☭ [State Anthem of the Soviet Union] ☭
Hey, guys! Welcome to Hip Hughes History. 😎
We're so glad that you made it because I've got a little pot on the stove here of the Russian Revolution. ✊🏼
And I'm gonna cook you up a meal of learnin'. 🍴
That's right, guys: big ideas, contexts, vocab, things that anybody can understand.
Certainly, this isn't gonna write your historical research paper for you. 📝
You're gonna have to do a little bit more of the learnin' and the readin'.
But we certainly think that we can get you the basics.
So why don't you sit back, put your feet up, and get a drink? 🍻
Because I think I hear the train of learning coming and she's stopping at the station of now.
🚂 [choo-chooing] 🚂
Alright so I would start off by saying there are probably five or six causes – probably three big ones.
The first one is definitely absolute monarchism. 👑
Russia for hundreds and hundreds of years, one thousand years or so, basically had an absolute monarchy system,
not unlike the divine kings of England, France or Italy.
The Russian monarchs were called czars.
And the czars wielded divine right, absolute power. 💪🏻
At times, Russia certainly had benevolent leaders such as Peter the Great.
But they also had Ivan the Terrible.
So depending on who you were dealt, which bloodline ran into the palace, 🏰
That's really what determined the type of government that you'd have.
And certainly Nicholas II, OH VOCAB! Use the vocab!
*whispering* Nicholas II
Nicholas II is the last Czar of Russia.
And Nicholas II is a little bit conservative, a little bit traditional.
He doesn't like the idea of not being a divine king.
And that's probably cause number one because in 1905 there is the first revolution.
So, in a sense, we can even go to the second cause of the major revolution, which is the first revolution.
In 1905, I believe it was a priest who brought a list of grievances to the Winter Palace.
There were tens of thousands of workers on strike, and he was representing those workers who were beginning to form what were called soviets.
Kind of representative bodies of the workers who felt that they were getting screwed. 🤬
They're working thirteen hours per day, they're getting paid almost nothing, they're cramped into little apartments.
They have no rights!
So this list of grievances, which included freedom of speech, workers' rights, an increase in pay,
women's work pay, an eight-hour workday, and representational government.
They thought that this Czar would be like "Okay, let's talk it out."
Instead, what happened was – I think the Czar wasn't home and the priest walks in with all the people and...
BANG!!! BANG! BANG!
🏃🏼🏃🏽🏃🏻💥🔫💂🏻
🅱️L🅾️🅾️DY!
Bloody Sunday.
This is called Bloody Sunday and, whether the Czar knew it or not, it's gonna have humungous ripple effects across Russia.
You're gonna have massive protests really forcing Nicholas II into a bind.
Even he can see the writing on the wall. 😬
If this guy doesn't throw a dog biscuit, the kingdom's gonna come a-crashin down.
So he issues what's called the October Manifesto 📜, and in the October Manifesto he makes a series of promises.
One of them is to give people the right of representation, in a sense setting up a Great Britain-esque system of a parliamentary democracy with a monarch.
It's called the Duma.
And people were supposed to be able to have representation in the Duma, and they would share power with the Czar and...
PSYCH! 🚮
That's why it's a cause of the 1917 Revolution.
I think that Nicholas II had an opportunity here to share power and maybe history'd be a different story if he had.
Maybe the Russia of today wouldn't even have a Soviet Union past. Who knows?
But because he reneged on that deal, because he abolished the Duma after he created it, because he wouldn't share power,
because he was just like "Nan nA na nANa! 😝" in the corner, he's really pushing Russia over the brink and into revolution.
Alright, let's go find another cause of the Russian Revolution because I'm talking too much.
Here we go.
I'm trying to list them in order, but it's difficult because all the causes are big causes.
Take World War One. That might even rank on top of the 1905 Russian Revolution.
WW1 is just cray cray.
It's a disaster. 🆘
And I think that Nicholas II believed that the war would benefit him.
That nationalism, and patriotism would have people rallying behind the leader.
He would be the great leader again.
But he gets his ass whooped!
Not only does he get his ass whooped, but he had been commander of the army, which made it even worse! 😳
Now the Ottoman Empire, which had allied with Germany, is a humongous southern blockade.
So the Russians can't get supplies, they begin to run out of food, prices soar through the roof.
You have huge inflation. You have massive urbanization and poverty.
So these economic reasons along with the deaths ☠️, some 10 million for the Russians.
10 million!
10 MILLION!
Even just two million dead would be just crazy!
This is all beginning to back up like a sewer and it's gonna be a cause of the Russian Revolution.
Another reason would be the philosophy of Marxism.
I see it over there so I'm gonna grab Marxism and throw it at you.
🤖 [Technologic by Daft Punk] 🤖
This is not a philosophy course.
You just have to understand the very, very basics of Marxism.
And there's two things I want to explain to you. The first is Marxism.
The other one is Marxism-Leninism.
Marxism is the philosophy by Karl Marx, who wrote books like Das Kapital, that is really a way of looking at the world.
And he sees the world through glasses 👓 where everything is kind of colored by property and money 💰 and ownership.
And he sees the future of the world going towards a split,
where you have one group of people who are the majority, the workers. They're called the proletariat. 👨🏻‍🏭
That's the vocab up on the wall.
The proletarian are the ones who work and work and work, but never get ahead because they don't own what they create.
They're working for wages.
And in Karl Marx's mind, everything is tainted by this.
Relationships, money, opportunity, everything!
On the other side you have the bourgeoisie. 🧐
Now isn't that just the most fun word to say ever?
bour-geöi-sie.
The bour-geöi-sie are the property owners.
The artisans, the merchants and the business owners.
The one's that, in Marx's mind, are making more money for working less.
That ownership alone is giving them the right to capital and this is splitting the world.
So he basically sees the end-all as communism where the proletarian will wake up in large numbers, they'll elect socialist governments, which will share the resources for the betterment of all.
And eventually communism isn't even a system of government.
Communism is a stateless system of utopia where everybody shares.
The slogan is:
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."
Kind of this concept that everybody will give and take what they want and need and it'll all work out.
I don't know. I'm not even gonna go there.
Now Marxism-Leninism is a little bit different.
What Lenin said, and this is Vladimir Lenin, who'll become basically the head of the Russian Revolution, the first "dictator" of the Soviet Union,
He takes Marxism one step further and he says, "If we wait for this to naturally develop, we'll all be dead, so what we need is a dictatorship of the proletarian..."
"... we need a political party to represent the interests of the workers before they even know what their interests are."
And through military leadership, you can create the socialism necessary to eventually bring about communism.
So he's basically Marx with a gun, right? 🔫
So that would be another major cause.
I would stick with those three.
I mean you could also talk about the major German propaganda arm in Russia because of the war.
You have the rapid industrialization which has occurred. You could put that as a reason.
And all the weird characters like Rasputin.
LOOK AT THAT GUY!
*yikes* 😬
Now you just went "ick". I know you went "ick".
What if I told you that not only is he a freakoid, a Russian religious mystic 🧙🏻‍♂️ that can heal people and a sex addict
with a story about things 🍆 I don't even want to mention because I'll get censored,
but that he is also advising the czar and his wife.
And he's advising them on military matters.
The czar was, I think, infatuated with him and his wife. *tongue click*
Because he claimed that he could heal their hemophilia, a blood disease that runs in families that hook up within the family, and has now gone off the wall and it's nuts.
Rasputin, I think, is another reason for the Russian Revolution.
The people already don't trust their government and now they're taking orders from that guy!
EEKS!
Alright, let's get on to the révolution!
Révolution!
Alright, so it's the end of 1916.
Even the nobles know that something bad is gonna happen.
They try to kind of blunt the force of the trauma by taking out Rasputin themselves.
And that's a really great story. You should google it right now in another window.
"Death of Rasputin"
I believe that... Let me get this right.
They invite him to a party, get the guy drunk on cyanide, give him all this poison to kill him.
Doesn't kill him, right?
Then they got nervous because they'd poisoned him, so they shot him in the back.
Then when they checked on the body, he had gotten up and tried to crawl away. 🧟‍♂️
So then they beat him to death, like billy clubbed him.
Then shot him in the chest.
Then, I guess he was still breathing, so they shoved him in a box and threw him in a river.
And they eventually find out that he had tried to crawl his way out and he had water in his lungs.
That might be a little bit of embellishment on the Internet, but it's a great story.
Alright so by 1917, we're at the end here guys of the February Revolution.
And remember: there's two revolutions.
There's the February Revolution, which is a moderate revolution.
And then the radical revolution, the communist revolution, in October.
So, basically, Petrograd, which was St. Petersburg (they changed the name) had a mini strike develop.
The Petrograd Workers went on strike, the Industrial Workers, there was like 50,000 of them.
And by March, the whole city is shut down.
And they start really revolting.
They're ripping down statues of the czar.
The czar goes a little nuts and tries to get the army to squash the rebellion.
The army's like, "Ain't gonna do it."
"Not gonna do it."
"No."
"We're with them."
And basically, the czar's regime falls apart.
The czar is put under house arrest after they stopped his train and took him off it.
And now the Duma, which was created in 1905 to share power with the czar, is now in complete power.
So let's take a look at February to October.
And find out why this provisional government, which was a very social-democratic oriented government that believed in civil liberties, didn't last.
Because I think if it had lasted, if they had done some things differently, the world would be a lot different today.
Alright so this is the period that some historians will call "the Dual Power Period", even though it's not really dual power.
Dual power means you have two institutions running the country.
The real one running the country is the provisional government.
And the provisional government was a bourgeoisie government.
Y'know people that owned property, had influence, the elites of society.
They're running the country.
And they're basically social democrats, like Europeans.
They want to vote, they want freedom, they want private property, they want capitalism, they want ownership of property, and these sorts of things.
And then you had the corresponding soviets.
These soviets that were formed in the 1905 Revolution that see themselves, not as representing all of the people,
but they literally see themselves as representing the interests of the workers.
And in the beginning of that period from what I've read,
they didn't see an opportunity for them to take over.
They didn't think Russia was ready for revolution.
They saw themselves as like a political lobbying group.
And they met where the government met, but they didn't vote.
They put influence on the bourgeoisie to make sure that the rights of the workers, the interests of the workers, were being legitimately looked after.
Kind of like unions in America, I would say.
But the provisional government makes a big mistake.
Now the leader of the provisional government, Alexander Kerensky,
he was actually a socialist. He kind of crossed over.
There's different socialists.
We can't do all of it, guys.
But the main ones were the Mensheviks, and then you have the Bolsheviks.
And the Bolsheviks are much more radical.
They don't wanna work with the provisional government.
They're kind of like this in the corner:
Y'know kind of pissed.
And that's Lenin,
and that's Trotsky is another name.
But Kerensky, he's not a Bolshevik.
He's kind of a social democrat, Menshevik kind of guy.
So he crosses over and runs the provisional government.
So the provisional government is really moderate.
It's like center-left in today's politics.
But they make a huge mistake.
And the mistake is that they don't get out of WW1.
So by not getting out of WW1, despite doing all the other things correctly like freedom of speech and representation and these sorts of Western democratic concepts,
the people are pissed.
They're pissed because there's still conscription,
they're still losing the war,
they have a humungously bad economy,
people are starving to death,
and there are humungous riots and strikes going on.
And at the end of the day, they can't keep the lid on the pot.
So let's move on.
So Vladamir Lenin.
Vladamir Lenon and Leon Trotsky (the two Bolsheviks, the radical communists, the one's that want to create this dictatorship of the proletarian) are really on the fringe.
At the beginning of the revolution in February of 1917, I believe that the Bolsheviks only had about 20,000 members
and even at the height of the revolution in October, they only have about 200,000.
So this is a real minority that's gonna take power.
It's truly the dictatorship of the proletarian.
A small group that represents the interests of the workers that's going to basically hijack the government in the pursuit of socialism and communism.
So Lenin, who was exiled to Switzerland, comes back in April of 1917 after his political party was no longer banned by the Social Democrats, the provisional government.
And the Germans fund him and secretly get him through the front via train to get him back.
The Germans initially loved the ideas of the Bolsheviks taking over.
They're for Lenin.
They're paying for his ride.
Because he represents the idea that maybe Russia will get out of the war.
So you have Lenin and Trotsky now, these little rebel rousers, in Petrograd.
And during the provisional government when everything is going to hell in a hand basket, a couple things happen.
One of them is a spontaneous revolution in July by the workers of Petrograd.
They took to the streets and were marching while yelling, "All power to the soviets!"
Really this was probably the chance for the Bolsheviks to take over, but they folded.
Lenin didn't support it right away.
He didn't want the revolution.
He was exiled to Finland.
They arrest Trotsky.
And really that first Bolshevik revolution in July was crushed.
And then in August something else happens.
In August, the military tries a coup.
The military tries to take over the provisional government to have a dictatorship of authoritarian totalitarianism by the military.
And what happened was Kerensky, the provisional government's leader,
(and I know I got a lot of name's going on here)
He falls back to getting the Bolsheviks to defend him.
The Bolsheviks were the soldiers many of them.
Many of them were navy officers and workers and they're called on to defend the city of Petrograd.
So Kerensky now owes the provisional government's life to the Bolsheviks.
So he releases Trotsky from jail, Lenin comes back from Finland and then by the end of September, near October the Bolsheviks see their chance.
So what's really interesting, and I don't think a lot of people understand this, is that the October Revolution is pretty much a bloodless revolution.
It's not a revolution like the American Revolution against the British.
It's not a French Revolution where all these people run around with their heads cut off.
It's really a coordinated, planned revolution.
And I think that's what it owes its success to.
The October Revolution is not the February Revolution.
The February Revolution was chaotic.
It was crazy. 🤪
It just kind of happened.
And out of that chaos, you had a chaotic provisional government.
But Trotsky and Lenin planned this bad boy.
With the control of the soviets, taking a majority in major cities, they basically voted through the soviets to dissolve the provisional government.
And that's what happens.
At the end of October of 1917, the Soviet Union is created and the provisional government is dissolved.
And we got ourselves the Soviet Union.
How do you like that?
With the dictator: Lenin.
The dictatorship of the proletarian (vocab!)
Alright guys we finally got there!
So what are the effects of the Communist Revolution of 1917?
Whoa!
That's the first effect. Twentieth century, baby.
The whole twentieth century is basically defined by this kind of us vs. them world 🤼‍♂️
of the Soviet Union being the engine of communism
trying to spread it around the world.
And the United States and the allied powers trying to stomp it out around the world.
So that's really gonna be the major effect.
We've split the world in a sense.
Now this really doesn't come into fruition until after WW2
because the Soviet Union immediately faced (this is another effect) its own civil war.
From 1918 to 1923, the Russians fought themselves.
The White Army, which was basically all the groups against the communists –
look when the communists start seizing land to "share the wealth" you're gonna piss off a lot of farmers
And those farmers and the bourgeoisie and the business owners and even radicals on the right (fascists and people who are for a different style of totalitarianism) unite.
And they unite with lots of momo! 🤑
💴 Japan is feeding them money;
💷 Great Britain is feeding them money;
💵 The United States was a humungous financial supporter of the White Army,
even giving them military advisors with some boots on the ground.
So the White Army fights the Red Army for five years. 🧖🏼‍♂️🥊
Millions of deaths
Just chaos, death, and destruction as the Soviet Union eventually comes under complete control of the communists.
And the first thing the communists do is instate one-party rule.
They ban other political parties.
They're gonna cleans the party of idealism, opposition, and pluralism.
Pluralism, democracy, voting. These sorts of things get in the way of the dictatorship of the proletarian, which is on this march for socialism and communism.
What else?
The czar is dead. ⚰️
The provisional government kept him alive, but during the civil war, the Red Army didn't want any sort of legacy hanging out,
so not only did they shoot the czar, but also his wife and all of his children.
That's just kind of a sad story right there. 🤧
Another effect is absolutely gonna be the Russians pulling out of WW1.
The Bolsheviks said they would do it and they live up to their word.
They pull out of WW1 and that's probably gonna be one of the reasons they're gonna be able to sustain power.
Because they pulled out of the war, they're seen as the ones who did what they said they were gonna do.
But the major effect on WW1 is to pull the US into WW1.
And sending troops across the Atlantic into Europe.
And I think that's really gonna nosedive into the US (even though we retreat to isolationism) becoming a world power.
So thanks Soviet Union! 🙏🏼
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☭ [State Anthem of the Soviet Union] ☭
