evening around about 11 o'clock on the 25th that is when the storming of the Winter Palace takes place now remember I said the Congress of Soviets was scheduled to open that day it was gonna open mid afternoon it got pushed back as far as it could um you know with the excuse given that hey we have something else going on in the city right now we got a focus on this um but by about ten forty so just a little bit before the storming of the Winter Palace takes place the Congress of Soviets opens so Lenin just barely misses the deadline but it is at this point fortunately rather moot rather moot because the only thing left to do is to actually go in and arrest the the provisional government there's not really any way no one's coming to save the provisional government the entire city is against them uh so even though the Mensheviks and the SRs in the Congress start to immediately uh denounce and decry this violation of the democratic norms of of whatever uh the troops of the Soviets and the and the MRC are taking the Winter Palace by about three o'clock in the morning on the 26th the deed is done the ministers are arrested again there's a little bit of fighting the Winter Palace is really big they don't just send in all the troops all at once because they really are trying to avoid as much bloodshed as possible so it takes some a couple of hours to work through the building and find the ministers but they finally do the ministers get arrested and then it is announced in the Congress of Soviets that the provisional government has been overthrown this is met with both wild applause from the Bolsheviks and a group that I haven't mentioned uh up to now the left SRs the left SRs are a faction of poor and working peasants within the SR party and they've started to separate from the the SR party proper uh and align themselves more closely with the Bolsheviks so the Bolsheviks and left SRs in the Congress are ecstatic the Mensheviks and the right SRs are livid and they stage a walk out they say we we will have no part of this the Bolsheviks are saying hey now that the governments gone maybe we can all come together to form a coalition government it is the Mensheviks and the right SRs that reject coalition and I think this is an important point to make because it is often we are often told that well the Bolsheviks were authoritarian and they were totalitarian and it was a single party state and therefore there was no democracy as if the goal the whole time had been for the Bolsheviks and the Bolsheviks alone to take over power that's that wasn't their goal they even at this late hour after months of examples of how the Mensheviks and the SRs were not going to work with the workers with the Bolsheviks how they were actually on the side of the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie they're still throwing them a bone they're still extending an olive branch they still are offering to work together with them it is the Mensheviks and the right SRs that walk out this leaves the Bolsheviks and the left SRs and by I think like five or six o'clock in the morning of the 26th they've passed a couple of decrees they have basically declared themselves the new revolutionary government everyone is weeping and hugging each other everyone is ecstatic everyone is also extremely exhausted at this point so by like five thirty six o'clock in the morning they close the session and everyone goes to try to get a couple of hours of sleep before they get back to the work of actually advancing the revolution and then we at there we have the the first socialist state in history beginning its consolidation a world historical moment you know a profound moment in world history that I think well I think we'll only gain more recognition as such as human history goes on and if we are at all correct that humanity will mature into a socialist and ultimately a communist phase in so far as it survives I think you know in retrospect these moments in history where these these first experiments in socialist construction were were one and and built will we come more and more prescient and more and more recognized universally as crucially important steps forward for our entire species so yeah just a profound profound moment and I only wish you know that we could experience what it would be like to be you know in that in that moment with with the rest of the the workers the revolutionaries that have fought so long and hard to get here and to have that moment of of a kind of rapturous culmination and of course there's dark days ahead but this is a this is a brief respite from everything and for for a moment of total victory and what that must have felt like emotionally for those that had given their life over to this to this cause and had fought and and put themselves time and time again in the in direct you know existential threat to to see this vision of society pushed forward yeah just just a fascinating fascinating moment in human history all right let's just end on this question which is just from a Marxist Londonist perspective what do you take as the the core lessons of of 1917 for organizers and revolutionaries in the Imperial Corps today I mean that is really why I started my podcast because um I mean I just wrapped up the section on the the Russian Revolution I will be going all the way through 1991 because the history of the Soviet Union provides really crucial lessons that we have to learn today in the 21st century um in the fight against fascism which comes obviously a few decades later um and in the ways that they were able to improve living standards and engage in geopolitics from a socialist as opposed to a capitalist perspective and all those kinds of things specifically for the revolutionary period um I think the Russian Revolution basically proves Marxism, Leninism to be the correct revolutionary doctrine again I'm not trying to pick a fight with anyone else I know that the Soviet Union committed a lot of mistakes I'm not saying that the Soviets were Utopia I'm not saying the China today is a Utopia state we all know Utopia's cannot exist but in the struggle against capitalism we have a Vanguard Party so first we have the correct understanding of the inner workings of capitalism and the fact that it is in fact the working class that is the next revolutionary actor and world history that comes from Marx and then from Lenin you have the development of the theory of the Vanguard Party also something else we didn't have a chance to talk about but you have the theory of the revolutionary proletarian state I know a lot of leftists want to see the state completely torn down whether your anarchists or you're just kind of on somewhere on the anti capitalist left a lot of people say well we have to destroy the state first because the state can be used as a tool of repression and etc etc but it is through the building of the revolutionary proletariat state that the Soviets were able to achieve all of all that they did for the peoples of the Soviet Union and then you also just have as we've said many times throughout this episode brilliance dialectical materialist understanding and and analysis in real time over the course of months most of it is done by Lenin I will say he gets a lot of credit and he is a really big name but he's not the only Bolshevik who's doing this stuff Stalin is also contributing to the real time analysis you have Bolsheviks like Nadiajda Kupsky Lenin's wife you have Alexander Kalantay at all levels of the Bolshevik Party you have people contributing to the movement you have the workers responding to the Vanguard Party because the Vanguard Party is able to maintain that organic connection with the masses so and really I think the biggest lesson to take away from the Russian Revolution is the true promise of Marxism Leninism the accusation is made very often that Marxism Leninism is this like really rigid, deterministic, almost fatalistic interpretation of history that capitalism will eventually give way to socialism and that socialism will eventually bring about utopia et cetera et cetera. Real MLs understand that that's actually that could not be further from the truth what Marxism Leninism gives us is the promise that there will be opportunities for change along with the blueprint for how to seize those opportunities capitalize on them and actually affect the change that we want we were talking before about how you know you have the boom and bust cycle of the capitalist production and it used to be like every couple of decades now it feels like every three years there's some new crisis that is coming about because capitalism is not able to resolve the material contradictions that lie at its center and it's running out of ways to actually resolve that Marxism Leninism does not promise us that when that explosion happens we will suddenly wind up in socialism what it promises us is through understanding the internal dynamics of capitalism these crises will they are inevitable and they leave open the possibility that's that's the inflection point that's where you can actually go in and try to change things and then Lenin and the Bolsheviks showed us how to do it now I'm not saying that in 21st century America or anywhere else in the world's at this time the playbook needs to be run exactly as the Bolsheviks did in 1917 that is not a dialectical understanding of history because we all know we were talking this whole episode about how things need to be adapted and changed to the moment but they proved that it can be done and they proved that if you are able to organically bring the masses together you can achieve escape velocity from capitalism and that to me is really the reason why everyone needs to understand the history of the Russian Revolution it's you know it is arguable that the Soviet Union was the best example we've ever had in history of how to move past capitalism but the Russian Revolution was the first time that a nation full of people of different ethnicities and different walks of life and different languages but welded together in a proletariat and a peasant class or the two classes came together and achieved that escape velocity and it is somewhat of a tragedy in my mind that unfortunately after they left the capitalist were able to keep the rest of us in chains that's a different story for why exactly that happened but that is why I think the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union needs to be studied and why honestly I think they deserve our respect amen could not agree more my friend um I really appreciate you being so generous with not only your time but your knowledge again I just want to give you incredible compliments on how you know well you tell history um and how accessible you make the detail history of a revolution that happened over a hundred years ago and it went a totally different part of the world um so huge props to you for that I will link to your show the sickle and the hammer and the show notes as well as your patreon um and I really encourage listeners to go over check it out show some rev left love give you some support and learn more right because that's ultimately what you and I and many others like us are engaged in which is uplifting consciousness through political education from a principled Marxist perspective um and we share we share that same goal so again thank you so much for coming on it would love to have you back on anytime Daniel to do another episode on anything at all um and in the meantime keep up the amazing work yes thank you very much for uh for letting me come on and talk to your audience I would love to see you guys all over on my show just keep fighting the good fight thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]