The Russian Revolution

Podcast Transcript

One of the most transformative events of the 20th century was the Russian Revolution.

The Revolution was responsible for the downfall of the Russian monarchy and the rise of the Soviet Union, the world’s first communist country.

However, its impact wasn’t limited to Russia. It had reverberations that were felt all over the world by other revolutions that were inspired by it.

Learn about the Russian Revolution, why it happened, and how it came about on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

This is going to be a rather ambitious episode, as the Russian Revolution is an enormous topic. There are entire podcasts out there that have spent hundreds of hours covering the subject in depth.

So, as it is impossible to cover everything, my goal here is to provide a very high-level overview of the revolution, the causes of it, and the major events that took place.

We’ll start the story at the beginning of the 20th century.

Russia in the early 1900s was a vast empire stretching across eleven time zones, ruled by an autocratic tsar who claimed divine authority. This enormous country was caught in a painful contradiction: it remained largely feudal and agricultural while trying to compete with rapidly industrializing Western nations.

Compared to the rest of Europe at this point in time, Russia was rather backwards.

When Karl Marx wrote of a communist revolution springing up in a capitalist, industrial economy, he was most certainly not thinking of Russia, which barely had an industrial base. He was thinking of a country like Germany or England.

The fundamental causes of the revolution had been building for decades. Russia’s social structure resembled a pyramid with a tiny elite at the top and a massive base of impoverished peasants.

About 85% of the population were peasants who had only recently been freed from serfdom in 1861, yet they remained desperately poor and landless. Above them sat a small but growing middle class of merchants and professionals, while at the very top, the nobility and the imperial family lived in extraordinary luxury.

Tsar Nicholas II, who came to power in 1894, was perhaps the wrong man for such times. Unlike his more decisive predecessors, Nicholas was indecisive and often seemed overwhelmed by the magnitude of Russia’s problems. He genuinely believed in his divine right to rule, which made him resistant to the kind of fundamental reforms that might have prevented a revolution.

The first major crack in the tsarist system came with the Revolution of 1905, triggered by Russia’s humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese War.

The Russian Empire had been defeated by what many Europeans still considered a minor Asian power. This military disaster exposed the incompetence of the tsarist government and the military’s leadership.

It was in this environment that the first step towards revolution took place in 1905. On January 22, Father Georgy Gapon led a peaceful march of workers to petition the tsar for better conditions. Instead of receiving their petition, the marchers were fired upon by troops, killing hundreds. This event shattered the traditional image of the tsar as the “Little Father” who cared for his people.

This event ignited widespread strikes, mutinies, and peasant uprisings.

In response, Tsar Nicholas issued the October Manifesto, which promised civil liberties and the creation of a parliament, the Duma. However, this concession was limited: the Duma had little power, and repression quickly resumed.

Fast foward almost a decade to the start of the First World War in 1914.

Initially, the war generated patriotic enthusiasm as it did in countries throughout Europe, but this quickly turned to despair as the true scale of Russian military unpreparedness became apparent. The Russian military suffered catastrophic losses, with millions of soldiers killed, wounded, or captured in the first two years of fighting.

The war created a cascading series of crises. Military defeats led to massive casualties, which created shortages of experienced officers and trained soldiers, which led to more defeats.

The economy, already strained by rapid industrialization, collapsed under the demands of total war. Food shortages became common in cities, while inflation destroyed the savings of the middle class.

Perhaps most damaging to the monarchy’s reputation was the influence of Grigory Rasputin, a mysterious monk who seemed to hold sway over Tsarina Alexandra through his apparent ability to help her hemophiliac son Alexei. Rasputin’s presence at court became a symbol of the dynasty’s corruption and incompetence, leading to his eventual murder in December 1916.

By early 1917, the tsarist system had lost all legitimacy. When bread riots broke out in February in Petrograd, which was what St. Petersburg was called, the crucial moment came when the soldiers refused to fire on the crowds and instead joined them.

What became known as the February Revolution unfolded with surprising speed. Within days, the centuries-old Romanov dynasty had collapsed, and Nicholas II abdicated. The revolution succeeded so quickly because it had already won in people’s minds—the monarchy had simply lost all support.

Two competing centers of power emerged from the February Revolution. The Provisional Government, led initially by Prince Georgy Lvov and later by Alexander Kerensky, claimed legal authority as the successor to the tsarist government.

Simultaneously, the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies emerged as an alternative power center representing the masses. A soviet was the name for the legislative councils in the aftermath of the revolution.

This “dual power” situation created a fundamental instability. The Provisional Government controlled the official state apparatus but lacked real authority over the military or the streets. The Soviet had the loyalty of workers and soldiers but initially chose not to take formal power, believing that Russia wasn’t ready for socialist revolution.

In April, things took a dramatic turn in a way that wouldn’t become clear until years later.

Vladimir Lenin returned to Russia from exile.

Lenin was the leader of the Bolsheviks, a radical faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party. His journey back to Russia is itself remarkable—the German government, hoping to destabilize Russia, provided him with safe passage through Germany from Switzerland in a sealed train car.

In one of the greatest cases of unintended consequences in history, the German plan worked far better than they could have hoped.

Lenin issued what became known as the “April Theses,” which shocked even his own party members. While other socialist leaders supported the Provisional Government and Russia’s continued participation in the war, Lenin demanded immediate peace, redistribution of land to peasants, and the transfer of all power to the soviets.

His slogan, “Peace, Land, Bread,” spoke directly to the three issues that mattered most to ordinary Russians.

Here, I should note something about revolutions in general. Revolutions are always against things, and are almost never for things, at least not at first. The Russian Revolution was first and foremost a revolt against the Tsar and the established order in Russia. It wasn’t a revolution for communism per se.

However, as with most revolutions, once the objective is complete, what happens next depends on who is more organized and, sometimes, brutal.

Throughout 1917, the Bolsheviks gained support among workers, peasants, and soldiers disillusioned with the Provisional Government. They were methodically working on taking full power in Russia.

Despite its name, the October Revolution actually occurred in November 1917, according to the Western calendar; Russia was still using the old Julian calendar at the time. This revolution was fundamentally different from the February Revolution.

While February had been a spontaneous uprising that overthrew the tsar, October was a carefully planned coup that brought the Bolsheviks to power.

The key figure in organizing the October Revolution was Leon Trotsky, the brilliant orator and organizer who chaired the Petrograd Soviet. Trotsky understood that a successful revolution required not just popular support but also control of key strategic points, such as telegraph offices, railway stations, government buildings, and military arsenals, all of which the Bolsheviks had secured by the time of the coup.

The actual “storming” of the Winter Palace, where the Provisional Government was meeting, was far less dramatic than later Soviet propaganda portrayed. Most of the palace’s defenders had already melted away, and the building was captured with minimal fighting. The real achievement was the Bolsheviks’ systematic seizure of control throughout Petrograd and other major cities.

The Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 was just the beginning of their struggle. They faced immediate challenges that would shape the Soviet state for decades to come.

First came the separate peace with Germany through the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918. Lenin recognized that continuing the war would destroy his new government, even though the treaty’s terms were humiliating and cost Russia enormous territories.

Russia ceded vast territories, including Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states, which are today Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and parts of Poland, amounting to about a third of its population, a quarter of its industry, and over half its coal and iron resources.

This decision sparked fierce opposition and contributed to the outbreak of civil war.

The Russian Civil War involved the Bolsheviks, known as the “Reds,” and the anti-Bolshevik “Whites.”

The Reds controlled central Russia, including key cities like Moscow and Petrograd. They were organized, ideologically unified, and led by the Red Army, which was built and commanded by Leon Trotsky.

Trotsky built the Red Army out of nothing, which was actually quite the accomplishment given the circumstances. The Russian Army today can trace a direct path to the Red Army created during the Russian Civil War.

The Whites were a loose coalition of monarchists, republicans, liberals, and moderate socialists. Some wanted to restore the monarchy, others a democratic government.

They were supported by foreign powers—such as Britain, France, Japan, and the United States—who feared the spread of communism. However, the Whites suffered from poor coordination, conflicting ideologies, and lack of a unified command structure.

Several smaller nationalist movements also emerged, particularly in Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, further complicating the war.

The Bolsheviks implemented harsh measures during the war, including War Communism, forced grain requisitioning, and widespread political repression. The Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police, carried out the Red Terror, executing tens of thousands of real and perceived enemies.

Given what we know about the rest of the 20th century history, it is easy to paint the Reds as the bad guys, and they were pretty bad. The Whites, however, were also guilty of atrocities, including pogroms and mass executions.

There were some communities that rebelled against both sides of the conflict.

Ultimately, the unorganized Whites couldn’t compete with the Reds.

By 1922, the Red Army had decisively defeated its enemies. The Bolsheviks emerged victorious, but the country was devastated: millions had died from combat, famine, and disease, and much of the economy was in ruins.

That same year, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was officially established, marking the birth of the Soviet state.

There are probably a dozen future episodes from what I’ve covered in this episode. Russia during the First World War, Rasputin, the return of Lenin, the February and October Revolutions, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the civil war, the involvement of foreign forces during the war, including America, and many others.

While the end of the civil war was the end of what most people would consider the Russian Revolution, the Revolution later turned on many of its early leaders.

Alexander Kerensky, the leader of the provisional government, fled to the United States and lived in New York. He died at the age of 89 in 1970.

Vladimir Lenin died of a stroke in 1924. His body is still on display in Red Square in Moscow today.

He was eventually replaced as leader of the Soviet Union by Joseph Stalin, who won a power struggle against Leon Trotsky.

Trotsky fled the Soviet Union and was hunted down by Soviet Agents. He finally met his end in 1940 in Mexico City when he was killed by members of the Soviet Secret police. He was killed with a mountaineering ice axe.

The Russian Revolution’s impact extended far beyond Russia’s borders. It created the world’s first communist state and provided a model and inspiration for revolutionary movements worldwide.

The establishment of the Soviet Union fundamentally altered the global balance of power, setting the stage for the Cold War that would dominate international relations for the next seven decades.