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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.35 Sinking Ships

When Tsar Nicholas issued his little collection of imperial edicts on February the 18th, 1905, he was no doubt hoping that this would be the moment the fever that had been raging since the summer of 1904 finally broke. He had heard his people, offered concessions, and directed his minister of the interior to come up with a workable plan to create space for popular participation in government. So having satisfied everyone, can the wave of protests and strikes and demonstrations and just general disorder stop now? Please? As your tsar I, uh, command it?

But the fever was not going to break, because what ailed Russia had not yet been properly diagnosed, nor were these concessions sufficient medicine. And, there were yet more pathogens to enter the body of tsarist autocracy, keeping it bedridden for the rest of the year.

While he was hoping these hopes, Nicholas was also praying to god for good news from the far east, an end to the humiliations and setbacks in the war against Japan. Nicholas was praying for something, anything that would balance the endless run of bad news. And for all this praying Nicholas… got you guessed it, further humiliations and setbacks. Specifically, just as the February Acts were being issued, the Russian army and Japanese army squared off at the battle of Mukden, which not only turned out to be a battle that served as something of a harbinger for what was to come in World War I just a few years later, but it was also straight up one of the largest land battles in military history up to that point. It featured about 340,000 Russians against 260,000 Japanese, their army now consolidated thanks to the fall of Port Arthur.

The battle of Mukden was not a single set piece affair, but raged for two weeks over extended lines with control of southern Manchuria at stake. Over the course of these grizzly weeks, the Russians took close to 90,000 casualties between killed, captured, and wounded. The Japanese rate was even worse, they suffered 75,000 casualties. So both sides suffered enormously, but in the end of the Russian army could not hold their line, and they fell back in chaotic and demoralized retreat.

But the Japanese by this point were exhausted themselves. Having endured way more casualties and expenses than they had anticipated before the initial attack on Port Arthur, they were now also facing overextended supply lines, and they were unable to pursue the Russians to finish the war right then and there. So, though, this was yet another defeat for Russia, it’s not like the empire of Japan was dancing around with a jaunty spring in its step. The war wasn’t over, and the Russian Baltic fleet now rechristened the Second Pacific Fleet was still chugging their way around the world, and on course for what the tsar hoped would be their divine destiny: to rescue Russia.

But while the defeat at Mukden did not yet end the war, it did lead to further piles of scorn being heaped on the tsar. In particular, the gruesome casualty rate lent further credence to accusations leveled at the regime that they were all incompetent and spending Russian blood and treasure with no plan or purpose. This latest arousal of outrage was then fed directly into a whirlwind of open political activity that had been stirred up by the tsar’s declaration that it was legal to petition the government, to make suggestions about how the state could be better run. So all over the empire, people got together to discuss what they should put into these petitions, especially liberals and reformists and constitutionalists from the professional classes, who would get together at the Free Economic Society, or houses of wealthier members, or at school halls, or in newspaper offices to discuss politics. Which technically, the tsar had not given them permission to do.

But what these open meetings did, in essence, was assert that along with the right to petition came an implied right to free assembly and freedom of speech. So, when the police authorities would come around to one of these meetings, they would just say, hey, we’re doing exactly what the tsar told us we could do, so buzz off. Now there were limits to this, obviously it’s not like the SRs could meet in a cafe and shout, hey, I’ve got an idea for reform. Let’s kill the tsar. But in general, political organizing and discussion was now tolerated, if for no other reason than the police simply didn’t have the resources to shut it all down even if they wanted to.

Now along with this asserted freedom of assembly and speech, came defacto freedom of the press, as journals and newspapers reported all these discussions, brazenly flouting the existing censorship laws that, again, the authorities were not actually strong enough to enforce. So, the traditional mechanisms of autocratic political repression were quite simply breaking down everywhere, and it really did seem like a new political era was dawning.

In the initial stages of this new era, most of these meetings, speeches, statements, and organizations were led by respectable liberal reformists, who were pitching respectable liberal reform. But just underneath the surface was the hand of the Union of Liberation, who were clearly becoming the most influential and potent of all of the underground revolutionary parties, largely because their whole mission was to forge a single monolithic anti-tsarist coalition. So they were happy to include all the other underground revolutionary parties, as well as above ground respectable liberals. So the Union of Liberation became a very necessary connective hub for all of the forces driving at revolution. And they weren’t just knitting together a coalition, they were also driving that revolution. Radical democratic members of the Union of Liberation were participating in all of these above ground liberal meetings and discussions, and they were always trying to get people to demand more, and push harder.

The most important of these was Pavel Milyukov, who had been on a speaking tour in the United States when the revolution broke out, and who arrived back in Russia in April, to hopefully be there for the founding of a new democratic constitutional monarchy for Russia. Milyukov spoke the language of democratic constitutional liberalism, which appealed to the constitutionalists, but he had also paid his dues as an enemy of the tsar. He had endured imprisonment and exile, just like the hardest core revolutionaries had, and they respected him for it. The SRs at one point actually asked him if he wanted to join their central committee, but he declined. They may have shared a single common goal — break the back of the autocracy and create a world of political freedom — but after that, they had very different visions about what the future of Russia ought to look like.

Many of these political gathering started out as improvised affairs, so the Union of Liberation worked to bring some order to it. They started organizing professional unions, which could act as political pressure groups. Now, this is something that had gotten going in the summer of 1904 when Mirsky had been brought in to the Ministry of the Interior, but after Bloody Sunday, professional organizing got going in a more systematic and open way. Soon, there was a union for lawyers, and one for doctors, and one for professors, also journalists, agronomists, teachers, veterinarians, pharmacists, and railroad employees. By May of 1905, there were 14 of these professional unions, including groups that were not directly linked to a profession at all but instead, a cause. For example, the Union for the Attainment of Full Rights for the Jewish People of Russia and the Union of Equal Rights for Women, the first organization dedicated fully to the defense of women’s rights as such, as opposed to the socialist or narodist programs that included gender equality amongst many other demands. The use of the word “union” here is a bit misleading — these were not labor unions, they were associations of professionals. And when they first started getting together, they drafted their own petitions to the tsar, which pounded mostly on liberal democratic political demands. But as members of the Union of Liberation were in the middle of all of this, there was also an effort to support the workers movement, and so, to include in their petitions demands for an eight hour day, better wages, pensions, and medical care to make sure that everybody stayed apart of the same anti-tsarist movement. We’re all in this together.

Speaking of those workers, as we saw last week, the initial wave of strikes kicked off by Bloody Sunday wound down by the end of January. But that was just the beginning of everything, not the end of anything. In St. Petersburg, the regime sought to establish a commission to investigate what happened on Bloody Sunday, and in a magnanimous gesture they wanted representatives of the workers to participate. These representatives were to be selected by nine electoral assemblies created specifically to perform this single task.

But socialists leaped at the opportunity to start influencing events, and they made sure to show up at these assemblies ready to do some influencing… and it worked. The St. Petersburg workers refuse to vote on representatives until the government guaranteed certain things, including the audacious demand that the findings of the commission be made public. When the government balked, the workers boycotted the election, and then the tsar decided to just shutter the whole commission and forget it. This made the workers angry, so just as the February Acts were being disseminated, tens of thousands of workers walked off the job yet again in protest. Now, these strikes were neither as long, nor as large as the great January strike, but it was proof that the situation was still incredibly volatile, and the workers were far from satisfied.

Elsewhere, the empire continued to be hit by sporadic strikes. So while January 1905 kicked off with something close to 500,000 workers walking off the job at some point, February saw 290,000 workers participating in some kind of strike action, often in areas that had not even been touched by the first wave. Now these strikes happened spontaneously and seemingly at random in terms of who and when and where and what industries were hit. In the first third of 1905, they were also often so spontaneous that it wasn’t until after the workers walked off the job that they attempted to formulate specific demands, most of which at this stage were still purely of the economic variety, right? Shorter hours, higher wages, safety standards, sanitation. But as the year progressed, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks and SRs and people from the Union of Liberation started making better and more stable connections to the working class leadership. And most importantly, they were feeding the workers, literature and news and pamphlets that joined these economic strikes to a wider political movement, and as 1905 progresses, we see a marked uptick in workers going on strike knowing in advance the demands they were striking for, and having democratic political things on that list.

The liberal intelligentsia, meanwhile, consistently expressed support for the workers, either out of genuine concern for their well-being, or simply enjoying the strategic value all this industrial disorder had for their own political reform project. Industrialists and manufacturers inside the reform movement for example, loved to tell their contacts in the Ministry of Finance that really what the workers wanted was political reform, and the economic concessions, which I think we can all agree would cripple the economy anyway, were of merely secondary concern.

The number of strikes slackened a bit in March and April, but even still close to 80,000 workers walked off the job in both of those months, even if it was only for a day or two. By mid April the regime was forced to conclude that an 1897 edict making striking a criminal act was simply unenforceable. They couldn’t arrest all the workers because soon enough there would be no labor force left. Not that the police could handle such an operation anyway. So I think we can add “right to strike” to a list of reforms that the regime was forced to accept in the face of political, economic, and social reality. They were even forced to admit that limited police actions targeting leaders was pretty counterproductive, because the standard punishment was to exile those working class leaders back to their home villages, which turned out to be a really great way to get the most radicalized voices to return home and start stirring up trouble amongst their friends, family, and neighbors back home, helping activate the thus far inert peasantry… and it is to the peasants who we now turn our attention.

The course of events in 1904 and 1905 had lead the regime to hope that the unrest would remain confined to the cities and the industrial areas, which were still very small pockets in the grand scheme of things. Nicholas and Alexandra were of course personally convinced that the real people of Russia, the good and noble peasants, continued to love them unconditionally. But just to be sure, the regime went out of its way not to spread the news of the tsar’s acts of February the 18th, which confirmed the right to petition. So unlike say the emancipation decree, which was read in every village church in the empire, the February decrees were really not. But the regime could not keep this information under wraps because the zemstvo liberals and others aligned with the political opposition out in the provinces sprang into action, and made it their business to spread the news far and wide. And while they may have been more temperamentally conservative, it’s not like the peasants didn’t have their own deep grievances they wanted the tsar to fix. We do not have enough land to support our families. The rent we pay for leased land is too high. The wages we receive for day labor is too low. Also, we would like access to timber and pasture land that is still being claimed as the exclusive preserve of the state and the nobility.

Adding to these longstanding complaints was a growing anti-war sentiment, and in the villages, this anti-war sentiment was not abstract, it was personal. The Russian army was primarily composed of peasant conscripts, so the lived reality of the Russo-Japanese war for the peasants was watching husbands, sons, brothers, and fathers taken off to go fight a war that was quickly revealed to be as pointless as it was incompetently led. And all the news of the death and destruction and the far east right up through the retreat at Mukden was then followed by more reservists being activated. And in the villages the attitude is what are you doing? Don’t send more of our boys off to die for nothing. End the war.

So compounding these factors, by the spring of 1905, many workers who had personally witnessed events of the previous winter were now coming back home with lurid tales of murder and revolution, and spreading around the ideas that had animated at all. This lead the peasants to start participating in these momentous events in two ways. First, village councils would get together and come up with their own petitions to send the tsar, featuring their own demands: more land, cheaper rent, higher wages — and, when they felt particular, purely bold, the biggest ask of all: take all that land is held by the state and the tsar and the nobility and transfer it to the people. But also influenced by local members of the rural intelligentsia, these petitions also routinely demanded a democratic national assembly, civil liberties and local self-government. These were the same kind of political demands that were now being tacked on to the worker petitions at the same time that they were being hammered in the press and by the zemstvos and by the various professional unions.

So on this front, political reform, all of Russia did seem to be speaking with one voice. But alongside this peaceful path of petition, plenty of peasants took a more aggressive approach, embracing the tactics that had been used during that sweep of rural unrest that had swept across southern Russia in 1902, which we talked about in Episode 10.30, and that was target large estates for looting and burning. These direct attacks on the local magnate was particularly heavy in the Volga region where the SRs had been making inroads, but it’s not like the SRs were some invisible hand guiding the peasants to revolution. Most of this, by the admission of the SR’s own agents out in the field, was spontaneous and self-directed. The common pattern was for peasants drawn from a cluster of villages around some particular estate to agree to congregate at that estate on a certain day. Then, numbering as many as 6 or 700, they would push their way in and loot the premises, making sure to locate the office where the debt and obligation records were kept and burn those in a giant pile. And then, as a grand finale, sometimes they would burn whole buildings to the ground. One of the earliest and most dramatic incidents was at an estate of Grand Duke Sergei’s in the Orloff province run by a notoriously cruel manager. Two weeks after the Grand Duke’s assassination, hundreds descended on this estate. They looted and redistributed whatever wasn’t nailed down, and then lit the place on fire. It took a contingent of regular army troops to break this all up.

But these direct attacks on the estates were not physically violent affairs. Managers and owners, even if they were hated, were told just to go stand off to one side and not get in the way. No one was being lined up against the wall and shot.

At least, not yet.

February, March, and April each saw a hundred or so such incidents across the empire. So this is not like the whole peasantry is now up in arms. But once the weather started warming up and the regime continued to flail, the number of these local insurrections increased out in the countryside.

These direct peasant actions led to a debate opening up inside the ranks of the SRs about the nature and utility of so-called economic terrorism. Some younger and more radical SRs argued that they needed to expand their target list beyond the narrow pool of political and police officials, because equally culpable in the people’s suffering and equally standing in the way of full agrarian socialism, were landlords and estate managers and bankers and industrialists. Just because you were technically a private citizen didn’t mean you weren’t a core cog in the apparatus of oppression. Plus, engaging directly against landlords and managers might actually bring on board peasants who are still struggling to accept that the tsar was not their benevolent and protective father. So on a practical level, it would be easier to radicalize the peasantry against local landlords than it was to radicalize them against the tsar.

This debate led to further arguments about how fast they should be moving now that the revolution appeared to be on. Most SR central committee members though, including their leading theorist, Victor Chernov, believed that decentralized agrarian socialism could only be accomplished after the political revolution was done, after the freedomless autocracy had been toppled. So even terrorist tactics had to reflect that single-minded political focus. Besides, killing hated members of the regime was one thing, but killing landlords and businessmen might, for example, spook liberal reformists into a reactionary posture too soon.

But those younger and more radical SRs were saying, no, we can do it now, we can do it all at once. We should attack and terrorize all the exploitive forces in society right now today, and start trying to seize and redistribute land. And this debate was the origin of the split inside the SRs, which lead to the more extremist SR Maximalists to break away and pursue their own faster, more violent and more direct route to agrarian socialism.

And while we’re here talking about these internal SR debates, I should mention that there were also internal debates inside the social democratic circles, especially along that Bolshevik-Menshevik divide. Lenin and his Bolsheviks argued that because the liberals and bourgeoisie in Russia were still pretty small and weak, that if the proletariat played a decisive role in toppling the tsarist regime, that they could win a powerful position inside the resulting democratic government. So much so that the period of quote unquote bourgeois rule that was implied by the two-stage revolution theory could be dramatically shortened.

And I’ll mention this in passing now, but we’re going to discuss it a lot more later, that Trotsky is already well on his way to articulating a theory of permanent revolution that will take this argument to its logical conclusion. To achieve this decisive place inside the post-autocratic government, the Bolsheviks also argued in favor of immediate armed insurrection, not just playing the peaceful game of petition and strikes and pressure and working for the liberals rather than alongside the liberals.

Martov and the Mensheviks, meanwhile, were far more in favor of holding off on the need for armed insurrection, and they planned to ride out the period of inevitable bourgeois liberal rule without trying to bring about the dictatorship of the proletariat too soon. As a result, we find Mensheviks in Russia far more willing to collaborate with the liberals and the Union of Liberation throughout 1905. But these arguments among the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party members were largely being held in an émigré vacuum, and as we discussed last week, they were happening at such a distance that the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks inside Russia were just improvising tactics and strategy at quite a remove from the alleged leaders of their respective parties.

So if we look back now over the course of the revolution so far, we find ourselves nearing the end of the fourth phase of the revolution. The first phase actually happened back in 1904, and was defined by the liberal opposition that culminated with the Zemstvo Congress of November, 1904. The second phase was defined by Father Gapon and his assembly, and culminated obviously with Bloody Sunday. The third phase was that wave of protest which culminated with the tsar’s February edicts, and now here the fourth phase is culminating in May 1905, when a number of currents converged simultaneously.

The first of these was the convergence of the workers movement and socialist agitation on May Day, 1905. May Day kicked off a whole new surge of worker strikes after the lull of March and April, and these were really important because it was the first time that the socialists managed to organize, and dare I say, lead the workers out of the factories. Up until now the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks and the SRs had always been hopping in to influence strikes after they had spontaneously broken out, but with May the first now declared International Workers Day, the socialist agitators planned events in advance and got the workers to go along with it. The strikes orchestrated in the first week of May then jolted the workers across the empire back to life and shot the number of strikers from the tens of thousands back into the hundreds of thousands. And then about a week after the May Day strike started, the Union of Liberation completed the next phase of their plan: joining together all the professional unions they had organized into a single force.

On May the eighth and ninth, 60 delegates representing fourteen unions voted to form a single union of unions. That’s what they call it, the Union of Unions. This new Union of Unions then elected Pavel Milyukov to be its chairman, which meant they were not here to be cautious and conciliatory. The Union of Unions was specifically organized to act as something like the public face of the Union of Liberation. Their objectives were overtly political and very radical, and they would push forever more audacious plans that were now being formed by the Union of Liberation, which included a call for truly universal democratic suffrage, and by truly universal, I mean, they were now arguing for women’s right to vote.

But if you know anything at all about the Revolution of 1905, you know the really big event of May 1905: the Battle of Tsushima.

While the regime grappled with domestic chaos, Tsar Nicholas had continued to pray for good news from the far east, prayers that had thus far gone unanswered. After the Battle of Mukden, all hopes and prayers now rested on the Baltic fleet, which had been redubbed the Second Pacific Squadron. Having departed in October 1904, this fleet of ships, plus an array of auxiliary boats, had been sailing around the world. And this Second Pacific Squadron included the largest and newest ships in the Russian navy: eleven battleships, plus cruisers and destroyers of various shapes and sizes, and they traveled around the tip of Africa to Madagascar, and then across the Indian Ocean.

Meanwhile, a third Pacific Squadron composed of lighter and older ships were also dispatched, taking the more direct route through the Suez Canal. Now, since our principle interest here is the effect of all of this on the Revolution of 1905, I am not going to do a play-by-play of this ignominious voyage of the damned, but if you are interested, there is such an entertaining play-by-play a bunch of you have sent it to me, they are very detailed and highly entertaining YouTube videos by navy history creator Drachinifel, which covers both the voyage of the damned and the resulting Battle of Tsushima.

The short version though, is that after seven months and 18,000 miles, the Russian fleet was finally approaching Japan in May 1905. Since their original mission to relieve Port Arthur had been mooted by the fall of Port Arthur, all the Russian Navy was trying to do at this point was push on to Vladivostok to regroup.

On May the 15th, they tried to sail through the straits of Tsushima, straits that were blocked by the whole Japanese navy, a Japanese navy that had spent the last few months relentlessly practicing for this very confrontation. They knew the Russian navy was coming, and they were going to stop them.

The essential Japanese strategy was to concentrate all their fire on one Russian battleship at a time, so, when the two fleets came into contact, that’s what they did. The Battle of Tsushima lasted all through the afternoon to the 15th, through the night, and then recommenced on the morning of the 16th. And while the whole thing is a very confusing mess, made more confusing by fog and mistakes and miscommunications, the final result was unambiguous disaster for the Russians. By the time the last small contingent of Russian ships surrendered on the morning of the 16th, almost the entire squadron had been sunk or scuttled, including all eleven battleships. So on May the 15th, this Russian fleet had carried with it the hopes and dreams and prayers of the whole Empire, and on the morning of the 16th, that Russian fleet simply did not exist.

Now, a few ships managed to break away from this debacle and they were either taken into custody by the Chinese, or a few arrived down in Manila and were taken into custody by the Americans. Only three Russian ships managed to complete the voyage to Vladivostok.

The Battle of Tsushima was a short, decisive, and devastating end to the Russo-Japanese war. It was the Russian Empire’s final humiliation in what had been a humiliating string of humiliations.

The Battle of Tsushima was an almost incomprehensible piece of news back in St. Petersburg. The tsar had gone into this war essentially by accident, and was so brimming with confidence at the outset that the whole of the empire was convinced that it would be quick and easy. Failures in the far east had then come so rapidly and seemed so incongruous with everybody’s expectations that it had shaken the core legitimacy of the tsarist regime. And despite all his praying, Nicholas now faced the unthinkable. There was no more hope. Russia was defeated. They lost the war. Through back channels, the tsar accepted an offer from US President Theodore Roosevelt to broker a treaty.

Now, obviously there’s never a good time to lose a war, but having news of the disaster at Tsushima arrive just as the revolutionary fever is rising in the spring of 1905… that meant that all the tsar’s problems were compounded to the point where he would be hard pressed to ever escape them.

Next week, in the wake of defeat abroad, Nicholas’s beloved absolute autocracy would find itself facing defeat at home.

 

 

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Hello, welcome to Revolutions.

The Final Episode: Adieu Mes Amis

I published the first episode of the Revolutions Podcast on September 15th, 2013. By the time that first episode aired, I had known about the show for about two years. I conceived of the idea while taking a class at the University of Texas, a story I told back in Appendix 1. When I did my year of grad school at Texas State, I took a course on the Mexican Revolution my first semester because I already knew what I was going to do after I graduated. My plan was to get a master’s degree in public history and then go off and do this podcast about great revolutions.

Instead, less than a year later, Mrs. Revolutions was offered a great job in Madison. She took it. I dropped out of grad school and we moved north in the spring of 2013. This advanced the timeline of when I thought Revolutions would happen, but Revolutions was definitely happening. And when we moved, it was time for it to happen.

Now, when we moved, we decided it would be okay for me to not go look for another day job. I had always had day jobs while working on the History of Rome. Advertising had entered the picture way back in 2009, but I always clung to the security of keeping a real job. But when we moved from Austin to Madison, we decided that I should not go out applying for jobs, that instead, I should take a crack at podcasting full time. We looked at the revenue I would need to be able to generate to make up for those missing wages and agreed that I could have one year to try to replace that income, just to see if it could be done. If, after a year, I was not successful and I wasn’t making up the wages, then I could just go find another job — but if it worked, then I could do this thing where I get to podcast full time.

Now this was not a small thing or an easy decision to make. Our son was just turning one at this point. This is not the most sensational time to decide, oh, I’m going to abandon financial security and go chase a dream. But the dream at least seemed plausible — after all, the history of Rome had been quite successful. So there I was in the summer of 2013 with this utterly helpless baby bouncing in my lap and I was just saying, well, okay, here I go. Let’s go work without a net. This is a great time to be doing this. I spent the spring and summer of 2013 as a stay-at-home dad, reading voraciously about the English Revolution during nap time, and in between trips to the park and the children’s museum.

Now this was a stressful period, obviously, and full of uncertainty, but I believed I had a good idea with Revolutions. Somewhere buried in the bins of my notebooks are the pages where I mapped out the original plan for all this. I knew that the threat of a sophomore slump loomed large after a successful debut. So the plan was to make this second podcast that followed up the History of Rome shorter and more limited in scope, to limit the risk of taking too large a bite and just choking. So yes, it was all mapped out to twelve to fifteen episodes on the English Revolution, then the American and French and Haitian Revolutions, probably Simone Bolivar in Spanish America, definitely Mexico and Russia, probably Ireland, Cuba definitely, then Algeria and Iran. On the back of my envelope, it projected to be about three and a half years of work. By the time it was done, I would have escaped being typecast as merely an ancient history guy, proven that I could do other periods competently, and after that I could do whatever I wanted.

But for sure it was essential that I not follow up the History of Rome with something so epically gargantuan as the History of Rome. I did not want to spend five years working on the next podcast.

So sitting here, recording this final episode of Revolutions more than nine years later, the following comparisons can be fruitfully made. The History of Rome wound up being 189 total episodes. Revolutions is winding up at 342. I have written and produced 342 episodes of Revolutions, including the episode you are listening to right now. That is 322 normal episodes, plus 20 supplementals. The History of Rome clocked in at roughly 74 total hours of material, that’s just over three days. That is so much! Revolutions we have now calculated stand at 190 hours, which is nearly eight full days. You could press play, come back a week later, and it would still be running. That’s kind of crazy.

Now as for the word count, the final transcript of the History of Rome is about 685,000 words. The combined transcripts for Revolutions, which I should mention are offensively mismanaged even by my own dismal standards, total up to 1.5 million words. I have written 1.5 million words while doing the Revolutions Podcast.

So do I regret having the initial plan breakdown so comprehensively? I absolutely do not. It’s one of the greatest things that’s ever happened to me. Some of those 1.5 million words and 190 hours of content in 342 episodes are some of the best and most rewarding work I have ever done in my life.

Now the initial plan in fact broke down almost immediately. After publishing Episode 1.1 in September of 2013, I started getting frustrated at how many things I was compressing and skipping over to squeeze my account of the English Revolution into a mere 15 episodes — and looking back, I now know the first season could have easily been 50 episodes. That’s how rich and dense and complicated it all is.

But I moved on to the American Revolution in early 2014, and as I did, I was doing my initial research for the French Revolution, and concluded that there was no point in trying to stick to the 15 episode format. If trying to fit the English Revolution into 15 episodes was frustrating, trying to fit the French Revolution into 15 episodes would be impossible. And so I asked myself the honest question, well, what kind of life are you trying to live here? If the complexity of these historical details are what’s exciting you so much, why deny yourself these most delicious fruits — I mean, after all it is your show. Do you want to live a life where you needlessly torture yourself over rules that you yourself created?

And I responded, nay, sir, I shall not live in this way. And so I did not.

So in my opinion, the Revolutions podcast really begins with Episode 3.1. When people ask me where they should start Revolutions, I tell them start at Season 3. That’s when it gets good. That’s when I get good. I say aside from a few stray references, mostly you don’t need to know anything from the first few seasons to understand what’s happening in the French Revolution. The world building begins there. The voice and groove and style of the Revolution’s podcast are established in Season 3, and so I uncorked 55 episodes on the French Revolution and never looked back.

But now that it is time to look back, it’s clear that if the Revolutions Podcast really starts with Episode 3.1, that it’s ultimately about the long 19th century and the great revolutions that defined its trajectory. The Revolutions Podcast is set between the twin pillars of 1789 and 1917, and if that’s what it ultimately became, I am more than okay with that. I think it’s cool as hell, honestly. I love it.

Now by the time the French Revolution series is rolling, the one year deadline to make the podcast work came and went. It worked. So I got to keep podcasting full time. I did not have to go get a real job.

Then, in March of 2015, right around the 250th episode, I got an email from a literary agent named Rachel Vogel.

Ever thought about writing a book, she asks.

Oh boy, have I ever, I reply.

So she said, well, what do you got?

And I sent her a bunch of ideas. A most of them were about the French Revolution because that’s what I was in the middle of. But attached to one of the emails was an idea I had to go back to Rome and cover this one particular period of late Republican history, and she said, well, that’s the one, let’s do it. So we spent the spring and summer putting together a book proposal for what would become The Storm Before the Storm.

So that brings us to the greatest day of my life, which I believe will remain the greatest day of my life for as long as I live. I mean, honestly, it’s impossible to beat. On September the 28th, 2015, two things happened. First, my daughter was born. I’ve got two kids, and that’s all the kids I’m ever going to have, so already here, we’re talking about a day of miraculous joy that is only even matched by one other day. But then, about six hours after she was born, I got a call from Rachel, saying Public Affairs would like to buy your book.

Now, this is pure insanity. I’ve wanted to write a book since I was a kid, so this call represents maximum life long wish fulfillment, and it is taking place just hours after the birth of one of my two children. So the idea that this day can be topped just beggars belief. When else am I going to arrive at a day that tops the combo of a., the birth of one of my two children and b., the sale of my first book, plus a third thing of equal measure to make it the greatest day of my life? This is not going to happen. It’s like somebody topping Johnny Vander Meer’s record of two consecutive no hitters by throwing a third consecutive no hitter. This is not going to happen. It’s an odd thing to know that you’ve already lived the greatest day of your life, but man, what a day that was.

Now after she was born, I took eight weeks paternity leave and then dropped the first episode of the Haitian Revolution in December of 2015. Now, I’ve said this many times in many places, but Haiti was a story that transformed me. It transformed my worldview. When it comes especially to my understanding of European and Atlantic history, my life has strong before the Haitian Revolution and after the Haitian Revolution vibes. Very early I was reading about the Big Whites of Saint-Domingue, these largest estate owners and major merchants of the colony and I was like, oh, I see. John Hancock and George Washington are Big Whites, aren’t they? Oh, yes they are.

But writing about events in Haiti, which were so intimately connected to events in both Europe and the Americas, is when I truly recognized the vast interconnectivity of all these revolutionary events. These revolutions I was writing about were not discrete national events, but instead one big event with several different theaters. Writing about Haiti is when I finally saw the one big revolution sloshing back and forth across the Atlantic in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. I am all on board with the Great Atlantic Revolution.

The Haitian Revolution is also the work I’m most proud of. White Europeans wrote the Haitian Revolution out of our history practically the moment after it happened. People just didn’t talk about it, they didn’t teach it. By the 20th century it wasn’t even an active act of omission, but simply one generation of scholars passing down this massive blind spot they had been told wasn’t really important or worth talking about down to the next generation of scholars.

But by the mid to late 20th century, this blind spot was being revealed, and historians of Haiti and the Caribbean have been pushing the Haitian Revolution back to where it belongs in our shared historical consciousness, as practically the only revolution worthy of the name. This process is still very much unfolding, but I can report that way more people talk about the Haitian Revolution now than when I was making these episodes back in 2015 and 2016. Now, I am not here to take credit for that, other people are far more responsible for this than I am, but to whatever small degree I have contributed to raising a bit of awareness about the Haitian Revolution, well, I count that amongst my proudest achievements.

Now by the time the last episode of the Haitian Revolution aired, we have entered the year of our lord 2016, with all that comes with it. In addition to writing the podcast, I was hard at work on this book about the disintegration of a centuries-old republic and was not thrilled by current events. There was this running joke on Twitter, where the latest piece of insane political news would break and people would write to me and say, Mike, you got to write that book faster man, and I would say, I’m writing the book as fast as I can.

I meant for The Storm Before the Storm to be vaguely prescient, that’s the vibe I was going for. I was not happy at all that the book stood in danger of being overtaken by events. But in December of 2016, I turned in the manuscript and held my breath, hoping it wouldn’t be totally obsolete by the time it finally hit the shelves.

Now throughout 2016, I was also doing Spanish American Independence, which finally ended with Simone Bolivar dying in February of 2017. The end of that season marks the end of what I’ve come to think of as Part One of the Revolution’s podcast. Part One covers the first five series, with the English Revolution serving as a little prequel, thematically foreshadowing what’s to come. With the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution and Spanish American Independence, these are all constituent parts of what’s been dubbed the Age of Revolution, or the Great Democratic Revolution or the Atlantic Revolution, this 50 year period of political upheaval after the end of the Seven Years War, driven by new ideas and new technologies and new classes of people, that redefine the nature of political power, legitimacy, and sovereignty.

This Great Democratic Revolution is tied directly to the political question that we’ve been talking about for all this time, where a combination of ancient and modern political virtues churned up in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were given real political force. Liberal institutions like constitutions, and bills of rights, and participatory political assemblies. We have great ideals like liberty and equality. This is when republicans challenge kings, popular sovereignty challenges divine right, subjects become citizens, colonies become independent states. This period is also linked to liberalism and the rise of capitalism, the transformation of social systems and economic systems to produce bourgeois democracies, the rule of parliamentary systems controlled by the capital-owning class. All of it produced the institutions and values necessary to build the modern world, to build a world better and freer than the world that came before us.

But if that’s all that was ever needed, then there wouldn’t have been anything left to say. But there was a lot left to say, because we know it’s not that easy or clear cut. And while this revolutionary period from the 1760s to the 1820s produced good answers to the political question, it also paved the way for a society left with an even bigger question, the social question. And so Part One gives way to Part Two, when revolutionary energy passes from liberals to socialists.

The two groups were ultimately born of the same parents, liberty and equality. It’s just that liberals came to believe that with the political question answered, liberty and equality had been achieved. But socialists looked around and say, how can liberty and equality exist in a world of such tortuously destructive inequality? It’s a good question to ask. So Part two mostly gets going with the Revolutions of 1848, which are simultaneously liberal political revolutions against archaic medieval empires, but also the first time we see organized socialists and anarchists challenging the nature of capitalism and the social order. The 19th century was born of a massive cataclysmic, all-encompassing war, which gave way to a life of iron and steel and coal. The rest of the long 19th century is battles over land and mines and factories and railroads and docks. It’s no longer just about taxes and parliaments, it’s about the meaning of human dignity in societies rapidly transformed by the industrial revolution.

People have often asked me how Revolutions has changed my own beliefs, and one thing I’ll definitely say is that everything I’ve covered since 1848 has helped me emerge from a narrow-minded and parochial liberalism that was focused exclusively on the political question. I figured as long as there was a strong constitutional order, a bill of rights, the rule of law, independent courts, and citizen participation in the crafting of legislation, that that was freedom, we now have a free society. And after that, you just kind of let things run their course. Now don’t get me wrong, I always thought there needed to be rules and regulations and, like, environmental protections. But beyond that, success or failure, rising or falling, this came down to the hard work and talents and efforts of each of us as individuals.

But as I said, I now see this as narrow-minded parochial liberalism. And when I look at history and I look at current events, I just don’t feel like that’s enough anymore. I care deeply about these revolutionary concepts of liberty and equality — that hasn’t changed at all, that’s been the same throughout — but I now recognize that political rights are only the skeleton, necessary but not sufficient for a healthy body politic. We need some meat on those bones. And I think that by 1848 I was coming to not just understand that, but believe it.

Series 6 on the Revolution of 1830 sits on the dividing line between Part 1 and Part 2 of the podcast. It’s very clearly a liberal political revolution, but it also serves as a prelude to the Revolutions of 1848 and everything that comes after. But mostly what the Revolution of 1830 means to me is that it’s when the Lafayette book snapped into place. Lafayette had been all over the American Revolution and the French Revolution, and had become a living symbol of the Great Democratic Revolution. But when I got into 1830 I was shocked how big of a part Lafayette played, and then as I was doing those bonus episodes on the Carbonari of the early 1820s and then the June Rebellion of 1832, I found his name popping up over and over again. So I felt like I needed to do something to mark his death in 1834. I started working up a standalone retrospective of Lafayette’s life and career right at the same time I needed to think about what I’d like to do for a second book, just in case The Storm Before the Storm did well. The outline for that episode eventually turned into the book proposal for Hero of Two Worlds.

In October 2017, The Storm Before the Storm came out, and y’all went ahead and put it on the bestseller list for me, for which I am eternally grateful. But the thing I remember most about this period is going out on the road for the bookstore tour, and, like, finally meeting my fans for the first time. I’d been podcasting for more than a decade at that point, but never really met my listeners. I just worked and published things online. I didn’t meet people that actually listened to the show. Other than the tours, I never encountered fans of the show in real life. And I very specifically remember going into the Harvard Bookstore on pub day, not knowing if anybody was going to show up, and then being absolutely blown away by how many people were there. Now, this might sound like a humble brag — and, fair cop to that — but for the record I do want to make it clear that I am just insecure enough that I didn’t really know if I was going to be walking into an empty room. I really didn’t know.

And what I learned on that tour, and which has been confirmed to me on all subsequent tours, is that you people out there are the nicest, friendliest, smartest, funniest, and most considerate fanbase in the world. Truly, you are. And that’s not just me saying that. Wherever I go, I talk to the managers or workers after the event, and no matter where I go, they always report just how lovely everybody was, which I happen to agree with. You guys make me look so good.

Now after the success of Storm Before the Storm, we took the Lafayette pitch to the publisher. I spent a bunch of time working on this pitch that was very detailed as I earnestly made the case that Lafayette deserved a biography covering his whole life. They loved the idea, and said yes immediately, and I realized in retrospect that I probably could have just said I wanted to write a book about the French guy from the Hamilton musical, and that would have been enough, because I’m pretty sure that’s what sealed the deal.

Now before Revolutions, I never really cared about French history, or French culture, or French anything. I was always far more of an anglophile. I never studied the French language — as is obvious from my adventurous pronunciations in the French Revolution series — but as I wrote the podcast, things changed. I started getting really into French history, like really into it. So much so that among other things, the Revolutions podcast is also Mike’s general history of modern France. By the time the Lafayette book was getting approved, I was working on the series that covered the Second Empire and the Third Republic in the Paris Commune, and had left no French Revolution unturned. With this new mindset, and with an eye towards writing a book about Lafayette, I had been aggressively studying the French language for about a year, and was getting pretty good at it. Then after the Lafayette proposal sold, Mrs. Revolutions and I started talking about how I’d need to go to France to do some research. Over a series of conversations, this turned very quickly from, let’s spend a summer in Paris, to let sell everything and move to Paris, thus completing my heel turn to full blown francophile, to which I can only say, allez les bleus.

We moved to Paris in July 2018, and after a few months getting settled, I launched the series on the Mexican Revolution. As I noted at the time, it was very weird to move to Paris and then immediately start writing about events in Mexico, but I did find a bunch of really cool books on the Mexican Revolution at Centre Pompidou, so I spent months in the heart of Paris writing about Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. Thanks to the course I had taken at Texas State all those years ago, it was probably the Revolution I knew the most about going into the show, along with of course the American and Russian Revolutions.

Now a big unanswered question is, when did I decide Russia would be the last series? I had after all started out aiming to do 20th century revolutions like Cuba and Iran, but by the time I got to Russia, I was saying, this is it, I’m done, I’m stopping here. So when did I make this decision? Why did I make this decision? And the honest answer is, I don’t know, and I don’t really remember. My best guess is that by the time we got to France and I was working on the Mexican Revolution, I could tell that the hours were getting shorter. And at some point in there, I decided that when I got to Russia, I would just pour everything I had into it, to make it the best it could possibly be, to have it last as long as it needed to last, but that when it was over, whenever it was over, that would mean the show was over. And so that’s what I did. And that is how it came to pass that the series on the Russian Revolution lasted three calendar years.

Episode 10.1 came out in May 2019. And then I spent the rest of the year simultaneously working on the podcast and Hero of Two Worlds… except a problem developed. The weekly deadline of the podcast naturally took precedence over the much longer deadline for the book. Whatever podcast episode I happened to be working on was due right now this week, while the manuscript wasn’t due to be handed in until late 2020. This meant that when push came to shove, the book is always what got pushed and shoved. So by the end of 2019, I was like, uh, ruh roh. I am failing to do two things at once here. So I decided to carry the story of the Russian Revolution through the end of 1905, and then take six months off to finish the book. And as you might remember, this is almost precisely when COVID broke in February and March of 2020. So just as I commenced this hiatus, we entered a long lockdown period, 23 hour a day lockdowns in Paris, which is when I wrote the first third of Hero of Two Worlds. There was nothing else to do.

Now, as you also may remember, things became quite a bit more complicated for me in September 2020. Just as I was meant to be finishing the book manuscript and returning to the podcast, my right kidney revolted. It produced stones so large they could not be passed and I needed surgery. Also the manuscript wasn’t done yet. The French had also lifted the lockdown over the summer and then entered second lockdown in the fall, so I was bouncing in and out of French clinics and hospitals and pharmacies, getting COVID tests and blood tests and then twice being on an operating table. It was all quite grueling, to be honest. It was not until December 2020 that I emerged from this ordeal, manuscript finished and my health mostly restored. If you ever want to relive the fine details of all this, go check out the episode, What Happened?

But that turned out not to be the end of it. Around about late February or early March 2021, my other kidney revolted. Same deal, stones too big to pass. Only this time we had the added complication that we had plane tickets booked to return to the United States set for April 18th. This was quite an immovable date on the calendar. And unfortunately I found it impossible to convey to people how much it would not work for my initial consultation to be set just a week before I left the country for good. I was in the end saved by the father of my daughter’s best friend, who was a hand surgeon at a hospital and he heard about my plight, popped in to see his friend the urologist, who just set me up on his schedule outside of all normal channels. This I have been led to believe is a very French experience, a million bureaucratic rules and procedures that don’t matter if you know somebody.

But even here, it was absolutely down to the wire. Forty-eight hours before I was set to board an airplane to depart France for good, I was heading into a French operating room for my final procedure. This was quite a stressful weekend, let me tell you.

But there were no complications. I got fixed, we got on the plane two days later and flew home. Our three years in France lasted forever, and went by in the blink of an eye. I’d say more about it here but on my way out the door I dropped an episode called The Streets of Paris which sums up my experience far more poetically than I’d be able to muster here.

After we got back to the States in April of 2021, it was all downhill. The second half of the Russia series was well underway and aiming towards 1917 and beyond, and then in August of 2021, Hero of Two Worlds came out. It was another great success thanks to all of you out there, and the thing I’m proudest of is that you all heeded the call to throw sales to your local indie bookstores, not the website that shall not be named, so Hero of Two Worlds debuted at number one on the bestseller list for the Booksellers Association of America, which covers all those independent bookstores. That news was very sweet. But since we were still in COVID as an acute emergency, all plans for a live tour were canceled, and instead I did what felt like about a bajillion zoom interviews through the end of the year. I spent the first half of 2022 finally bringing the Russia series to a close, more than three years and 103 episodes later, pretty close to what the entire Revolutions Podcast was originally supposed to be. And I think back on that guy sitting there with a one year old on his lap in 2013, not knowing if any of this was going to work out or not, and while I’d like to go back and tell him, relax man, it’s all going to work out, he’s going to figure it out for himself eventually. Why ruin the surprise? It is, after all, a pretty good one. It worked. It all worked.

That brings us to the final phase of the Revolutions Podcast. And while it maybe would have been nice to drift easily into retirement, we elected instead for an insanely tumultuous final few months. I don’t need to remind you of what this was all about because it just happened. But the paperback for Hero of Two Worlds came out in August of 2022, and I hit the road for a long overdue live book tour. This tour took me through 14 cities in 18 days in September, and then transitioned into six more cities in October for the monologue shows. All the while I was writing up the final appendices. I traveled everywhere with my microphone, I recorded one episode in a hotel in Denver, another in a hotel in New Orleans, another in a hotel in Austin. The tour was exhilarating and exhausting. But now I’m home. The final appendix was published last week, and this final episode is almost done.

Podcasting has changed a lot since I started Revolutions — they definitely hit the mainstream long after I started the show. Back when I was doing the History of Rome, and even in the early days of Revolutions, I would tell people what I do and they would say, oh, what’s a podcast? And I would have to explain it to them: it’s like an on-demand radio show. But then as I continued on with revolutions, I got to a point where I would say, oh, I do a podcast and people would get excited and say, oh, I’ve heard of podcasts. Those are really cool. What’s yours about?

Of course, these days we’ve hit the stage where I hesitate to tell people that I’m a podcaster because people will say, oh, a podcast, everybody’s got a podcast. And when I look ahead to the future, one of my goals in life is to still be podcasting at the point when the response becomes, podcast? people are still podcasting? And I will say, yes, I am.

So does that mean there’s going to be another podcast? Well, yes, of course, there’s going to be another podcast! Over the course of my many travels and many conversations, there is one topic that far outstrips all the others, that is the question of what am I going to do next?

Mike, what are you going to do next? Please tell us what the next podcast is going to be.

And I’ve always laughed and said, ah, yes, there’s going to be another podcast, but no, I’m not telling you what it’s going to be, I’m keeping that a secret.

Well, the time for keeping secrets is over.

It’s time to tell you what I’m going to be up to next, because it is, in fact, all lined up. For a while now, the great writer, historian and presidential biographer, Alexis Coe and I have had a little mutual appreciation society thing going. A few months ago, she asked what I was doing after Revolutions, and I said I had some notions, but nothing seemed to be fitting exactly right. So we got to talking, and we got to talking about working together. And we hit upon a very simple idea, simplest idea in the world, really: we both love history. We both love books. We both love history books. We love talking about history books. We love writing history books.

And so, we are going to team up to talk about history books.

This new team of Duncan and Coe is going to talk about new history books and old history books and big history books and little history books, but that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to start a podcast where we talk about history books, these things that are so near and dear to our hearts, and which I know are very near and dear to your hearts too.

Now as soon as we started talking about this idea, I got very excited. The idea of talking with somebody of Alexis’ caliber about history books every week just seems like the best idea in the world. I, for example, absolutely have to take a break from long form narrative history podcasting — seriously, you guys, I need to rest that part of my brain for a while — and so a conversational show sounds absolutely wonderful. And besides, you guys haven’t really heard casual conversational Mike that much. Unless you hear me on somebody else’s podcast, you’re getting scripted Mike, all the time. I also have not really been able to read off-topic for like 15 years. I have had to remain laser focused on whatever the topic of that week’s show is, so I’ve just been reading Roman history books and books about the various revolutions I’ve covered for again, like, 15 years. So getting to read a variety of books on a variety of subjects is going to be a really nice change of pace. I can’t wait to read books that are not about Rome or revolutions and not feel guilty about it.

I am also beyond the stage in my career where I feel like I have to fight tooth and nail for my own place in the world. I feel like I’ve kind of carved out a place for myself in the world. And so now I would like to use that place that I’ve carved out to help other people who are fighting for their own place to find their place. I’ve spent my whole life looking up at a summit that I’ve been trying to reach. And now that I’ve kind of reached that summit, I want to look back down and help other people reach the summit too. I remember how hard it was for me in the beginning, I remember how hard it was when I published my first book, and Alexis remembers all this stuff too. And that’s the last bit of this. The thought of working with somebody like Alexis Coe is thrilling; I in fact cannot believe that she pitched me on this idea.

So there’s no official start date for this. I do need to rest. But I’m not going to rest for very long. Stay subscribed to this feed and I will let you know when the Duncan and Coe history book show starts up. It’s going to be great. I can’t wait.

Well, okay, yes, technically I can wait a little bit, but it is coming.

But that also means that Revolutions is ending. It is time to close this chapter of my life. It’s important for stories to have endings. That way new stories can begin. And there are so many stories left to tell.

Now, I did this once before when the History of Rome ended. It was a difficult decision, it was bittersweet — but it was also the right thing to do. And just as I did with the History of Rome, I’m going to drop a little donation link into the show notes for this episode. If you’ve enjoyed Revolutions and are going to miss Revolutions, and appreciated, some of those 342 episodes and 190 hours and 1.5 million words, maybe you want to drop a couple bucks in the tip jar on your way out the door. Whatever you think is fair, I think is fair too.

This show has been my life for 9 years. It means so much to me. Every word I wrote, every minute I recorded, every episode I published, they all mean the world to me. And I could not have asked for a better audience to write for. I love Revolutions very much. I love all of you very much. And so I will bid you now that fond and bittersweet adieu. But I promise that we’ll see each other on the other side….

 

This week’s episode is brought to you by Audible. You don’t ride an elevator for the music or pick an airline for the movies, so when it comes to audio entertainment, it makes sense to choose Audible. Audible has an incredible selection of audiobooks across every genre, from bestsellers and new releases to celebrity memoirs, mysteries and thrillers, motivation, wellness, business and more. Audible members get full access to a growing selection including audiobooks, Audible originals and podcasts. You can download and stream all included titles you want. And now you can even listen to podcasts like, let’s say, Revolutions or the History of Rome on Audible. How awesome is that? All your favorite content is going to be on one app. It’s the home for stories told by the biggest stars like Ethan Hawke, Kerry Washington and Kevin Hart. It’s home to epic adventures, chilling mysteries, and can’t miss comedies.

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Hello and welcome to Revolutions.

Appendix 12: Coming Full Circle One Last Time

So this is the penultimate episode of the Revolutions Podcast. This is the last formal appendix episode and then next week I’ll have one more final informal farewell, and then, we’ll be done. I will have many heartfelt things to say next week, but to get a little head start on it, let me just say that it has been an incredible honor to produce this show, an incredible honor that a bunch of people let me do what I do here. And that if I look back over all the episodes I’ve produced and all the time we’ve spent together, that maybe the Revolutions Podcast has shaped the world for the better, or at least made your world a little bit better, as you mow the lawn and go for a walk and wash dishes and commute to work — all the things that people do when they listen to the Revolutions Podcast. Thanks for letting me spend that time with you. I’ll miss you too.

Now we’ve been talking about discrete historical events and eras and epochs that despite their differences about where and when they happened, we can call them all revolutionary events. With apologies to those of you who believe that the revolution never ended, whichever revolution it happens to be you’re talking about, we do tend to put conceptual brackets around our historical revolutions and say, here is when it began, and here is when it ended.

Now, there’s often not a right answer to figuring out when a revolution ends. If the French Revolution explodes in 1789, we can say that it goes to 1794, 1799, 1804, or 1815. All of these are acceptable endpoints to mark a book or a documentary or a podcast focused on the French Revolution. I said the French Revolution ended in 1799 partly because my daughter was about to be born and I needed to wrap up the season on the French Revolution. She’s um, seven now, in case you’re wondering how long we’ve been at this together. But in the end, whatever date we slap on to the end of a revolution, we should say that at a certain point the revolution does end. And so I want to start today by looking back at each of our ten seasons and nailing down when precisely we say each of the revolutions ended.

Now the revolutionary period in Britain and Ireland runs through 1660 and it is easily marked by the collapse of the Commonwealth and the restoration of the Stuart Monarchy. And this is one of our revolutions that really does seem to look like a revolution, one full turn of the wheel. Now if we mark this period beginning with the Bishops’ War of 1639, we are talking about 21 years of revolutionary upheaval in the British Isles. And then of course there’s the necessary coda that it would all be recapitulated in 1688 with the Glorious Revolution, when Dutch bankers staged a hostile takeover of the British Crown. But for our purposes, 1639 to 1660 is the revolutionary period.

Now the American Revolution marks its end at 1789 with the implementation of the Constitution. We could say that the revolution proper actually ended with the Treaty of Paris, and that the Articles of Confederation period was actually the first chapter of post-revolutionary American history, a chapter that was quickly closed by some radical centralists who locked themselves in a room in Philadelphia and drafted an entirely new system of government even though nobody told them to. But there is so much force around the notion that the permanence of the Constitution means that the Constitution must end the revolutionary period. So if we say this all got going with the Stamp Act in 1764, we’ve got ourselves in America a good clean 25 years of revolution.

Now I don’t want to belabor the point about the French Revolution because it will sprout volumes of words, but the French Revolution can go through 1794, 1799, 1804 or 1815, and it’s really just choose your fighter. But the tumults that opened in 1789 do seem like they must be extended conceptually out to 1815, and that like, the Revolution in Britain and Ireland, it ends with the restoration of the monarchy that was ousted in the first place. So if we take the French Revolution and extend it to the restoration of the Bourbons, it took 23 years for the revolution to come full circle.

Now the Haitian Revolution goes until the Declaration of Independence on New Year’s Day 1804. After this we enter the period where local leaders like Henri Christophe and Dessaline organized stable post-independence political regimes — or at least they tried to. Dessaline promulgated the Declaration of Independence 12 and a half years after the Bois Caïman ceremony. The revolutionary period in Haiti would have ended with the War of Knives in 1799, about eight years after Bois Caïman, but Napoleon’s attempt to reinstate slavery in San-Domingue kept the revolutionary period going and led indirectly to Louverture’s capture and death. But with Independence Day 1804, we say the Haitian Revolution closes.

Now Spanish-American Independence has the same dynamic as Anglo-American independence, with the various declarations of independence coming in the middle of the process, declarations that are often retrofitted to serve as the beginning or the end of the revolutionary period, but mostly which just kind of appeared in the middle of it and were only truly recognized after the fact. Most Spanish-American holdings declared independence in the 1810s or 1820s and then fought wars against Spain and each other to carve up South America into the chunks we more or less recognize today. And because we’re talking here about a bunch of different countries spread out over an entire continent, divided by sometimes impassable terrain, marking the boundaries of the Spanish-American independence era is always going to be a bit vague. But if we start it with the Abdications of Bayonne in 1808, we can say that it ends really once and finally for all in 1833 with the death of King Charles VII, but really by the mid to late 1820s, Spain was recognizing, at least tacitly, the independence of its former South American colonies. So we’re talking about a period of perhaps 10, 15, or 25 years, depending on where you want to mark the boundaries, still, a very long time.

Now in contrast to this, we get the French Revolution of 1830, which was lightning compared to everything that had gone before it. I mean, we call it the July Revolution for a reason, it’s obviously over in a matter of days. Although I have heard it recently posited, by me, that the June Rebellion of 1832 is actually a second wave of the Revolution of 1830. But even if we stretch the definition of the Revolution of 1832 to its breaking point, we are still talking about something that was over in about two years, not a giant generation’s long upheaval — although we will say more about this in a second.

The Revolutions of 1848 are also much more compact in time, but remember the Revolutions of 1848 start in 1847 and last until 1849. The result was the reestablishment of various dynasties on neo-absolutist terms in Austria, Hungary, and the various states of Germany. In Italy, it marked a brief pause in the wars between the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia and Austria for control of Italy. In France, the revolution moved quickly through the brief and dirty history of the Second French Republic, which takes them to the doorstep of Napoleon III, who was there to complete the farcical recapitulation of 1789 to 1794 to 1799. The revolutions of 1848 lasted for about 18 months total from the opening events in late 1847 to their closing events in early 1849. Now the revolutionary events surrounding the fall of the Second French Empire and the birth of the Third French Republic mostly ends with the suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871, but it takes its final form with the Constitution of 1875, which we didn’t actually talk much about in the show because it wasn’t pertinent to our revolutions, Bloody Week had already happened.

The French Third Republic was the first sovereign regime to last more than 18 years since the Fall of the Bastille in 1789. Now as you know from the show, because we did talk about this, had the Bourbon heir to the throne been willing to serve under the tricolor, the events of 1870, 1871 would have resulted in a constitutional monarchy for France, but he wouldn’t, and so it didn’t. And one suspects that it also probably just preempted the inevitable third overthrow of the Bourbons, which I feel like was all but guaranteed. So we’re talking here about six months of revolutionary activity from the fall of 1870 to the spring of 1871, an event which I also think closes a thing we might call the Long French Revolution.

The Mexican Revolution is also tricky to mark the end of, because like France and as we’re about to see with Russia, there is no dramatic endpoint. Things just shift and evolve. In Mexican presidential history, it just sort of drifts from Carranza to Obregon to the PRI as armies demobilize, normal life resumes, and legends of the revolution like Villa and Zapata are assassinated. Now it does feel like the revolutionary process might run all the way through the presidency of Cárdenas because the radical economic and social possibilities of the revolution were not seized on until Cárdenas in the 1930s. But the revolution by that point already feels like a historical event, so it’s easier to say that it lasted from the election of 1910 to the election of 1920, a decade of winds sweeping Mexico.

Now like the revolutions of 1848, the Russian Revolution of 1905 starts in 1904 and does not end until 1906. And also like 1848, it ends with the re-entrenchment of the imperial dynasty on neo-absolutist terms. The tsar now recognizes a duma and other certain types of public assemblies like the Zemstvo. This obviously rickety settlement does not last through World War I, and so in February 1917 we get this second revolution. It’s possible to say the revolution ended in November 1917, with the immediate survival of the Bolshevik regime after the October Days. Maybe you want to push it to the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918 — I’m not going to argue with you — but I personally think that the Russian Revolution runs at a minimum through the end of the Civil War. It’s only after the Civil War that the Communist regime is actually on stable footing. Then, with the coming USSR, it moves out of the revolutionary phase, a phase that lasts five, six, or seven years depending on how you want to do the math.

So now that we’ve grasped the scope of all of these revolutions, we can start to compare how it started with how it’s going. Maybe haul back up our definition of what a political revolution is and make sure everything we’ve been talking about here qualifies, and if it does qualify, how exactly does it qualify? So we said that a political revolution is when the existing structure of political power — how power is exercised, justified, legitimized, defended, and transferred — is displaced by a force originating beyond the bounds of that existing structure and replaced by something different. So, do our revolutions qualify as political revolutions? Spoiler alert, of course they do, otherwise I would not have been talking about them.

So the revolutionary upheavals in Britain and Ireland had begun as a part of a long process of negotiation between the crowns of Britain and the lords of Britain. They’re fighting over issues that go back to the Norman Conquest, you know, through the medieval period, Magna Carta, into the age of the Tudors, the Wars of Religion, and the consolidation of something like a stable central monarchical apparatus. This gave way to a cousin from Scotland, who was himself the product of negotiated settlements between all of those groups and then also between the Scottish and the English. But the great question of the day was really whether or not a parliament, an assembly of stakeholders of the realm, would be a permanent part of statecraft. And the answer was unequivocally yes: Britain would be a constitutional and parliamentary monarchy. Everything that happened between 1639 and 1660 guarantees this. When James II later tried to undo this very settled fact, it was him that went, not the wallpaper. So even though we might say that the Stuart Restoration means that it was all a big hullabaloo over nothing, no, no, no. The British monarchy of Charles II was very different than the British monarchy of Charles I.

Now it should be very obvious how the American Revolution changed the nature of its sovereign because we’re talking about a colony that was now independent. So right there, the seat of sovereignty and justifications for that sovereignty are going to be different. In this case, the seat of sovereignty has moved across an entire ocean. The new citizens of America also had to find new terms to justify their fledgling commonwealth, with no deep historical tradition to point to anymore, nor any divine will of god, they instead pledged fealty to a piece of paper that they wrote a week ago last Tuesday, which is admittedly very curious behavior. But obviously the United States is now a republic and not a monarchy, and that’s actually a pretty revolutionary outcome, so the American Revolution was absolutely a political revolution.

If we take the French Revolution all the way through the fall of Napoleon in 1815, we must look at how the restored bourbon monarchy was organized. When Louis XVIII was restored to power, he did not believe he could get away without ruling with a charter of government that at least mimicked a constitution. There were guarantees for elected assemblies, balanced ministries, and basic individual rights. And I think there’s a real sense that just as with the English Revolution and the American Revolution, was, is there going to be a parliament, some permanent assembly of at least some part of the population who would now participate in government? Now, typically, at this point in history, this parliament is going to be full of the wealthiest members of that society, and they tend to resemble oligarchies far more than democracies. But still, the disequilibrium that caused the revolutions were in part caused by the sovereign refusing to allow even that much. So a vital component of any stable equilibrium was the permanent recognition of a popular assembly. So all of these revolutions, one of the main things they do is produce parliamentary structures.

But moving on from that, we can look at Haiti and find another very easy case to analyze. The Haitian Revolution started with a slave colony administered by some rich stakeholders and colonial officials, and it ended with a full-fledged independent state run by the slaves who had freed themselves. I actually cannot imagine a more dramatic revolutionary change. We don’t have to talk about it much because it’s so huge and so obvious.

Now, again, Spanish American independence is a lot like Anglo-American independence: there was once a colonial regime of intendants who were in charge of things, but now all the various states of South America are independent and answerable to no one beyond their own territories. So each of them will break into different sorts of constitutional or personalist regimes, there are usually running battles between liberals and conservatives inside each of the newly independent nations, and coups and revolts in civil wars and foreign wars will continue unabated for another hundred years. But in the immediate aftermath of the wars of Spanish American independence, the regimes of South America were being run in entirely different ways than they were before the process of Spanish American independence, especially because they too are all now republics.

Now the Revolution of 1830 is a very subtle shift. And as I’ve said previously, the Revolution of 1830 might actually be even more conservative than the American Revolution. But it does take Louis XVIII’s Charter of Government that was pointing to God and saying that’s where sovereignty comes from, and flips that around and says, no, no, no, sovereignty comes from the people. The new Charter of Government that was revised in 1830 recognized the people as the ultimate authority, not God, and the terms of the Charter were made far more legally binding on the king and every other party involved than had been going on under Charles X. But 1830 is also mostly just a blip in the long French Revolution.

1848 was of course a year of mostly failed revolution, so most of the post-1848 regimes were just the dynasties restored to power. But even in triumph, the regimes had been altered. Post-1848 neo-absolutism allowed for measures of electoral participation in carefully managed assemblies. The majority peasant population of all these kingdoms and empires could be reliably turned out to support the regime politically, as one of the great weaknesses of the radical democrats inside Vienna or Budapest or Prague or Berlin was how small their numbers were. The vast majority of the population in all these places was still rural and poor, not urban and upwardly mobile, so they voted conservative. But it is unlikely that even these compromises and concessions would have arrived absent the shock of the revolution. So 1848 absolutely changed the regimes where they happened. In France, 1848 ultimately produced the second empire, which fell apart in September of 1870. This might have been another motor point to the long French Revolution, with the Third Republic following its predecessor, the Second Republic, and just giving way to some successor state after it had outlived its usefulness to the political factions involved, whether they be legitimists or Orléanists or Bonapartists or radical democrats or socialists. But instead the Third Republic just kept lurching forward and even persisted through World War I, which is quite a feat when you really think about it.

Now in Mexico, comparing 1910 to 1920 actually produces some stark similarities. The presidency of Porfirio Díaz and the presidency of the many faces of the PRI have very similar political monopolies over a nominally democratic system. The PRI also winds up having some technocratic post-scientifico influences that scan a lot like the group that was surrounding Díaz in his latter days. But there were also major progressive advances inside the Mexican Constitution of 1917, especially about social guarantees, the right to an education and sweeping anti-Catholic legislation that did have a major impact on property, social, and cultural relations in Mexico, where the church had once loomed so large and was now dispossessed and barely tolerated.

Now comparing and contrasting the Bolshevik-Communist state that followed the tsarist regime is also pretty simple, they are very, very different things. And although you can kind of unfocus your eyes and see, yes, authoritarian police state, authoritarian police state, and let’s just call these things the same thing, the regime of Tsar Nicholas II and Stalinist Russia were absolutely not the same thing. A major political revolution had happened.

Now in each of these cases, the new regime was able to answer some of the questions the old regime could not. Mostly, this turns out to be a question of the extent to which other stakeholders in the realm would be allowed to participate in the crafting of laws, taxation, and spending. Feudal arrangements that were based on contractual mutual obligation and spheres of influence gave way to a modernizing state that was more all-encompassing in its grasp, ambitions, and organizational worldview. This disrupted the former contractual bonds between sovereign and subject, so the powerful interests of these various states sought new modes of retaining a degree of influence and power. This is why parliaments arise, because they become an assembly of those interests. And the population of the ruling class was subtly shifting away from the old medieval houses and towards these rising bourgeois houses as modern capitalism set out to conquer the world.

So as we can see, all of our revolutions have been political revolutions. But only some of our revolutions were also social revolutions. Now remember, we said a social revolution is when the economic relations and or cultural hierarchies of a society — their personnel, rationalizations, habits, norms, obligations, and modes of production — are rapidly transformed such that the society is organized in a fundamentally different manner. About half our revolutions don’t really come with a massive reorganization of economic relations and cultural hierarchies. They simply continue a line of socioeconomic development largely unbroken by the revolutionary period. It’s not hard to look at the American economy before, during, and after the American Revolution, and recognize that it’s not like the founders took a sledgehammer to the economic relations that had made them also wealthy and influential in the first place. In the realm of economic and social relations, there was no break or overthrow of the past in America. But we can contrast this with the Russian Revolution, where the Bolshevik Party undertook the massive reorganization of huge parts of the Russian economy with dramatic results. Say what you will about collectivization, it was quite a radical break from the past.

Now following on that, one of the great changes that comes to these greater revolutions, the social revolutions, is in land ownership. Places like France, Haiti, Mexico, and Russia all come with mass confiscation of land by revolutionary and post-revolutionary authorities, particularly the largest of states of the most conservative defenders of the ancien regime, and, inevitably, the church, whether it’s Catholic or Orthodox. There’s also quite a bit of land churn during the British revolutions, which Charles II wisely left for Parliament to figure out after the restoration. When Louis XVIII came to power, he faced the question of those national lands, the stuff that had been confiscated and then resold at auction to people in good faith, and he decided he didn’t want to touch any of it with a ten-foot pole. His brother Charles X would have restored all former owners to their lost property, but the verdict of the revolution was too strong at that point. He couldn’t undo it. The land churn remained.

But aside from these material changes, I think we can also talk about changes in cultural attitudes and mentalities, changes in psychology caused by the revolution. I’m thinking specifically here about something I read at the end of the Mexican Revolution. It was a quote from an old Hacienda manager noting the change in the attitude of the peasants, that even as things settled back down and appeared to return to normal, that there were things you simply couldn’t do anymore, ways you couldn’t talk to the peasants anymore, that the revolution had, like, bathed the population in the waters of self-respect. This is also something I find for French peasants and workers and tradesmen and sailors and soldiers after the French Revolution. It stamped a certain insolent egalitarianism on them all. There was much less tolerance for things like natural superiority or natural inferiority. And all this is especially true if education and literacy are one of the results of the revolution. A better educated population naturally thinks differently about itself. We know this.

Now, anything that involves a lot of trauma and instability and bloodshed and threats to basic survival are, of course, going to impact how people think about themselves and think about the world. But it’s also the case that many of these revolutions take place over decades, like over an entire generation, and we do need to control for the fact that human society can simply change over time, whether there was a revolution or not. Now for example, we can talk about economic changes before, during, and after a revolution and ask ourselves whether any of this was the result of the revolution, or simply the changing nature of an economic system at a time of great theoretical and technological innovation. The Witte Boom happened under the tsars, after all. Napoleon III and Porfirio Diaz inaugurated and oversaw economic leaps forward far more dramatic than anything produced by the revolutions that preceded them and followed them.

Which brings us to the last big question I want to talk about here: was the revolution worth it? What were its benefits? What were its costs? We can compare and contrast the beginning and end of the revolutionary process and then ask if the middle bits were really necessary. Whether the ends justify the means. Whether the means were the only means of achieving these ends. And to be specific here, what we’re talking about here is basically all the deaths, the injury, the trauma, the dislocation, and the destruction that comes with revolution and war. But since any prolonged period of human history is going to involve a lot of death, injury, trauma, dislocation, and destruction, we can only fairly talk about the excess casualties caused by the revolution. Was the revolutionary result worth the price paid in all those extra dead?

A corollary to this question is whether the revolution was even a necessary event at all to achieve the final outcome. What would have happened had there been no revolution? What changes can be identified and attributed to the revolution and the revolution alone? Was the revolution necessary to get from point A to point B? One might look at the Restoration Settlements of 1815 and the nearly unfathomable suffering and devastation unleashed by the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars and wonder if maybe so paltry an end maybe doesn’t justify the enormous cost.

But these are not questions that I am going to have good permanent answers for, because they are questions that everybody is going to have to answer for themselves in their own way. In terms of hypotheticals, we can look and say, well, there is always a scenario where better leaders, smarter leaders would have done the compromises necessary to avoid revolution and arrive at a conclusion that very much looks like the result of the revolution without the revolution having ever taken place. I mean, wouldn’t it maybe have been better for everyone and less traumatic and destructive and bloody if Louis XVI had simply issued a charter of government in 1789? Sure, absolutely.

So we can always conjure a hypothetical where we say, no, the revolution was not worth it because if they had just done X, Y and Z, they could have avoided the revolution. But they didn’t know what X, Y and Z was at the time. And most importantly, we don’t get to redo history with a new set of leaders. Our leaders were great idiots, and so they blew it. But there are other times where it’s even difficult to see a hypothetical, where the leaders who were present in the ancien regime managed to produce the revolutionary settlement without a revolution. And I am thinking here specifically of the Haitian Revolution. Can you imagine a world where it’s possible for the major merchants and landowners and stakeholders in San-Domingue, right, the Big Whites, to willingly abolish slavery, pick up and leave the island and give full control of it over to the black population? Absent a revolution, I really don’t see that happening. No amount of hypothetical enlightened self-interest is going to lead that group of people to make those choices, at least not in that time or that place. So we can say, well, wouldn’t it have been better if the French had just said, you know what, slavery is wrong, let’s withdraw from the colony and allow our former slaves to create an independent republic for themselves? Well, yeah, sure, that would have been better. But the question is, could you have gotten from point A to point B without a violent revolutionary upheaval in San-Domingue in the 1790s?

Now, one can point to other constituent parts of the French Empire and the Caribbean, or if you want, the British or Dutch or Spanish. Those places often wind up with the result of the abolition of slavery and independence for the polity in question without necessitating a revolution, as we witnessed in San Domain. And so maybe you want to say, well, those places did it without a revolution, to which we might say yes, but absent the experience of the Haitian Revolution, do those other imperial powers make the same choices they do about divesting themselves from slavery? And then more to the point: was it in fact better to make all those slaves wait another 30, 40 or 50 years just because we think it might have been better for their freedom to have come without a bloody revolution?

Because ultimately, there is a moral component to all of this, where we have to set aside questions of efficacy and practicality, and more in terms of what is morally justified or not. If a person is held in slavery against their will, are they not allowed to commit maximum violence in order to free themselves from their bondage? This is to say that the crime of enslavement is so morally intolerable, and so fundamentally anathema to the human condition, that you can’t morally rule out any tool a slave might use to free themselves. This includes killing their master, killing their master’s family, killing the master’s society. How could anyone possibly complain about this? They were a bunch of slavers. And what would you say to these slaves rising up? Oh, no wait, hang on, your masters will eventually get around to freeing you. Well, maybe not you, maybe your grandchildren, but you get my point. I mean, how do you ask the last person to be a slave for just a little while longer after you’ve decided that slavery is a horrendous evil that must be abolished?

But that said, there are other times, of course, where none of that pertains. And when you look at the grievances of the British North American colonists or South American Criollo elite, the Big Whites of Haiti we were just talking about, or what about events in Mexico or events in all these various regimes in France through the 19th century? Was the violence and destruction that accompanied lurches forward politically and socially really vital? Couldn’t these changes have come without everyone breaking into armed violent camps? I mean, we often see societies change and transform over time. Land changes hand, economic modes are altered, attitudes change. I mean, if you just let a society go for another 20, 30, or 40 years, when you check back in, it’s going to be different than it was 20, 30, or 40 years earlier. Violent revolution is hardly the only thing that changes human behavior.

It has been suggested to me that what I should do after the Revolutions podcast is maybe start a podcast called Reforms, where we just talk about all the really boring, mundane ways that societies have progressed and transformed without resorting to violent upheaval. That if you compare and contrast, say, the British and the French, we find that today they have very similar political rights and economic systems and modern social relations, but they took very different paths to get here. The British traveled the same tumultuous revolutionary times as the rest of Europe and mostly navigated the waters by a series of calculated concessions and compromises. They didn’t feel the heat of 1848 because political reform bills had cleaved the interest of the middle class from the working class. In places where 1848 did start to pose a real revolutionary threat, we also see a bunch of sovereigns eagerly capitulating to demands for reform. The crowned heads of places like the Netherlands and Belgium and Denmark and parts of Scandinavia all very quickly signed on to constitutional reforms. That’s why most of them are still monarchies today. So if they accomplish the same thing using reform instead of revolution, is revolution really this vital component? Maybe, maybe not.

I think that there is something to the notion that all the chaos on the continent caused by the French Revolution did impact British decision making; that with the great example of the French Revolution staring in the face, the leaders of Britain kept coming back to the idea that maybe it would be better to just avoid all of that. Make a few requisite concessions and then get on with the business of getting on with it.

Now even after all these years I do not ultimately have great answers to these great questions. No two people can ever look back on the history of revolutions with the same pair of eyes. Certainly I can tell you from all the emails and messages I’ve gotten over the years, that different people take exactly the same set of podcast episodes and draw wildly different conclusions from them. Some people write in to talk about how revolutions appear to be the worst possible idea that humans have ever had, while others write in and ask me for the best specifications of a good barricade. Mostly I just think it’s my job to present you with all of the information, to tell you what happened, and then leave it to you, my fine listeners, to figure out what to do with all this information.

But there’s not going to be much information left, is there? Next week will be the final episode of the Revolutions Podcast. It will be a fond and bittersweet adieu to a show that has consumed my life for the last nine years, and will at least partly define my life forever — I mean I’m pretty sure it’s at least in the first couple sentences of any obituary that gets written about me, even if I live another forty years. And that’s not a bad thing. I’m very proud of this show. It means a lot to me. And I’m glad that it’s meant a lot to you too.

So let’s all get together next week one more time to say goodbye.

 

 

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Appendix 11: Meet the new Boss

The working premise of these appendices is that we can take a bunch of unique historical events that are mostly defined by their own time, place, and context, and tease out some similarities; to observe how these revolutions progress through certain common steps; to catch the places where history seems to be rhyming.

But as we moved into appendices 9 and 10 to discuss a specific stage of conflict between moderates and radicals, we have been drifting a bit from universal application. Not all revolutions become defined by a conflict between moderates and radicals: the American Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the Spanish American revolutions, don’t really express themselves in these terms. Sure, we could take the model and go looking for things in those revolutions that fit the mold, but they’re not gonna fit that well or that convincingly. So as we wrap up these appendices, we should always keep in mind that if we find uncomfortable tension between an abstract model of history and the particular details of a historical event, or if factual relations need to be ever so carefully stretched or framed to fit a template, my advice is to let go of the template. Always, always err on the side of letting the historical facts speak for themselves in their own way and on their own terms.

That said, we do return in this appendix to something that does seem to happen at the end of all revolutions — well, nearly all revolutions, not all of them. Never all of them. But most of them. It’s actually one of the most common observations about the universality of certain revolutionary events: that they seem to invariably reach a stage where political power and authority coalesces around the magnetic personality of a single charismatic leader. That what started as a vast, multi-faceted, multi-faced, multi-party, multi-interest, all-encompassing revolutionary mass movement aimed at the overthrow of the ancien regime has splintered, via the entropy of victory, will ultimately give way to a powerful leader commanding unique authority, who will use their power to settle all accounts, tie up old threads, and often conveniently give name and face to the transition from revolutionary to post-revolutionary era.

And whatever the specific causes, twists and turns, and courses of whichever revolution we are talking about, it is undeniable and practically axiomatic that a revolutionary period involves an enormous amount of chaos, uncertainty, and insecurity for the population of whatever society we’re talking about. This honestly doesn’t need much of a further explanation, because… it’s a revolution. It’s gonna be chaotic. The old political order has literally been thrown out and people are scrambling to erect something new in its place. In the interim, there’s gonna be a lot of confusion. During that process, different political groups will set up rival claims to power, and one group will say, we are the new power, pay attention to us, not those other guys over there. And those other guys over there are saying, no, we’re the new power. Pay attention to us. Lines of authority get very scrambled. Nobody knows who’s in charge or how long they’ll last. And in the revolutions we’ve been talking about, this is often accompanied by a great deal of combative violence. There could be riots or street fighting, there are often full-blown wars. For the average person living through a revolution, stress and confusion are likely the dominant emotions.

Now, along with this prevailing political chaos, revolutions also cause enormous amounts of economic dislocation. Supply lines are disrupted, trade lines are cut, goods become scarce, money becomes inflated, maybe even worthless. There’s no stability or predictability. You can’t really count on anything. You go to the same bakery you’ve always gone to and there’s no bread to be had. You go to sell your grain at the market and nobody has anything to pay you. Workers and laborers are conscripted into armies, and there’s not enough hands for field or factory. Output plummets, transportation networks are destroyed or impassable. With old economic relations torn asunder amidst war and revolution, just trying to put food on the table becomes a dicey proposition. The struggle for survival often becomes a daily, even hourly challenge with no certainty whatsoever that tomorrow will bring anything different.

Revolutions also come with a breakdown of law and order. Now, the old system of law and order may have been worth overthrowing, just as the old modes of economic and political relations may have been worth overthrowing, but it means that in the aftermath of a revolution, the legal system is going to be a bit of a dysfunctional mess, and it’s very easy for unsavory characters to get away with things. Nearly every revolution we’ve covered has been accompanied by a spike in criminal behavior — and I’m here just talking about regular old crimes, theft, fraud, extortion, kidnapping, assault, rape, and murder. The rise in banditry and what we would call today gang activity rises amidst economic uncertainty and the breakdown of old systems of legal justice.

All of this chaos naturally produces a kind of general exhaustion in the population. A revolution is above all an exhausting proposition, not just for those participating in it, but for those who are essentially on the sidelines. Stress and uncertainty wear us down. We become very tired, tired physically, tired psychologically, tired emotionally. The longer it goes on, the more the exhaustion prevails, and like a kind of low grade torture, invites us to sign on to anything the torturer puts in front of us to just make the torture stop. And in a revolutionary setting, that torture becomes defined by ongoing and never settled factional civil wars, that can provoke from a normal person, the sense that, uh, my god, I’m sick to death of all of you people, just settle things so we can get on with our lives.

So the number of people who are stressed and exhausted and absolutely over it in society rises as the revolution progresses. Remember, we started with the masses all pouring out into the streets in this first revolutionary wave, to overthrow an ancien regime that had itself become so exhaustingly and frustratingly and provocatively irritating that it just had to go. But as conflicts open up within the revolutionary coalition, and individuals and groups and parties get tossed aside, the people who supported those individuals or groups or parties drop out of politics. They quit, they leave, they run, they hide. And those who are winning the revolution very much prefer it this way. They’re happy to purge and discourage and prohibit people who disagree with them from participating in politics because, look, they’re trying to organize a new legitimacy, and dissenting voices will mess all that up. So as the stakes rise, the willingness to tolerate dissent inside the revolutionary regime shrinks, and people wind up unable to muster the energy to fight on. What they want is some semblance of order, and revolution often takes them to the point where they are willing to accept order in whatever form it takes, whether they actually like it or not.

The point I’m trying to make here is that human beings have a tendency to prefer living with something resembling security, regularity, safety. This is one of those primordial instincts that goes with the territory of being a mammal in nature. We prefer to go back to the same place for food, and find that there’s food there. We prefer it when we can go to the same place we found water last time, and find that there’s water there again. We prefer to be able to go to sleep at night and not be attacked by predators or rival groups while we sleep. And to be honest, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s stressful to live in chaos and people would prefer to live with less stress and fear if they can get away with it. The fact is most normal people endure the revolution as passive and helpless spectators. Most people are not obsessed with politics. Most people don’t even care about politics, or if they do get interested, they get quickly fed up. And day by day, the promise of order and regularity becomes very alluring.

And so if a single leader out there starts to make a name for themselves, and that name begins to promise order and stability and an end to the chaos, a lot of people are willing to listen. And even those who are still idealistic true believers and don’t necessarily believe that the order promised will be worth the price, well, they look around and despair that the people probably don’t have any fight left in them. So even if a leader rises up without much cheering, they may rise with something a leader likes just as much, and that’s exhausted resignation.

But let’s be clear, it’s not like the leaders we’re gonna talk about here rolled in and said, oh, aren’t you sick of all the chaos and disorder, hand all power to me, I’ll make everything better. No, it usually happens far more subtly and organically than that, but the implication is always there. However, the revolutionary path twists and turns and rises and falls and ebbs and flows, it takes us to this place: some charismatic leaders accruing more and more political power with less and less resistance.

Usually the rise of this leader comes as they personally win over the loyalty of a large section of the armed population — by which I mean, an army. And resistance dissolves, not necessarily from a feeling of oh gee whiz, I’d rather go about my business and not pay attention to politics anymore, but more, oh, that guy commands such an overwhelming amount of violent force that it would be suicidal to try to challenge them. And so the revolution that started with the many becomes the one.

So who are we talking about specifically here? Well, if you’ve paid any attention at all to the podcast, you can probably name each individual I am about to discuss off the top of your head. Because they wound up as the great charismatic leader defining the end game of their particular revolution, we had to talk about them a lot. So none of these names should be unfamiliar, most of them should be right on the tip of your tongue.

So who are we talking about in the English Revolution? It’s obviously Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell rises up through the ranks of the Parliamentary Army, becomes a key figure in the New Model Army, is a forceful leader inside the particular faction looking to turn the kingdom into a commonwealth, give it a written constitution, and an orderly republican form of government. The problem, of course, as you might remember from those episodes, is that as Cromwell tried to produce these written constitutions and new structures of government, people just kept not doing what they were supposed to do. The good lord protector, elevated to maintain security in the realm and act as an executive inside of a new constitutional order, kept finding the other branches not behaving the way they were supposed to behave, and so he had to keep dismissing them, improvising a new approach, and finding out that those new ways also didn’t work. And so in exasperation, Cromwell would blow them up. Appointed lord protector for life, Cromwell ruled from 1653 until his death in 1658. Now it’s true he kept refusing to wear the crown, and he never stopped trying to get a power sharing system in place, but as the Rump Parliament and the Bare Bones parliament and the Rule of the Major-Generals came and went, the one thing that stayed was Cromwell, indisputably holding power to the end.

Now, as you may have noticed, the American Revolution tends to miss a lot of these beats in the latter stages of the revolution, but it was still an incredibly chaotic event, and obviously there’s only one man who fits the bill here, and that’s George Washington. Washington is the central, indisputable leader of the American Revolution. He’s the indispensable man. Never authoritarian, but always authoritative. It’s true he got dragged kicking and screaming to be the first president of the United States, but it’s very telling that everybody told him he had to do it, and that the absence of his presence would make the whole project fall apart. The presidency was a uniquely powerful executive institution at the time. Both head of government and head of state. It was designed specifically for Washington, but Washington is a different breed of cat here. He defied human nature and instead of ruling for life, retired. But the revolution does revolve around Washington, doesn’t it? And it resolves to Washington, doesn’t it? He’s not a dictator, he never was a dictator, but had he been born of a slightly different cloth, King George the First of America was absolutely on the table. It remains utterly remarkable that he wouldn’t take what nearly every other man in his position would have — or at least, every other person we’re talking about here today would have. And even though he’s not a dictator, the American Revolution absolutely ended with a single charismatic leader in charge.

Now, when we get to the French Revolution, you know, the only person we could be talking about here is Napoleon Bonaparte. Like so many things about the French Revolution, Bonaparte is the prototypical example of all this. Bonaparte seized power in a nearly fumbled coup in 1799, and then set about deliberately consolidating power after the Directory had discredited itself with chicanery, hijinks, and corruption. Bonaparte’s power only grew as he continued to fight wars with the rest of Europe, won those wars, the result of which being European conquest revitalizing the French economy. This made him very popular. He then set about trying to reconcile French society, and he invited back the old tossed out bits, the the old aristocracy and the Catholic church, and he built up a personalist empire that by the time he unveiled it, no one could stop him.

In Haiti, things obviously revolve around Toussaint Louverture. And where does he come from? Ah, yes, just like the first three, he’s a great military leader who was winning battles on the field, that’s a bit of a theme here. In the beginning, Louverture was merely one player in a much larger game, but by the mid 1790s, he had consolidated power by successfully playing external opponents like the French, British, Spanish, and Americans, and internal opponents like Andre Rigaud. Commanding the largest and most powerful army on an island ravaged by chaos and war, there was no political entity to transfer power to even had Louverture wanted. Him and his army were it. And so wherever Louverture was, that’s where political power was. He spent a good five or six years as a dictator, calling the shots as he tried to mold his tricolor society that would be built on the back of plantation cash crops. But eventually, even those closest to him in the upper rungs of the Haitian military apparatus decided that what Louverture wanted was not necessarily what they wanted, so they betrayed him and allowed him to be arrested by the French, and he wound up dying in captivity.

So who’s next? Well, of course, it’s Simone Bolivar.

Bolivar is the only one of our group who actually assumed the literal title of dictator. Although those of you from the good old history of Rome days know that a dictator in the context of the Roman Republic was not the unseemly anathema of free goverment, but was instead a vital emergency tool that was used by a free republic at a time of crisis. Bolivar, a lot like Cromwell and Washington, but not like Bonaparte or Louverture, was forever thinking he would be able to set down his dictatorial authority and hand power to some kind of representative government founded on the rule of law, et cetera, et cetera. But Bolivar could never find people willing to do it in exactly the way he wanted them to do it, and so because of that, he had to keep brushing them aside and reinstalling himself as dictator well after the point when everybody actually wanted him to go away. But when Bolivar was in the room, nobody could say no to him.

Now the Revolution of 1830 is maybe, even more than the American Revolution, is probably the most conservative of all the revolutions we’ve talked about. The leader on the white horse who comes riding in to restore order in July of 1830 is… Louis-Philippe. Louis-Philippe may have been conservative and he may have reigned over a smallish electorate, but it’s not like he was ever anything resembling a dictator in any meaningful sense of that word. There was a charter of government in place, there was a legislative branch with an upper house and a lower house, there were judges and laws, and Louis-Philippe knew exactly the role that he had been cast in. Both publicly and privately, he tried to rule as a constitutional monarch bound by certain constraints. I mean, that’s why they had overthrown Charles X in the first place. So the revolution of 1830 does not really fit the mold here.

Now most of the revolutions of 1848 also don’t really fit the mold because most of them failed. And we wind up with neo-absolutist monarchists coming back into power. When they came back into power, they tended to have a few more rules about what they could and could not do, but it was far more of a restoration than a revolution. In France specifically, though, the Second Republic managed to last for about three years before another Bonaparte decided he wanted to be another Napoleon. The justifications for Napoleon III were roughly the same: everything is so chaotic, the leaders around me are wildly unpopular with most people, so I’ll just self-coup my way into power. Napoleon III’s legitimacy and charismatic authority came exclusively from the fact of his name, that’s it, he had nothing else to recommend him for any job. He was in this sense a lot like Octavian from the History of Rome days trotting around the name of Caesar without having done anything to actually earn it.

Now, like the revolution of 1830, the French Third Republican Paris Commune era also do not really resolve towards a dictatorial outcome. It’s very possible that the Paris Commune would have gone towards a dictator had their charismatic dictator been around, and there is somebody who would’ve fit the mold. It’s August Blanqui, the man who was born to play that role, but he had already been arrested and locked up, and so he wasn’t there for the Paris Commune, so they did committee rule until the end.

Meanwhile, for the French Third Republic, it maybe could have gone towards a dictatorship, but instead there was just enough multiplicity of interest without a single charismatic figure on any side that everyone wound up crammed into a very tense and uneasy republic that nobody loved, but everyone was willing to tolerate, at least until the next revolutionary turn of the screw. Except that didn’t really happen. The French Third Republic lasted until World War II, and after that it’s, here comes Charles de Gaulle, who absolutely fits the bill here, but it’s like 75 years later.

Now in Mexico. Carranza very much wanted to play the role of the charismatic dictator after Madera, but the man had no charisma. He was so deeply unpopular, even among his own subordinates, and he could point to no military or political track record that he could lay claim to popular power. Meanwhile, the people who did have that track record in charisma, people like Villa and Zapata, had different agendas, and they didn’t really want the job, so as the Mexican Revolution progressed, it progressed to Alvaro Obregon and the crew from Sonora. So in the Mexican context, Obregon is playing this role here. He’s got the military accolades, the legend of his one arm, and his astute politicking. But with no reelection being such a huge part of the Mexican Revolution, Obregon gave way to a successor, and from there, the PRI developed itself into a unique system where the party became the dictator rather than any single man.

And then finally in the Russian Revolution, you know who we’re talking about, we’re talking about Lenin and then Stalin, about whom we have just spent about a gazillion years talking about, and whose careers likely don’t need much of a rehearsing here. But obviously, post-February Revolution Russian democracy didn’t even last the year before it was back to a single leader calling the shots — and yes, they technically did this while adhering to the byzantine ethics of Party Committee rules, but still ,be real. Everybody knows they were dictators.

So let’s make some observations. First, where does the authority of so many of these guys come from? It’s simple. It’s military victory. Look at these names: General Cromwell, General Washington, General Bonaparte, General Louverture, General Bolivar, General Obregon. They all made their name as military men. So what is it about generals that so many of these individual leaders who define the end game of a revolution come from the military?

Well, let’s start by not overthinking it. Sovereign power is all about holding a preponderance of force over your society, we’ve talked about this at length. And if you are a military leader who has developed a loyal army, well that’s kind of the ballgame, isn’t it? Because who can possibly stand against you, but another army. And these guys were all successful, not just in combating foreign threats, but more importantly, they had very likely just won a civil war. And so at that point, there’s quite literally no army that can stand against them, that army was just defeated. But also just in terms of the cult of personality type influence that’s necessary to go along with these kind of rulers, military victory is a great way to have your name and face spread far and wide, either by word of mouth or in newspapers or radio broadcasts. For that kind of mass reach, you need to be doing something that affects all of society, be involved in something that all of society cares about. The course of a war is one of those things that everybody is gonna be talking about, and so the victorious leader in one side of this war is gonna get talked about a lot. And if they are victorious, they are gonna be talked about in positive terms. The military, of course, also functions as a hierarchy, with a commander-in-chief at the very top, and so it’s practically built for personalist rule. When all the other institutions of society have fallen apart, the army structure transfers very nicely into the political arena, which necessarily involves one person at the very top giving orders.

Now with Lenin and Stalin, we have a unique situation among our dictators as they commanded their authority as political operators, not military generals. The military men who tried to become dictators, people like Kornilov, or Denikin or Kolchak, were all Whites, they weren’t Reds. Now, Trotsky ultimately derived some of his personal authority from his successful organization of the Red Army, but he was a civilian hand guiding the ship, not General Trotsky, Commander-in-Chief, and he got out flanked and booted out of the revolution anyway. But though Lenin and Stalin derived their authority from their ability to manipulate political parties rather than their charismatic authority as military leaders, it is worth remembering that both of them were acutely aware that they couldn’t have charismatic military heroes running around out there challenging their authority. They had to guard against such figures emerging, and they did, constantly. And we know what happened as a result when World War II got started.

Now, the second thing we can observe here is that almost none of these leaders explicitly set out on a road to be a dictator. It is something that developed organically over the course of the revolution, and developed from their own experiences with politics during this period. Cromwell didn’t start out by saying, oh, I’m gonna start as a member of the landed gentry, but when I’m done, I’ll be lord protector. George Washington didn’t really want to be a political leader at all. He kept trying to get out of that job in a way that I think transcends mere showmanship. Napoleon was an ambitious young man, but he was improvising all along the way, I don’t think Emperor Napoleon was his plan from the start. Absent the Mexican Revolution, Alvaro Obregon is just out there in the north raising chickpeas. But revolution did come and war came with it, and a mix of frustration and duty and opportunity and ego convinced each of these men that they must for the good of society, take power and reign supreme. But in almost all of these cases, it feels like something that they arrived at in the due course of time, not something that they laid out as a goal for themselves at the start of the revolution.

A third thing we can observe comes directly from that thought, but which needs fuller expression, and that is the bit about ego. For a variety of reasons, our leaders have come to regard their own judgments and decisions and choices as vital to the health and wellbeing of their society. That to remove themselves from the situation would be to doom society to a return to chaos. When we look at people like Bolivar and Cromwell basically concluding that everyone around them is doing it wrong, and therefore I must remain so that the good and right thing must be done, we can ask what their motivation is here. Because not doing it how I want it done is not necessarily the same as not doing it right, unless you’ve got a rather large ego. To reach the point where dictatorial power is even a possibility, you have to be something of an egomaniac. Even Washington, with his supernatural aversion to dictatorial power, was an egomaniac. Of course he was. You can’t spend any time around the guy and not conclude that, at least compared to a normal person. You don’t have the kinds of careers these people have without an unreasonable amount of ambition and an unhealthy level of self regard. It’s very abnormal, and their egos are doing a lot of the work of convincing them that they have to stay in power at all costs, otherwise it’s catastrophic, not just for them as individuals, but for society as a whole.

Now, fourth thing we can observe is that our charismatic authority figures are always operating out of something resembling a middle ground. Now, they’re naturally gonna be to the right of the most left wing radical elements of any revolution, but they’re always also gonna be much further to the left than any right wing element. Whatever else these people are, they’re not restorationists or reactionaries or conservatives. They’re all revolutionary leaders, who often continue to do revolutionary things, even as they pull in a more conservative direction. Cromwell was a Republican, but he’s not a Leveler or a Digger. Washington tended to be a Centralist and a Federalist, but is clearly trying to balance the interests of everyone in the American revolutionary coalition. I mean, he went off and put down a proto-populist uprising in the west, clearly prioritizing order over liberty, but he’s also not trying to create a monarchy in America. Bonaparte tried to reconcile the Revolution with traditional French society, inviting back conservatives and cutting deals with the Catholic church and restoring slavery in the colonies, but even in full dictator mode, he was doing progressive things that the Revolution wanted done. Educational and bureaucratic and legal reform that the more technocratic side of the enlightenment always wanted, a side that had always called for this, being delivered by an enlightened dictator, naturally. And even Lenin and Stalin who come to power from a radical left flank of the Russian Revolution had left wing critics that they put down in their rise to power, Left Communists and anarchists and Left SRs. Anyone who would’ve preferred more bottom up styles of authority and less top down styles of authority? They had to go.

And that brings me to the last observation I wanna make, which will lead into what we’re gonna talk about next week, is that in all of these cases — with the real exception of Louis-Philippe — all of our charismatic authority figures wind up wielding more power and have a greater reach than whatever ruler was in place prior to the revolution. If you look at the military resources and financial resources available to them, the size of the bureaucracy out there doing their bidding, the breadth and depth that they can expect their laws and decrees to be enforced throughout society, we always find a very big jump in the power of the executive. From what King Charles was able to do to what Oliver Cromwell was able to do. Crown and Parliament and the North American colonies versus President Washington in the United States. Louis XVI versus Emperor Napoleon. The French Colonial Administration of Saint-Domingue vs Toussaint Louverture. The Spanish Colonial Administration of South America versus Simone Bolivar. Louis-Philippe versus Napoleon III. Porfirio Díaz versus the PRI. And finally, Tsar Nicholas against Lenin and Stalin. You would be extremely hard pressed to make the case that the former’s political authority exceeded the latter’s. Revolutions don’t just produce dictators, they produce powerful dictators.

And that will segue us nicely into what we’re gonna talk about next week in our final appendix. We will take a large sweeping look back from the end of the revolution to the beginning of the revolution. When we look back, we will ask, what happened? What changed? Was it worth it? What did these revolutions accomplish? Are revolutions horrendous nightmares to be avoided at all costs, or are they vital lurches forward to be cherished and celebrated?

This final appendix will be the second to last episode of the Revolutions Podcast, and so we will wrap up the appendices by wrapping up our revolutions, and then the week after that will be the final episode of Revolutions, when I bid all of you a bittersweet adieu.

 

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Appendix 10 – The Revolution Devours Its Children

Well, we all knew this one was coming eventually: the point in the revolution when a small clique of radical fanatics who seize control of the government in the second wave of the revolution embark on a reign of terror to purge the enemies of the revolution. At the moment of maximum crisis, surrounded by enemies on all sides, they turn to firing squads and guillotines and chopping blocks to ruthlessly eliminate all perceived threats. And as the radical clique now in charge of the government is inevitably composed of a teeny tiny minority of the population, the vast majority of the population might find itself plausibly targeted as enemies of the revolution. Not just conservatives, reactionaries, and restorationists, but anyone deemed insufficiently enthusiastic about the radical program, or who have ever so slightly different opinions about what that revolutionary program should be about. And this includes, of course, those who helped make the revolution in the first place, the leaders of that first wave, like the hapless moderates, so recently overthrown in our second wave. So we have reached the phase when our revolution begins to devour its children.

But here’s the thing: it doesn’t always go like that. Not all revolutions wind up at a reign of terror phase; in fact, most of them don’t. It seems like they do, because the two biggest, most famous and most influential revolutions — the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution — both progressed to a phase of terror. And since we take those to be our model revolutions, we think that all revolutions must progress to a phase of terror. But as we discussed last time, that radical second wave challenge to the moderates fails as often as it succeeds. So oftentimes there are no radicals in power to launch such a reign of terror. And as we know, moderates would never dream of using excessive violence to cement their control amidst revolutionary chaos.

Oh wait, of course they would.

So even though plenty of revolutions do not wind up at a radical reign of terror phase, they nearly all wind up at a point when top-down violence by the revolutionary government is deployed against its own people. We don’t have a dramatic name, such as “reign of terror” for top-down violence committed by moderate revolutionary regimes, so I’m gonna take a page from a different period of French history to give that a name. Let’s call them bloody weeks, after the infamous suppression of the Paris Commune — because here too, the revolution is devouring its children.

So what I wanna do today is go through both kinds of top-down revolutionary violence, both reigns of terror and bloody weeks. Establish the who, what, when, where, why, and how of both types of revolutionary child-devouring, and mark out how they are different — because they are different — but also notice how they are very much the same.

Let’s start with the “what” question, as in: what are we even talking about here? So let’s define our terms. A reign of terror is when a revolutionary government, captured by a radical faction, uses the power of the state to carry out a campaign of political violence. It involves an intrusive mechanism of surveillance, encouragement of citizen mutual denunciation, mass arrests, flimsy rules of evidence, and often, though not always, concludes with summary execution. The ultimate goal of a reign of terror being the liquidation of perceived enemies of the revolution, and a final consolidation of power by those in power.

This is in contrast to a bloody week, when a revolutionary government, successfully defended by the moderate leaders against the radicals, uses the power of the state to carry out a campaign of political violence against the defeated radicals. It involves the declaration of martial law, mass indiscriminate arrest, and often though not always concludes with summary executions, the ultimate goal being the liquidation of perceived enemies of the revolution, and a final consolidation of power by those in power.

So as you can see, these are different, but they are also the same. The particular political sins being rooted out and punished are obviously gonna be different varieties whether the violence is perpetrated by radicals or moderates, but in both cases, we are looking at top-down state violence perpetrated against its own people for the purpose of defending the political power of the perpetrators.

So let’s move next to the when question, as in: when do reigns of terror happen, when do bloody weeks happen? Well, in both cases, they obviously happen after the contest between moderates and radicals has been decided. We also obviously need to have advanced to the point in the wider revolutionary event where an ongoing existential crisis has created emergency conditions that seems to justify the harshest possible measures, measures that in other cases would be considered beyond the pale. The question of when this happens is when we find our revolutionary leaders exhausted, stressed out, and afraid. They need to be deeply fearful and not a little bit paranoid of what will happen if their rivals win, so they cannot allow their rivals to win. We don’t find reigns of terror or bloody weeks happening after the initial first wave of revolution. In the honeymoon period that follows that first wave, everyone is excited about the limitless possibilities of the revolution, and that isn’t exactly fertile ground for a reign of terror or a bloody week, because the prevailing emotional vibe is hope, optimism, and unity, rather than fear, bitterness, and division.

So now let’s move on to a bigger question of who. And the who question has two aspects: who perpetrates the reign of terror or bloody week, and who are the victims of a reign of terror or a bloody week. Now I wanna set aside the latter aspect for a moment to focus on the former. Who is doing this? And we already know part of the answer because of the inherent distinction between reigns of terror and bloody weeks. Reigns of terror are perpetrated by radicals, bloody weeks by moderates. But the who is doing this question also involves the wider personnel carrying out the project, because it’s obviously not gonna be enough for uncompromising leaders of some executive committee or provisional government to order mass arrests and executions without anyone to carry out the orders. So we must also note here that in both cases, there’s gonna be a loyal apparatus of police and military and lawyers and judges who do the actual rounding up, arresting, arraigning, sentencing, and carrying out of the sentences. These people must have some kind of ideological motivation for not just going along with all this, but actively and eagerly partipating.

So we can give the reign of terror a name and a face like Robespierre, and we can give a bloody week the name and face of Adolphe Thiers, but absent thousands of willing subordinates and collaborators, it’s never gonna happen. Carrying out a vast project of political violence is a team effort.

And before we go on, I also wanna mention here that everything we’re talking about here today is distinct from white terrors. A white terror is perpetrated by reactionaries, conservatives, and restorationists, that’s a whole separate can of worms. What we’re talking about here today is still revolutionary on revolutionary violence, because the revolution is eating its children.

Now, I wanna briefly set aside the other big who question — who are the victims — because that question will make a lot more sense after we’ve talked about the why question. Why embark on political massacres, what’s the point? This isn’t something you just haul off and do on a whim. Even fanatics have justifications beyond just a mindless thirst for blood. Mindless thirst for blood is actually a far rarer condition than one might suppose; even historical actors with the most blood on their hands can point to a thing they were trying to accomplish that somehow necessitated all that blood.

So let’s start with the reigns of terror. For reigns of terror, I see five broad categories that have shown up historically, all of which are mutually reinforcing, and so we’re gonna talk about these in no particular order.

But first, we have a thing called winning the war. Why have a reign of terror? Because we need to win the war. What war? Well, whatever war the regime happens to be fighting at the time. In both Russia and France, the perpetrators of revolutionary terror, whether Jacobin or Red, were waging both civil wars and foreign wars. The very existence of the revolution seemed to hang in the balance — it did hang in the balance. It wasn’t even irrational paranoia that led them to see spies and saboteurs and fifth columnists trying to undermine them from within who needed to be purged, spies and saboteurs and fifth columnists were absolutely trying to undermine them from within! They probably did need to be purged. And with victory or defeat in the field determining the whole fate of the revolution, the revolution’s own soldiers and officers needed to display iron discipline. If anyone slacked off or failed in their duty, it wasn’t just a mistake, it was treason. So the implementation of terror was justified by its leaders as a vital response to the exigencies of war.

Second, related to the exigencies of war, was economic mobilization and the marshaling of resources by the state. Among those most frequently targeted by revolutionary terror were not just political partisans or foreign enemies, but something else. Hoarders, speculators, profiteers, people who were undermining the revolutions’ economic mobilization. People who refused to hand over grain or sell at a price below what they thought reasonable. People who would not give up their tools or their livestock or their fodder to some passing army or political agents. If a revolution comes under radical control, there’s also usually an amount of confiscation and redistribution of land going on, and anybody who opposes that is often gonna find themselves on the wrong side of a machine gun or a guillotine.

Now, in those economic cases, we’re often dealing with people motivated by economic self-interest rather than political ideology. So to turn to our third point is the necessity of clearing out those rival political factions and parties, the people who are driven by political ideology. This is the liquidation of the Girondins, the trial of the SRs. It’s very important to paint these rival groups as totally illegitimate, so as to not challenge the hegemony of those radicals who have seized power, whether it’s the Mountain or the Bolsheviks. It’s vital for the radicals who, as we have noted, are a very small group, to identify themselves one to one with the greater revolutionary struggle. No other group can be allowed to have a legitimate claim to the revolution, and anyone who does is liable to find themselves on the wrong side of a machine gun or a guillotine.

Now, this relates to the fourth point, which is that the regime must eventually establish its own preponderance of force over the society. That’s the whole basis of political sovereignty. The first wave of the revolution broke the ancien regime’s claim, but eventually the post-revolutionary chaos is going to have to give way to something resembling a new order. If the radicals won their contest with the moderates, then obviously the moderates were unable to establish such a preponderance of force for themselves. And as the radicals take over in a hostile, dangerous, and chaotic time, they need to bring down some kind of violent hammer to establish that we are now sovereign, and the way that you know that we’re sovereign is that we can lock you up or kill you whenever we want A reign of terrors, that’s partly about making society well and truly afraid of challenging them. That’s what sovereignty’s all about.

Fifth and finally, a reign of terror has its own ideological logic, outside immediate threats to the power of the radicals, whether it’s real or perceived. The reign of terror is an extension of the radical’s willingness to liquidate and destroy old institutions, and start their revolutionary society off with a clean slate. Defenders and beneficiaries of the old ways can and should be cleared out ruthlessly, so that a good and pure new society can be built. And because they are radical, that list includes not just people actively conservative or reactionary, but anyone insufficiently committed to new beginnings.

So broadly speaking, those are the justifications for reigns of terror. They answer the question, why do we need to have a reign of terror? And it’s not that we have to accept those justifications, it’s just that those are the justifications the radicals themselves believe.

Now bloody weeks, on the other hand, have subtly different justifications. To follow up from that last point about the desire to start new and destroy everything old, the top-down state repression that goes along with a good bloody week is the other side of that coin. They must arrest and deport and confiscate and kill not to ensure a year zero fresh start, but to prevent a year zero fresh start. Moderates, as we’ve defined them, often love a good political revolution, but they hate the possibility of a social revolution, and they’re absolutely willing to kill to prevent the world from being turned upside down. In fact, they’re perfectly willing to compromise and reconcile with many parts of ancien regime society, but unwilling to compromise with the most radical wing of their own revolutionary coalition. So it’s pardons for conservatives and firing squads for radicals.

But the principle justification for a bloody week is order. Where a reign of terror is tied to the continuing advance of the revolution, bloody weeks are all about restoring order. The radical challenge and further extracurricular activities by revolutionaries out there must be declared out of bounce for all time. And so, the radicals who keep challenging and pressing the new modern regime are condemned for their criminal behavior, for their rioting, their disturbing of the peace, destruction of property, and treason. The justification for a brutal smackdown on the radical wing of the revolutionary coalition rests on the need to restore order.

But just like a reign of terror, this restoration of order is about establishing the moderate regime holds a preponderance of force and a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. The time has come for people to stop taking up arms, stop manning barricades, and stop with all these irregular solutions to their political problems. The moderate regime that’s in charge right now is in charge. You are playing by our rules, and if you don’t like it, there will be fatal consequences.

And this is related to the same kind of clearing out of political rivalries that we see in a reign of terror. The moderates need to poison the legitimacy of the radicals to make sure that whatever standing they once had amongst the people is destroyed. And as much as we think that such behavior is only the purview of a radical, moderates can get up to some pretty shady business in the interest of preserving their own position against ideological rivals. Radical leaders claiming to represent a better, truer, or less compromised version of the revolution must be swept off the table. The people must not be allowed to hear their alternatives to the moderates. And if they suggest that revolutionary solutions are the answers to their problems, there must be fatal consequences.

So, now that we have a sense of the whys, we can return to the second part of the who question: who are the victims? Because the question, why are we doing this, sets the stage for, who are we doing it to? So let’s talk about who winds up a victim of a reign of terror.

These terrors, of course, involve famous names like kings and queens and high princes: Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the Romanov family. And this is usually the most common popular understanding of what a reign of terror is — it’s the people rising up and dispatching once and for all the hated benefactors of the former regime, ruthlessly killing the blood-sucking parasites who had been rightly overthrown by the revolution. But when you actually go through the numbers and the list of victims, we find that those people generally make up a small minority of the victims. Aristocrats are not the most common victims of a reign of terror, for a very simple reason that by the time the revolution has reached the reign of terror phase, most of those original benefactors of the ancien regime like the old nobility have fled into exile. They are beyond the reach of the revolution. Most of the French aristocracy had taken up residents elsewhere by the time the reign of terror came along, same is true the old Russian nobility. So if they’re not around to get killed, who is getting killed?

Well, obviously we should talk about the fact that a lot of people getting killed are revolutionary leaders, who were simply rivals for power of those who now happen to be in charge. This is Jacques Pierre Brissot and the Girondins against Robespierre and the Mountain. This is the leadership of the SRs against Lenin and the Bolsheviks. This is where the colloquialism about the revolution eating its children comes from: it’s the Girondins talking about the Mountain. And most especially, it applies to those overthrown moderates now rebranded as reactionaries. Jean-Sylvain Bailly, who stood at the center of the Oath of the Tennis Court, was then hauled out to the Champ de Mars to get his head chopped off for crimes against the revolution, most especially, the massacre of the Champ de Mars. We have the Duc d’Orléans, turned Philippe Égalité, whose ambitions and money had played such a huge role in 1787 and 1788 and 1789 eventually executed for treason. They didn’t give him so much as a thank you note.

I should also add at this point that revolutionary terrorists are not directing their terror solely from the left against everyone to their right. What we actually find them doing is creating their own new middle, and launching themselves against their right wing, yes, but also against their left wing. So, obviously, many people caught up in the terror are caught up because they’re conservatives or because they’re moderates, but others are caught up in the terror because they are too radical and too extreme. The terror is coming from a new center of gravity.

So in Russia, for example, we could talk about Left-Communists and SR Maximalists and anarchists, who were targeted by the Bolsheviks, along with liberals and Whites for the same reason: that their activities were undermining the unity of the revolution at a time of foreign and civil war. When Robespierre launched the Great Terror in 1794, who did he target before he even got to the Cordeliers gang? Left wing Hébertists, who were actually more radical than the members of the Committee of Public Safety.

So beyond ideological rivals, we often find a good number of foreigners being targeted in all of this. It is typically a very dangerous thing to be a foreigner inside of a revolutionary event, because though you might find temporary excited encouragement, and a universality of fellow feeling early in the revolution, this is often eventually gonna be met by a paranoid style of revolutionary nationalism, where you now might be identified with enemies of the revolution because of your foreign connections. Revolutions are very dicey times for even the most apolitical of expatriots.

But most of the victims? Most of the victims are simply poor, anonymous commoners — peasants, workers, lower class randos who run a foul of the regime in one way or another, or who simply live in an area that happens to be in a state of acute unrest, and the government decides to order in some infernal columns. The official tally of the official Reign of Terror is packed with victims from Vendée, for example, whether they were engaged in the uprising or simply picked up for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Those who are subject to such summary executions, whether by drowning, hanging, cannon fire, guillotine, or machine gun, their names escape our notice because they were nobodies. For every execution of a famous celebrity historical figure, there are hundreds or thousands of executions of unknown commoners. Partly, this can be the result of ratcheting up draconian capital punishment for the simplest of crimes. Lots of victims of the French Reign of Terror were like pick pockets and thieves, people who had just broken the law. If you think about the September Massacres, which were a prelude to the official Reign of Terror, something like half the people who were killed were not aristocrats or enemies of the revolution at all, but people simply being held for having committed some regular old crime.

A bloody week, meanwhile, tends to be a little bit more focused than all of that. It’s less about a prolonged period of repression hitting out multiple directions at once and more about a brief and sharp blow against the radical wing of the revolutionary coalition. And it is hitting out especially against those who have recently attempted to take up arms against the government in the second wave of the revolution. So after the June Rebellion of 1832, or the June Days of 1848, or the suppression of the Paris Commune, or like after the Spartacist Revolt in Germany, the victims tend to be politically radical. They are targeted for trying to move the revolution beyond whatever center the moderates have tried to establish, and unlike a reign of terror is not accompanied by a similar attack against conservatives, reactionaries, and restorationists, unless some group of them also attempted to stage some kind of violent counter-revolution.

In terms of economic class and social standing, the victims of a bloody week tend to come from the lower middle classes and lower classes, so students, artisans, rank and file soldiers and sailors, possibly a few professionals and intellectuals if they got a little too enthusiastic about the radical second wave of a revolution. But unlike a reign of terror, which can find a number of rich, or at least formerly rich aristocrats, as well as lots of comfortable ladies and gentlemen, the victims of the bloody week are gonna be coming from the poorer districts. Which doesn’t exactly set bloody weeks apart from reigns of terror, since reigns of terror also involve lots of lower class victims, but those victims do seem to come exclusively from the lower classes, and that is different.

Now finally we come to the question of how they did it. What are the mechanisms and procedures undertaken by the who — who are perpetrating top-down state violence, and the who — who are the victims of that top-down state violence?

Well, when it comes to the reign of terror, the mechanism is usually some kind of revolutionary tribunal, to at least give a nominal appearance of revolutionary justice. Now, during the French Revolution, revolutionary tribunals were set up to do more than just give the appearance of justice, and there were rules of evidence. But when the law of suspects came down, those rules were suspended and we get to infamous kangaroo court style tribunals. Evidence no longer really matters, accusation carries all before it. So even as there are judges and prosecutors and defendants all playing their parts, the verdict is predetermined, and with ruthless efficiency, the accused are turned into the executed.

But for the most part, the reign of terror likes to keep up the appearance of legality, especially when it comes to trying people who are in the dock for political reasons. People were not hauled before the revolutionary tribunal merely for their political leanings; the accusation was not we disagree with you politically. The accusations, for example, against Danton and Desmoulins were that they were involved in a corrupt self dealing scandal with a certain state owned company, which they had nothing to do with, but it’s not like the Committee of Public [Safety] was just saying, oh, these people pose a political threat to our power, so they must be dispatched with. It was far more that they were corrupt, that they were profiting from the revolution at the expense of the people.

One of the most common accusations we find are “collaboration with foreign enemies,” no matter how spurious or absurd the charge. And so for example, as with Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, you have inner circle Communists admitting that they colluded with the imperialist capitalists to overthrow the revolution. Even if such accusations are literally unbelievable, it is necessary to establish them so as to discredit these leaders, which is, as I said, one of the key goals of a reign of terror: to make sure that the party in power is recognized as the only legitimate representative of the revolution. So you don’t accuse them of supporting the wrong political policies, you accuse them of colluding with enemies of the state.

Now bloody weeks can use the same kind of legal procedures, and though there is certainly quite a bit more fidelity to objective facts and following something like the rule of law in bloody week procedures, there is still something very perfunctory and summary about the nature of the justice being dispensed. Since mass arrests and processing of detainees unfolds quickly and sometimes haphazardly, and it just really doesn’t matter if somebody who’s really innocent gets found guilty. But that said, there is some attempt to limit the harshest penalties to those who were, for example, caught with arms in hand, or who were recognized as the leaders of some insurrection. In these cases, the crimes don’t necessarily have to be manufactured because the bloody week is taking place in the aftermath of a failed revolutionary challenge to the government, and it’s much easier in that case to accuse and prosecute somebody for participation in a failed coup when they are caught with a gun in their.

But it is worth pointing out that those who are rounded up and tried by a moderate regime’s courts and subsequently sentenced to detention or deportation or execution are there after a period when martial law had been declared, and plenty of people who surrendered or laid down their arms were not arrested and processed according to the regular rules of law, but instead came under the immediate jurisdiction of military officers operating under that martial law. And so before the polite niceties of an organized criminal court come into play, many radical leaders and followers find themselves summarily shot on site rather than being processed at all. The vast majority of those killed in action during the Bloody Week were not killed during an exchange of fire, but in summary executions in the street after surrendering or being arrested.

Now, there are plenty of differences between reigns of terror and bloody weeks. A bloody week does tend to be of shorter duration, and more limited in scope, and more limited in who it’s targeting. A reign of terror tends to go on for longer and be a more all-encompassing blanket over society. Now, it’s difficult, given conflicting historical evidence, to know for sure who counts as a victim in a reign of terror or a bloody week, and what the final numbers for such activities actually were. But it also seems that a reign of terror often involves more suspects, more defendants, and more execution than a bloody week will. A bloody week also has a tendency to directly hit a group that has recently attempted to stage some kind of insurrectionary coup d’etat, and so it falls under the purview of a sovereign regime defending itself from an illegal revolt, as opposed to a reign of terror, which is more ideologically driven and is attempting to use their violence to establish entirely new political, economic, and social norms among other things.

So I have not come here to say that reigns of terror and bloody weeks are morally and politically equivalent. But they are both expressions of the same moment in a revolution, when the revolutionary regime uses the power of the state in murderously violent ways in an attempt to establish their permanent ascendancy over the society in question. And more importantly, that these murderously violent acts are committed against other factions of the original revolutionary coalition. In both cases, this is the revolution devouring its children, and that is something that does seem to inevitably occur in every revolution.

So we are approaching the end of this final project of appendices to the Revolutions Podcast. We’ve gone through many stages, and one of the key through lines from beginning to end is that chaos has prevailed. Old political and legal structures no longer have the force that they once did. The society engulfed in revolution grapples with almost continuous uncertainty and insecurity. Violence and criminality rise. Disorder seems to reign.

And so next week, as we approach the final stages of both revolution and the Revolutions Podcast, we will talk about why it is that at the end of every revolution, we always seem to meet a revolutionary dictator.

 

This week’s episode is brought to you by Better Help. It would be nice if life came with an owner’s manual, something comprehensive we could use as reference and guidance when things start to go haywire. Oh, no problem, we could say, let me just flip to that section of the owner’s manual, and see, oh yeah, I’m at fault, better apologize, or, wait, no, actually, I’m the victim here and deserve an apology. But even though that’s not how any of this works, therapy is the next best thing to an owner’s manual. Therapy helps us frame and talk through the problems in our lives so we can figure out exactly how to handle the latest batch of issues that have cropped up. As the world’s largest therapy service, Better Help has matched three million people with professionally licensed and vetted therapists, available a hundred percent online. Plus, it’s affordable. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to match with a therapist. If things aren’t clicking, you can easily switch to a new therapist anytime. Couldn’t be simpler. No waiting rooms, no traffic, no endless searching for the right therapist.

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Appendix 9: The Second Wave

As we’ve discussed over the last two appendices, when the first great revolutionary wave recedes, inherent divisions among the revolutionaries emerge. Those who find themselves in charge of the post-revolutionary government struggle to maintain cohesion. The disequilibrium of the later stages of the ancien regime finds its counterpart in the disequilibrium of the early stages of the revolutionary regime. Things are still extremely fraught and nothing at all is settled. The revolutionaries turned responsible agents of government must improvise on the fly a new set of political arrangements that will hopefully allow equilibrium to return to the society they’ve seized control of.

And this is no easy task, because all the chaos balls bouncing around the later stages of the ancien regime are still bouncing around in the early stages of the revolutionary regime. Plus, there are almost certainly shooting wars breaking out on multiple fronts. Achieving stability is an incredibly difficult task, and occasionally it’s impossible.

Now we know that divisions among the revolutionaries can open up on many fronts — religious, geographic, economic, and social class — but one of the most dependable splits is along temperamental and ideological lines. This is a split between moderates and radicals.

Radicals cheered on the first revolutionary wave and now want it to advance further, in bigger and bolder directions. Moderates cheered on the first revolutionary wave and now want to consolidate a few minimal gains before risking anything more, if indeed they even want to risk anything more. Chances are they are satisfied with the minimum gains and don’t want the revolution to advance further at all. It usually happens that as the early stage revolutionary regime coalesces, moderates wind up in key positions of authority. If that government tries to put the breaks on the revolution, they will inevitably be criticized by more strident radical voices. If the conflict between radicals and moderates escalates, then the stage will be set for a second revolutionary wave, a more radical wave that sometimes succeeds and washes out the moderates, and other times breaks against the stormwall and is forced to fall back.

Before we go on today though, let’s get our terminology down, because words like “radical” and “moderate” can take on all sorts of meanings in people’s minds. The definition of these words shifts constantly depending on time period, geographic location, and political context. So, let’s be clear about what we’re talking about.

Let’s start with radicals and radicalism. I often find people misunderstanding one another about who or what should be called radical because we equivocate on the meaning of the word. Broadly speaking, we need to disentangle two types of radicalism: radicalism of means and radicalism of ends. Radicalism of means is a willingness to engage in any strategy or tactic that will achieve political objectives, whatever those objectives happen to. A radical in this case is somebody who will ignore both the spirit and the letter of any custom, law, rule, or norm in the pursuit of their objectives. The ends justify the means. Radicalism of means is thus measured by a willingness to do things beyond the bounds of what we might consider normal ethical behavior. It involves a flexible imagination, single-minded clarity of purpose, and very few compunctions about doing things that other people might consider bad or wrong. If a radical of means is losing a chess match, they might win that match by bashing their opponent over the head with a chair. This is the tactical approach of a radical of means. This kind of radicalism can be deployed towards any objective, so conservatives, liberals, moderates, all of them have radical wings. So a radical conservative is absolutely a thing, even if the words themselves appear to be contradictory. A radical conservative is someone willing to go to any length and use any tactic in defense of the status quo.

Now, the other type of radicalism is radicalism of ends. When we talk about ends here, we are talking about how much society will change from the present status quo. A conservative is somebody who wants things to change not at all, or change very, very slowly. A moderate is willing to tolerate some change, but not go too far or too fast. A radical, meanwhile, wants the complete reordering of society after an apocalyptic year zero, and this total reordering of society is often premised on the destruction of old social and political institutions. The goal of such radicals is not remodeling the house, but tearing it down and building something new from the foundation up. Radicalism of ends is not limited to left wing or progressive political actors; a religious fanatic might have the radical end of a theocracy, a nationalist might have the radical end of an ethnically pure society. The point being that the radical end involves a great departure from the present status quo, and a greater willingness to toss out institutions of that status quo that are seen as irredeemably corrupt.

Now, on the other side of our looming confrontation, we have moderates. In contrast to the radical, the moderate is going to limit the scope of their imagination, whether we’re talking about means or ends. Moderation of means entails having some kind of mental list of things one won’t do, that if one can only remain in power if one does X, and X is too radical a step to contemplate — whether it’s assassination, black male, or hostage taking — then the moderate will not do it. They will acknowledge defeat and quit the field. Moderation of ends, meanwhile, entails a cautious imagination about what is possible. Change and reform must happen, but it should not go too far or happen too fast. We must proceed one step at a time. They consider calls by radicals to cut the cord and sprint away from the chain to the past as a reckless risk that will provoke a backlash, threatening to undo even moderate revolutionary gains, let alone the great dreams of the radicals. For the moderate, prudence and patience are the watch words after so much chaos and violence.

With these parsed definitions in mind, we can now see that there can exist moderate radicals and radical moderates, which, like the radical conservatives, seems like a contradiction in terms. A moderate radical, though, is somebody who dreams of great social transformation, but has limits on what they are willing to do to achieve that grand objective. A radical moderate, meanwhile, is willing to engage in any activity or behavior necessary to ensure the revolution is not handed over to radicals, or anybody who wants to turn the world upside down. When I think about the French Revolution of 1848 and the ministers of the provisional government who deliberately sabotaged the national workshops in order to discredit them and halt further advances on the social front, well those seem like radical moderates to me.

So if we go back and survey the people who come to power after the first revolutionary wave, we typically find ourselves among moderates of ends. This is explainable in part because of where they come from. The first batch of post-revolutionary leaders is typically drawn from the ranks of the old ruling class as we broadly defined it: educated elites with the money, connections, and standing to have a place in society under the ancien regime, even if they were not actually holding the levers of power. These leaders then typically come from that breakaway faction of the ruling class we talked about in our early appendices, people who had become so resistant or frustrated with the now former sovereign that they launched a revolution to overthrow them. Before the dust even settles, these are the kinds of people then stepping into positions of post-revolutionary authority because they are the ones closest to the halls of power. To be in such a cohort means one is materially comfortable and probably at least a little bit respectable, even if they had been considered gadflies or nuisances at ancien regime cocktail parties. Everywhere we look in the first wave of post-revolutionary government, we find such prominent figures, who had names and reputations made before the revolution, not by the revolution.

For reasons not hard to understand then, this set of leaders naturally tends to be more limited in their revolutionary goals, they are quite moderate. Certainly they want to avoid the kind of root and branch destruction contemplated by the radicals. Why? Well, because the old ways weren’t all bad for them. So the goal is to reform some broken parts of the system without turning the world upside down, or, worse yet, losing credit with the banks. So moderation of ends prevails inside the committees assemblies and ministries now claiming sovereign authority over the realm. Though, it is worth pointing out that even if all these folks are considered moderates because they are moderates of ends, this first batch of moderate leaders have just passed through a period where they were quite radical on the question of means. They have, after all, just come from performing the mental gymnastics necessary to justify a revolutionary power grab. Even an arch moderate reformer like Francisco Madero was briefly a radical — it doesn’t get much more radical than launching an armed revolt against the government.

Complicating the situation for our first batch of moderate revolutionary leaders, from the Earl of Essex to Prince Lvov, is that upon taking up their post-revolutionary authority, their time and attention is now split. The issue here is that the revolutionary government must serve two masters, the revolution and Leviathan. The former demands liberty; the latter demands orders. Now that they oversee the administration of society, this group must see to it that society is well administered. Many of the functions of the former regime need to be maintained in full: municipal infrastructure, social programs, tax collection, the administration of justice and regulatory agencies, seeing that the entire military apparatus is still functional. The first generation of revolutionary leaders are now tasked with ensuring all that stays functional. This is an especially difficult task given that if the state was functional, there probably would not have been a revolution. So we are invariably talking about a society whose political and economic systems are frustratingly out of sorts. Just trying to keep the lights on will consume an enormous amount of time and energy and take up most of the emotional and psychological bandwidth of our initial revolutionary leaders.

But consumed as they are with trying to keep the lights on with maintaining order, with serving Leviathan, they also must deliver on the promises made by the revolution. These are usually pretty simple promises: liberty, equality, bread, land, freedom. But while it was easy to shout slogans like these to the masses while the ancien regime was recognized as the great obstacle to all of that, to anything and everything that one might desire, it turns out to be far more difficult to deliver after the obstacle has been removed. As it turns out, it was never just about one of our great idiots standing in the way of all that is good and pure. There are lots of competing interests out there that must be considered when formulating policy, lots of competing revolutionary interests. There’s tension after all when the workers cry for cheap bread and the peasants demand for better prices for their grain. Peasant demands for redistribution of land will incur protests from major landowners who may have themselves been a part of the revolutionary coalition seeking liberty, and might even consider breaking up their estates if they are adequately compensated, but adequate compensation means making demands of the peasants that might infringe on their conception of revolutionary liberty.

Governing means making decisions. Making decisions means making enemies. And if one’s decision making tends to routinely give short shrift to the maximum revolutionary program, if it is consistently limited, cautious, and moderate, then the radicals are going to be among the enemies made.

So what are some examples of this, of the moderate program of the first cohort of revolutionary leaders? Well, we can look at the English Civil War and see that parliamentary leaders coalesced around a few great lords, whose object in fighting the civil war initially was simply to gain a bit of leverage over the king, maybe force him to take them on as ministers, but that was it.

In the French Revolution, the moderates of the National Assembly eventually produced the moderate Constitution of 1791, which no one was happy with, but which especially incensed radical voices, who wanted to move in a far more republican, egalitarian and democratic direction.

In the Revolution of 1830, the Orléanists went into a room, locked the door, and revised the charter of government in the mildest way possible to avoid demands from young radicals in the streets to declare a republic.

When Francisco Madero got himself declared President of Mexico, his first order of business was reconciling with old Porfirians, and backing away from the demands made by the people who put him into power.

In Russia, the first provisional government was composed almost entirely of conservative liberals, whose only real objective was restoring some competence to the state apparatus and nothing more. In fact, they were terrified of anything more than that.

And this takes us back to our old friend, frustration. Radicals who came out into the street, manned the barricades, joined citizen militias, expected their service and sacrifice to mean something. And instead, they open the newspaper each day to discover that the people that they have fought to elevate into power might not be interested in delivering on the promises of the revolution. And so frustration sets in. And just as they had vented their frustrations with the ancien regime, the radicals now begin to vent their frustration with the first cohort of moderate leaders.

Now, radical frustration with the moderates is driven by a mix of true belief and self-interest. True belief is not something to be casually dismissed. Sometimes we find radical leaders like Danton or Lenin, or. Describe merely in terms of Machiavellian calculation and self-interest. But radicals are often radicals for very simple reasons.

It’s because they believe in the radical program. They believe that the revolution will be deed half done if it does not deliver on its full promise. So in the days, weeks, and months after the revolution, they are shocked and outraged and appalled by the scattered crumbs brushed down onto the floor by the moderates who claim sovereignty over the realm. Their frustration and anger and disappointment is then further exacerbated by fear, most especially fear of counter revolution. And so while moderates may argue that the radicals will go too far, and that will open the door for a backlash in counter revolution, the radicals argue the opposite, that the very moderation of the moderates is what invites counter revolution. Radicals are outraged and appalled at the lack of vigorous measures against enemies of the revolution — people who should be in prison or in exile are wandering around free.

But while we should not ignore the fact that radicals are not just saying things that they genuinely believe that their larger program could, should, and must be enacted, let’s also not kid ourselves about the nature of ambition and self-interest. Most of our radical leaders come from a lower social tier than the first cohort of leaders who stepped into positions of authority after the revolution. Had our radical leaders been richer or more important or more influential, they would probably already be in the halls of government right now. Radicals thus tend to come from the second tier of the educated and comfortable set of society, a lot of young lawyers and journalists and military officers. They are passionate strivers who, whether they are fully conscious of it or not, are pursuing their own personal life ambitions, as they push press and criticize the inadequacy of the moderates. So, it is true belief, yes, but it’s also an obvious path to personal power.

So the growing chorus of radicals who are opposed to the moderates fall into the classification set of radical radicals, those who are unfettered by traditional norms of behavior, but who are also pursuing total social, political, and economic transformation. They demand that more radical means be deployed by the revolutionary government to advance the revolution and defend the revolution. They demand sterner, tougher, and more uncompromising. revolutionary government. They want to use pressure and intimidation and violence to achieve their goals. And they want to use these radical means in pursuit of radical ends: mass redistribution of land, the nationalization of industry, democratic equality, whatever counts as the radical position in the time and place and context we’re talking about. Radicals want to fight against foot draggers and layabouts and corrupt sellouts down at city hall. They want no more excuses, no more delays, they want the government to deliver on the simple promises of the revolution. And as each new policy, law, or decree falls short to the radical expectations, frustration mounts, and factional battle lines become well drawn. As the weeks, months, and sometimes even years pass, the tension and conflict between the moderate government to the first wave and the radical tendencies of the coming second wave ebb and flow, build and recede, until some great moment of truth arrives, which triggers the radical attempt to stage a second revolution.

As radical challenges to the moderates mount, the moderates often find themselves caught in a dilemma. The first cohort of moderates often come to power having denounced the coercive tyranny of the former regime, and they promised to respect everyone’s political liberties, it’s one of the great reasons they went into revolution in the first place. They thus have difficulty cracking down on opponents, even as their opponents get openly belligerent. Moderates are bound by their principles to allow their enemies to operate out in the open and thus allow the second revolutionary wave to build.

So even after the Bolsheviks got caught up in an armed insurrection in July 1917, the response from the provisional government was incredibly mild. Lenin and a few other leaders skipped town, but mostly the Bolsheviks… just got left alone.

Freedom of speech and thought and the press meant that the Jacobin Club and the Cordeliers’ Club could agitate right out in the open, and moderates in the National Assembly and then subsequent Legislative Assembly were helpless to do anything about it.

When Lafayette attempted to arrest Marat for inflammatory speech, public sentiment mostly sided with Marat, and Lafayette was forced to back down.

But even if it’s not about principle or public opinion, moderates have another incentive to not come down too hard on the radicals: there’s an understanding that the radicals are the most committed soldiers in the war against reactionaries and counter revolution. Radicals are naturally going to be the most dedicated and most committed defenders of the revolution. Moderates can’t afford to alienate them too much for fear of losing their shock troops, the people we need to hold the line against counter revolution because we can’t do it ourselves.

So as tension builds and builds, there is then another big thing thrown into the mix, and that is that this is often happening in the context of a wartime emergency. As we noted in our last appendices, revolutions bring out all sorts of different wars, both foreign and domestic, and if the war has any sort of ideological dimension where the very survival of the revolution appears to be at stake, radical demands are going to come with an existential bite. Toleration of counter revolutionary activity must be met with severe consequences. The enemy is at the gate. For the revolution to survive, the enemy must be destroyed. And when we look back over our revolutions, we often find that just as with the first wave, military debacles often accompany the second wave. We’re talking here of things like the failures of the French armies in the spring of 1792, Kerensky’s failed offensive in the summer of 1917; these failures discredit the moderates and get people’s heads turning towards radical critics who promise to win the war and save the revolution, or in the case of the Bolsheviks, end the war and save the revolution.

Now, an interesting distinction between the first wave and the second wave of the revolution is that the second wave uprising is often planned in advance and launched according to a prearranged timetable. As we’ve seen, one of the great hallmarks of the first wave of the revolution is that it breaks out spontaneously, it’s random, it catches everyone by surprise. Both revolutionaries and defenders of the ancien regime scramble to respond to an event that nobody foresaw. But the second wave typically comes after degree of planning. Arrangements are made. Orders are given. A date is circled on the calendar. The second wave does not happen as a spontaneous reaction to some trigger, but because somebody decided that this is the moment we strike.

So what are some examples of this? Well, obviously the French Revolution looms large. The French Revolution was defined by conflicts between “moderates” and “radicals,” whatever those terms happen to mean at any given time, as they did change meaning depending on whether we’re talking about 1789, 1790, 1791, 1792, 1793, or 1794. But obviously the great radical second wave was the insurrection of August 10th, 1792, an event which often goes by the name, the Second Revolution. Total. And frankly justified loss of faith in the King combined with a looming threat of Austria and Prussia led Danton and other Paris radicals to plan, organize, and stage a revolutionary insurrection. They gathered forces, they circled the date, and then they rang the tocsin at the appointed hour.

This was also true in Russia in October 1917. The October Revolution was a planned and orchestrated assault on Kerensky’s government — unlike the first revolution, which followed the spontaneous activities of the women in Petrograd, who, it should be remembered, the Bolsheviks had told to stand down. Now these two incredibly famous moments in revolutionary history also get us into the dynamic of the people who initially made the revolution eventually get thrown overboard by the revolution. And we’ll get much more into the revolution eating its children next week. But the overthrow of the moderates by radicals indicates that there is presently a lot of activity in the kitchen. Now, August 1792 and October 1917 are the most famous radical second waves to hit a revolution. And because the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution are the two greatest and most influential revolutions in world history, we might think to ourselves that radicals rising up and overtaking moderates is just a thing that happens in the normal course of a revolution.

But as often as not this radical second wave manifests itself, but is then defeated by the moderates. That’s what happened in all the subsequent French revolutions we talked about. After the Revolution of 1830, moderates took control of the French government to the increasing frustration and anger of young Neo-Jacobin radicals in Paris. These radicals subsequently staged the June Rebellion of 1832, which was an attempt to revive the revolution and push France towards an egalitarian republic. This uprising was defeated by forces loyal to the moderates in a matter of days. Now we often treat 1830 and 1832 as two separate historical events, but really 1832 is best understood as the failed second wave of 1830.

Similarly, the June Day’s uprising of 1848 was launched against the moderates of the February Revolution, but instead of succeeding, it was beaten back down by those moderates. This is also a way to view the relationship between the moderates of the third French Republic and the radicals of the Paris Commune. The Commune, like its radical predecessors was crushed by the moderates. And we also saw this throughout Central Europe in 1848, as, for example, moderate German liberals rallied to put down the forces of the Heckers and Struves of the world.

There are also times when such a second wave either does not materialize at all, or to the extent that the revolution is radicalized, it doesn’t necessarily follow from the concerted action of any radical group. The American Revolution had radicals and moderates, but it’s not like John Adams ever staged an armed coup to win the debate over independence. The Haitian revolution radicalized as emancipation went from unthinkable to fact of life, but this just occurred inside a five-sided messy conflict rather than a binary struggle between moderates in power and radicals out of power trying to overthrow them. In South America, Simone Bolivar traveled a path from seeking merely republican independence for Gran Colombia to seeking to overturn the racial caste system and emancipate the slaves, but this did not involve a direct insurrectionary dynamic like August 1792 or October 1917.

So as we talked about last week, with the fact that there’s always a restorationists wing of any revolutionary civil war, there’s also going to be a radical faction inside of the revolution. That faction is always going to be present, they are always gonna want to push further, and they would love to toss the moderate sellouts out on their butts. But they’re not always gonna have the forces or resources or luck necessary to carry that out. So the radical challenge will thus always manifest, but it can be beaten back.

But other times they very much do have the forces and resources and luck necessary to carry it out. And so next week we will move on to the subsequent attempt to consolidate and settle the revolution once and for all. This typically involves crackdowns, purges, imprisonment, exile, and executions for those on the wrong side of the revolutionary government, whether it takes the form of a dramatic reign of terror carried out by victorious radicals, or more mundane repression by the state, because the moderates won their conflict with the radicals and now would very much like to restore order, such top down violence by the government on the people — or at least some targeted group of the people — inevitably follows.

As we discussed in the first appendices, ultimately, the legitimacy of any government rests on its monopoly on violent force, and eventually the revolutionary government is going to have to prove that it has a monopoly on violent force, and it is this late stage process in any revolutionary event that often takes that revolutionary event to one of the most common results of any revolution, and that is authoritarian dictatorship.

 

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Appendix 8: Wars, Both Foreign and Domestic

Last time we discussed a nearly universal characteristic that follows any successful revolution, and that’s the entropy of victory. Today we’re gonna talk about another near universal characteristic that follows a successful revolution, and that is war.

Now we know that in normal times, war is the continuation of politics by other means. This goes double in a revolutionary moment, when all the old rules and norms and laws of politics have collapsed anyway. Violence has already entered the picture as a viable and justifiable means to political ends, so it’s not much of a leap for a full blown war to break out as a direct consequence of the revolution. So what we’re gonna do today is break down the types and categories of revolutionary wars, both civil and international, because though war itself may be a constant, the particulars depend very much on time, place, and circumstance.

Now, first, let’s talk about domestic wars — civil wars. One thing that became very clear to me in making this podcast is that all revolutions are civil wars. It is always and everywhere the case in a revolution that at least two sides are contesting sovereign power using force. The preponderance of force stage of the revolution is by its very nature a civil war. Now, this is true whether it’s armies on a battlefield or street fighting around barricades. So technically, civil war has already entered the picture thanks to the contest over the preponderance of force, but we’ve already talked about that. What we’re here to talk about today are the kinds of conflicts that happen after that phase. Whether that phase took three days, or three years, or three decades, it resulted in revolutionary victory. And what happens after revolutionary victory is what we’re here to talk about.

Now, there are two broad categories of civil war that follow revolutionary victory. One is wars between revolutionary factions, now that the entropy of victory has broken their unity. The other kind is wars between the revolutionary regime and some restorationist group fighting to bring back the ancien regime. Typically, these two types of civil war are gonna be happening simultaneously, driving into each other and freeing off of each other, because we would hate for anything to be simple and uncomplicated.

Now, to take the second of these types first, in any post-revolutionary moment, we invariably find a rump force still loyal to the old regime, that’s ready to organize an armed struggle to reclaim sovereignty from the revolutionaries. This is often considered a realistic goal because of the growing disunity of those revolutionaries. Like we may have been defeated, but now look at them squabbling and backstabbing. We can regroup and stage a comeback.

Now, in the early going, the goal of this group will often be the literal restoration of the ousted sovereign: the aim of putting King Charles I, or King Louis XVI, or Tsar Nicholas II back on their rightful throne. But problematically, if a sovereign has been overthrown by a revolution, it’s often because their appeal as individuals has become, you know, rather limited. When the Russian Whites were initially trying to get organized, hey, we’re trying to bring back Nicholas and Alexandra was not much of a sales pitch. So what I’ve observed about these counter-revolutionary restorationist movements is that they start growing in size and strength and potency once they become more about restoring the former regime generally and less about restoring the former sovereign specifically. The royalist restoration in Britain succeeded when it represented the institutions of a royal dynasty rather than Charles I, the individual human. The Royal and Catholic armies in Vendée were trying to restore the monarchy after Louis the 16th got his head chopped off, but not Louis the 16th — he had gotten his head chopped off. And then ultimately, what Russian White leaders like Admiral Kolchak and General Denikin started doing was trumpeting the restoration of the Russian Empire, one and Indivisible, but not necessarily Nicholas and Alexandra. It was actually somewhat helpful when the revolutionaries dispatched these various problematic sovereigns because the restorationists were free to pursue the idea of the old regime, the overthrown ruler themselves safely relegated to permanent martyrdom, thanks to an ax, a guillotine, or a pistol.

Now there’s always gonna be a faction committed to the restoration of the old regime, but it’s not the case that this faction is always going to become strong enough to wage some kind of counter-revolutionary civil war against the new revolutionary regime. There were, of course, Bourbon legitimate who organized after 1830, but they never had the size or the strength necessarily to challenge the July Monarchy. Then after 1848, there were Legitimists and Orléanists running around, but they didn’t have the juice to challenge the Second Empire. And then after 1871, there were Legitimists and Orléanists and Bonapartists, none of them commanding enough support on their own to wrest control of the state from the others, and so they all fell into an unhappy business partnership that we call the Third Republic. So there are always gonna be die hard diagnostic claims and supporters, but those claims and supporters no longer capture wide attention or interest.

The same was true ultimately of diehard Porfirians in Mexico. There was a faction that kind of rallied to Felix Diaz, but it was insignificant in the grand scheme of things. The groups that fought for control of Mexico after 1910 mostly moved on from the Porphyrian dynasty. So while there is always some restorationists faction in play, they are not going to define what form revolutionary civil war takes.

That leaves the other type of civil, the one that stems directly from the entropy of victory. This is revolutionary on revolutionary violence. Intra-revolutionary conflict can break out along any of the lines of discord we talked about in Appendix Seven: socioeconomic class, geographic regionalism, political ideology, religious belief, straight up personal conflict. We’ve seen these types of civil war break out all over the place in the podcast: fighting between Bolsheviks, SRs, and anarchists, the Mountain versus the Gerondins, fighting between liberals and socialists, between centralists and federalists, republicans and constitutional monarchists. If we look at the United States after Yorktown, things like Shea’s Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion can be framed as at least civil war-ish conflicts between two wings of the victorious revolutionaries along socioeconomic and regional lines. To wit, rural western farmers against the eastern commercial elites.

Now, in some cases, the Civil war side of the equation seems to overawe the revolutionary side. Revisionist historians think the Civil War aspects of the English Revolution were so pronounced that they want to call the whole period the English Civil Wars. The Haitian Revolution had lots of intra-revolutionary conflict culminating especially with the War of Knives between Louverture and Rigaud, which broke down along regional and ethnic lines. And then so much of post independent Spanish America was defined by competing caudillos, these conflicts often being less about ideology and more about regional factionalism. This was a pattern that held all the way through the Mexican Revolution, which, not unlike the English Revolution, is often recast as merely a civil war with barely any revolutionary content to speak of, it was just powerful leaders vying for the throne. Now, I personally think it was much more than that, but one could frame it that way.

Now I can only speak of the revolutions that we’ve covered, but it seems clear that even setting aside the preponderance of force phase of the conflict, all revolutions will involve a further civil war of some kind or another. And it is usually a mix of the two types that we just talked about, where disunity and fighting among the revolutionary groups allows restorationists groups to spy an opportunity to strike, creating multi-front and multi-factional conflicts where it’s often not clear who’s fighting who and who is on whose side. This certainly describes the situation in the French Revolution after about 1792 and the Russian Revolution after 1917, where there were simultaneously strong restorationist forces in the field and intensely bitter conflicts amongst the revolutionaries themselves.

But were civil wars, the only types of wars consuming the French Revolution and Russian Revolution, or any of the other revolutions? Oh, good gracious, no. That would make things far too simple. Because revolutions are also always at the doorstep of a foreign war. One of the other big takeaways from all my reading about all these revolutions is that the international dimension is vital to understanding the revolution’s trajectory. No revolution unfolds in an isolated bubble. That is because no polity on earth, be it a city state, or a kingdom, or a republic, or an empire, operates in an isolated bubble. We are always connected beyond the territorial bounds of our societies. When something is tumultuous and destabilizing as a revolution breaks out, foreign neighbors are going to get dragged into it one way or the other. Cash, weapons, supplies, soldiers, and diplomats start crossing borders in both directions, as all the interested parties in the revolution seek aid and comfort from various foreign powers, and those foreign powers look to increase their influence and interest inside the polity undergoing the revolution. Now, sometimes this stops short of full blown declarations of war, and unfolds instead as proxy conflicts within the context of the inevitable civil wars. But other times, domestic revolution leads directly to international war.

Now, there is something of a prevailing myth out there that the most common type of international war will break out when neighboring powers fear the spread of radical ideas, and invade and crush the revolution to restore the ancien regime. One imagines an ousted sovereign turning up in a neighboring court begging for help, and the sympathetic neighbor saying, ah, yes, we must raise troops to put down the revolution before it spreads. Now don’t get me wrong, this does happen sometimes — the Russians sometimes march into Hungary — but usually it’s not that way at all. The great powers of Europe eventually concluded the first French Republic was an intolerable menace that had to be destroyed, but that’s not how the war started. Indeed, almost nowhere do we find international powers mobilizing for war primarily on restorationists grounds; not in the English Revolution nor the American Revolution, French Revolution, Haitian Revolution, Spanish American Independence, not in 1830 or 1848 or 1870, not in Mexico or in Russia.

Now these kinds of things can happen — France did after all invade Spain in the early 1820s with the express purpose of overthrowing the liberal regime and restoring Bourbon absolutism — but these are the exceptions rather than the rule. I mean, even after the Allies had been at war with France for 23 years, they still found themselves without a clear answer of who should follow Napoleon in 1814 and 1815, because the allies did not agree amongst themselves that it was a war aim to restore the Bourbons to power.

Now what more typically draws neighbors into a war is not their solidarity with the ousted monarch, who could after all, easily be a long despised rival who they were happy to watch burn, but instead their interests in the neighbor’s resources, strength, and general disposition. Probably, they’ve had local clients who were always happy to orient trade and diplomatic relations in the foreign patron’s direction, and now that the regime has broken down completely they want to back factions most inclined to support their interests. This is what happened in the Mexican Revolution, where the United States, with all its banks and guns decided to be the king maker of Mexico. They constantly shifted their support. First Villa was great, and then he was the devil. Madero and Carranza and Obregon came in and out of favor. What the United States wanted more than anything else was hegemonic influence over Mexico, permanent political stability, and commercial profits. They didn’t really care who delivered it.

This also happened in Haiti, which effectively became a battlefield between the British and Spanish and French forces in addition to the local population, because it was the most profitable piece of real estate in the world. And in Russia, you can see how much the Allied occupations of the periphery of the empire and their support for the Whites was less about needing to restore Nicholas and Alexandra to the throne and far more about advancing each country’s political and economic interests in post-revolutionary Russia.

But it is also true that sometimes it’s less about calculation of interests of wealth and power, and instead comes down to the mood and temper of those with the power to make war and peace. This is when individual agency can come into play. Like the big shift in Hapsburg policy in 1792, thanks to the death of Emperor Leopold II, who was staunchly committed to staying out of France and the ascension of his son Francis II, who was ideologically committed to putting down the revolution. So sometimes it’s true that the whims and personality of individual rulers decide things, and this is a big deal, especially for Francis II because he was subsequently emperor until 1835 and never really changed his mind.

Now, as often as not, revolutionary wars are not started by the foreign powers looking to invade or capture or destroy the revolution, but are instead started by the revolutionaries themselves — that is, they are looking to expand and grow their power, which leads to war with their neighbors. The wars of the French Revolution, I think, began when the Jacobins started to push for a war in 1791 and 1792 as like, a character building exercise that would invigorate the nation and push the expansion of this Empire of Liberty they were trying to create. They had dreams of the universal salvation of mankind and wanted to overthrow neighboring regimes to see it done. In the Russian context, the Red Army’s campaigns on their western flank were about expanding the Communist revolution to Germany and beyond. Now, in the case of their conflict with Poland, well, Poland had its own expansionist dreams that ran them right into Russian expansionist dreams, so it’s not like the Polish Soviet War was entirely about Bolshevik dreams of worldwide socialist revolution, but that did have a lot to do with it. There was a reason they were trying to march on Warsaw, and that was to create a bridge to Germany. And many observers saw the battle of Warsaw explicitly in terms of a battle between capitalism and communism, with the result being the miraculous salvation of capitalism from the invading communists.

Now, there are course also international wars where the neighboring country or foreign power is not at all opposed to the idea of revolution at all. Sometimes the regime is positively giddy at the idea that a revolution has broken out somewhere in a neighbor’s territory because of the wonderful opportunities it affords. The prototypical example of this is France deciding to support British North America in their rebellion against crown and Parliament; it was certainly a wonderful opportunity to stick it to the British. Simone Bolivar tried to get the United States to play a similar role in the struggles for Spanish American Independence, but was rejected. It took support from a different neighboring power, the Free Republic of Haiti, the second free and independent nation in the western hemisphere, that got him back on track. And during the Russian Revolution, Russia itself was blockaded, but after the founding of the ComIntern, the Russians flipped all of this, and they became the patrons of revolutions in other countries. They were always willing to play the role of banker or arms dealer and safe haven for communist revolutionaries abroad.

Now, one sort of exception I do want to talk about here is the Revolution of 1830, which was not followed by an international conflict. And we might simply say, oh, well yeah, well, not much changed, so there was no reason for a war, but it was a fear of international war that was one of the main selling points of Louis Philippe; certainly it’s what earned him Lafayette’s support. Because there would have been a war if the result of the July Days fighting had either been the declaration of another French Republic or the elevation of a bone apart to the throne. The words republique and Bonaparte meant only war, and it is very unlikely that in 1830 the other great powers of Europe would’ve allowed either a republic or a Bonapartist restoration without a fight. And so, the French swapped one Bourbon for another, and then made it very clear in their first communications with all the other foreign offices of Europe, we are not a threat to you, we mean you no harm.

So what all of these wars mean, whether they are foreign wars or civil wars, is that a revolutionary epoch is a militarized epoch. Nearly all the revolutions we’ve talked about involve military mobilization on a scale that far exceeded the military mobilizations of the ancien regime. From the creation of the New Model Army to the creation of the Continental Army, the levée en masse, the Red Army, the various armies of the Mexican Revolution and Spanish American independence and the Haitian Revolution, we have tons of people either volunteering to serve in the ranks, or conscripted into service. In all of these places, the number of people under arms dramatically increased, and the hearts and minds of tons and tons of people were stamped by military service, with the drilling and the orders, the battles, the blood, the boredom, the losses, the courage, the victories, all of it. The shared experience of war marks the revolutionary generation.

And one of the effects of this is that military service has always afforded an opportunity for upward mobility. The army and the navy have always had room for talented recruits and opportunities for young men to advance up the social ladder, and in a revolutionary war, these opportunities are everywhere. People can come from nowhere and become something. This is especially true in a situation where the martial aspects of the revolution increase, and so the social and political authority of military officers increases beyond their mere military authority. This upward churn creates leaders and heroes and, at the very top, opportunities for commanders in chief to lead the whole nation. Napoleon is obviously the most famous example of this, but George Washington went from merely being a prominent Virginia planter to being, like, god of America. Simone Bolivar did it in South America, Obregon did it in Mexico. If wars are everywhere, soldiers will become your leaders.

But all these civil wars and foreign wars requires bodies to be sacrificed, and so what we often find amongst the lower classes is an initial burst of enthusiasm and volunteering giving way to hostility to ongoing conscription. This then becomes a major driver of resentment and backlash against the revolutionary regime. Husbands and brothers and sons, and fathers being hauled off to go kill or die in a war they don’t really wanna fight in. Obviously in the French Revolution, the Vendée uprising is explicitly an uprising against conscription. Throughout the old Russian Empire, every side engaged in impressment and conscription of one kind or another, which provoked local resistance whenever and wherever it happened. Dodging the draft, whoever’s draft it was, became a cause for local celebration of the sly foxes who kept clear of the recruitment officers. It created enormous amounts of resentment and it created distrust between the people and their governments.

Now, going alongside this resentment over conscription is resentment over requisitions, where armies operating in theaters are simply plundering the local population in order to keep the war machine going. These requisitions at bayonet point often seem very anathema to the idea of liberation and emancipation and utopian prosperity that the revolution was supposed to be about. Instead, people wearing revolutionary cockades or stars on their hat come around telling you you have to give them all your chickens. With civil wars and foreign wars erupting all over the place, the common people always have to endure crisscrossing armies conscripting and requisitioning and then occasionally running into each other in huge battles that cause enormous pain, suffering, and destruction wherever they break out. And this is a huge part of the explanation for why revolutions break out with so much hope and optimism, and often sink into so much cynicism and pessimism.

Warmaking also has a profound effect on the course of the revolution. With existential emergencies constantly coursing through the revolution, the new regime has to deal with every single one of them. And as they attempt to win whatever war it happens to be fighting, they’re often led to take draconian measures implemented for the salvation of the revolution. And if the government is not doing enough, if they seem to be losing the war, this presents a path for radical challenges to that regime. Radicals can demand sterner measures and more clear eyed leadership. They can say that victory alone ensures survival, that this is no time to hem and haw and have a heart.

So next week, we’ll get to the stage in the revolution I’m sure you all knew was coming eventually: the radicalization of the revolution, when many of those who started the revolution are now suspected of being weak-willed traitors who can no longer be trusted with power. And with so much at stake, how can we possibly allow them to remain in power even one day longer?

 

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Appendix 7: The Entropy of Victory

Last week we ended with victory for the revolution and defeat for the now former sovereign. This was the moment when one of our great idiots of history stepped forward and managed to screw things up so badly that despite every material, political, social, and ideological advantage, still managed to get overthrown. I mean, you have to be pretty incompetent to allow this to happen. And yet, here we are. It came down to that final test of strength, the regime failed it. And was transformed by the mystical trifecta of loss of faith, loss of trust, and loss of will from a regime into ancien regime.

Now, as we discussed last time, one of the truly remarkable things about our great idiots is how they managed to unite so many different people with so many different interests against them. Nobles and commoners, owners and workers, landlords and peasants, university professors and illiterate laborers. They all came to share a belief that the sovereign was an obstacle. An obstacle to what? It didn’t matter. Whatever it is the heart desired. And so this vast revolutionary coalition full of people with almost as many interests as there were individuals in the coalition came together to do this one thing: remove the obstacle.

Well, now, that unifying obstacle has been removed, which brings us today to one of the great recurring themes of the Revolutions Podcast. It has happened in every revolution to every class of revolutionary and every class of revolution: the entropy of victory, when unity of shared purpose turns almost immediately into the chaos of factional conflict.

Now, at first, there’s naturally a real wave of optimism and euphoria that follows the departure of the sovereign. The drinking is fueled now by joy rather than rage. Toasts to victory are raised in palaces and cafes and dormitories, and out in the streets, and whether people are drinking expensive champagne or grog from a communal barrel, it’s all singing and dancing and hand shaking and backslapping and partying. We’ve done it. The bad old regime has been overthrown; viva la revolución. In the parties and parades and events that follow, the defecting opposition part of the ruling class — the people who are about to step into the uppermost ranks of power in like the executive ministry — pledge to the people that they will do all that the revolution promised. The people in the streets greet this with cheers and say, yes, yes, it is good now that you are in charge, hurray, please go do the things we expect the revolution to do. Everyone agrees that everything is great.

But when the booze wears off and the sober and hungover light of day intrudes, our oh so recently unified revolutionaries gaze upon each other with fresh eyes. The naïve only belatedly realized after the fact that the revolutionary coalition will not hold after revolutionary victory. The more savvy and calculating have already begun making moves to ensure that their revolutionary program becomes the revolutionary program. And there are many programs to choose from. Is this the end of reform or the beginning of reform? Have we already gone too far and need to pull back, or have we not gone far enough and need to push forward? Differences of opinion about what the revolution is and what it means can break down along economic class lines or geography or religion or naked interpersonal conflict, but it does break down, and it will break down.

Now, this does not necessarily happen right away; sometimes it can take as long as several hours. But however long it takes, the revolutionaries will turn on each other. They’ll maneuver against each other, box each other out, and shut each other down.

Now one of the main recurrent lines of division that we’ve seen over the course of our revolutions is the divide between the salon revolutionaries and the street revolutionaries, a division defined mostly by economic and social class under the ancien regime. We can now firmly identify salon revolutionaries with those breakaway elements of the ruling class and their educated supporters, who do revolution by talking, writing, and moving money around. Meanwhile, the popular forces unleashed by the revolutionary trigger are synonymous with the street revolutionaries, who do revolution with barricades, paving stones and guns. Both the elites in the salon and the commoners out in the street need each other to win, but their goals and interests and motivations are very different. Especially because one of the first post-revolutionary goals of the salon revolutionaries is restoring order and getting everyone in the street to go home, while one of the first post= revolutionary goals of the street revolutionaries is to stay in the street and keep pushing until all the bastards have been overthrown, not just some of them.

But that said, this would be a very superficial analysis if we just said, oh, the elites in the salon are united in their class and the commoners in the streets are united by their class, and so now class conflict will follow this brief period of cross-class unity. Because the divisions that lead to post-revolutionary entropy are more subtle than that. So, for example, there are a few different species of salon revolutionary who will immediately join in combat with each other for post-revolutionary ascendancy. On a political axis, they range from conservative to radical, sort of hewing to their economic and social class, but by no means bound by that class.

So to start, on the most conservative side of the spectrum, we have our most reluctant of revolutionaries. These are the people who are revolutionaries bracketed by scare quotes; they are “revolutionaries.” Typically, they are grandees of the old regime who were fed up with specific ministers and specific policies of the former sovereign and who were ready, eager, and downright willing to accept even the mildest of reforms or compromises to head off revolution. But because a great idiot was in charge, they could not even get that much. So the program of these most conservative of revolutionaries is the absolute minimum number of changes and reforms necessary to resecure this sacred thing called order. They witnessed the explosion of popular forces into the streets as an unmitigated disaster. Whatever joy they took in victory was overcome immediately by anxiety and fear that these popular forces will be worse than the old.

Their first post-revolutionary object is to return as much of society as possible to the way it had been before, to get things back to normal. Get the people off the streets and back into their homes, get regular economic activity restarted, make whatever necessary alterations to the political structure need to be made, but other than that, let’s get as much as possible as quickly as possible back to normal. These guys absolutely do not want a social revolution, they barely want a political revolution.

Now, the complaints of these most conservative of revolutionaries are typically, as I just said, mostly matters of personnel and policy rather than deep-seated ideological conviction. But adjacent to them on the conservative radical spectrum are those who do have ideological convictions. They have abstract ideals and beliefs about how a polity should be organized and governed, but who view the recent revolution as the full achievement of these ideological convictions. That once a limited set of post-revolutionary reforms have been implemented, that’s it, that’s what we came here to do, and that’s what we’re gonna keep doing forever. To borrow some useful terminology from post-Revolution of 1830 French politics, I am talking here about a thing called the Party of Resistance. The revolution for them is the end point. That whatever the sovereign had been doing that was so offensive should be undone — and we’ll perhaps sprinkle in some reforms to ensure such things don’t happen again — but that’s it. This group is also terrified of the popular forces that have been unleashed, and they want to close Pandora’s box before social revolution escapes. In their minds, any campaign for additional post-revolutionary progress or reform has to be shut down. Because while their revolution to overthrow an intolerable sovereign was necessary, revolution itself? Is bad, very, very bad.

So sticking with our post-1830 nomenclature, the Party of Resistance is contrasted with this thing called the Party of Movement. And here we situate our old friend Lafayette, who was associated with the Party of Movement after 1830. Lafayette is our bog standard liberal noble. He has deep political convictions and believes that sometimes revolutions are justified and sometimes they are not. But if and when a revolution does happen, it is meant to establish a regularized framework for further reform and a continuous renewal of society. Movement. Now, generally speaking, Lafayette and his cohort of liberal nobles were not thrilled about revolution, and would also prefer order be restored and people in the streets return to their homes, but they believed that the way to maintain permanent order was to funnel all that energy into a political framework designed to facilitate reform rather than stifle it. The revolution was supposed to lay the groundwork for more reform and more change and more progress. The revolution was supposed to be the beginning of something, not the end of anything. The Party of Movement types are extremely hostile to more conservative Party of Resistance types, and downright mortified in fact, that if the forces of resistance prevail that it would just lay the groundwork for… another revolution. They believe that reform was a release valve, not a ignition switch. And if the Party of Resistance wasn’t careful, the Party of Movement might decide it had no choice but to call the streets back into play.

But sliding over to the more radical side of the spectrum, there are voices inside the salons who are not mortified at all by the popular forces out in the street. Who do not think the first order of business is order. These radicals are the link to the streets. They do not think that link is merely an alliance of necessity entered into with anxious trepidation and terminated at the earliest opportunity. No, no, no. They believe the revolution in the streets is the revolution, that those popular forces, the people ought to be the main focus of the post-revolutionary program. They thus tend to be far more democratic in their politics and happy to make promises that their other brethren in the salon would view as crossing the line from political to social revolution. With society in a scramble as a result of the revolution, the radicals in the salon see a golden opportunity to rethink not just a few political rules and ministerial portfolios, but how people relate to each other and how the wealth and resources of society are distributed. Against the Party of Movement types, these more radical salon revolutionaries believe the revolution that overthrew the anicen regime was not just about creating the conditions for more reform, but for more revolution. The ranks of this faction of salon revolutionaries look to the streets for power and possibility, even if they themselves come from different socioeconomic circumstances. Radical leaders like Lenin and Trotsky and Robespierre and Danton may have cheered the streets and riled up the streets, but they were not from the streets.

So let us leave the salons then and turn to the streets. Know in the main, the dominant emotion in the salons after the revolution was anxiety over how to restore order as quickly as possible. For the folks out in the streets, it’s not that at all. At least in the beginning, it continues to just be euphoria. It’s a revolution. We did it! Anything and everything is possible. The folks out in the street are often slow to catch on how much the elites in the salons want to limit the breadth and depth of the revolutionary outcome. Because remember, there was a prevailing unity built around a few shared simple ideas, like liberty, freedom, equality, bread, and land. In the wake of the revolution, the elites now stepping into power will continue to shout those same slogans and say, what we are doing now is fulfilling those promises. But those words always meant very different things, in the salon and in the streets. It will take days, weeks, months, and sometimes even years for the streets to realize that actually, we are not getting from this revolution what we thought we were getting. Everything on our list of grievances and our list of hopes has been dropped, while everything on your list of grievances and your list of hopes has been enshrined. Thus, the euphoria and optimism give way to anger and disappointment, and the seeds of the second wave of revolution are planted amidst the manure of unmet popular expectations.

But even had the elite revolutionaries of the salon say, you know what? Let’s advance the agenda of the lower classes first. After all, they provided the popular forces necessary to overthrow the old regime — you know, just, if they said that — We would still run into the entropy of victory because the people are not a monolith, and out in the streets there are many different kinds of people doing many different kinds of things. And even setting aside all The People from the people who don’t support the revolution or don’t care about the revolution, there are still many different people who make up The People. And so like on a very basic level, we have urban workers and rural peasants — they’re all a part of the popular masses, but that’s very different factions, very different classes. They all may be salt of the earth commoners, but they have very different expectations that are in fact often in direct conflict with each other. If we go talk to urban workers, what they want is cheap and plentiful bread, and in fact, a revolutionary policy they might support is sending armed cadres out into the countryside to requisition grain, to keep bread cheap and plentiful.

The peasants, meanwhile, hate all that. They absolutely hate it when armed people come around and take all their grain. What they really want is land, and to be paid more for their grain, and then to be left to their own devices. There’s also, of course, often a more conservative worldview out there in the villages, especially because the peasants in the villages are the peasants who stayed in the villages as opposed to the peasant who left the villages to go off in search of work elsewhere. So in those villages, we have people often rooted in old social traditions. They might be in favor of tossing out rich landlords and redistributing the land — they are, after all, hugely radical on that front — but in the smaller scale social order, in terms of husbands ruling wives and fathers ruling sons and the family structure and religion, they’re interested in keeping most of that intact. And so when it’s time for the revolution to pay off, things that are good for the urban worker wing of The People and things that are good for the rural peasant wing of The People are diametrically opposed, and will likely lead each side to conclude that they will have to fight the other side in order to get what they want.

So after the revolution is won, entropy is now entering the system along political lines and class lines: conservatives are looking to consolidate and hold, progressives are looking to change and advance. But hopping off the political axis of interest and the economic axis of interest, there is also, in any revolution, geographic divides. Once the fundamental binding ties of a former political regime are broken, everything can be called into question, especially when we are talking about revolutions that involve independence or national self determination. So we see this in South America, where Gran Colombia suddenly becomes Venezuela and Ecuador and Columbia. In the British colonies, remember, there’s Virginia and Massachusetts and South Carolina. Are these actually going to be bound together in a new polity after the overthrow of the old polity? Russia was a multinational empire. Overthrowing Tsar Nicholas meant we now have Ukrainians and Lithuanians and Georgians, who are thinking to themselves, hey, maybe Ukrainians and Lithuanians and Georgians ought to be in charge of Ukraine, Lithuania, and Georgia.

Who the us over here is and who the them over there is changes overnight with an ancien regime is overthrown, especially if it involves the expulsion of a foreign imperial power. Everyone’s brain immediately remaps everything and suddenly over here and over take on different meanings. So when they all rose up in independence, the people of Gran Colombia viewed themselves as separate and different and unified against Spain. But once Spain is gone, we’re Venezuelans and Ecuadorians and Colombians. These geographic divisions then feed into one of the great post-revolutionary political questions: where will power now reside? Should it be centralized and run from a large urban capital, or devolved down to the local level? This is that age old centralist/federalist divide. Because there will be those who think it vital and necessary to have a centralized authority, and in fact, maybe consider the goal of the revolution to be increasing the centralized power of any new sovereign. On the other side, there will be people who think the whole point of the revolution was to break such centralized power and let local regions and states and cities call their own shots. After the revolution, does Léon have to take orders from Paris? Do Bostonians have to take orders from Virginians? Do the Russians have to rule Ukraine?

Now, the interesting thing about all these political and economic and geographic divisions that are gonna lead to the entropy of victory is that it’s very difficult to map where any single individual is going to wind up on the post-revolutionary ideological spectrum. So some Virginia planters like George Washington and James Madison are gonna become political centralists, whereas other Virginia planters like Patrick Henry and George Mason are gonna become staunch federalists. When we look at Russian SRs, Bolsheviks, and Mensheviks through the lens of socioeconomic class, it’s nearly impossible to distinguish one from the other. They all look, sound, and dress the same. They all live in the same kind of places, they all had the same level of education, they all basically read the same books and do the same kinds of work, and yet, all of them are gonna want to kill each other. In the French Revolution, Jacobins and Girondins wind up at each other’s throats even though there’s no way socioeconomically to distinguish them. And then up in the upper classes, how does a Lafayette, who’s a wealthy noble, or a Jacque Laffite, who’s a rich banker, wind up in the Party of Movement after the revolution of 1830, whereas a simple bourgeois intellectual like Francois Guizot winds up in the Party of Resistance? Why in the case of post-tsarist Russia does one Georgian leader think that Georgia should be truly independent in this new thing called the USSR while another thinks that the USSR should be unified, and ruled centrally from Moscow?

These questions can’t be explained by where people grew up or what their socioeconomic class is. A lot of it comes down to individual biography, character, and choices. So we must admit that at a certain point, individual power and influences come into play. Material interests and even political ideology is always mixed in with interpersonal conflict and ambition, where it’s not solely about political or ideological differences between Mensheviks and and Bolsheviks and SRs, or the Girondins and the Mountain, but more about which people are actually going to be in power. Who is going to get to be the minister of what? Which faction is going to enjoy the perk of making final decisions? This stuff does matter, especially if you really don’t like somebody on like a personal level and don’t want them to have power. Those kinds of interpersonal conflicts can actually precede ideological or geographic or religious or class considerations — those all become post hoc justifications. People sometimes just don’t like each other. A lot of Mensheviks became Mensheviks because they didn’t like Lenin. Now, I took pains during the Russian Revolutionary series to establish that there are in fact political differences between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, but a lot of it was personality, not principle.

So the entropy of victory sets in as soon as victory is won. Well, okay, okay, it might take several hours. But it sets in so quickly because while it’s easy to agree that the great idiot needs to go — that he was an obstacle to all our hopes and dreams — it’s much harder to agree on what happens next, because there are so many competing hopes and dreams out there. And the entropy of victory sets us up for what we’re gonna talk about next week, because divisions among the various revolutionary factions are absolutely going to provide the opportunity conservative reactionaries out there in the tall grass have been waiting for, to undo the revolution. And that means civil war. The divisions between the revolutionaries are also going to inform, and be informed by, our new post-revolutionary regimes relations with their foreign neighbors.

So next week we’re gonna be talking about war. Because war always seems to follow pretty hot on the heels of revolution: international wars with neighboring powers, civil wars between revolutionaries and reactionaries, civil wars between competing revolutionary factions. It’s extremely difficult, though not impossible, to get through a revolution without a war.

And it is extremely difficult for that war to not spin around and further radicalize the revolution.

 

 

 

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Appendix 6: Victory and Defeat

So the revolution has come. All potential compromises, accommodations, and settlements have been spurned. All off-ramps have been missed. Not only has the potential revolutionary energy stoked by years of resistance and frustration to the sovereign grown to uncontainable levels, but the trigger has now been pulled, turning all that potential energy into kinetic energy. Elites are now rushing through palace corridors and hosting feverish meetings in their salons. Regular people are pouring out into the streets, erecting barricades, tossing pavement stones, blockading neighborhoods, signing up for revolutionary armies.

These are the heady days when no one really knows what happened, what’s happening or what’s going to happen. Will the regime emerge from this chaotic moment dead or alive? It’s high impossible to predict. But as I said last week, one of the main things that the revolutionary trigger does, is open the final contest to decide the fate of the regime, whether the sovereign still holds a preponderance of force. Who wins and who loses this brute force determines the fate of the regime and the revolution. Now we know from any game, fight, or sporting match, that not only does one side win because of the things the winner did right — their superior talent and strategies and tactics — but also because of the things the loser did wrong — their inferior talent and strategies and tactics. The narrative of any sporting match can be framed as a story of what the winning side did, right, or a story about what the losing side did wrong, but always, always, always, it’s a mix of the two.

So as we discuss this final revolutionary contest, we must talk on the one hand about the superiority of the forces rising up, as well as the inferiority of the forces falling down.

Now, on the rising upside, we have what I have variously described as a cross-class alliance, a revolutionary coalition, and a full blown shadow society. By that I mean that every socioeconomic level, branch, category, whatever, has a revolutionary wing from the uppermost reaches of the ruling class on down to the lowest peasants and workers. In between, there will be revolutionary lawyers, students, shopkeepers, administrators, merchants, clergy artists, journalists, clerks, artisans, servants, bankers, professors — all of them springing into action to advance the revolutionary cause in their specific socioeconomic niche. At the very tippy top of this vast cross-class revolutionary coalition, we might find a dissident member of the royal family ready to replace their cousin on the throne.

They might be surrounded by rich, educated, influential supporters, each of whom are ready to take over the ministry of finance or justice or the interior. This then extends on down the line through merchants and businessmen aiming for profitable new arrangements, through middle class professionals ready to take over the administrative functions of the state, young students and clerks ready to staff those mid-level and lower level functionaries, on down to workers wanting to force changes in their factories and peasants redefining the terms of land ownership and authority in their home villages.

Now, at every level of this cross-class coalition, people are making risk/reward calculations. Now I am not myself a huge proponent of rational choice theory, where people are sitting down and gaming out scenarios and making purely logical choices based off of like mathematical equations. I don’t think humans actually work that way, but risk/reward calculations are present, they are doing some of the work. If you’re watching a society advance through all these stages of disequilibrium to shocks to the system and then reach this trigger point, it might still seem like there’s a very low likelihood of revolutionary success, and no real personal advantage or reward to be won. This is a high risk, low reward scenario — and in that case, you’ll probably sit it out. But if you look around at your society and decide, hey, there’s a good chance of revolutionary success and enormous possible rewards and advantages to be won — this is a low risk, high reward scenario and you might say, yeah, okay, let’s go for it.

But this is a calculation that’s made by various members of the cross-class coalition each in their own way and each for their own reasons. Because it is not the case that everyone in this coalition has the same interests, far from it. Our proverbial Duc d’Orléans, that royal cousin waiting in the wings is thinking about how wonderful it will be to sit on the throne to decide lofty matters of state and play the great game of international diplomacy, to have everyone bow to you while you bow to literally no one.

These are not the same interests as, oh, let’s say a rural peasant, who is mostly interested in getting a little bit more land. Or the interests of the urban worker, who’s mostly interested in higher wages and cheaper bread. Or the interests of middle class professionals, often eyeing possible material gains, yes, but mostly interested in gaining access to political power and influence they have likely been denied previously. They want to participate, to have a real voice in politics.

And when you look at all these interests, they’re often quite contradictory. The members of the breakaway faction of the ruling class want to wield power, not share it with social inferiors. The land for the peasants, where’s it gonna come from? Well, probably from the real estate portfolios of the ruling class families, some of whom might be in that revolutionary coalition. Now there’s of course always gonna be tension between urban workers who want to pay less for bread, and rural peasants who want to be paid more for their grain.

So if this coalition has such divergent interests, and everyone’s risk/reward calculation is based on wildly different factors, how are they even united?

Well, I think there are several unifying categories. There might be geographic ties, where we over here see the sovereign as representing them over there. This is obviously a huge factor in fights over things like independence and national self-determination. All of those other conflicting interests are papered over by shared geographic proximity or ethnic identity, or the sovereign is seen as a fundamentally foreign object they can all get together to remove.

This can also take on a religious tone, as religious differences often follow geographic and ethnic contours, so that religious doctrines and belief become binding touchstones for the revolutionary coalition against those heretics over there. Religious doctrines can also be seen as a subset of one of the major unifying ties, just abstract principles and ideas, which often spring from those new ideas that help fuel all the political disequilibrium in the first place. We’ve talked through so many late 18th century and early 19th century revolutions we know that things like liberty and equality, as words, as concepts and slogans exert a major unifying effect. Now, these ideas need to be vague enough and universal enough that everyone can feed their specific interests through that abstract slogan. So, both the banker and the worker, the landlord and the peasant, might say that they are fighting for liberty or equality while they are talking about very different things.

But what I really think brings them all together, really fuses them into a single force capable of overthrowing the regime, is the fundamental belief that the sovereign is an obstacle. The sovereign is an obstacle that has to be removed. Whatever it is you want: liberty, equality bread, land, power, respect, wealth, the sovereign stands in the way. It is an obstacle. This takes us back to those two big things causing equilibrium: resistance and frustration. The sovereign has either been doing things we hate or the sovereign has not been doing things we want, and we have all now, all of us, each in our own ways, decided that the only option left is removing the sovereign.

People at every rank and class have come to believe that the main thing preventing them from having all the things they want… is the sovereign. It is an obstacle that must be removed, and everyone agrees on that.

Now, one interesting point I want to make before moving on is that I have not found it to be the case that this initial revolutionary coalition is fused together by a single charismatic leader. Now, I’m speaking specifically here of the first revolutionary wave that rises up and overthrows the ancien regime. With one notable exception, the cross-class revolutionary coalition will have leaders — some of them may even enjoy a popular following — but they are invariably just one among many. First wave revolutionary coalitions have many different leaders, most of whom no one has ever heard of. The major charismatic leaders who do become unifying revolutionary figures: Cromwell, Washington, Louverture, Bolivar, [???], Lenin — they make their names after the revolution has started. They do not make the revolution with their names. Even someone like Washington, as unifying a charismatic revolutionary leaders we’re likely to find, was not the one out there leading the people of New England into armed revolt in 1775. The people of Massachusetts were not shouting “Long live Washington,” at Lexington and Concord; they’d probably never even heard of a guy.

Now, the notable exception here is the role Francisco Madero played in the Mexican Revolution. Not that Madero himself was such a charismatic revolutionary leader, that he commanded unrivaled authority in the revolutionary coalition, because he really did not — but given the particulars of the Mexican Revolution, emerging as it did from a rigged presidential election, Madero became a symbol. His name and face were absolutely a unifying element to the Mexican Revolution. People were absolutely shouting “Viva Madero!” as they rode off into battle.

So that brings us to the fact that people are now riding out into battle. The great physical challenge to the sovereign has been launched, the contest over who has a preponderance of force has begun. This means that the cross-class revolutionary coalition must be able to produce armed forces capable of taking on the sovereign’s armed forces. There must be enough willing volunteers to risk not just their socioeconomic position, but to risk their lives. And by virtue of the very nature of clashes like this, that means that they must come overwhelmingly from that popular force now exploding into the streets, what has been unleashed by the trigger, the popular forces that make the revolution a true revolution.

These armed forces can take several different victorious forms depending on the needs of each revolution. They can be whole, regularized armies: the New Model Army, the Continental Army, Madero’s Army of the North. They can be volunteer citizen militia groups, the most famous of these being the French National Guard. And as we saw, the National Guard was such a decisive force that you could basically predict how a revolution would go based on the loyalty of the National Guard. There are also semi-organized but mostly irregular forces operating on their own revolutionary initiative, neighborhood groups, building barricades, and watching out for their own quarter. This probably also includes political parties, who organize inside of existing military structures in the interests of fermenting mutiny and unrest. We’ve seen that in groups from the Levelers to the Bolsheviks. And then finally, we have our good old fashioned unorganized mobs: protestors, demonstrators, and marchers appearing so spontaneously and in such huge numbers that the regime simply cannot contend with them.

The women marching on Versailles in October 1789, the women marching through Petrograd in February 1917. Whatever form they take, however organized they are, whatever weapons they have, all of these forces serve the same function. They challenge the sovereign’s claim to a preponderance of force, and that means that they are the force that will make or break the revolution. It’s why the popular element is so important. No popular element, no force strong enough to openly challenge the regime’s forces.

But, like, how can the sovereign possibly lose this contest? They are the sovereign. They control the army and the navy. They command the resources of the entire polity. All existing social hierarchies, economic production, chains of command, terminate with them. Their word is law, and it’s been that way for, like, decades. The sovereign’s ability to project physical force inside of their polity is quite literally unrivaled, it’s why they’re the sovereign. So how on earth can they possibly lose?

Well, again, first things first, they usually don’t. That’s why the number of failed revolutions and revolts, insurrections, uprisings, rebellions, et cetera, far outnumber the successful ones. But when we come across a very specific set of political, economic, and social circumstances, and those circumstances are presided over by one of our very special great idiots of history, a sovereign can lose, and then does lose.

The reason they lose is that while the ties binding the forces of revolution grow stronger and wider, the ties binding supporters of the sovereign wither and disintegrate. So, just as the revolutionary cross-class coalition coalesces around a few lofty abstractions and the fundamental belief that the sovereign is a obstacle to peace, land, justice, equality, bread, and/or freedom, the corresponding cross-class alliance that has propped up the regime all these years is now breaking apart. By the time the final trigger is pulled, years of resistance or frustration have already pushed former supporters into the ranks of either the opposition — or more probably, the ranks of the apolitical dropouts. And just as with the revolutionary coalition, I’m talking about people up and down the socioeconomic line, lawyers, journalists, peasants, workers, bankers, clerks, servants, a bunch of people who had previously defended the regime and supported the regime, each in their own way, and each in their own niche, now start to passively go quiet. They start to care a little bit less, or they start actively defecting to the revolution.

Once the trigger is pulled, push is truly coming to shove, and the alliance that has long supported the sovereign runs its own risk and reward scenarios to decide what they should do. And since we are inevitably dealing with a uniquely incompetent, weak, and ineffective sovereign, would-be supporters often failed to see the advantage of continuing to be die hard supporters, because it means they will likely die. Hard.

Now, do all of these supporters have the same interests? No, of course not. Just as with the revolutionary coalition, they range from a sovereign trying to hold onto the throne, all the power and influence and wealth that comes with it, sitting adjacent to ministers, advisors, and high ranking officials who are all about to lose their august status. There are gonna be business interests connected to the existing regime who will suffer under a different regime. But there are also like, bakers, with a contract to supply a palace; prosecutors who will lose their positions; maybe a customs official who will be replaced. Even village elders who have a pretty nice plot of land and good standing in the local community might tend to prefer the present sovereign.

There are also other abstractions out there binding them together, things like tradition, duty, obedience. Maybe religious principles are coming into play that hold supporters together against the rising revolutionary tide.

But here’s the problem: those binding abstractions and those individual interests are rapidly losing their potency. And even if that doesn’t push them into the revolutionary ranks, It at least pushes them out of active support for the regime. It makes them willing to shrug their shoulders and acquiesce to the final outcome of the contest without too much fuss one way or the other.

So the moral, economic, and political ties binding together, the sovereign’s coalition of supporters is unraveling. But even still, right up to the moment that the trigger is pulled, the sovereign is still a mighty force. The sheer number of rifles, pistols, swords, cannons and bayonets they command invariably dwarfs anything the revolutionaries can put into the field. I mean, look, we’re talking about the entire British army and Royal Navy against whatever the colonials are trying to scramble together. The French Army against protestors roaming angrily around Paris? The tsar’s combined military forces presently organized to wage a world war against a few malcontents in Petrograd and Moscow? And this is not even counting yet their police forces, elite bodyguards, secret services, and Black Hundred style reactionary paramilitary groups, all of whom are well practiced in the bashing of heads.

On paper, the balance of forces is nowhere near balanced. The sovereign commands so much more. More men, more weapons, more munitions, more resources, more everything. So how can this on paper dominance fail so spectacularly?

Well, it fails thanks to a corrosive trifecta called loss of faith, loss of trust, and the mother of them all, loss of will.

Now, remember, the deal here is that the sovereign, at the moment, is uniquely weak and incompetent. That’s why they’re being taken out. That’s why the revolution is gonna succeed. And people inside the regime’s,armed forces can sense that weakness, they can sense that incompetence. So they begin to lose faith. This includes those who might in nearly any other circumstance support the regime, or who reluctantly still support the regime even though their hearts are not really into it anymore. So, rank and file soldiers, non-commissioned officers, senior officers and staff, on up to commanders in chief, they’ve all been watching political events with growing dismay and disillusionment. And they are rapidly losing faith in the sovereign. And I often think here of General de Marmont, from the Revolution of 1830, who read the Four Ordinances with shock and dismay, and said to a friend, “Well, I suppose I’m obliged to now go get killed for them.” And then he was in fact ordered to lead the armed repression of Paris, even though he wanted nothing to do with the Four Ordinances and thought it was totally stupid. He did his duty, and people like General de Marmont may be instinctively and temperamentally supportive of the sovereign, but their own mounting exasperation with the sovereign’s inability to manage events might start to produce in them this thought:

I’m a professional soldier, loyal to the sovereign of my kingdom, empire, or republic, whoever that may be.

Once senior officers start to lose faith in the individual presently on the throne, and realize that their professional loyalties are merely to the abstract concept of the sovereign, and that they owe their faith and fidelity to that rather than the present great idiot sitting on the throne, it’s pretty bad news for the great idiot presently sitting on the throne.

Now, even if they have not completely lost faith, and they are inclined to defend the present great idiot at all costs, they may yet be doused with another corrosive acid, and that is loss of trust. And where loss of faith is looking up at the sovereign, loss of trust is looking down at the rank and file. We’ve seen this repeatedly over the course of the podcast. Sure, there are battalions of soldiers mustered under arms and ready to be deployed, but what happens if we actually deploy them? So many times we’ve seen loyal officers assessing the morale of their soldiers and reporting back up the chain of command, uh, if I order them to fire on the people, it’s entirely likely they will mutiny me and shoot me instead. It’s the men, sir. They can’t be trusted.

And this is often what truly paralyzes the sovereign’s ability to deploy their overwhelming force: when they cannot be sure that those forces won’t immediately defect. And this is not theoretical, we saw it happen a bunch of times, where protesting citizens are on one side of a street and soldiers are raid against them on the other side of the street and then they just physically switch sides, they like literally cross the street. And if you don’t trust your soldiers to stay loyal, kill who you’ve ordered them to kill, well, it turns out your on paper strength does not really exist in real life.

And that brings us to the moment of defeat for the sovereign. And this is when their will disappears.

Now, this is not an original idea, this focus on will, and it’s a point I’ve so often seen and become so attached to that I actually wrote about it in Hero of Two Worlds when I got to the point when the British we’re gonna call it quits after Yorktown and I figure rather than reinvent the wheel, I’m just gonna quote this paragraph, which I wrote to open up chapter nine:

War is a content of wills. Weapons, armies, fleets, and fortresses are simply the means by which one breaks the will of their enemy. A generation hence, Clausewitz would write war has three broad objectives: “Destroying the enemy’s armed forces; occupying their country; and breaking their will to continue the struggle.” But the first two are merely the means by which one achieves the third, the only true goal of war — breaking the enemy’s will to continue the struggle. Victory and defeat are subjective psychological events, not objective material conditions. If the enemy’s will is broken, a million canons will sit idle. But if their will is not broken, it does not matter if they are disarmed or occupied. It does not matter how naked and defenseless they stand. They will simply kneel down, pick up a rock and throw it.

And so the final moment of truth comes for our beleaguered and besieged sovereigns. Not when all their forces have been wiped out, but when their will to fight on dissolves. Maybe they are told that, thanks to a loss of faith or a loss of trust, further action is impossible. Maybe they themselves don’t want to commit mass murder to stay in power. Maybe their closest friends and advisors are saying, sire, it’s, it’s over. It’s time to sign this piece of paper announcing to the world that it’s over, that you, the obstacle are going away. And even if there are still armies to be deployed, money to be raised, plans to be drawn up… there’s simply no more will left to do any of that.

Now, in terms of the revolutions that we have covered, the period between the trigger being pulled and the sovereign’s will disappearing, can take anywhere from several days, to several months to many, many years. This contest over the preponderance of force, that final conflict, goes on for as long as the sovereign can maintain it. Charles X in 1830 and Louis Philippe in 1848? They gave up and abdicated the throne in a matter of days. Tsar Nicholas held out for just over a week, from late February to early March 1917. Porfirio Diaz waged a war against Madero’s army for several months before calling it quits in May of 1911 and sailing into exile.

But in other revolutions, this period takes years and years. Louis XVI salvaged his position by coming to Paris within days of the Fall of the Bastille and saying, yes, yes, I accept it all. No more fighting. I am now your citizen king. But it wasn’t until August of 1792 that he really gave up. The contest between Crown and Parliament and the American colonies lasted from the trigger in April of 1775 to Cornwallis’s defeat in October 1781, and even then, it was several more years before it was clear that hostilities would not resume. The wars of Spanish American Independence continued off and on for more than a decade before the Spanish sovereign claiming authority over the Americas finally called it quits. And our old good friend King Charles I of England, Scotland, and Ireland? Well, he never gave up. He never acknowledged defeat, right until the moment they chopped his head off.

The sovereign finally giving up, losing their will to fight, admitting they have lost the contest over who controls a preponderance of force, marks the victory for the forces of revolution. It sets off a wave of euphoria up and down the line. People are ecstatic. The great obstacle has now been removed. All their dreams can come true.

Except, what happens next?

With the unifying obstacle removed, the conflicting, competing, and contradictory interests of all the people in that cross-class revolutionary coalition are exposed for all to see, and we all know what happens after that.

Say it with me now: the entropy of victory.

 

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Appendix 5: the Triggers

So far in the appendices, we’ve taken our once successful sovereign regimes to the precipice of revolution. About ten, fifteen, maybe twenty odd years before the revolution, destabilizing disequilibrium enters the picture, caused by an increasing inability of the sovereign to balance competing political interests in the ruling class, or manage the prevailing and ever changing socioeconomic conditions.

Then, two to three years or so before the revolution breaks out, this unstable system gets hit with a shock that hardens political divisions, draws sharp battlelines, and makes peaceful reconciliation increasingly impossible. This was especially true for those challenging the regime — not just because they were afraid of what might happen if they backed down, but because they now saw the sovereign as weak, incompetent, and ineffective. They saw how the sovereign behaved to all these crises and shocks and deemed them uniquely vulnerable to attack. So failing to press their advantage would be an unforgivably missed opportunity. And so everyone pushed on towards the precipice.

And today, we are gonna talk about the moment everyone plunges over the edge together. The thing that takes all of this from potential revolutionary energy to kinetic revolutionary energy, and that is: the triggers.

Now, before we get into this, let’s remind ourselves that nothing we have talked about so far guarantees a revolution. In fact, even at this late hour, no revolution necessarily follows from any of the conditions we’ve described so far. A sovereign can manage its political equilibrium in perpetuity. If disequilibrium enters the picture, the sovereign can regain its footing. It can change, adapt and reform. Even after the shock to the system has come around, there’s no guarantee that the crisis will meet a dramatic revolutionary trigger.

More than anything else, revolutions are rare. They’re so rare, they’re super rare. And that’s partly why they’re so fascinating, because they are so uncommon. The uncommon draws our attention. The common place does not. So most of the time the volcano, gurgles and shakes, but ultimately does not erupt. The logic is never, if there is potential revolutionary energy, then there will ultimately be kinetic revolutionary energy. We must always, always, always keep this in mind. If you’re a gambler and you would like to make a fortune, always bet against revolution. Besides if you lose that bet and a revolution happens, maybe the revolution will wipe out all your debts. So either way you can’t lose.

But obviously we are here talking about the times revolutions did break out, when all the conditions were ripe and a trigger kicked that energy from potential to kinetic. So I wanna start today by running quickly through the trigger points as I see them through all of our various revolutions, and then offer some thoughts on what we see. Now what’s interesting about a revolutionary trigger is that it’s simultaneously only obvious in retrospect — because at the time, it’s nearly impossible to tell if this is just a dramatic event or if it’s a revolutionary trigger. We won’t know until we know the future. But at the same time, the trigger also needs to have enough dramatic impact in the moment that people recognize it at the time as a big deal. Something important that has happened.

So nearly all the triggers we’ll talk about today were recognized as such pretty quickly, even if nobody planned for them to happen, and they just sort of blew up at random. Because that’s been a running theme of the show: that certain conditions prevail, that many people are actively pushing towards a revolution, but when the deal actually goes down, almost no one predicts or plans the actual, literal trigger in advance. They’re not planned. They’re simply capitalized upon by opportunistic improvisation. Revolutions are rarely scripted in advance. They are almost always adlibbed.

So as we go through what I think of as the triggers of the revolutions that we’ve covered so far in the show, your mileage may vary. You might disagree with me here and there. But I am gonna offer what my read is on all of these events.

So in the English Revolution, for example, we have this 1639 to 1641 crisis period, after this shock to the system that was the Bishop’s War. There’s the Short Parliament, the impeachment of William Laud, the trial and execution of Stratford, the rebellion in Ireland — which I actually referred to in the podcast specifically as the direct trigger of the civil war.

But I think the even more direct trigger was when King Charles showed up at Parliament on January the fourth, 1642, to arrest the five members. This attempted usurpation of parliamentary rights sparked outrage in the city of London. Students, apprentices, journeymen, and clerks all took to the streets in the days that followed, creating such a tumult that King Charles and his family had to secretly flee the city on January 10th. And this is when things went from confrontation to revolution. The sovereign was driven from his capital, leading to parliament’s militia ordinance, which gave them the right to raise armed forces without the need to consult their runaway king, and that directly set up the civil war. Charles himself, as we know, would not return to London until he himself faced trial and execution.

Now, the trigger for the American Revolution is obviously the shot heard round the world, the battles of Lexington and Concord. This is famous, we made it famous, it’s almost impossible to disentangle ourselves from it. Though it is worth mentioning that the battle of Lexington and Concord was actually the fourth time British regulars had gone out to secure colonial munition. There was the Powder Alarm around Boston in September, 1774; then again in Portmouth in December, 1774; then Salem in February, 1775; and only then do we come to the events in Lexington and Concord in April of 1775. It’s also worth noting that just five days later there was a thing called the Gunpowder Incident down in Williamsburg, Virginia, pitting Lord Dunmore against a militia raised by Patrick Henry.

So, why was Lexington and Concord the trigger, and all those other things. Just things that happened? Who knows? That’s just the way things go.

Now in the French Revolution, it’s also impossible to disentangle ourselves from the cataclysmic, earth-shattering Fall of the Bastille in July 1789. That is the traditional, historical, dramatic beginning of the French Revolution, even if a bunch of stuff leading up to that moment is also a part of the French Revolution. But the Fall of the Bastille was not really the trigger, was it? The trigger came three days earlier, when Louis XVI fired Controller-General Jacques Necker. That’s what set off all that decisive unrest in Paris, as the Parisians believed Necker’s dismissal was a prelude to the king shuttering the National Assembly and ordering regular soldiers to occupy Paris. So when the King made this incredibly provocative move, they rose up in defense of the revolution that had only just then gotten going.

Now, none of these first three triggers was premeditated; as I said, most things are improvised on the fly — just things happen, and people respond. Now, in future appendices, we’ll get to the second revolutionary waves that often fall with the first waves, and many of those involve triggers that are, in fact, planned in advance: the Insurrection of August the 10th, Lenin’s, October Revolution, et cetera, et cetera. But the first time we get to something that seems truly premeditated comes with the Haitian Revolution. It arrives in August of 1791 with the Bois Caïman ceremony. There was no immediate threat from the colonial authorities that drove the Haitian slaves into revolt. There was no especially provocative thing they did. The slaves just saw an opportunity, got together, and they did it.

Now with Spanish American Independence, it’s obviously going to be a vast array of events out there, because we’re talking about things that unfolded across an entire continent. But we can point to those first cries of freedom in 1808 and 1809 and 1810, mostly triggered by news from Spain that there was this new national junta that had taken over, and was inviting participation from the American component to the Spanish Empire. In the specific case of Grand Columbia, though we can turn to April 1810, when a small group from Spain arrived claiming to represent a regency council, that other people on board the same ship told the locals… didn’t really exist, it wasn’t actually a thing. And so within days, a large crowd was marching to confront the Captain General in Caracas. They demanded their own junta that would be answerable only to the king himself, who wasn’t actually in power. This got them all rolling downhill towards a formal declaration of independence by the end of the year.

Now in 1830, we have as clear a cut trigger as we’re ever likely to find: it’s King Charles X publishing the Four Ordinances on July the 26th, 1830, which immediately sets off a wave of popular resistance, the formation of barricades by the people of Paris, and the self-directed recall of the National Guard soon to be placed under the command of old General Lafayette. The trigger here is easy. It’s the Four Ordinances. And once again, the regime has done something provocative and people are rising up in response.

Now in 1848, we know the final crisis revolved around the Banquet Campaign, with Francois Guizot ordering the last and biggest of the planned banquets shuttered in February 1848. But though tumultuous unrest started immediately, on February the 22nd, it was not actually clear what the ultimate result of this unrest would be, nor how much, if anything, the regime would have to concede in order to restore order. And this was true until about 9:30 PM on February the 23rd, 1848, when French troops fired on Parisian demonstrators, leaving scores of dead and wounded. This moment was referred to then as the massacre of the Capucines, and it turned the crisis into a revolution. This is the moment. This is the trigger. Louis Philippe was riding outta Paris into exile by noon the very next day.

And as for the rest of Europe, as we talked about in Season Seven, when you make a circuit around the continent, you can basically track the beginning of each revolution in Germany or Italy or Austria or Hungary by how long it took to deliver news bulletins from Paris. That was the trigger there. What happened in Paris?

And the third time we see news bulletins serving as a revolutionary trigger — I think the first was Spanish America, the second was central and southern Europe in 1848 — is the collapse of the Second Empire into the Third Republic, which began as soon as news of the Battle of Sedan arrived. As with Spanish America, it was similarly triggered by news of a massive political vacuum opening up. The emperor had been captured, what are we gonna do now? Let’s declare another republic.

The trigger for the Paris Commune, on the other hand, was far more standard issue, where the regime does something and people mobilized to resist. And it’s in fact very similar to the American Revolution: the regime was trying to take the cannons of Paris the same way the British had tried to secure the powder of the American colonies, and the people rose up in opposition.

Now, the Mexican Revolution followed immediately on the heels of the clearly rigged presidential election of 1910. And while the arrest of Francisco Madero and thousands of his supporters in June 1910 probably planted some very fertile revolutionary seeds, the real final trigger that drove Madero and his inner circle into revolution was the National Congress ratifying the fraudulent election in October 1910. This is when they reelected Porfirio Díaz to the presidency and more provocatively made the hated Ramon Corral, vice president and de facto heir. This was the immediate trigger for Madero to publish the plan of San Luis Potosi and raise a revolutionary army in the north.

Now, the Russian Revolution of 1905 comes with one of the most infamous of all triggers, the events of Bloody Sunday. This is when the tsar’s troops fired on unarmed protestors and drove nearly all segments of Russian society into a vast revolutionary push to demand fundamental political reform.

But what’s kind of funny about the trigger of the revolution of 1917, one of the greatest revolutions in human history, is that it was not about the regime doing something provocative or some apocalyptic piece of news from abroad. It’s just that February 23rd, 1917 Petrograd was just… it was just a really nice day. It was warm and comfortable after a very long and very cold winter. So it’s weird to go through all these and then write down that the trigger for the 1917 revolution was just that it was a nice day, but that’s what happened. It’s why the protests surrounding International Women’s Day were able to roll so seamlessly into demonstrations from the Petrograd Garrison. It was so nice! Everybody wanted to be outside. History, man it’s crazy.

So these triggers all come in many shapes and sizes, but what nearly all of them have in common is that the sovereign made some kind of final, provocative move — this isn’t true of all of them, but it’s true of most of them. The trigger that triggers revolution is almost always the regime doing something. They try to take our guns, they try to take our rights, they try to take our lives. The initial trigger is pulled by the regime. And the explosion of kinetic revolutionary energy that bursts forth is almost always a defensive response to some kind of perceived threat or provocation.

But what is it that the trigger unleashes? What is the huge difference that comes from one of these triggers that makes the after so much different than the before? And what I would say is that the trigger unleashes popular forces, popular forces that come bursting onto the political scene like the Kool-Aid Man. Whether in the form of crowds or demonstrators or marchers or barricade builders, militias, or full blown organized armies, the political confrontations that have thus far been going on in the political society now have a large mass mobilization element that is uncontrolled and uncontrollable by the prevailing sovereign. That’s what the trigger triggers. That’s when an intractable political crisis becomes a full blown revolution: when the people get in on the action.

Now, no doubt, many of you out there listening have perhaps been surprised by the early centrality that I have placed on ruling class divisions as the vital precursor of revolutions rather than talking about popular upheavals, grassroots pressure, social movements, the kind of things that come from outside the narrow band of the ruling class. These popular forces come with agency and direction and purposes beyond anything the ruling class is interested in, so why not make them the center?

But my read on all these events that we’ve covered is the absent irreconcilable differences inside the ruling classes, those popular forces can’t make a revolution. They can only make a revolt or an insurrection or an uprising. A united ruling class is a very tough nut to crack. Unless that popular energy links with defecting elements from inside the ruling class who have the resources and authority and leverage necessary to actually make the thing happen, this revolt will most likely burn out or be suppressed. Only when the ruling class is divided and when a major faction is ready, willing and able, to ride popular waves rising up in the street, do we get a revolution.

Now, that said, there’s a crucial distinction then to be made the other way: if a breakaway group from inside the ruling class takes power without introducing any popular forces, it’s what? It’s probably just a coup d’etat. So, if popular uprisings without elite support are merely revolts and elite cliques trying to seize power without popular support is merely a coup, then I think that maybe we can sharpen our definition of a political revolution. I said that it was when “the existing structure of political power — how power is exercised, justified, legitimized, defended, and transferred — is displaced by a force originating beyond the bounds of that existing structure, and is replaced by something different.”

I should now add the notion that the force originating beyond the bounds of the existing structure has to have some sort of broad, popular element and some kind of element inside the ruling class. There needs to be a cross -class alliance for it to count as a revolution.

Now, it’s also important to qualify everything I’ve just said by saying that it is not in fact the case that there were no popular forces at work in our various revolutions prior to the final trigger being pulled. It’s not the case that the trigger necessarily brings people out into the street for the first time. Let’s remember here that there was plenty of mob violence and destruction of property in Boston. Carried out pretty routinely in the 1760s and 1770s. Before the Fall of the Bastille, France saw routine grain riots for years, to say nothing of things like the Day of the Tiles and the re own riots. We often see marches and protests and even violent clashes taking place prior to the great revolutionary trigger. What makes the trigger a trigger is that it fuses the interest of that breakaway clique in the ruling class and a popular force now backing them up. They are now pushing in the same direction towards a very irregular solution to their collective political problems.

But the entrance of a popular element does complete the cross-class alliance, I think is so vital to a successful revolution. We now have an armed force populated with individuals ready to fight against the prevailing regime and taking orders not from any institution of the old regime, but from their own new chain of command, which terminates with some pocket of the old ruling class now setting itself up as the new ruling class. The trigger locks into place what is effectively a whole shadow society, featuring everyone from wealthy elites to middle class professionals and intellectuals to artisans and workers and soldiers and peasants. All of them are now linked by a new set of binding ties, often defined by all those new ideas that we talked about, which are now floating around out there. This shadow society is going to try to displace the old society.

Another thing we have to mention when we’re talking about all this stuff is that though a popular force is now present and the people have now entered the picture, that does not mean that the people are a single united entity; nor that popular forces represented anything close to a majority of the inhabitants of whatever kingdom, empire or republic were talking about. The People — capital T capital P — are an invocable political concept, not a description of the sentiment of the overwhelming majority of the population. As you may have noticed, the popular forces unleashed by our various revolutionary triggers are often just a subset of the population of a single major city, like Boston or Paris or Petrograd. And even when the revolution spreads to include other regions and cities and villages, it’s not like the revolutionaries ever make up a true majority of the population. Not only are there plenty of people from rich elites on down to poor peasants who will be ready to uphold and defend the former regime, let’s face it: most people, most places, most of the time, are apolitical. They don’t care. They’re just trying to ride the thing out.

So, the kinetic revolutionary energy unleashed by the trigger, these popular forces, are never actually representative of the people everywhere united. That’s just never going to be a thing that happens. Nor is it even necessary. It’s just that so many of those people are in fact, willing to march out into the streets that the sovereign regime can no longer control events. That’s what we mean by popular forces entering the picture. They have become too big for the regime to control.

And that right there is the rub. That’s the point. That’s the crux of the thing. In the grand scheme of things, I think what’s really going on with these triggers, what they do, when they turn political confrontations in the ruling class into full blown revolutions, is that they open up the great challenge to the sovereign’s last bulwark of power: their preponderance of force. That preponderance of force is what kept everyone and everything in line. It’s what the sovereign has that practically makes it a sovereign, a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Until the revolutionary trigger gets pulled, this preponderance of force is not questioned, however consciously or tacitly, up until that trigger point. It’s taken for granted that the sovereign can deploy coercive physical force far beyond that which can be deployed by any rival or challenger.

But when the trigger is pulled, it breaks the last tie binding those old political arrangements, and it brings popular forces out into the street and sets up a physical contest for power. This is a challenge to the sovereign’s claim to a preponderance of force in the most direct way possible. It’s like challenging the reigning champ to a fight: if you think you are so strong, prove it. And as we’ve seen, our existing ancien regimes, our sovereigns, they’re weak. And incompetent. And ineffective. And it is not at all clear they will be able to prove it.

So next week, we’re gonna move on to the first stage of the actual bonafide revolution. No more disequilibrium or shocks to the system or triggers, but now a raw contest for power pitting a weak ineffectual but still powerful leviathan against a revolutionary force enjoying maximum .revolutionary unity.

Now, if you’ve paid even a little bit of attention in the podcast, you know that that period of maximum revolutionary unity is very fleeting. And never ever outlast the death of leviathan.

But before we go, I just wanna remind everybody that I am coming to Boston, Washington, DC and Newark live and in person on October 26th, 27th and 29th. I just got back from my run through Austin and San Francisco and Seattle, it went great. The shows are super fun and I love being out there. So please get your tickets while you can, and if you’re in Boston, Washington, DC, or Newark, I will see you there.

And if not, I will see you here next week for Appendix Six.

 

 

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Appendix 4: Shocks to the System

By the time you’re hearing this, I will already be on the road for a run of shows in Austin on October 3rd, San Francisco on October 4th and Seattle on October 5th. But if you want, you can still grab a ticket to any of those shows, and I think you should do that, because it’ll be a great time. I’m also looking forward to Boston, October 26th, Washington DC, October 27th, and Newark on October 29th.

Links to tickets for all of those shows are in the notes to this episode. Now, unfortunately, since last we spoke, the Chicago date has been postponed due to scheduling issues out of my hands. If you bought tickets to it already, thank you, thank you very much. Uh, the venue will be reaching out about what happens next. It’s beyond my control and purview, so unfortunately I’m not gonna be in Chicago, but all other places I will see you very, very soon.

Now, over the past few episodes, we have established that revolutions emerge from societies with sovereign regimes that were once successful. And not successful in the distant past, but successful quite recently, and quite recently successful because their political institutions modified and transformed with the times. It’s tough for a political apparatus to go even a single century without significant modification. Even something as apparently timeless as the British monarchy has only lasted all these centuries thanks to major changes to the monarchy — like, for example, then not having any real power anymore.

Here in the United States, we have this thing called the Constitution, which was ratified in 1788, but there have been, at minimum, like a half dozen major transformations to the prevailing constitutional regime over the past 230 odd years. I mean, the constitution that was ratified wasn’t even the Constitution that was in effect like 20 years later, they were already amending the hell out of it, and it’s been continually shifting to fit the structure of American society ever since.

Now, as we’ve discussed, the stable equilibrium of successful regimes is always dynamic and full of conflict. Political rules, structures, expectations, evolve, grow, and shift constantly. No successful regime is successful because they are static. It’s always seeing organic replacement of members of its ruling class, and resultant changes in methods and objectives of statecraft as the political regime tends to be representative of and align with the prevailing productive forces. As those forces shift and transform, the state has to do the same, while always maintaining this little laundry list of things that needs to do: balance the interests inside the ruling class, maintain stable revenue streams to cover expenses, keep up credit worthiness in the eyes of the banking system, and always, always, always keep a preponderance of force over all other potential political challengers.

But the various regimes we’ve been dealing with, the regimes that become ancien regimes, stopped being able to navigate such social change for whatever reason. The balance between innovation and tradition falters. Disequilibrium enters the system. Larger conflicts open up among the rival conflicts of the ruling class. Ambitious elites outside the in-favor group grow larger and more confident and more active, as our ancien regimes generate either resistance to their innovations, or frustration with their lack of innovations. New ideas enter the picture: either wholly new concepts and ways of thinking, or new ways of framing old political conflicts in abstract and apocalyptic terms. And just to touch back on this, because Americans love telling a story about the glorious perpetual uniformity of our constitutional system stretching back to the days of the founders… I mean, there was a whole ass civil war in the middle of all this, and the entire constitutional structure had to be renegotiated on the battlefield because the former regime was unable to reconcile the differences of the American ruling class.

Now, today we’re gonna talk about the moment in the buildup to a revolution when a regime facing unstable disequilibrium is hit by a major shock to the system. This is not the trigger point that unleashes revolution, but a shock that moves all the pieces into a hardened, immovable place, such that a revolution doesn’t have to break out, but the odds have tipped so mightily in its favor that it kind of seems unavoidable. These big shocks to faltering systems reveal all the fault lines and ruptures and broken pieces which will lead through a few final acts of mismanagement, stupidity, luck, ambition, and desperation towards revolution.

And these shocks are not a quick thing that happened just before the trigger lights everything up. All the things we’re gonna talk about today precede that trigger point by like two or three years, a weirdly consistent number as I found as I went through all of this. Every revolution is different though, and so I believe it will be profitable to go through the specifics of each revolution we covered in the series to identify what the great shakes were that took disequilibrium to full blown revolutionary potential and then assess where we are at.

So the outbreak of the first English Civil War in 1642, what begins the English Revolution, was preceded three years earlier by the first of our system shocks: this is the Bishop’s War of 1639. This is when Charles attempted to create religious uniformity in his kingdoms by imposing the Anglican Book of Common Prayer on the Scots.

Charles, launching the Bishop’s War in 1639, is almost the platonic ideal of the Great Idiot move. Political disequilibrium had been rising during his years of personal rule, but if he just hadn’t gotten into anything that stretched the crown’s resources too thin or provoked too much passionate resistance, his personal rule could have gone on, like, indefinitely, But instead, he voluntarily plunged into a war that provoked hardened resistance on multiple fronts simultaneously: religion, politics, finances, ethnicity, nationality; all of these questions were opened up all at once. The Bishop’s War shocked the political system from disequilibrium into hardening polarization that also gave all of Charles’ enemies the point of leverage They needed to pursue their ambitions for power, and that was money. Charles needed money to prosecute the Bishop’s War, and he was gonna have to come to them for money. And to get that money he was gonna have to recall Parliament. And when they reconvened, they planned to make Parliament the arena of revolution. So 1642 is made possible by the system shock in 1639.

Now it’s a little harder with the American Revolution to pinpoint the exact shock that made conflicts over colonial administration following the Seven Years War truly unresolvable, the exact moment when colonial resistance to Crown and Parliament’s innovations became a true pre-revolutionary crisis. But if we don’t overthink it too much, one does tend to land on the showdown over the Tea Act of 1773, the resultant Boston Tea Party and Intolerable Acts. In response to these final shocks, rhetoric on both sides escalated in truly mutually exclusive directions. On one side of the Atlantic, there was the need to defend the principle of parliamentary supremacy, and on the other side of the Atlantic, the need to defend the sacred rights of Englishmen. And though it’s often not talked about quite as much as the closing of Boston and other onerous trade restrictions, uh, the Quebec Act is actually one of the major shocks, because it threatened Virginia planters like George Washington, who were speculating in Ohio land as much as the other parts of the Intolerable Acts affected the hooligans of Boston. So all those correspondence committees,pan-colonial coalition builders and active organization of the militias to defend the colonists from threats not just from below or from beyond but from above began to be taken very seriously, which set up the powder alarms of 1774 and 1775. But the final system shock to the American colonial regime came in May of 1773 with the Tea Act. It was, after all, extremely downhill from.

Now if the American Revolution is a bit nebulous about the precise moment of the system shock, the French Revolution can be drilled down to a very specific date. That date is August the eighth, 1786. This is the day Controller-General Calonne went to King Louis XVI and said, sir, we’re stony broke. We simply don’t have the money to pay our bills anymore. Opposition elements inside the French ruling class, particularly the rising Robe Nobility, had been resisting political, economic, and administrative reforms for a good fifteen years. But as awareness of the Crown’s financial distress circulated, they braced for what was sure to be the strongest push for those kinds of reforms yet, at a time when they had the best chance of resisting that push, because they wielded both the material resources and political rhetoric necessary to force a constitutional settlement on the Crown. And the response to the financial crisis — the desperation of the Crown, the ambition of the Robe Nobles and their incompatible rhetorical claims — drove France in to a political crisis that opened in the summer of 1786, just as a social crisis was breaking out that would snowball into 1789. But I don’t think that hail storms and bad harvests trigger the French Revolution absent the stunning shock that hit the system on August the eighth, 1780.

Now the Haitian Revolution was intimately tied to events in France, so much so that when we go looking for the pre-revolutionary shock, that would shatter the web of tension in Saint-Domingue, the answer is just… the French Revolution, As we saw repeatedly during the series on Haiti, events in Saint-Domingue were determined by the arrival of the latest news from France. The big whites of Saint-Domingue followed events in France closely, and when those events moved towards the Day of the Tiles in 1788, the subsequent call for the Estates-General, questions about what sort of representation the population of the colony should have broke out everywhere. The Big Whites started talking independence, talk that scared the hell outta the free people of color in the colony, as they knew full well that the Big Whites looked enviously at the young United States, which was a closed republic of landed white oligarchs defending slavery and answering only to themselves.

This created the conditions of an outright civil war between the Big Whites and the free people of color in the colony, as the free people of color could not and would not allow a Declaration of Independence in the name of racial apartheid to go through. These irreconcilable conflicts triggered by the French Revolution in 1789 — that’s the big shock here — made possible the real revolution that was set in motion in 1791, the slave insurrection. So you can almost say here that August the eighth, 1786 is doing double duty, because absent the French Revolution, there is no Haitian Revolution. At least, not the one we saw in our historical timeline.

Now, Spanish American Independence is very messy to explain because there’s multiple phases to those conflicts stretching out over like 25 years. But there was one big shock to the Spanish colonial empire in America, which as with Haiti, actually happened back in Europe. This is Napoleon’s invasion of Spain in 1807, which knocked off the Bourbon Monarchy and created absolute havoc in all Spanish jurisdictions. Up until that point, all the revolutionary hopes of people like Francisco de Miranda and young Simón Bolívar were proving hopelessly quixotic. The forces of prevailing order were simply too strong. But the catastrophic impact of the Napoleonic conquest in the Peninsular War so completely reshuffled the political alignments in the Americas that those dual axes of power we talked about, liberals against conservatives and centralists against federalists, saw each of those four factions come out about as strong as all the others. Now, events in Spanish America do not move in quick linear fashion towards revolutionary victory, but the shock of Napoleon opening up his bleeding ulcer in Spain in 1807 created the conditions against which potential revolutionary triggers could actually trigger a revolution. And one need only look at the spectacular failure of Miranda’s expedition as late as 1806 to see how important the Napoleonic invasion of 1807 was to the possibility of revolutionary action in Spanish America.

Now, when I went looking for the shock to the system of the French Revolution of 1830, I looked and I looked, and I was just striking out. Couldn’t find a war, not an economic crisis, not even really a financial crisis. There didn’t seem to be anything that looked like a great shock to the system the way that these things played out in other revolutions.

Until it dawned on me that the shock to the system came on September the 16th, 1824, and this is when Louis XVIII died and the Comte d’Artois ascended to the throne as King Charles X. The revolution of 1830 was so completely and thoroughly about Charles himself that his elevation to power was in and of itself the final shock to the Restoration Bourbons, a final shock that they didn’t survive. Now, the north star of his elder brother, Louie XVIII, had almost literally been maintained political equilibrium at all costs. It’s why Louis XVIII died with a crown on his head, and his brother did not. After Charles X came to power, France advanced rapidly towards disequilibrium and then revolution just simply by the very presence and behavior of Charles X. After he arrived, the incompatible and apocalyptic rhetoric on both sides of the political divide exploded in mutually exclusive directions by the late 1820s. Charles believed he was tasked with restoring a traditional order ordained by God; the liberals believed they had to defend the rights they had won through hard years of war and revolution and refused to give back. I’d venture to say that 1830 was likely the most avoidable of all the revolutions we’ve covered. Having even a slightly less combatively provocative monarch on the throne, the Kingdom of France sails through the summer of 1830 with nary a barricade in sight.

Now, one might argue that 1848 was just as avoidable, and indeed Francois Guizot’s reaction to the Banquet Campaign was an act of almost incomprehensible self-sabotage. But unlike 1830, Europe in 1848 had been laboring for a few years under a system shock caused by what we would often consider to be the traditional causes of modern revolution: economic and social upheavals tearing their inadequate political regimes asunder. I mean, the hungry forties were a thing. Crop failures and the potato famine led to a humanitarian crisis, which put pressure on the consumer economy, which triggered a business recession, which triggered worker layoffs and then, finally, that great split atom of revolutionary chaos, a financial crisis for the state, as tests to the credit-worthiness of the conservative regimes of Europe forced them to make concessions to those whose money they needed to survive. So the shock to the system that made 1848 possible arrived around 1846, with widespread crop failures and the cascading effects thereof.

Now, our series on the Paris Commune was really two revolutions in quick succession. The first was the overthrow of the Second Empire and the Declaration of the Third Republic, the other was the Revolt of Paris and the Declaration of the Commune. The political disequilibrium of the Second Empire had metastasized after Napoleon III’s run of success in the 1850s gave way to his run of failures in the 1860s. And even absent the Franco-Prussian War, the liberal opposition to Napoleon III was riding so high by the late 1860s that it’s kind of hard to not see France ending up with institutions that look an awful lot like the Third Republic one way or the other, whether there was a titular figurehead monarch or not. But history goes the way history goes, and the Franco-Prussian War did happen, and even though this particular shock did not proceed its revolution by years like all the other examples, the Franco-Prussian War is when the political dynamic changed so thoroughly that revolution became possible, and then probable, and then, an accomplished fact. So the Franco Prussian war is the shock to the system.

But the other revolution nested inside the overthrow of the Second Empire is the Paris Commune, and its intractable political conflict with leaders of the newly proclaimed Third Republic. This was rooted in the Siege of Paris; that was the shock. The experience of the Parisians during the siege, their isolation and estrangement from the rest of France, coupled with the not wholly unjustified belief that the rest of France was happily and purposefully sacrificing them to the Germans… it radicalized them, polarized relations between them and the leaders of the Third Republic, such that when the siege was lifted, there was very little common ground for anyone to stand on. There was very little common ground anyone wanted to stand on.

Now, of all our Great Idiots of History, I gotta say, I think Porfirio Díaz was the best of the worst. He was the least dumb idiot of them all. He was extremely gifted at creating and maintaining stable political equilibrium in Mexico. And in 19th century Mexico, that’s no mean feat. But by the time the 20th century rolled around, old Porfirio had lost his nimble edge after running into a question he would not answer, possibly because he could not answer: the question of who would succeed him in power. It was the succession question more than anything else that unraveled the Porfiriato, because with the political and economic and geographic factions of the Mexican ruling class balanced so delicately, the minute Díaz named a successor that represented one of those factions, all the others were going to be very angry. To say nothing of the possibility of naming a successor more popular than he was, which might result in his immediate overthrow — that’s why he stayed away from Bernardo Reyes. So Díaz stalled. He tilted this way, while leaning that way, and in the end got so focused on avoiding naming a successor who was too popular that he named Ramón Corral, who everyone hated, which turned out to be even worse. Then, as economic and social upheavals rocked Mexico in circumstances very similar to 1848, Diaz himself dropped the final shock into the system: this is the Creelman Interview of 1908, where he said, “I won’t seek reelection in 1910.” This interview created a zero sum game contest for the presidency of 1910, pitting every Mexican faction against every other Mexican faction that none could afford to lose. And then Díaz changed his mind and ran for reelection in 1910, but by then, too many people were too committed to succeeding him to allow him to not be succeeded.

Now finally with the Russia series, we talked actually about two great revolutions: 1905 and 1917. And the shock to the system in both cases was disaster in foreign war. 1905 was caused by the massive unforced error that is the Russo-Japanese war, which very nicely brings us full circle: a full revolution, back to Charles I and the Bishop’s War. In both cases, we got a military conflict launched by the sovereign thanks to a mix of hubris, stupidity, and myopia that rebounds so spectacularly in their faces that it absolutely shatters the legitimate foundations of their respective regimes. Now, World War I wasn’t quite so specifically Nikki’s fault — though it is fun to remember that he got into World War I, partly because he believed it would undercut revolutionary threats that had been escalating prior to the war.

(Good job there, didn’t work.)

But in both 1905 and 1917, the shock of defeats, the mismanagement and the ineptitude, created huge anti-regime coalitions ranging from conservative nobles to bomb-throwing anarchists, all of whom were so frustrated by the government’s stupidity the disequilibrium actually passed into a new political equilibrium that coalesced outside the infinitesimally small inner circle of the tsar’s nuclear family. Like, there was a new kind of equilibrium that had emerged from World War I — it just excluded Nicholas. So very clearly in both 1905 and 1917, the expectation of quick military victory giving way to prolonged humiliations and defeat are what shocked an already unstable autocratic system into revolutionary upheaval.

Now, an observation we can make here after reviewing all of this is that almost no two revolutions faced identical shocks to their respective systems. There is very clearly not one weird trick for shocking an already shaky system into revolution.

Now, war is a pretty good culprit in all of this, we do see this repeatedly:in Stuart England and Romanov Russia, both proactively started wars that undid them. The Spanish American Empire also got shocked by a war, but they were invaded, conquered, and occupied by an outside force, that’s a very different thing. Now the Franco-Prussian war was more similar to Stuart England and Romanov Russia, and was absolutely the thing that loaded the Second Empire into its deathbed. So for those four revolutions, I think war really is kind of the answer.

But war is not always the answer. The French Revolution, the greatest revolution of them all, was not shocked by a war. There was no war to be had. It was all about a state financial crisis that was so bad the French couldn’t even do wars anymore. The American Revolution was meanwhile just about intolerable administrative reforms, it also had nothing to do with the war. The Haitian Revolution was triggered by the collapse of its home government, not unlike Spanish America, but in this case, it was not caused by invasion and occupation, just good old homegrown chaos. The Revolution of 1830 came down almost entirely to the conduct of the individual monarch, had nothing to do with anything but Charles. 1848 saw widespread economic and social distress that outstripped the ability of the European regimes to cope. And then finally, Porfirian Mexico followed 1848-style social problems with financial panics and recessions, but was mainly about a regime unable to answer the question of succession, which is the one time we really saw something like a succession crisis trigger a revolution in the whole series. Which surprises me because the history of Rome was so full of revolts and insurrections and revolutions surrounding succession time.

But whether the shock was military or economic or political, when it came, the effect was the same, and that’s the point. Competing factions in the ruling class polarized away from mere disequilibrium into something far more combative. Because in all the cases, from the Bishop’s war to World War I, the regime was exposed as weak, ineffectual, and incompetent, that’s what the shock does. There was now blood in the water and ambitious elites see a golden opportunity to grow their power and authority at the expense of the weak and ineffectual and incompetent sovereign. The shock to the system means that it now looks like a very good time to strike, the time to risk it all, rise up and attack, instead of meekly backing down in the face of the forces of traditional order. Because more than anything else, it was no longer clear that the sovereign held that all important preponderance of force. And critically, as we talked about last week, the breakaway faction of the ruling class looking to capitalize on the regime’s apparent weakness was now armed with new ideas and theories and phrases that elevated their struggle from mere self-interest up into the lofty realms of liberty and rights and justice.

They staked their lives in fortunes and sacred honor to the idea that they fought for more than just a refusal to pay new taxes. And when those kind of lofty motives, that lofty rhetoric, meet the opportunity created by a shock to the system and the awareness that the regime is now weak and ineffectual and incompetent, well, backing down becomes as unthinkable as standing up had once been.

Next week, the people are going to start standing up. And things are about to start getting out of hand. Appendix 5 is trigger time — when all the kindling has been laid, fuel has been piled up, and the sparks are flying all over the place. And there have been plenty of times in history where even at this late hour, even when an unstable regime has been hit by heavy shock to the system, revolution still does not break out because the final triggers don’t hit just right. But we’re not here to talk about any of those.

Because, what’s the fun in that?

 

This week’s episode is brought to you by Harry’s. Things have gotten hectic out there for everyone. Summer is over, fall is here, school, work, and responsibilities are all back, and they’ve all got us rushing from one thing to the next with barely time to breathe. I’ve been on tour for the last two weeks, and I’m barely in the same town for more than eighteen consecutive hours, but I carry all my Harry’s stuff with me, so it’s right there whenever I tip over from normal looking travel weariness to okay, you’re looking a bit haggard there, bud. So I love the shave I get from my Harry’s, especially at the price. Normally a low price like this means something rough and irritating that kind of makes me wish I hadn’t shaved at all, but with Harry’s, I’m always walking away feeling good, clean, and refreshed and perpetually happy I’m not paying outrageous premiums just to feel good, clean, and refreshed.

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And now a word from our sponsor, Better Help. We’ve all found ourselves in situations where we’ve got some problem, and rather than trying to find a solution to the problem, we just settle in and fixate on the problem, and then completely forget that we should probably be trying to solve the problem rather than just rehashing it in our minds over and over again. One of the things that a good therapist can do is help us shake out of that habit of fixating on our problems and think more clearly about what a solution could possibly be, because believe it or not. Finding a solution to the problem is better than just running it through your mind over and over again. And it’s the kind of thing that we don’t even realize we’re doing, but with help and therapy we can get a broader perspective to see the bigger picture, and work towards overcoming and solving and disentangling ourselves from our problems rather than just sitting around with them forever.

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~dramatic music swells~

Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Appendix Three: From Equilibrium to Disequilibrium

Before we get going, I wanna remind everybody that I’m doing ticketed live shows in October, and those dates are coming up fast. I will be talking about history and narrative building and how we situate ourselves in the world by telling historical stories about ourselves and our societies and the whole world. Historical storytelling is often treated as merely a sub genre of literature, when in point of fact it is literally the way humans organize their existence. I mean, think about it — anytime you start trying to describe your own individual life or explain the society you live in, you’re almost automatically doing historical storytelling. So I will have deep thoughts on all that, and then take any burning questions you might bring with you. It’s a great night, so I hope everybody will come to see me…

• October 3rd in Austin, Texas at the Paramount Theater,
• October 4th in San Francisco at the Palace of Fine Arts,
• October 5th in Seattle at Town Hall, and then
• October 25th in Chicago at the Vic Theater,
• October 26th, Boston at the Wilbur theater,
• October 27th in Washington, DC at the Lisner Auditorium, and then finally,
• October 29th in Newark, New Jersey at the New Jersey Performing Art Center.

Links to the tickets are in the show notes, and I can’t wait to see you all there.

Now last week, we talked about the prevailing sovereign regimes from which our revolutions emerge. Now, the first thing to note is that revolutions are rare. They are not common events. And it’s why when they happen, we are so gripped by them and so fascinated by them. Most regimes, most of the time, do as the British are so fond of saying they do, which is simply muddle along. Sovereign regimes are typically either just responsive enough to their perpetually fluctuating socioeconomic base to remain in power via slow evolutionary transformation, or they are so tyrannically repressive that they don’t care and they don’t have to care. They successfully eliminate the slightest hint of opposition. Now, obviously the most successful sovereigns do both. They both change with the times and prevent the formation of any true threat to their power. They preside over and maintain a stable political equilibrium where all possible threats or either modified, co-opted, or repressed. And last week we noted that all of our ancien regimes achieved this kind of stable equilibrium for decades before faltering, and then failing, and then falling.

And what we’re gonna talk about today is how the faltering begins, how a regime that has achieved stable equilibrium — politically and economically and socially — enters a period of disequilibrium. Because the kind of historical event that go down as revolutionary triggers, the kinds of things we’re gonna talk about next week, wouldn’t have happened, or they would not have mattered at all in a stable political regime. It is only because the system itself has become unstable, that it has entered an acute state of disequilibrium, that a revolution can be triggered at all. So, let’s talk about the onset of pre-revolutionary disequilibrium.

Now, the thing that I have seen repeatedly over all ten seasons of the podcast is that political disequilibrium begins at the top. There is an old saw about the fish rots from the head, and I found this to be broadly true. I think in all our revolutions the opportunity for a larger revolutionary event is made possible by a significant split inside the ruling class. This split inside the ruling class matters not just in moral or psychological terms, but in material terms. The members of the ruling class are members of the ruling class because they control significant resources. They are rich, they run businesses and industries and banks. They own large tracks of productive land. They have influence and authority inside key regional blocks. They have a massive roster of clients, individuals, families, whole regions, whose fortunes are tied to some particular individual or family or faction of the ruling class, such that if the deal goes down, and we wouldn’t be here if the deal wasn’t about to go down, these defecting members of the ruling class can call on all these resources to attack the sovereign rather than defend it. And once that call comes down from the defecting wing of the ruling class, that’s when popular forces enter the equation, popular forces that will turn elite conflicts into revolutionary events. Because those popular elements are initially suborned, approved, and encouraged by a significant faction of the ruling class.

Now we start with the rotting head, not because only elite conflict matters, or that popular pressures from outside the ruling class circles don’t play any role at all — of course there’s much much more going on — but a unified ruling class is a very tough nut to crack. As long as they’re all on the same side, it’s extremely difficult to get a revolution going. It’s also, obviously not the case that the popular forces called to enter the fray on behalf of this defecting wing of the ruling class have the same objectives as their alleged leaders. I’m just saying that time and again, the door to revolution is first opened by intractable conflicts inside the ruling class, from great English lords challenging King Charles I, to pretty much every member of the Russian court challenging Tsar Nicholas, the flood of revolution rises in the headwaters of the ruling class.

Also, just to make a quick point before we move on, the equilibrium that exists in the “stable regime” is by no means about uniform harmony. As we talked about last week, ruling class groups will always be divided between those in favor and those out of favor, and there’s always gonna be people grumbling not just about the individuals in power but the whole system. So I just wanna be clear here that the equilibrium we’ve been talking about is not about everyone in the ruling class agreeing with everyone else like they share a hive mind. But rather, there exists a stable balance of competing forces, who are jockeying for power and position and influence, such that those who might be inclined to overturn the whole system are marginalized and isolated.

So when we go looking for pre-revolutionary disequilibrium, the question is not, ooh, is there conflict among the elite, because there will always be conflict among the elite. It is more properly, is the sovereign able to keep these conflicts inside the regular bounds to the political order? Can the out of favor faction be placated sufficiently to prevent them from seeking irregular solutions to their grievances, and can the in favor faction be encouraged to not dig their heels in quite so much to ensure that such irregular solutions are not contemplated by their opponents.

Now, we might be tempted to think that disequilibrium enters the picture when a reformist opposition inside the ruling class challenges the prevailing status quo with greater and greater intensity, that this is all akin to a military siege where the reformist opposition wing launches an offensive against the conservative wing, who dig in for a stubborn defense. In this telling, all the initiative is coming from the reformist opposition. But true pre-revolutionary disequilibrium is a two to tango type situation. It’s not just that the forces of reform antagonized defenders of the status quo, it’s that the defenders of the status quo themselves display greater than usual inflexibility and intolerance. Their behavior is more provocative and inflammatory than it has been in the past. Now a stable regime can grapple — if not intelligently, than at least competently — with the ever evolving nature of the society they rule, such that calls for reform and innovation can be absorbed and responded to or outright coopted. Pre-revolutionary disequilibrium comes when responsible leaders in the regime, monarchs and ministers and advisors, become unresponsive and stubbornly antagonistic in new and novel ways. There needs to be pushing and pulling on both sides for equilibrium to collapse.

In the broadest and most abstract terms, what I think is going on in this push pull struggle that creates pre-revolutionary disequilibrium is a conflict between innovation and tradition, between the desire to create something new, and the desire to preserve something old. Now, again, we might tend to think, oh yes, this is easy to explain: opposition reformist forces from the out of favor wing of the ruling class launch broadsides against the defenders of the status quo. And indeed, this is often the case. There’s a prevailing system of government, an available litany of ideas and reforms and policies from which to draw critiques of the system, and a growing circle of influential people in the ruling class willing to provide those critiques. Then, when their initial reform efforts are thoroughly stymied by an unusually inflexible sovereign, they turn to our irregular solutions. This is the very familiar story of innovative outsiders challenging insiders, who are defending the traditional status quo.

But there’s a whole other side of the innovation/tradition dynamic. Because innovation is not the sole preserve of progressive reformers challenging the existing sovereign. In fact, as often as not, pre-revolutionary disequilibrium comes when the sovereign itself is the one introducing innovations to enhance and entrench its own power. Think of the buildup to the English Revolution, the decade of personal rule by King Charles I is almost entirely the story of Charles and his ministers introducing innovation after innovation to the existing political system. Innovations in taxation, in religion, in administration. Whatever else Charles was up to, it was not about a conservative defense of the traditional status quo.

So too with crown and parliament before the American Revolution. The story of post Seven Years War Colonial America is a story of new taxes, new regulationsions, and new rules being introduced into the political system by the sovereign. I actually found this dynamic to hold true for all the European colonies in the Americas after the Seven Years War: the British, the Spanish, the French, and the Dutch, the Portuguese — each in their own way introduced innovative reforms that triggered, with their very newness, resentment, anger, and combativeness from the colonial elite opposed to these intolerable threats to their traditional rights and privileges. So the innovation that upsets the political equilibrium and creates pre-revolutionary disequilibrium comes from the sovereign, on behalf of the sovereign.

What this means is that concepts like innovation and tradition do not really tell you much about the lay of the revolutionary land. Obviously, there are defenders of tradition who will turn out to be staunch conservatives and reactionaries, the Comte d’Artois and future King Charles X of France leaps immediately to mind, so too obviously Nicholas and Alexandra. These are people who you would never find on a list of revolutionary leaders who are obsessed with defending the traditional order.

But there are also defenders of tradition who do wind up on the list of revolutionary leaders. Quite a lot of them. One need look no further than the colonial elite of British North America in the 1760s and 1770s. They were mostly interested in stopping innovative encroachments to their traditional rights and privileges and ways of life. It was the powers that be that launched a campaign of change in reform and innovation, not those who would wind up taking up revolutionary arms.

We can also point to, say, the Robe Nobility of pre-Revolutionary France, who use their institutional control of the parliament to resist political, financial, and administrative innovations coming down from the crown — up to and including bringing in popular forces to support them.

But on the other hand, we do of course find the forces of innovation intuitively in the revolutionary camp. In cases like the European Revolutions of 1848 or Russia in 1905 and 1917, we find advocates of new things like constitutions and bills of rights and participatory parliament in the revolutionary camp after the deal goes down. But, as we just noted, we also find the forces of innovation, trying to reform the regime in order to save it. And we’re talking here about the Turgots and the Wittes and the Stolypins of the world. None of those guys were interested in overthrowing the regimes they served. Their innovations were about putting the sovereign on sound and sustainable footing. So whether or not you’re among the forces of innovation or the forces of tradition doesn’t really tell us much about where you’ll wind up when the revolution starts.

Now in this conflict between innovation and tradition, I have observed two recurrent models for how things unfold historically, and I cannot help but laugh because these two models are totally contradictory. Not only can I not report that there is just one model of the innovation versus tradition conflict that holds true in all revolutionary cases, but I cannot even say that the two models I found are remotely similar. They are in fact, complete opposites.

In one model, revolutionary disequilibrium comes when intolerable innovations from the regime provoke resistance from a significant faction of the ruling class, and in the other model, revolutionary disequilibrium comes when innovations pushed by those outside the regime are stymied by those inside the regime, which provokes frustration amongst the significant faction of the ruling class.

So on the one hand, we can say that the arrival of something new triggers political disequilibrium. And on the other hand, we can say the obstruction of something new triggers pre-revolutionary disequilibrium.

So, sorry for anyone out there who came here looking for the master key to explain all revolutions… there isn’t one.

So let’s talk first about resistance. Many revolutions begin their life in the resistance. The sovereign introduces something new and inflammatory, and inflamed groups organized to resist. As I just mentioned, the new taxes and religious dogmas introduced by Charles I provoked Puritans and parliamentarians to organize a resistance. In the American Revolution, the arrival of the Stamp Act, the Navigation Acts, the Intolerable Acts. Triggered progressively more organized resistance efforts, mostly in the form of protests and boycotts and petitions. In pre-Revolutionary France, crown ministers like Turgot and [????] and Necker introduced revenue and administrative reforms that ran afoul of the parliament, who believed, not incorrectly, that the crown was attempting to grow its power at their expense. So the build up to 1789 was about resistance to innovations from the crown.

We even see this in Haiti, because remember, before the real revolution got going in 1791, the Big Whites of Saint-Domingue were getting annoyed at attempts by the crown to control their activities in the colonies, like new policies handed down from on high demanding they be not quite so brutal in the treatment of their slaves.

In Spanish America, the reforms to colonial administration imposed by the Bourbon Kings Charles III and Charles IV in the name of efficiency, rationality, and profitability posed a threat to the Criollo elite in those colonies, because the major connective threat of all those reforms was more centralized control by Spain.

Then, the revolution of 1830s, probably as pure a case of resistance to revolution as we’re likely to find. King Charles X tried to roll back politics to 1788, and resistance to his efforts in the late 1820s exploded spectacularly in the summer of 1830. The barricades that went up in July went up quite literally as an act of physical resistance to the Four Ordinances.

Now, before I go on, I do wanna establish that in most cases of sovereign innovation, the principle issue on the table is money. To the extent that abstractions like efficiency or rationality enter the conversation, it is invariably in the service of generating more revenue for the sovereign, more consistently and in a more sustainable way. Charles I did all his innovations because he needed money and didn’t want to call parliament. The British ministry wanted the American colonies to at least pay for themselves, so they started dropping new taxes and regulations. Then obviously everything going on in pre-Revolutionary France is about the crown trying and failing, trying, and failing again, trying and failing some more, to get its financial house in order, to somehow extract money from their very wealthy kingdom.

Now, this is not always the case — 1830 seemed to be mostly about personal pique rather than a cash grab — but resistance is very often driven by the sovereign’s attempt to extract money in ways intolerable to those who have money. When the financial innovations fail to head off a coming financial crisis, often thanks to widespread resistance, those with money now have enormous leverage over the sovereign — and, they’re also now mad as hell about ten to fifteen years of intolerable innovations. That’s where revolutions can come from.

Okay, so many revolutions come when the sovereign innovates in ways that make people mad and trigger a resistance. That makes sense. But a bunch of revolutions come about in the opposite way, when the sovereign is not innovating. Society is changing, events are unraveling, inadequacies are obvious, and yet nothing is being done, everything is staying the same. As I mentioned last week, watching a bunch of incompetent ministers run your country or your kingdom or your empire into the ground is downright offensive to members of the ruling class who consider themselves smart, wise, and capable… or at the very least smarter, wiser, and more capable than the jokers currently wrecking things. So the feeling that’s growing out there and creating pre-revolutionary disequilibrium is not resistance, but frustration. Nobody’s trying to stop anything; in fact, they’re desperate to get something started.

And what’s kind of weird but I think is just a coincidence, is that the first six series of the podcast seemed to follow the model of resistance to innovations, while the final four fit this model of frustration. I mean, 1848 was so much about mounting frustration across Europe, from nationalists and liberals looking for things like constitutions and self-rule and bills of rights and participation in government and unification of national interests, all being stymied by regimes stubbornly sticking to the reactionary spirit of the age of Metternich. The Banquet Campaign in France was driven by people who believed they deserved to have the right to vote and be heard in national politics. And it was their frustration with Guizot’s inaction that got them going more than resistance to Guizot’s innovations. Because there were none. Guizot was just sitting there, arms folded, refusing to do anything. The Third French Republic will come along and overthrow the Second Empire after an entire decade of mounting frustration with the inadequacies of Napoleon III’s imperial regime.

The build up to the Mexican Revolution is mostly a story of out of favor Mexican elites organizing themselves around the idea that Porfirio Díaz has to go, because his regime has become old and stagnant and is not keeping up with the times. This is why the Creelman interview turns out to be so important to the early run of events, because in that interview, Díaz indicated that desired changes would be coming, and then he reneged.

Then finally in Russia, we have this huge array of elites, practically everyone outside of Nicholas and Alexander’s nuclear family, craving new ministers, new leaders, and new policies. All those educated professionals and the zemstvo? They were begging to be allowed to help run Russia because they knew they could do a better job. And instead of being invited in, they were shut out, much to their great… what? That’s right. Frustration.

So pre-revolutionary disequilibrium can be stirred by one of two great emotional forces: resistance and frustration. But just as with the existence of elite conflict, I have to make the point that resistance or frustration are two very normal political feelings, even in stable systems. Those who don’t want something done, that is being done, will resist its rollout and impact. Those who want something done, but see that it’s not being done, get frustrated. The difference here is that resistance and frustration will grow beyond the bounds of the existing political system, because they’ve been building for too long, or because some kind of crisis hits the system that amplifies the political stakes. So regimes enjoying stable equilibrium will always contain elements of resistance and frustration, but they are kept at a low simmer rather than heated up to a rolling boil. And just to reiterate the point we introduced in our last appendix, one of the great ways to take things from a low simmer to a rolling boil is to have one of our great idiots of history running the kitchen.

Now, the last thing I want to talk about today that brings some unification to the different types of pre-revolutionary disequilibrium, whether in the form of resistance or frustration, is the presence of new ideas in the society, new ideas that provide a glimpse of what an alternative regime might look like, or rhetorical language that casts a political struggle in newer and more explosive terms. Without new ways of thinking, the old ways of doing will never change. A society organized around an absolute monarch can’t be challenged by new notions of rights and constitutions or liberty and equality until those ideas exist. Defending worker rights in a capitalist system, isn’t gonna happen until people articulate new critiques of that system and offer new solutions to the new problems.

These new ideas are generated from a variety of places: intellectuals, writers, philosophers, literary and artistic salons, all of which, and all of whom, are often patronized and attended by prominent members of the ruling class, who are happy to encourage the growth and elaboration of new political and social ideas. These ideas also often come from entirely different countries; this is ideas migrating across borders in that ever present international republic of letters. And the intellectual current of regimes on the verge of becoming ancien regime must, almost by definition, be flowing without effective interference from that regime. New and novel ideas that challenge the regime spread because the regime can’t stop them.

We see this in pre-Revolutionary France and central Europe in the 1840s, and especially in Russia, where the alleged smothering blanket of official censorship was always exaggerated, because if it was really true, nobody would be able to read the revolutionary denunciations of censorship, which they always could and always did. I think I’ve mentioned this, but the details of the tsar’s censorship office are hilarious with how overworked, understaffed, and hapless they were.

So, a regime that is transitioning from political equilibrium to political disequilibrium is one in which new ideas that challenge the prevailing regime cannot be stopped. And just to reiterate, this point are often being encouraged and spread by elements of the ruling class. We call this going the full duke d’Orléans.

Now, one of the most important way that new ideas can destabilize the equilibrium of a regime is not just about introducing wholly novel ways of thinking about things, but also providing rhetorical frameworks that successfully recast mere self-interest as a fight over great abstractions like justice and liberty. This is how mere annoyance with a new tax or frustration with the conduct of a particular minister transcends the particulars of the moment and becomes not just a small matter of the money at stake, but the enormous matter of rights. This rhetorical advance is a great driver of pre-revolution disequilibrium. Resistance to a new tax is not about my own pocketbook here and now, it’s about defending the rights of man always and everywhere. When this move is made, it doesn’t matter if the new tax is a single extra dollar per year, it must be resisted. I mean, it’s how all those guys convinced themselves that paying an extremely rudimentary land tax was literal slavery. Frustration can become expressed in apocalyptic terms that all but preclude the possibility of reconciliation. Revolutions are, after all, born first in the mind, and so new ways of thinking and speaking are incredibly important to growing disequilibrium in a society where all compromises and settlements will no longer feel valid.

All of this leaves us on the verge of where I will start next week: with a political regime now consumed by disequilibrium being hit by shocks to the system, which opens the door for some spark, some trigger, some flashpoint to send everyone flying in wildly different directions, opening up the possibility of a complete reformation of the political order.

And if the ruling class that has gotten all of this destabilization and disequilibrium started isn’t careful, a complete reform of the social order.

 

 

Before we get going this week. I wanna remind everyone that tickets are on sale now for seven live dates with me, Mike Duncan, coming this October, where I will be performing my traveling monologue, The Stories of History, wherein we will discuss how building historical narratives explains where we find ourselves as we forever attempt to answer that great question, how did we get here?

Tickets are on sale now for shows in Austin on October 3rd, San Francisco on October 4th and Seattle on October 5th, and then tickets are on sale for the second batch at the end of the month: Chicago on October 25th, Boston on October 26th, Washington DC on October 27th, and Newark on October 29th, and we now do have links for all the ticket pages, including Newark. They will be included in the show notes to this episode. So go forth, buy tickets, come on out, and I’ll see you there.

This week’s episode is brought to you by Audible. I love audio books, I really do. I spend a lot of time sitting around and reading books, but sometimes I can’t sit around and read books, but I still want to read books. That’s what audiobooks are great for. And like, for example, right now, I’m bouncing around on this paperback tour for Hero of Two Worlds, I’m in and out of planes and hotels and cars, and audiobooks have been a great companion through all of it. Now, all Audible members get access to a growing selection of audiobooks, Audible Originals, and podcasts, all of which are included with membership. You can listen to exciting new titles like Monsters and How to Tame Them from Kevin Hart, where even if being a better you, isn’t something you regularly think about, Kevin Hart’s signature real talk and wit will teach you how to tame your negative thoughts and patterns, no near death experience required.

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Appendix Two: The Ancien Regime

One of the inspirations for the Revolutions Podcast is an old, old book called Anatomy of Revolution by Crane Brinton. It first came out in 1939, so it’s an old, old book. Brinton set out to compare and contrast four great revolutions: the English Revolution, the American Revolution, the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution, and then attempt to identify enough structural similarities between them to at least gesture in the direction of the existence of a uniform process for all revolutions. I read Anatomy of Revolution once when I was young, and then came back around to it much later in life, just as I was wrapping up the History of Rome. And if you don’t remember this story, what happened is I reread Anatomy of Revolution because I was taking a class at the University of Texas, where I had to write a paper about Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers’ Movement. The paper I wrote applied the patterns Brinton identified in Anatomy of Revolution to the United Farm Workers Movement. Writing that paper is when the idea for the Revolutions Podcast first struck me. So, here we are about a decade later, coming back around to follow in Brinton’s footsteps. Not to copy his model, but to walk through the ten examples that we have at our disposal to identify in our own way and to our own satisfaction what kind of identifiable patterns exist within the random chaos of revolutionary history.

Now as we go through this process over the next several appendices, we will be sticking tight to my boring thesis that major historical ruptures like revolutions are the result of individual agency acting upon large structural conditions. Both factors need to be taken into account when describing the development and unfolding of a revolution. But hopefully along the way, we’ll find some similarities both in the structures — the larger forces impacting events — and also the decisions made by individual actors. All revolutions after all must have at least a few things in common, otherwise they wouldn’t be recognizable as the same type of thing.

So I want to begin where all revolutions begin: with an existing political structure. You can’t have a revolution without something to overthrow, something to turn the regime into the ancien regime. If you’ve read around in revolutionary history, you’ll find historians and authors often using that term, ancien regime, which was obviously first applied in terms of the French Revolution, to any pre-revolutionary state, whether we’re talking about Tsarist Russia, the Mexican Porfiriato, or the kingdoms of Charles Stewart. And one thing English speakers need to always be aware of is that the word ancien can be a bit of a faux ami — a false friend. It looks very much like we’re talking about an ancient regime, something deeply rooted in the past, a sovereign entity that has prevailed for time immemorial and whose roots stretch deep into the misty past. You know, an ancient regime. But in point of fact, the French word ancien doesn’t mean ancient, and instead it simply means old or former. And so you’ll see the word used like l’ancien ministre de la culture, which means simply, the former minister of culture. That minister could have had their job for like a year and lost it last week and they would still be l’ancien ministre de la culture, the former minister of culture. They were never the ancient minister of culture.

Now I bring this up because as we run through our various ancien regimes, we find that they are not in fact very ancient at all, and most of them are a very recent vintage. With the kingdoms of Charles Stewart, for example, we’re talking about a dynasty that had been in place for a mere 22 years when young Charles I first took over from his late father James I in 1625. And this arrival of a new form of government wasn’t a small thing. The Stewarts represented the unification of Scotland and England under a single crown and brought with them wholesale revisions to the political order that had prevailed under the Tudors. When the revolution broke out, it was responding to something quite new, not very old. In the American Revolution, we have a colonial regime that had been in place for 150 years, which is quite old compared to many of our other ancien regimes, and it is worth noting in this context that the American colonists were rising up as much in defense of their traditional way of life as they were advancing something new and different.

In France, Louis 16th inherited a kingdom that had been completely remade by Louis 14th less than a hundred years earlier. The French ancien regime, par excellence, bore little resemblance to the truly ancient feudal modes of government. The royal absolutism of the 18th century was a very recent innovation, and it is against that recent innovation that the French Revolution would be staged.

Like Anglo America, the French colonial administration of Saint-Domingue had been around for 150 odd years, but it also was not until the mid 18th century, in the generation or two before the Haitian Revolution, that the French government back home started to take a real interest in how the colony was administered.

Now the Spanish Empire in the Americas was of course centuries old by the time the independence movements break out, but remember that after the War of Spanish Succession in 1714, the Spanish crown passed from the Hapsburgs to the Bourbons, and the colonial apparatus underwent a top to bottom overhaul. When Francisco de Miranda was born in 1750, the colonial regime against which he would set himself was barely a generation old.

Now, moving on to the French Revolution of 1830, we don’t have to do much here because obviously it was staged against a regime that had been in place for a mere fifteen years. The same is true of the French Revolution of 1848, which was staged against a regime that had been in place for a mere eighteen years. Now, of course, elsewhere in Europe in 1848, the Hapsburgs and the Hohenzollerns obviously had deep dynastic roots, but between the reforms initiated in the 18th century by enlightened despots like Joseph II and Frederick the Great, and radical changes imposed during the Napoleonic invasions, the legal structures and political alignments and methods of statecraft in Central Europe were, in 1848, like 30 or 40 years old at best.

The Second French Empire then was less than 20 years old when it was overthrown and replaced with the Third French Republic in 1871, the Mexican Porfiriato had just celebrated its 30th anniversary when it started to fall apart, and then finally we have Russia — and the Romanovs had of course been in power for like 300 years, but much like the rest of Europe, the tsarist regime had been changed and changed again, by figures like Peter and Catherine, and then the political settlement was reorganized again after the Napoleonic Wars. This means that the Revolution of 1905 was staged against a regime that was like a century old, and then 1917 obviously comes against a post-1905 settlement, which had been in effect for a scant 12 years.

So acknowledging that in general, our ancien regimes are not very ancient, but in fact, quite young, we must also note that they started out life very successful. They must have. Now, given that the only reason we are talking about these regimes is because they are on the verge of spectacular collapse, it’s often easy to forget that at some point, these regimes must have worked. A regime does not last long enough to become an ancien regime unless it was able at some point to answer the political questions of its own particular time and place.

Now, what I mean by that is that every time and place has its own way of assessing the legitimacy and solidity and resiliency of a sovereign regime, whoever or whatever that sovereign may be. The political system might be grappling with clashes between regional interests, clashes between families or ideological factions, clashes between religions; all of these clashes, ultimately about the basic question of who will wield power and who will not.

So let’s take a random example: the political question facing Porfirio Díaz in the mid 1870s. In Diaz’s case, the great political question facing Mexico was how to balance the central power with regional powers, balance conservative factions with liberal factions, and then ensure that Mexico would keep up economically in a rapidly industrializing world. And Días was able to answer these questions with the famous — or infamous — construction, “pan o palo,” bread or the stick. With one hand, he offered favorable inducements, and with the other, menaced deadly force in order to achieve the political stability which had alluded Mexico since independence. And initially he was very good at this — Porfirio Díaz would not have lasted long in power had he been bad at it.

And Louis 14th did a very similar thing in France in the late 1600s and early 1700s, and though the theatrical trappings of court life at Versailles would eventually become an absurd joke, when they were first rolled out, Louis had to tame the unruly French nobility, and he successfully did it. He answered the great political question of his era, and it’s why his system of royal absolutism stuck. Though, before we move on, we should also apply the lessons of Greek drama, because we often find in these regimes that the very attributes that made them successful initially eventually become the liabilities that take them down.

But this brings us to the question of what makes a successful and stable regime? Now throughout history, most of what goes into forging political stability is about balancing the interests of the ruling class. It is not until comparatively late in the game that popular forces are invited into the political process, and even in our age of democratic rule, we all know that to a huge degree, our political system is still shaped by the interest of our ruling class. Now satisfying the ruling class is critical, because that ruling class are the ones who control enough wealth, patronage, and resources to challenge the wealth, patronage, and resources of the sovereign itself.

And when we talk about the ruling class, we mean it in two different ways. The wider definition covers everyone in the socioeconomic stratum from which political leaders are drawn, and who control large amounts of the polity’s wealth and resources. But within this wider ruling class, there is a more narrow definition that simply includes those members of the ruling class who are actually ruling; those who hold the ministerial offices and other influential positions and who thus wield power. Not all members of the wider ruling class can be members of this more narrow ruling class, and it creates the ever present conflict between those members of the ruling class in favor with the sovereign, and those members of the ruling class out of favor with the sovereign. Who is in favor and who is outta favor can be decided by royal whim or democratic elections, but no matter what, wherever you look throughout history, there is always gonna be a faction of the ruling classes in favor, wielding actual authority, and a faction of the ruling classes out of favor, who do not have, but would very much like to possess, that authority.

The thing that makes a stable regime stable is not that it has eliminated all opposition from this out of favor wing of the ruling class, but rather that it has made those out of favor as small and ineffectual as possible, unable to pose a real challenge to the regime. For most of human history, that was the definition of political stability. If we take a little detour back to the history of Rome, we should remember that the two consuls per year structure of the Roman republic was, yes, about ensuring that one person could never build up or wield individual power for long, but it was also about spreading the highest offices around to ensure that every family in the ruling class got a cookie when it was their turn. It was a big part of the structural stability of the Roman republic, because there was never a faction of the ruling class permanently out of favor. A family could stand a rival clan, holding a consulship for a year because they knew that next year it would be their turn. Practically the entire ruling class of the Roman republic thus got their turn in their turn, so no one felt compelled to overthrow the system. And it’s a big reason why the Roman republic lasted for 500 years.

But if we look beyond the bounds of the ruling class, a stable and successful sovereign must have their legitimacy at least tacitly acknowledged by other key groups, demographics, and constituencies within the society: educated professionals, intellectuals, writers and journalists, smaller scale merchants and artisans, rural peasants and urban wage laborers. Unless the pan o palo is in broad and wide effect, forces are gonna emerge who feel no loyalty to the regime whatsoever, and who might also feel like they have a good shot at overthrowing that regime. And this is where the sovereign’s imperative to balance and satisfy the interest of the ruling class becomes so crucial: because all these other social economic classes are usually influenced by or controlled by some faction or other inside the ruling class. Forces that might be unleashed by an unhappy lord are easily kept in check by a happy lord. And by lord, I hear mean not just some landed aristocrat from fuedal Europe, but maybe a corporate employer, or a media mogul, or a local political leader. A sovereign must ensure these ruling class elements use their power and wealth and authority to support the regime, and not, for example, go the full Duc d’Orléans, and invite the dreaded rabble into answer the political question for themselves.

Now, the last thing I wanna discuss here on the political side is arguably the most important, and that is that a stable sovereign must have a preponderance of force. They must command and control armed forces that are superior to any other potential challenger. The bread must be skillfully distributed and keep everybody happy, yes, but the stick must be quick and strong. Anyone contemplating a challenge to the regime must be forced into the conclusion that it’s just not worth it. The regime’s forces are simply too strong. Because if someone contemplating such a challenge concludes, hey, maybe I can pull this off, the sovereign is already in pretty big trouble.

So all of our ancien regimes successfully displayed and deployed armed forces that could overwhelm all potential challengers. And of course, this is achieved partly by building up the sovereign’s own forces, but also by dismantling and disarming potential opposition groups. Now this needs to be done carefully with a lot of favors and privileges and straight cash bribes to make it all go down easier, but it is important to make sure that any potential challenger to your regime cannot muster the resources or the forces necessary to actually do it. As long as a regime maintains a preponderance of force, no one will challenge them, but once people start to suspect that, hey, maybe the stick is not as quick or as strong as it used to be, well, that’s when revolutions happen.

So, okay, moving on from the political aspects of our ancien regimes, let’s hop over to economics. I think in general what we find in all of our ancien regimes is that in the generation or two prior to the revolution we see a lot of dynamic economic growth. Now we are talking here about the stable phase of our ancien regimes, not about the moments we’ll talk about next week, when shortfalls or crop failures or recessions throw the political equilibrium out of balance. What I’m talking about is before all of that, and there, we typically find a generation or two’s worth of economic growth and increasing wealth, rather than any kind of stagnation or decline. We see this from the advancing commercial prosperity of Britain in the 1600s to the generally increasing fortunes of colonial elites, whether they be Anglo, Spanish, or French. Europe in the 19th century is obviously a story of rapid capitalist growth. You can say a lot of different things about 19th century European economics, but one thing you cannot say is that it was stagnant or declining.

Later in the series, we found both Mexico and Russia in very similar places in the latter bit of the 19th century. Found on the periphery of the capitalist empires, they initiated rapid industrial growth to keep up. Now critically, the fortunes made during this period of economic growth are not necessarily distributed evenly, and thus create two revolutionary forces that will act both in concert and contradiction. On the one hand, we have the growing ambition and self-confidence of those who have benefited from dynamic economic growth, and on the other, the growing anger and bitterness of those exploited and impoverished by new economic modes of product. The fact that we find a lot of economic dynamism in pre-revolutionary societies naturally lends itself to talking in Marxist terminology. A natural outgrowth of the sovereign’s imperative to maintain stable relations within the ruling class, and the imperative of that ruling class to have a reliable sovereign, means that there is invariably a convergence of the economic systems and political systems of a society. The socioeconomic base creates the political structure, which turns around and further entrenches the organization of that base. So, a society where the means of production are owned by major landowners in a medieval agrarian society means that the political system will naturally develop a stable equilibrium that accounts for how wealth influence and authority are distributed in a feudal agrarian society. This is gonna be different from a heavily industrialized urban capitalist economy, which will naturally draw in different units:w corporations, banks, leaders of trade and industry and commerce, and their beliefs about what an acceptable political system looks like need to be taken into account.

And so, in the Marxist account of revolutionary history, a shift in the economic base, like the one from feudalism to capitalism, is gonna trigger revolutionary energy, when the old political arrangement of the super structure no longer fit the base. And the fact that we see shifts in economic activities and a lot of dynamic economic growth in pre-revolutionary ancien regimes does lend some credence to the notion that to disconnect between the economic base and the political superstructure is a critical source of disequilibrium that will require a political response.

So everything we’ve spoken about thus far has had to do with the structures of these societies, their political, economic, and social arrangements, the structural backdrop for historical action. But there is this whole other side of the revolutionary equation, and that is individual agency. When the moment comes for a nimble political response, who’s taking the call? Two leaders might be given exactly the same set of structural conditions; one leader is able to navigate the problem, the other triggers a revolution. Not because the structures they inherited made revolution inevitable, but because of their individual choices, And one thing I am now willing to say, after all of the revolutions that we’ve covered, is that none of them had to happen. None of them were inevitable. All of them broke out when and where they did partly because of the quality of the leadership at the moment of the crisis. And even more to the point, the reason there was a crisis at all was because the quality of the leadership was substandard. Individual agency is a key component of creating revolutions, and there’s nothing quite like incompetence to create a revolution. The roster of leaders for our various ancien regimes is an absolute rogues gallery of buffoons, blunders, and absolute fail sons: King Charles I of England, Scotland and Ireland, the members of the cabinets of George III the 1760s and 1770s, Louis 16th, the administrators of Saint-Domingue in the 1780s, Charles IV and Ferdinand VII of Spain, Charles X, King of France, Louis Philippe, King of the French, Ferdinand I of Austria, Napoleon III, Porfirio Díaz, and finally Tsar Nicholas II. These are some of the biggest dumbass leaders in history, and from quite early in the process of making the Revolutions Podcast, I realized that there is a Great Idiot Theory that exists right alongside any great Man theory of history: that as often as history is made by the brilliant, the wise, and the bold, it’s made by the ignorant, and the incompetent, and the weak. Every single ancien regime we have talked about on the show did not have to fall into a revolution. It took the very special and unique incompetence of each member of our rogues gallery of dumbasses to make it happen.

The single character trait that all of our great idiots seem to have in common is a fundamental lack of imagination. And this lack of imagination usually manifests itself as pigheaded inflexibility. If revolutionary energy is building, that means the regime is facing new political questions it may not have the answer to. Successful leaders use their imagination to dream up new answers to these new questions instead of stubbornly insisting on sticking with the old answers. And what I witnessed a lot in the run up to revolutions is kings and emperors and ministers being very insistent and demanding, where they should have been flexible and creative. Tsar Nicholas could have easily forged a settlement within Russia’s ruling class that would’ve allowed him and his family to remain on the throne forever. There might still be a Tsar of Russia. Instead, he refused to let in even the smallest shaft of imaginative light, such that he could see a positive place for himself, his family, and his dynasty in an ever so slightly reorganized political system that acknowledged the existence of changes in economic, intellectual, and social currents. a different leader, making slightly different decisions, dies happy in a big fancy bed instead of getting shot in a basement.

The Great Idiot Theory of revolutionary history also has a very specific subset to it. It’s not just that our sovereigns and their ministers are doing a bad job and therefore bad things happen — although that is very much the case — it’s also that people around the bumbling sovereign, who are smart and ambitious and capable, get extremely frustrated with the very act of watching the bumbling sovereign make such a hash of things. It’s offensive to their intellect and their pride. Why is my great nation or kingdom being ruled by such an idiot? And thus offended, these educated members of the ruling class start entertaining the idea that it might be necessary to remove the incompetent sovereign. Incompetent rulers will always invite challenges to their rule, and incompetent rulers presiding over society whose structural forces are generating discontented energy… well, that’s gonna invite a revolution.

So to sum this up, how do we define a stable regime? We define it as one whose economic and social arrangements align with the political regime of the sovereign, producing a general sense of the regime’s legitimacy. This consensus is forged with both bread and stick, with bribes and inducements existing alongside brutal oppression and persecution. These regimes must also have competent leaders in charge to grapple with the ever changing set of political questions, as the passage of time provokes new questions to be answered. It was once the case for each of our ten pre-revolutionary regimes that we talked about on the show that they were stable, that they had equilibrium, that they were all once regimes and not ancien regimes.

Next week, we will turn our attention to the moment when that transition starts to happen. Everything we talked about today was about establishing and maintaining stable political equilibrium. But what happens when elements start entering the system that create disequilibrium? When the old political settlements, agreements, privileges and penalties are no longer enough to keep the discontentment, anger, and above all ambition contained? When the structural forces of society begin grinding into one another and creating revolutionary friction, deft leadership is required to find a new equilibrium. And if, instead of deft leadership, you have one of the great idiots of history running the show?

Well, my friends, I think your regime is about to become ancien.

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Appendix One: Coming Full Circle

Nine years ago, I set out to write a series exploring great revolutions in history. My goal was to synthesize as much information as I could about these revolutions and then craft narratives that laid them out from beginning to middle to end. But here at the end of the end of the series, I want to take a look back and survey all of these narratives and see if we can’t draw some conclusions about the nature, form, and progress of revolutions.

Each revolution was unique unto itself, but many of them seem to have similar characteristics. I think we’ve all noticed little patterns and recurrences that are nested inside of the contingent distinctiveness of each series. Stock characters and groups seem to show up over and over again, and events of striking similarity just keep happening. I mean, how many times did I say “a large crowd gathered in a confined space and someone fired a shot, but we’ll never know who and we’ll never know why.” Now this absolutely is not about drawing out fundamental laws of history — because those don’t exist — but we can recognize that in all the events we’ve talked about on the show, they fall under the category of revolution because they have certain common characteristics. So I wanna spend some time together figuring out what those common characteristics are.

I’d like to start these concluding episodes by returning to the very beginning. When I launched the show, I wrote an introduction, an episode zero to introduce the series. And since I published that introduction way back in September 2013, hand to god, I haven’t listened to it since. I always needed to focus on whatever the topic of the week was, and I knew basically what I had said in the introduction, so there was never any need to go back and listen to it again. And so for the first time, in nine years, I sat down and listened to it again, because I thought that to end the show, it would be worthwhile to return to the beginning. Did I actually do what I set out to do? What can I say now that I couldn’t say then? What did I get right, what did I get wrong? What was I vague and cagey about that I can now, after all these years, state more directly and confidently?

So, what we’re gonna do here in Appendix One is take an annotated look back at the introduction, kind of a director’s commentary track on the things that I said oh so many moons ago. So I started the introduction by saying:

The word revolution is one of those words that you think you know the definition of, until you actually start trying to define it. Then it turns out to be a slippery fish. Because first of all, the word revolution coined by Copernicus in 1543, is supposed to mean completing an orbit, coming full circle.

Okay. So right off the bat, I would rewrite this opening to say something like popularized by Copernicus, not coined by Copernicus. I’m looking at the Oxford English Dictionary right now, and they’ve got the first references to revolution coming out of Latin and old French as early as 1390, with smatterings of additional references in the 1400s and early 1500s, all predating Copernicus.

But then I go on to say:

But the kind of revolution we’re talking about is the opposite of that. It’s a sudden radical change, overthrowing the old regime and replacing it with a new one. It’s not about coming full circle. It’s about boldly setting out on a new path.”

So right away, the word doesn’t even mean what it’s supposed to mean, and it only gets muddier from there.

Now, if we continue to scan down in the Oxford English Dictionary, we find the word revolution as “alteration, change, or mutation” popping up as early as the 1600s, whereupon it would become very specifically linked with the events of Stuart Era Britain. It’s still not clear to me why a word that literally means return to the old came to mean change into something new, but then again, the word literally now has an accepted secondary informal definition of figuratively, so languages gonna language.

So I went on to say:

Because even overlooking the utter absurdity of using the word revolution to describe a fundamental change in political organization, we still have a hard time expressing precisely what we mean by revolution. We know it involves overthrowing the existing regime, but we also know it’s more than a mere coup. We know it involves a conflict between two competing forces within a country, but we also know it’s more than a mere civil war. We know it involves mass mobilization, but we also know it’s more than some half baked peasant revolt. It’s more organized, more directed, more thoughtful. Isn’t it? Well, sometimes yes and sometimes, really, no. As it turns out, distinguishing coups from civil wars, from revolts from revolutions, is a very sticky proposition.

Okay. So now here, I’ll just make a comment on the writing because I’ve gone from this being a slippery fish to a sticky proposition, and if I had to do this all over again, I would’ve picked a lane, I would’ve talked about how it was very slippery or how it was very sticky, not both of them at the same time, but you know, maybe the slippery fish got left out too long, and now it’s a sticky… proposition, which, ew…

So, let’s move on.

I go on to say, ” Indeed, for each of the revolutions we are gonna cover in this series, there is a contingent of revisionist historians or sociologists ready to argue that no revolution in fact took place, that it was just a rebellion masquerading as a revolution, because, look the revolutionary effects were neither as wide or deep as one supposed, or only a narrow band of socioeconomic elites actually participated, or no one at the time actually thought they were engaged in revolution. But the problem is that when we add up all those particular reinterpretations, we’re left with the unsatisfying notion that in all of human history no revolution has in fact ever taken place. And that just seems not right.”

You know, when I wrote that I was deep in the weeds of the English Revolution and looking immediately ahead to the American Revolution, both of which come with very heavy, “it wasn’t actually a revolution” factions within their respective historiographic traditions. But having moved on down the line, I have found that this has broadly held true. In every revolution I’ve covered, with the possible exception of Haiti. I have found people arguing against interpreting this particular historical event as a revolution, often deploying the argument that the end result was so similar to the original conditions that we might have witnessed a civil war or a coup d’état or a chaotic breakdown of the legal order, but if the word revolution applies, it’s only in its original sense: coming full circle, that nothing really changed.

Now, I don’t personally buy most of those arguments, and I think the great invisible pillar of the case is a pedantic special pleading, which is why I’m happy to continue to endorse what I say next, which is, “With that in mind, this series is based on a broad definition of what counts as a revolution.”

So the Revolutions Podcast was always based on that principle, erring on the side of an inclusive definition of revolution rather than a restrictive one. But even still, I then offered some guidelines for how other people have tried to define the definition of revolution. I said, “The Encyclopedia of Political Revolutions, dealing with this same problem, casts a wide net by including events that share two characteristics. First, irregular procedures aimed at forcing political change within a society and second, lasting effects on the political system of the society in which they occurred.”

So let’s unpack this a bit more than I did at the time. Any given society, no matter its form, has rules, laws, traditions, governing who holds power, why they hold power, and who power will be transferred to next. This could be tribal heritage, oligarchic consensus, constitutional law, genetic inheritance, or random lottery. It doesn’t matter what the system is. It just matters that the system is. It serves as the regular procedure of allocating power. A revolution necessarily manifests from outside regular procedures and instead deploys irregular procedures to allocate power in a novel and heretofore illegitimate way.

Now this could, of course, also apply to a mere coup d’état, which is why the Encyclopedia of Political Revolutions requires that second condition: lasting effects on the political system of the society in which they occurred. Which is to say, it can’t just be about swapping out political personnel, changing only the answer to the question who holds power. A revolution also changes the system itself. It changes the why and the how of power allocation, as well as the who. A revolution uses irregular procedures to overthrow the old regular procedures and then impose new regular procedures in their place. The tribal heritage, oligarchic consensus, constitutional law, genetic inheritance, random lottery that existed before, must be swept aside and replaced.

So then I go on to say, “But I’d like to get a touch more specific than that. Because it’s not enough to have a cabal of elites force their way into power — that’s a coup — and it’s not enough to have an amorphous blob of angry peasants marching around with clubs and axes — that’s a revolt. Or maybe an insurrection. Sociologist Charles Tilley narrows the definition a little bit further to, ‘A forcible transfer of power over a state, in the course of which at least two distinct blocks of contenders make incompatible claims to control the state, and some significant portion of the population subject to the state’s jurisdiction acquiesces in the claims of each block.’ Which is jumbled well, because he’s a sociologist, but basically, we need some cross-class alliance of dissidents to overthrow an existing regime by extra-legal means and then alter the political system in some fundamental way.”

Now, before I move on, I will say that I don’t actually think that what I said there about, we need some cross-class alliance of dissidents is actually a necessary part of Tilly’s definition, I think that was just me projecting my own beliefs about the mechanics of a successful revolution. I think a revolution needs a cross-class alliance, but that’s not something that logically follows from what Tilly was trying to say about two distinct blocks of contenders.

Anyway, I go on to say, “Where it starts to get messy is when further wrinkles are added. Theda Skocpol, for example, creates a super-class called social revolutions that requires change to the political structure be accompanied and reinforced by deep changes in the social structure. And this is perfectly reasonable, but leaves us grappling with difficult and ultimately subjective questions, like how much change? For how many people? For how long? And how do we even measure it? These are the kinds of questions that academics will be arguing about forever as new evidence is uncovered and old evidence is reexamined, and which I plan to neatly sidestep. Don’t get me wrong, we’ll get into it, but I have no intention of adhering to some strict analytic criteria and then casually tossing away events like the Mexican Revolution because not enough hectares of land were ultimately redistributed to make it a really real revolution. If it walks like a duck and it talks like a duck, it’s probably a revolution.”

Now, this is the part of the introduction that I personally remember most — well, this and one other part — that if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s probably a revolution. I absolutely did not want to get bogged down in semantics. And I still don’t, by the way. I often find the pedantic urge to create perfect definitions to be incredibly tedious. But after nine years and ten seasons, I think maybe I should take a stab at trying to define what a revolution means.

So for me, the first thing we must do is delineate between a political revolution and a social revolution. And okay, here we go.

A political revolution is when the existing structure of political power — that is to say how power is exercised justified, legitimized, defended, and transferred — is displaced by a force originating beyond the bounds of that existing structure and replaces it with something different.

Okay, we got that?

Meanwhile, a social revolution is when the economic relations and/or cultural hierarchies of a society — their personnel, rationalizations, habits, norms, obligations, and modes of production — are rapidly transformed, such that the society is reorganized in a fundamentally different manner.

Now when those two are combined, we get what I can loosely dub a great revolution. A great revolution is the combination of a political revolution and a social revolution. When the revolutionary transformation of the political structure of society unfolds alongside a fundamental reorganization of the society’s economic modes of production and cultural hierarchies.

Now the first thing to say about my stab at creating a definition here is, that, like all definitions, mine are entirely inadequate to the task, and are open to obvious critique and objection. Even as I try to be as precise as possible, all I can come up with is something like “society is organized in a fundamentally different manner.” I mean, what does that even mean? Who gets to define what is the same and what is different? I’ve frankly moved no further than Skocpol. How many hectares of land need to be transferred before you can say that it’s a new mode of production, or that society is now organized in a fundamentally different manner? How many new individuals need to enter the ruling class for it to be counted as a new type of ruling class? I don’t think there’s any combination of words that will so thoroughly and completely define what a revolution is to be beyond objection and beyond subjective interpretation. The reason it’s hard to come up with a definition of revolution is because it’s hard to come up with a definition of revolution.

I do think that it’s important to understand the difference between political revolutions and social revolutions though, that they are talking about different things, and it’s vital to distinguish them. Of the revolutions that we’ve talked about on the podcast, the American Revolution is the easiest one to point to and say, well, was that really a revolution? But clearly distinguishing political and social revolutions makes the answer pretty clear: the social and economic structure of American society largely carried over intact between the Colonial era and the early Republican era, so it’s not a social revolution. But did the Americans use force originating outside the existing political structure to displace that structure and replace it with something different? Yeah, that quite obviously happened. The American Revolution was a political revolution.

And just as a political revolution can occur without a social revolution, a social revolution can also occur without a political revolution. We never talked about these things because the existence of a political revolution was kind of a prerequisite for being included in the podcast, but things like the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the Digital Revolution, can and do rapidly transform the economic relations and cultural hierarchies of society without necessarily requiring a political revolution to also occur. The arrival of computers in the internet at the end of the 21st century has pretty massively impacted our social organizations, and also pretty much unfolded without the displacement and replacement of existing political structures.

At least not yet.

The special category of great revolutions comes into play when social and political revolutions are combined, when forces outside the existing political structure overthrow that structure and replace it with something new, and it happens alongside a general reorganization of economic and social relations inside the society resulting in a permanent change to that society.

So, what did we talk about on the show? Did we talk about political revolutions, social revolutions, great revolutions? Well, to apply these definitions, I wanna first turn to what I said next specifically about the English Revolution.

I said:

If there was ever a historical period that highlights this problem of what do we call it, it’s the period we’re going to begin the series with: Britain in the 1640s and 1650s. Something happened. Everyone agrees on that, but was it a revolution? And if it was, was it a religiously driven Puritan revolution or an economically driven bourgeois revolution? Or was it neither, and instead just a civil war that has been anachronistically labeled at revolution? the men and women who lived through the period often referred to it as simply ‘the late troubles,’ and left it at that. So what was it? A revolution, a rebellion, a civil war? In truth, it was all of these things. It started as a conflict over whether the political system should be reformed, descended into civil war, sparking a totally unexpected revolutionary period in the late 1640s and early 1650s that saw the king executed, monarchy abolished, and a written constitution introduced for the first time.

But then the storm passed, and by 1660 the monarchy was restored, and most of the recent innovations swept away. So what do we call it? Every possible label — the Great Rebellion, the English Revolution, the English Civil Wars, the Wars in the Three Kingdoms — fails to capture some essential element of the story. Since I am primarily interested in the revolutionary aspects of the period, I am going to use English Revolution as shorthand. I know that this is problematic, not the least of which, because y’know, Scotland and Ireland, and if you want to yell at me about calling at the English revolution, please email me at revolution podcast@gmail.com.

Uh, side note, you can actually stop emailing me about that.

But just so you, I’m not a Marxist or some unreconstructed Wig, I’m just a guy interested in the revolutionary aspects of the period, who is going to be talking a lot about the English revolutionary aspects of that period.

So this part of the introduction gets at the trouble of naming things, and the inadequacy of naming things, and how hard it is to define things. But given that we’ve now worked up a couple of definitions of our own, let’s see if we can’t apply them to what we’ve talked about in the show.

So, series one about the Late Troubles in Britain in the 1640s and 1650s was very clearly a political revolution. The revisionist take that it was merely a civil war cannot account for the displacement and replacement to the political system that went on. They chopped off the king’s head and they promulgated a new republican constitution. And even though the monarchy came back in the end, that monarchy was fundamentally different as a result of the revolutionary upheavals. The political arrangements of Britain after the Late Troubles was completely different. It was a political revolution.

But that said, even though there were socially revolutionary aspects in the form of the Levelers and the Diggers, these pockets were ultimately pretty limited in scope, duration, and reach. Yes, those people called on property relations and cultural hierarchies to be overthrown, but those relations and hierarchies were not ever actually overthrown.

So, Britain 1640s and 1650s, a political revolution, but not a social revolution.

Now moving on to the American Revolution, we just kind of talked about that, so I think we can move on: it was a political revolution without a social revolution.

Now, the French Revolution on the other hand absolutely entailed a social revolution running alongside its political revolution and so it’s the first of our great revolutions. That said though, the quality and quantity of the social revolutionary aspects can be debated. What really happened to land ownership and commercial relations and social privileges and cultural interactions and linguistic transformations? I mean the French Revolution ultimately destabilized not just the existing absolutist monarchy, but also the social and economic systems that it rested on. But how much, and how far and to what degree these things changed is a matter of ongoing debate. We must also always keep in mind de Tocqueville’s argument that there was at least as much continuity as change between the Ancien Regime and Revolutionary France, but when you look at the leadership of the first French Republic, what they were up to and why, it’s very clear that they believed it was their job to change everything, up to and including the nature of time itself. And from having also studied the Restoration Bourbon period, in some detail, I can also say with confidence that the Restoration Period was not simply a reversion back to pre-revolutionary norms.

Now, many of the revolution’s most ambitious dreams did disappear, but French culture, economics, language, and politics, they were all changed forever. The revolution came, and it touched everything and it left a permanent impression on everything. It was a great revolution.

Then moving on, there’s not really much to say here about the Haitian Revolution. There’s no real confusion or debate. It was probably the single most revolutionary event we talked about on the show, and about which there can be the least argument. The Haitian Revolution was a great revolution, maybe the greatest revolution.

So the series on Spanish American independence then obviously covers many different regions and countries each with their own unique dynamics but in the main, we’re talking here about an anti-colonial revolution that displaced and replaced the systems of political power, so it’s definitely a political revolution. There’s also more social revolutionary rhetoric baked into Spanish America than we saw up in Anglo America. Dismantling the racial Casta system and Bolivar’s turn to abolitionism are the most obvious examples. But we also know that the practical outcomes of the revolutions fell well short of these professed ideals, and the revolutionary mythology in Spanish America — that independence produced racially egalitarian societies — is not actually as true as the myths would have us believe.

So, Spanish American independence is a political revolution for sure. And it was much more of a social revolution than we saw in the American Revolution. But you can only really give that social revolution partial credit, because it unfolded far more in the telling than in the doing.

The French Revolution of 1830, meanwhile, was a pretty straightforward political revolution. And even though critics will say it merely replaced one Bourbon with another, the existing structure of political power was displaced by a force originating beyond the bounds of the existing political structure and replaced it with something different. That happened.

And though the July Monarchy is referred to as the bourgeois monarchy, because as Jacques Laffitte said, “Now, the bankers will rule,” the actual impact on social hierarchies and economic relations is pretty muted, and to the extent that things changed in France, it was just part of an ongoing transformation of European society as it moved from the early to the mid 19th century. That transformation unfolded pretty independently of the abrupt political revolution of 1830. There was not a commensurate abrupt social revolution in 1830. So we call the French Revolution of 1830 a political revolution. The same can be said of the Revolutions of 1848, especially given the fact that 1848 was our first failed revolution. Like in 1830, the Revolutionary wave that swept Europe was mostly a political revolution; it was about overthrowing old political regimes and replacing them with more constitutional and democratic governments. And as we saw, the rocks upon which the revolutions of 1848 were dashed was the question of whether the political revolution would advance to a social revolution. This was the rupture between the liberals and the socialists. The liberals wanted to keep it a political revolution, the socialists wanted to advance it to a social revolution, and that rupture is what allowed the conservatives to survive and reassert themselves. The rupture played out most famously in the contrast between February and June 1848 in Paris, but the same kind of thing played out all over Germany and in the Hapsburg realms. The distinction between political revolution and social revolution was never so obvious and clear cut.

Although, that said, the Paris also makes this pretty obvious and clearcut. The events of 1870 and 1871 in France also saw a stark contrast between the successful political revolution that overthrew the autocratic Second Empire and founded a liberal constitutional Third Republic, and the bloody repression of the social revolution that broke out in Paris, which was explicitly aiming to turn the world upside down and completely reorganize the social order. Now, had the Paris Commune succeeded, and spread its model to other cities and departments in France, I mean, yeah, obviously we’re talking about a great revolution. But Adolphe Thiers spent one bloody week making sure that didn’t happen.

Now, the Mexican Revolution is actually a super interesting case, and there’s always gonna be people making the argument that the Mexican Revolution was actually just a bunch of war lords, waging a multi-polar civil war against each other that started with a repressively autocratic presidential republic and ended with a repressively autocratic presidential republic, so this doesn’t even count as a political revolution. And, look, on the one hand, I think it’s kind of true that after the winds that swept Mexico stopped blowing, that the political structure of PRI Mexico was awfully similar to the Porfiriato.

But when you look at the goals and the legacy of the Zapatistas, the goals in the legacies of Villa’s Army of the North, the widely remarked upon changes and the mentality, attitude, and lifestyle of the peasantry between 1910 and 1920, the Mexican Revolution was far more than a clash of war lords. And then, if you push it all the way through the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas, the nationalization of land and resources? I mean, there were major transformations in the political order and the economic structures of Mexico. I’m hard pressed to not call it a full blown great revolution. A revolutionary transformation of the political structure of society unfolded alongside a fundamental reorganization of the society’s economic modes of production and cultural hierarchies. That’s what happened in Mexico at the beginning of the 20th century, so I’m here to call it a great revolution.

And then finally, we ended with the Russian Revolution, which is at first blush, quite obviously a great revolution. The old structures of political power were displaced and replaced, and nearly every facet of cultural and economic life was altered forever. But people will always say, Hey, look at that, a highly bureaucratized authoritarian police state was replaced by… a highly bureaucratized authoritarian police state. And even if we recognize major continuity between the Witte System of the 1890s and the state industrialization projects of the five year plan, the scale and scope and impact of Soviet industrialization was well beyond revolutionary. And that is to say nothing of collectivization, which was brutal, imposed by raw force and traumatized tens of millions of people, but it’s hard to say the economic relations and cultural hierarchies of Russian society — their personnel, rationalizations habits, norms, obligations, and modes of production — weren’t rapidly transformed such that society was organized in a fundamentally different manner.

So attempts to reduce the Russian experience to a mere civil war or coup d’état or to blow it all off and say, ah, the more things change, the more they stay the same, all of that strikes me as too clever by half. The Russian Revolution was a great revolution.

Okay, so we wandered quite a ways away from the introductory text, so let’s return now to what I said.

Finally, let’s talk a little bit about interpretation. In broad terms, historians interested in explaining revolutions tend to break down into two loose camps. One camp argues that revolutions are wrapped when slowly building tensions in the socioeconomic system finally break; the other camp argues that it has far more to do with the calculations and miscalculations of individual historical actors. The former is criticized for erecting very nice looking theoretical models, and then highlighting anything that proves the model and ignoring anything that doesn’t. The latter is criticized for essentially arguing that nothing was amiss until the moment rebellion, civil war, and violent social upheaval spontaneously consumed the entire nation. Neither of these interpretations alone is, at least to me, satisfactory. Long term social forces set the parameters for action, but they do not dictate the results. Individual choices dictate the results, but always within the bounds of those long term social parameters. This is not a bold thesis, but I’m pretty sure it’s how life goes.

Now I still basically hold to this, and this is basically just a restatement of Karl Marx’s line that “Men make their own history, but they do not make it in circumstances of their own choosing.” Large structural forces are absolutely necessary to explain the onset of any revolution, but contingency and individual decision making are vitally important to explaining the specifics of how and why events unfolded the way they did. I don’t think it’s the case that any revolution can be predicted accurately in advanced by analyzing all those social forces, because it’s always gonna come down to happenstance and luck and accident. But I also think it’s true that happenstance, luck, and accident won’t on their own produce a revolution. Those little X factors need to be operating inside the proper environment or else nothing is going to happen.

So that brings us finally to the other bit that everyone remembers about the introduction, and the part that people like to rip me about the most. It is when I said, “I’ll close with a note on programming. With this show covering a series of distinct time periods that are thematically linked, but otherwise wildly disconnected, when I make the transition from one revolution to the next, I’m going to have to pause and recalibrate. Specifically, I’m gonna have to pause and recalibrate for four weeks. I’ve thought a lot about this and I just don’t see any good way around it. Each revolution will run its allotted 12 to 15 episodes–

Mm-hmm.

— and then I’m gonna go dark for a month while I get ready for the next batch. So 12 weeks on four weeks off. Sound good? Good.

Okay, so obviously the most hilariously glaring thing here is the idea that I was gonna do the series in 12 to 15 episodes a piece, and in case you haven’t heard me talk about this elsewhere, the thing that happened is that, while I was working on the very first series on the English Revolution, I was absolutely being tortured by how much I had to leave out, and how many different things I didn’t feel like I could talk about or explore because of this limit I had put on myself. I mean, there’s easily enough material about the English revolution to fit fifty episodes, it’s incredibly complex. So I did make a good faith effort at keeping that 12 to 15 episode limit going for the American Revolution, but then as I was staring down the barrel of the French Revolution, I realized I just couldn’t do it. And more to the point, I didn’t want to do it. I needed unrestricted time and space to explain things the way that I thought they needed to be explained. And so even though, yes, Russia went beyond self parody, I don’t regret a single episode of it. I’m just never gonna be the guy you come to for the quick summary of anything. I’m the guy you come to for the details.

But there’s actually something else hiding in this paragraph that’s even more important in terms of my own intellectual development, and it’s this bit:

With this show covering a series of distinct time periods that are thematically linked, but otherwise wildly disconnected…

Because look, I no longer believe that. It’s one of the most consequential changes in my historical worldview from when I started the show in 2013 to where I am now here at the end of 2020. Now I knew going into the podcast that there were obviously gonna be links between like the American Revolution and the French Revolution, similar ideas and other connections, crossover characters like Lafayette and Thomas Payne. But once I hit the French Revolution, I realized deep, deep in my bones how much I was not talking about distinct time periods that were wildly disconnected. Quite the opposite. I found everything deeply interconnected, enmeshed and interrelated. I basically lost all faith in discrete national histories being able to even remotely answer the basic historical question, what happened? It probably started when I realized that there was no way to explain the French Revolution without explaining the Polish Partitions, but then as I advanced into Haiti and Spanish America, I became fully consumed by the idea that this whole time I’ve just been describing one single revolutionary event playing out in different theaters, that there isn’t an American Revolution and a French Revolution and a Haitian Revolution, but one single Atlantic Revolution. I simply do not believe that things are wildly disconnected anymore. I have a fundamentally holistic understanding of history now.

But then advancing through the years, as we moved to 1848 and the Paris Commune and Mexico and Russia, the histories and personalities and ideas, they grew, they developed, they shifted and transformed, but there was never a break in continuity. Everything is connected to everything else. There are no histories. There is only history. One single thing that never ends.

So then I wrapped up the introduction by saying,

So with all that out of the way, let’s get into this thing. I apologize in advance if I butcher any pronunciation, it’s bound to happen, email me when it does, don’t just leave me hanging.

And yeah, pronunciation was always a challenge. I used Forvo and Google Translate and dictionaries and videos and direct contact with native speakers, but still, I failed and failed and failed again with only the thin hope that maybe in the future, I would fail better. I know for a fact that I managed to mispronounce a minimum of one word in each of the following languages: English, French, German, Hungarian, Russian, Polish, Italian, Portuguese, Serbian, Croatian, Czech, Slovakian, Latin, and Lithuanian. There are probably others I can’t remember at the moment, but you know, for the record, the show is over now, so you can stop emailing me about my pronunciation.

Then the very last thing I said was, the show lives at revolutionspodcast.com. That is as true today as it was when it was written, and it will remain there until civilization collapses.

So, you know, five, maybe like ten years. Haha, just kidding, or am I.

So, I think looking back from this vantage point, coming now full circle and doing a revolution on revolutions, I think we’re off to a pretty good start on wrapping up the show. And over the next several episodes, we’ll walk through the processes and structures of all the revolutions that we’ve talked about, all the beginnings and middles and ends, to see how they relate to each other, how they connect to each other, and kind of come to that good old conclusion that while history never repeats itself, it sure has a habit of rhyming.

 

 

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~dramatic music swells~

Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.103: The Final Chapter

On May 19th, 2019, I published the first episode of the tenth and final season of the Revolutions podcast. It was episode 10.1: The International Working Men’s Association. And now, here we are more than three years later. It took 39 episodes just to get through the Revolution of 1905, then a hiatus to finish Hero of Two Worlds — which went from blank piece of paper when I started this series to a completed manuscript, to the hardcover release, and now, as I read this, the paperback is imminently forthcoming. The pandemic hit, and then it went on and on and on. It still goes on. I was personally in and out of French operating rooms, then we moved back to France — not that those two are explicitly linked.

There have been a million upheavals, big and small, personal, professional, public and private. There have been political upheavals that we all follow even if I don’t talk about it here on the podcast. Wars and insurrections, mass protests and attempted coups, ruling class intrigues, systemic failures and insufficient responses. The greedy, the timid, the daring, the inept, the fearful, the blind, the cunning, the unwilling and the bold, all crashing into one another. The unthinkable is thinkable. The impossible possible. The past, not even past, but the future staring us dead in the face. It’s been a long three years, that went by in the blink of an eye.

Now in Episode 10.1, we saw a scruffy crew of political dissidents and radical social activists convene in London in 1864 to plot a new course for European civilization — and, by virtue of Europe’s colonial stranglehold on the world, to plot a new course for human civilization. Most of them were veterans of the barricades of ’48 — or, at least, the printing presses of ’48 — and they worked in the reactionary aftermath of the failures of ’48. Their concern was a monstrously exploitive economic system enforced by the hired guns of the ruling class. Their objective was nothing less than total revolution; not just swapping out this ruler for that ruler, but the end of rulers. Not just transferring property from this tribe to that tribe, but the end of property. Not just the rise of one tiny political faction overthrowing another tiny political faction, but the end of factions entirely. The end of the minority ruling the majority. The end of mass exploitation, misery, and degradation. The triumph of dignity, justice, and prosperity for all. Liberty equality and fraternity, finally.

From its inception, the international Socialist movement was run through with internal conflicts, arguments backbiting, shit-talking and infighting. Their assaults on capitalism and imperialism were almost as vicious as their assaults on each other. In a few short years, the first International Workingman’s Association, explicitly organized to unite them in unbreakable solidarity, broke into two rival camps, two internationals, with each side expelling all the members of the other side. Purges and counter purges were baked into the foundation from the start. And so it went for the Russian wing of international socialism, through the decades where nothing happened and the weeks where decades happened. Marxists and anarchists, orthodox and revisionists, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, internationalist and chauvinist, Social Democrat and communist, the Left Opposition, the Right Deviationists. Every few years or months or weeks, a new round of purges, expulsions, and walkouts, as any one of the several socialist parties out there broke into two camps, then those two into four, and those four into eight, those eight into sixteen, each group declaring themselves to be the avatars of socialist purity and righteousness, and everyone else a blockheaded bunch of losers.

Now, in fairness, it’s always easier for the defenders of the status quo to stick together. The status quo is a tangible, existant thing. It’s here and now, it’s what exists. Unity of purpose is simply defending what exists, protecting how things are. And not only that, they have the tangible resources to protect themselves, because what they are defending are those tangible resources. Meanwhile, the fight to replace the status quo means creating something new that presently exists only in the imagination. It’s a blank slate of infinite possibilities. It’s a utopia, approachable from an infinite number of paths, some of them leading in wildly different directions: up, down, around or behind, to this valley or that mountaintop or that paradise by the sea. And because there are an infinite number of places to go and an infinite number of ways to get there, the critics of the status quo, the enemies of the status quo can divide into an infinite number of factions, while the defenders of the status quo can just sit tight and stay put. It’s literally all they have to do. It’s all they want to do. It’s all they ever will do.

And so, the socialists and the anarchists and the communists fought amongst each other and within their own ranks. The battleground of factional infighting, from the first International forward, was always the congress and the executive committee. Always and everywhere, we find congresses and committees. Whatever the party, whatever the faction, congresses and committees. A congress of delegates would convene to vote on platforms and policies for this party or that party, but most importantly, to vote on the permanent committees, who would supervise the work after the congress disbanded. By simple practical necessity, the members of these various standing executive committees were empowered to articulate and enforce policies, platforms, tactics, strategies, and objectives. To win control of one of these executive committees meant winning control of the party, winning control of the movement, and possibly winning control of the whole revolution. It meant making your vision of the revolution, the official vision of the revolution, and thus the only permissible vision of the revolution.

From the standing committees of the first International through the Executive Committees of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party to the central committee of the Bolshevik Party, and now the Politburo of the Communist Party, we’ve seen time and again that winning control of these small committees, of perhaps five or seven or nine members, was a great prize. And this was the substance of Trotsky’s critique of the Bolsheviks when he said, “In the internal politics of the party, these methods lead to the party organization substituting itself for the party, the Central Committee substituting itself for the Party organization, and finally the dictator substituting himself for the Central Committee. The only thing he got wrong about this in projecting the future layout of the Communist Party is the additional rung of the Politburo between the Central Committee and the dictator. And while Trotsky was of course, prescient, he did not complain much about these things when he was in the Politburo.

Now, through the years, it was always woe to those who disagreed with the executive committees, especially if and when and where its handful of members realized they were empowered to set rules about who could be a member of the party, who could participate in party congresses, who was allowed to vote for members of the executive committees. Once control over the process was secured, the results would always be the same, because those who controlled the process controlled the results. This could become permanent once the executive committee established themselves as the court to final appeal, to whom all complaints must be sent, and from whom all final judgments would be handed down. The circuit would be closed. Whatever the Politburo said was right. Even when it was wrong, the only options left would be to conform, quit or be expelled.

Now, obviously I’m talking about all this because we’ve come to the final chapter of the Russian Revolution, which, if it wasn’t called the final chapter, would be called the Great Purge.

In the Great Purge, Joseph Stalin would carry the logic of committee rule and banishment of opposition, logic that had been a part of revolutionary socialism since the days of Marx, Engels, and Bakunin, to its most monstrous conclusion. It was the final elimination of all mental, legal, and political lines that separated disagreement with Stalin, from treason against the party, the Soviet Union and the revolution. By the early 1930s, Stalin had danced his Politburo quadrille with ruthless agility, isolating and removing his rivals one by one until the only dance partners left were those of Stalin’s choosing, and they only danced to the tunes Stalin called.

But his victory brought him no rest. When you’ve played treacherous games against a thousand hidden enemies your whole life, it’s impossible to not see hidden enemies everywhere all the time, especially once you’ve surrounded yourself with people who agree with you because they are terrified of disagreeing with you. And so, we have this tragic irony: that just as Stalin’s power inside the Soviet Union became truly unassailable in the mid-1930s, he unleashed a massive campaign of terror.

Stalin aimed his great purge at all levels of Soviet society: up at the top, he aimed to eliminate Lenin’s thin stratum of old Bolsheviks; anyone who could claim political authority, legitimacy, or respect due to their own service to the Party and the revolution, rather than simply Stalin’s whims. In the middle rungs, he aimed at state bureaucrats, party officials, and local functionaries; anyone who even so much as hinted at the existence of a method of Communist statecraft different from the glorious system handed down by Comrade Stalin. This middle group also included pretty much anyone who had gotten a college education before the revolution, including most of the cultural intelligentsia: writers, poets, artists, musicians, theater, directors, filmmakers; anyone who showed any interest of thinking for themselves. This also included academic elites like professors and scientists and researchers, plus that class of engineers and technical specialists and managers who had already been feeling the heat of political terror since the beginning of the first Five Year Plan. And then last, but certainly not least — because they felt it the most — we had the general masses, hundreds of thousands of workers, peasants, shopkeepers, secretaries, cleaning staff, teachers, people denounced for god knows what reason, put on a list, arrested by the police and either shoved on a cattle car and sent off to a labor camp or dragged to a basement where they would be shot.

Now explaining the Great Purge of course begins with Stalin’s own paranoid megalomania, and his obsession with eliminating personal enemies. Stalin would always act and behave as if the USSR, the revolution, the Communist Party, the Central Committee, the Politburo, and he himself were all one and the same thing, and moreover, in a state of constant siege. They were encircled by enemies. Now Stalin’s paranoia was driven partly by an intense feeling of perpetual victimization, that he was always the butt of slander and unfair attacks from everyone else, that everyone was out to get him, and so he could always justify going off and getting them first. Stalin also came ready equipped, just as Lenin did, with the personality of a bully. When he saw people backing down, he didn’t take that as a time to let up, but instead to go harder, that it wasn’t enough to beat your enemies, you had to degrade them, humiliate them and ruin them, and then destroy them.

But while Stalin’s own increasingly unhinged personality is a necessary part of explaining the Great Purge, it is not sufficient. Stalin’s siege mentality wasn’t just a psychological idiosyncrasy, it was the essential worldview of the Bolshevik party. The idea that they were always and everywhere surrounded by enemies trying to beat down the gates, climb over the walls, come up through the sewers. This is understandable given that they had come from the revolutionary underground, where people absolutely had been out to get them all the time — and not just visible enemies like policemen, gendarmes, or soldiers, but hidden enemies right in their own ranks. Every good comrade at every party meeting might in reality be an agent of the Okhrana, a spy, an informer, an agent provocateur. This wasn’t paranoid delusion, this was just a fact of daily life. It is an idle paranoia to suspect your closest comrade of secretly working against you. It’s in fact in the job description of any alert revolutionary.

This culture of paranoia grew proportionately when the Bolsheviks seized power and became the Communist Party. It was no longer about the police or the Ministry of the Interior but about entire nations and armies and peoples, all of them out to destroy Soviet Russia and the revolution. The White Armies were backed by an international gallery of enemies: France, Britain, Germany, the United States, Poland and Japan. It hardly matters that after historians got the time to sift through the various government archives that it became clear the international interventions by these powers into Russia during the Civil War were far less vast, coordinated, or committed than the Soviet leaders supposed. Doesn’t matter, because in the heat of the Civil War, they saw enemies everywhere, because there were enemies everywhere: internal and external, at home and abroad, inside and outside, above and below. The consequences of too much paranoia paled in comparisons to the consequences of too little.

It’s also not like the 1930s were a time to let one’s guard down. Now, from our advantage point almost a hundred years later, we can see plainly that what’s about to happen in the Soviet Union is a grotesque farce, a deadly exercise in creating absurd fantasies that all participants recognized as absurd fantasies but then pretended were real. And we also know that, internally, the opposition to Stalin was hopelessly atomized, weak, and inconsequential. But in the 1930s, the USSR was still surrounded by enemies. The Nazis had come to power in Germany, Mussolini ruled Italy, in the far east, the Empire of Japan, who had already dealt Russia a humiliating defeat a generation earlier, was aggressively expanding. Meanwhile, the lingering belief that the headquarters of western capitalism in Britain, France and the United States, the leaders of the international bourgeois, were always devising ways to undermine and then overthrow the Soviet Union. Was it beyond belief that right now, at this very moment, any one of those powers was suborning spies and saboteurs inside the Soviet Union, that political opposition to Stalin was ready to accept aid from any power willing to give it? It wasn’t crazy. All you had to do was look at the history of the Communist Party itself: the Bolsheviks had after all pulled into Finland Station on a train paid for by the Kaiser.

Now whether he was working in the Kremlin, making the official rounds through the Soviet Union, or relaxing at his beloved retreat on the Black Sea, Stalin’s mind always returned from whatever project he was working on to the larger problem of all those enemies out there out to get him, foreign powers like Germany and Japan passing money and information to dissident political leaders inside Russia who used that money and information to turn workers and peasants against Comrade Stalin, and by extension the Politburo, the Central Committee, the Communist Party, the Soviet Union, and the revolution. As his mind returned to this place, one face stood out clearer than any other, one voice rose above the rest, one pen would not stop scribbling: Trotsky, the stepson daddy liked best, the man whose intellectual arrogance rankled twice as hard because his intellectual superiority could not be denied. Trotsky, who embodied a totally legitimate communist alternative to Stalin whose claim to being [Lenin’s?] true heir was distressingly plausible. Trotsky had been a world famous political celebrity back when Stalin was an anonymous functionary. It’s safe to say that Trotsky had lived rent free in Stalin’s head for twenty years, and time had only increased Stalin’s obsession, his fear and his hatred of Trotsky. And it’s why Trotsky’s name will be everywhere in 1936, 1937 and 1938. Every confession would include links to Trotsky. I met with Trotsky. I corresponded with Trotsky. I’m a member of a group led by Trotsky.

Trotsky, Trotsky, Trotsky. It would always come back to Trotsky.

Now as with all of Stalin’s paranoia, he was not wholly unjustified. All those people he had isolated and ditched in the Politburo quadrille, plus anyone associated with the old Workers’ Opposition or the Left Opposition or the United Opposition or the Right Deviationists, all those guys had networks of friends, allies, and supporters who had been pushed out into the political wilderness, where they nursed deep and bitter resentments and plotted their comeback. All of them fully intended their time in the wilderness to be merely temporary, and when they staged their great comeback, it would be to fulfill the dying words of Lenin: get rid of Stalin.

In the fall of 1932, the secret police uncovered a couple of long documents written by an old Bolshevik named Martemyan Ryutin. The first was called An Appeal to all Members of the All Union Communist Party, and the other was a 200 page booklet called Stalin and the Crisis of the Proletarian Dictatorship. Ryutin, who’d been an ally of the right, called for an end to forced collectivization, the slowing of industrialization, and the reinstatement of all exiled Party members, including Trotsky. The appeal provocatively called Stalin “the gravedigger of the Revolution” and “the evil genius of […] the Russian revolution” and stated bluntly “Stalin must be removed by force.”

So, though Stalin’s imagination was a fever swamp of paranoia, it’s not like he was wrong that lots of people would love to see him overthrown, tossed in prison, or executed. These threatening anti-Stalin tracks enjoyed wide circulation among all flavors of the opposition, and when the author was identified, Ryutin himself was arrested and sentenced to ten years in prison. But the most troubling thing of all was not that somebody had written all this, but how many people had read it, and how many people chose not to report it?

Stalin’s natural paranoia further grew into unnatural proportions in December 1934 when he was dealt a sudden blow. Now, if you will recall when Zinoviev was ousted from all his Party positions in 1926, leadership of the Communist Party in Leningrad was handed to a guy called Sergei Kirov. Kirov was widely popular inside the Party, had a genial good nature, and an ability to get along with everyone at a time when that wasn’t just out of fashion, but potentially dangerous. But, he could get along with anyone because he got along with Stalin. Kirov was above all a Stalin loyalist, and probably the one person in the Party Stalin actually considered a real personal friend, somebody he enjoyed hanging out with. But on December 1st, 1934, while Kirov was walking through the corridors of the Smolny Institute — still the headquarters of the revolution in Leningrad since the dramatic days of 1917 — a disgruntled former member of the Party came up and shot him in the head.

Now the assassin turned out to be a classic lone nut, and even under suggestive torture couldn’t make any convincing claims to being the triggerman for some vast coordinated conspiracy. All the investigations into Kirov’s assassination revealed was that security around the Smolny Institute was lax, and that a political opposition to Stalin existed. But there was nothing really to connect the two. This conclusion was not entirely satisfactory to Stalin, but that was the conclusion even of the secret police.

Now, the secret police had been reorganized again in July 1934, that which had started as the Cheka, and then became the GPU, was now folded into a larger apparatus of internal security called the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, known by the Russian acronym, the NKVD. The head of the NKVD was a guy called Genrikh Yagoda. Now the details of Yagoda’s early career are disputable, but he joined the Bolsheviks before the October Revolution and quickly found a home in the Cheka. He rose to become its deputy chairman and run day-to-day operations after it was reorganized as the GPU, and he held that operational position for a decade. When the GPU became the NKVD in July 1934, Yagoda was named People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs, giving him broad jurisdiction over both the regular police and the secret police, which was now a huge network of agents operating pretty much independently of all other party and state organizations. The NKVD was above, below, and behind you all the time, and everyone knew it.

But while Yagoda was a careful political survivor, and had absolutely no ethics to speak of — he did, after all, continue to hold his position as Stalin threw out faction after faction — he was not among those whose career had been entirely made by Stalin. He was not a hundred percent Stalin’s man. And it was a fact both of them were well aware of.

Meanwhile, up through the ranks of the Party apparatus rose another man, who was willing to be far more accommodating of Stalin’s wishes, particularly the wish to uncover the vast conspiracy he knew existed. This is Nicolai Yezhov.

Yezhov came from the lower classes. He’d started his life as a Taylor’s assistant and a factory worker. He served two years in the army in World War I, joined the Bolsheviks in 1917, and then spent the Civil War serving in the Red Army. Through the 1920s, he bounced up the rungs of both the state and the Party, promoted ever upward as people better than him, more talented than him, and more independent than him were ousted by Stalin. Finally in 1934, Yezhov was elected to the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Now, unlike Yagoda, Yezhov was Stalin’s man, he was one of Stalin’s favorites, and he was constantly in and out of the boss’s office. And as I just said, he was more than willing to enable Stalin’s most paranoid fantasies. Yezhov harshly criticized the NKVD’s investigation of the Kirov murder for failing to uncover a vast opposition network that must have been behind the assassination. Eventually Stalin was himself convinced of what he was already convinced of, and at the end of 1935, reopened the Kirov case. Yagoda, who knew which way the winds blew, ramped up arrests and investigations of this vast Trotskyite conspiracy, well aware that Stalin had told Yezhov to keep a close eye on the NKVD. They had better deliver what the boss wanted.

And so they did.

In early 1936, without anyone being fully cognizant of what was happening — neither the perpetrators, nor the victims — the Great Purge began. Now the most infamous expression of the purge would be the Moscow show trials of 1936, 1937 and 1938. The show trials were the mechanism by which Stalin systematically targeted and eliminated all the old Bolsheviks. It was a mechanism that had been first introduced with the Trial of the SRs, and then refined during all those trials against economic wreckers in the late 1920s and early 1930s. And the method would be the same: almost no evidence would be needed; the show trials were first and foremost a show, and would rest largely on dramatic confessions by the accused. These confessions would be extracted by various threats and torture and false promises, and which provided Stalin with both public propaganda and the personal satisfaction of watching his enemies humiliated, ashamed, and groveling.

Now, first on the docket were Zinoviev and Kamenev. Since their political defeat in 1927, they had been kicked out of the Party, but then later reinstated, kicked out again, and then secretly convicted of complicity in Kirov’s assassination even though no evidence existed, because they had nothing to do with it. In 1936, they were hauled back to Moscow and subjected to extended interrogations that broke them down mentally and physically. By the summer in 1936, they were ready to confess to anything to make it all stop. To secure the deal Stalin, personally promised they would not be executed if they admitted to being co-ring leaders of a vast conspiracy organized by Trotsky. He also promised not to do anything to their families.

And so, they confessed. Confessed to things they had nothing to do with. In August, 1936, the first trial began. Zinoviev, Kamenev, and fourteen other defendants admitted to leading what was officially dubbed the Trotskyite-Kamenevite-Zinovievite Leftist Counter Revolutionary Bloc. In a shocking display trumpeted for all the world to see, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and the other leading lights of the Communist Party stepped forward one by one to confess in the most groveling terms treasonous acts against the Soviet Union and the revolution. As soon as they were done confessing, all sixteen were found guilty and sentenced to death. Stalin had never intended to keep his word to his old comrades. On August 25th, 1936, Zinoviev and Kamenev were taken down to a prison basement and unceremoniously shot. The oldest of the old Bolsheviks were done to death, just like the Romanovs. The time had come for the revolution to devour the last of her children.

To prepare this final revolutionary feast, Stalin needed someone who did not harbor any doubts or hesitations. And that meant getting rid of Yagoda. Now, this is not to exonerate Yagoda in any way: he oversaw the NKVD during a decade of mass arrests and imprisonments and executions. He was also a pioneer in realizing you could use slave labor from the gulags to help build Russian infrastructure. But, he was resistant to the Great Purge. He had always doubted the existence of a grand coordinated conspiracy surrounding Trotsky, and in 1936 suggested they maybe not go forward with anymore show trials, because it would be bad for publicity on the world stage. These were doubts and hesitations Stalin could not tolerate. So, in the fall of 1936, Stalin wrote a memo to the Politburo that said:

We consider it absolutely necessary and urgent that Comrade Yezhov be appointed to head the people’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Yagoda has obviously proved unequal to the task of exposing the Trotskyite-Zinovievite bloc. The GPU was four years late in this matter. All party heads and most of the NKVD agents in the region are talking about this.

The very next day, Yagoda was demoted to a minor post in the government, and Nikolai Yezhov was named People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs. Now under Yezhov’s direction, a second Moscow trial was staged in January 1937. This one also focused on a conspiracy allegedly organized by Trotsky. This second Moscow trial was called the Case of the Anti Soviet Trotskyist Center, and featured 17 more old Bolshevik defendants. The most famous of them was Karl Radek, the steadfast Communist Internationalist and revolutionary veteran of Poland and Germany and Russia. Also among the accused was Yuri Pyatakov, who’d been name checked by Lenin’s Testament as one of the up and coming theoreticians of the Communist Party. Standing beside them was also Grigory Sokolnikov, long time commissar of finance. The charges were all absurd, that they were leading members of a conspiracy organized by Trotsky and backed by Nazi Germany to overthrow the USSR. Thirten of them were sentenced to death. Karl Radek was given only a term in a labor camp for providing the most convincing confession, confirming the great lie that there was not just an inner conspiracy, but a huge network of sympathizers and fellow travelers left to be identified and eliminated. This trial was also broadcast for the whole world to see and hear, shocking confessions of the most incredible crimes by the least likely suspects. It was unbelievable, as well it should have been.

Adjacent to the attack on the old party leadership, Stalin also targeted the upper rungs of the Red Army and navy. The senior military staff was full of heroes of the Civil War who commanded respect, influence, and authority independent of Stalin, and who, by the very nature of the military’s hierarchy, commanded, armies and navies that might be turned against Stalin. In 1937, the NKVD fabricated a right wing Trotskyist military conspiracy, like, literally fabricated, as in, forged the documents themselves and tortured junior officers into making incredible confessions implicating the most decorated officers in the Red Army, who were now accused of being spies and saboteurs working for the Nazis. But the trial of the military officers would not be one of the show trials. Stalin seems to have understood that dispatching party flacks was one thing, but tearing down military heroes was another. Might not go over well publicly.

So in June 1937, they held a secret trial, done quickly and away from the spotlight. At the top of the list were three of the five marshals of the Soviet Union, the senior most leaders of the military, elevated to those positions because they had won the Civil War. They were all found guilty of heinous acts of treason and executed right then and there. This trial was the beginning of a massive subsequent purge of the Red Army; almost the entire uppermost rung of the officer core was dispatched. By the end of 1938, about 5% of the total officer corps had been purged, including most of the senior commanders. So, heading into World War II, all the best and brightest and most experienced commanders the Red Army had were gone. Which, I can tell you, had the senior leadership of the Nazi Party absolutely giddy with delight.

Now down a social rung from all those elite leaders, the Great Purge spread out into the middle strata of Soviet society, most infamously devouring, the cultural intelligentsia. During these years, thousands of writers, musicians, scientists, poets, linguists, philosophers, playwrights, movie directors were arrested, imprisoned, sent to labor camps, or outright executed. Universities and research departments and publishing houses and theaters and music companies were all placed under constant surveillance by the NKVD, and the slightest ping of disloyalty or independent thought merited a knock on the door in the middle of the night. Now this was all part of Stalin’s broader cultural campaign to make everything and everyone conform to Stalin’s vision of communist society. And during the same period, those who formed to Stalin’s vision of society were promoted and extolled… until he changed his mind, and yesterday celebrated writer became today’s sinister villain, and tomorrow’s erased memory.

Now, the Great Purge was never aimed solely at senior officials and educated elites. It also targeted the general population. On July 2nd, 1937, Stalin issued top secret orders to regional leaders of the party in the NKVD: they were told to immediately produce a list of all Kulaks and criminals in their districts. Those named were to be rounded up and either deported or executed, depending on the circumstances. As we discussed last time, most of the real Kulaks had been rounded up and deported years earlier, and so that left the NKVD to uncover new Kulaks, wherever and however they could. And failure to produce a convincing and long enough list meant that when that list was produced, your name would probably be on it.

So local units of the NKVD, having quotas to hit, rounded up people on the slightest pretense, tortured them into confessing and implicating others, and then rounding up those named and doing the same thing all over again. In this way, hundreds of thousands of people were accused of various political crimes, including old favorites like economic sabotage and wrecking, spying for foreign powers or organizing insurrection among the peasants and the workers. People would then be rounded up, tortured, and signed confessions that would be passed over to little NKVD tribunals, who would review end stamp paperwork they barely glanced at. There were only ever two sentences: deportation to the gulags or immediate execution.

Now the purge fell hard on the general population, but it felt disproportionately hard on non Russian nationalities inside the Soviet Union: Poles, Ukrainians, Finns, Latvians, whoever. National minorities comprised 36% of the victims of the Great Purge despite being only a fraction of the Soviet Union’s total population. Sentences of death were handed down in about 75% of cases involving minority nationalities and only 50% of those involving Russians. The purge of the Poles was particularly intensive: they accounted for 12 and a half percent of everyone who was killed. Now these groups were all targeted because they came from areas on the border with hostile powers and might be in league with those hostile powers, and so non-Russians were treated to especially harsh and unforgiving treatment, because they were plausibly suspected of opposing the Russian Communist Party. Gee, I wonder why.

After a nearly two year reign of terror that blanketed every level of Soviet society, Stalin delivered his grand finale in March of 1938. It was meant to put the final nail in the final coffin of all opposition. They orchestrated the third of the great Moscow shows, this one targeting all the remaining old Bolsheviks, with a special emphasis on all the Right Deviationists, since most of the left had already been purged. So, this meant the group who had helped Stalin run the USSR in the late 1920s: Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, Christian Rakovsky, Nikolai Krestinsky. For them, Stalin saved his most absurd accusations, beginning with the crazy charge that Bukharin and the others had plotted to assassinate Lenin and Stalin back in 1918, and ending with their alleged plot to partition the USSR and hand over all its territories to Germany, Japan, and Great Britain.

Now, this is all clearly insane, and on the first day of the trial Krestinsky repudiated his written confession and pleaded not guilty to all charges. But he recanted his recantation the next day, after being encouraged to confess with such persuasion that he dislocated his shoulder. Bukharin held out against confessing for the better part of three months, but finally the combination of the ongoing torturous interrogation and direct threats to his wife and son finally wore him down. Even still, when he stood up and confessed at his trial, it was only to vague crimes of opposition. He never acknowledged a single one of the specific charges against him.

Not that it mattered. They were all found guilty. Bukharin himself was shot on March the 15th, 1938.

With this final round of confessions and executions, pretty much the entire original leadership of the Bolshevik Party had now been liquidated. The people who carried the Party into the October Revolution through the Civil War and all through the 1920s, anyone that Lenin would have recognized as a colleague and collaborator and comrade, was now dead. The original members of the first Politburo — Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bubnov, Sokolnikov, Rykov, and Bukharin — they were all shot. Only Mikhail Tomsky avoided execution by committing suicide in 1936. Expanding the scope beyond just the Politburo, practically every member of the original central committees who had run the party in the teens and twenties was now gone. Their death dates read like a roster of the leaders of the French revolutions, whose dates of death, no matter the year of their birth, is always -1793 and -1794. The Russian equivalent of this is -1936, -1937 and -1938. Everywhere you look -1936, -1937, -1938.

Though, in fairness, it wasn’t all of them. Some of them made it to -1939 and -1940. Karl Raddick was executed in a labor camp in 1939, Alexei Rykov and Christian Rakovsky managed to make it to 1941 before they were hauled out and shot. In the end, the men and women who had made the Revolution of October were devoured not by the revolution, but by Stalin, who rewrote all the history books to make October the work of two men and two men only: Lenin the great infallible leader, and Stalin his great and infallible heir.

Ten years earlier, Trotsky denounced Stalin’s actions as the onset of a Russian Thermidor, a cynical and conservative retreat from the revolution. But in hindsight, we can see that when Trotsky said all this in 1927, the revolution in many ways had barely begun. Collectivization, the Five Year Plan, and now the Great Purge? This is not the stuff at Thermidor, but the most feverishly radical days of the Jacobin reign of terror. Now Stalin was at least a passing student of revolutionary history, and he knew that after the terror must come a Thermidor. And so in 1938, he abruptly shifted gears again, rather than go down like Robespierre, Stalin decided to be the author of his own Thermidor, to play both parts in this unfolding historical drama. And why not? It’s not like anything mattered. It’s not like anyone could stop him. So one of the defendants at the third and final show trial was none other than Genrikh Yagoda, charged now with unjustly orchestrating a campaign of indiscriminate terror, of presiding over the imprisonment and murder of thousands of innocent people, for shame, for shame! Comrade Stalin is ashamed! Yagoda was found guilty and executed in March of 1938.

But sending Yagoda out as a sacrificial offering to the gods of Thermidor was not enough. In the summer of 1938, after the final show trial, Stalin turned on Nikolai Yezhov. He cut him out of the loop and trashed him in Party meetings, which was a clear precursor to expulsion, as anyone close to Stalin knew. And Yezhov with close to Stalin.

So Yezhov himself resigned as head of the NKVD in November 1938, but this did not save him. He was arrested in April 1939 and accused of “massive unfounded arrests of completely innocent persons.” The story was now going to be that Yagoda, and then Yezhov, had gone completely rogue, misleading Comrade, Stalin and the other Party leaders, and building a giant machine of death to satisfy only their own sadistic pleasures. By now Stalin had issued an order suspending all the death sentences and winding down mass repression and the Great Purge.

So Stalin got to have his cake and eat it too. He directed a campaign of mass murder to secure his power and position forever, and then took credit for ending it. Yezhov himself was shot on February 2nd, 1940 in an execution room of his own special design. His replacement, his head of the NKVD, was like Stalin a Georgian, a Georgian by the name of Lavrentiy Beria, a kind, generous, and compassionate soul. The ascension of Beria would signal the arrival of a kinder and gentler secret police. There would be no more reigns of terror in the Soviet Union ever again.

Now through all this, the great boogieman of Stalin’s imagination was still out there. Trotsky was still talking, still scribbling with his pen. Now, he had been evicted from France in 1936 and proceeded to live for a time in Norway, but once he was evicted from Norway, he was invited to come live in Mexico by leftwing president Lázaro Cárdenas. And now we’re back to episode 9.27 of the Mexican Revolution. Trotsky lived in Mexico for the final four years of his life, continuing to write and in his own special way continuing to alienate and ostracize anybody who might support him. It’s actually kind of funny that Stalin was obsessed with the idea that Trotsky was organizing a vast coordinated conspiracy, because anyone who got close to Trotsky was eventually pushed away.

Now Trotsky believed to his very last breath that his present condition of exile was exactly like the exile he had endured before 1917, that eventually his story would end with a triumphant return to Russia, where he would reclaim the mantle as Lenin’s heir. But that is not how the story of Trotsky ends. It ends instead with an ice ax to the back of the head on August 21st, 1940. The Russian revolution was over. Stalin had won.

Over the course of the Great Purge from 1936 to 1938, the total estimate of arrested was somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5 million people. The gulags now burst with prisoners who were put to work as defacto slaves in the Soviet Union’s ongoing projects of industrialization and modernization. The total executions were somewhere in the neighborhood of 700,000, give or take a hundred thousand here and there. If you include all those who subsequently died in the camps thanks to the brutal conditions, the total death toll of the Great Purge is round about a million. Many families followed the officially accused off to their deaths. Stalin promised not to harm the families of the old Bolsheviks if they confessed, but he broke those promises. Kamenev’s sons were executed. So was his first wife, Olga. She was executed in 1941 along with 160 other prominent political prisoners, including the great SR leader Maria Spiridonova. Bukharin’s wife was sent to a labor camp, but she survived, and saw her husband rehabilitated a half century later. But most families were not rounded up. They just endured the pain and trauma of having loved ones disappear one day. Typically the families of those put to death were told their loved ones had been sentenced to ten years in a prison camp, but they were forbidden to write home or communicate in any way. When these ten year periods elapsed at the end of World War II in 1946 and 47 and 48, the families were told their relatives had died in prison.

Now, if we pull back and look at the big picture, the loss of life in Russia and the Soviet Union during this revolutionary period is staggering. So not even counting the 2 million soldiers and civilians who died in the midst of World War I, we’re probably talking about a million or a million and a half people killed during the Russian Civil War, the 5 million who died in the famine of the early 1920s, the 10 million who died in the famine of the early 1930s, and here we’ve got another million or so killed in this Great Purge. These are all rough estimates, but it pushes the number of what we would call excess deaths stemming from the revolution and the Civil War and every other thing that happend close to something like 20 million. And this is all leading into the catastrophic disasters of World War II that’s estimated to have killed 27 million people. I can’t even begin to fathom the trauma endured by someone who was born in like 1900 and who managed to live to the age of 50, to have come of age in the revolution of 1905 and its repressive aftermath and then World War I and then the revolution and the Civil War and collectivization and the purges and then World War II. I mean, it’s just… my god, it’s horrific. There are hard times in history, and then there are hard times in history. These were hard times.

So let us return now to the beginning and take stock of where we stand. What can we make of the Russian Revolution? What can we make of the long arc from Marx to Stalin? Now, in theory the Bolshevik Party — and subsequently, the Communist Party — was the party of the proletariat. That is where they came from, it’s who they were meant to represent. The Communists were a manifestation of industrial capitalism, an answer to its horrors and degradations and exploitations. Opening chapter two of the Communist Manifesto Max and Engels wrote,

In what relation do the communist stand to the proletarians as a whole?

The communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties.

They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.

They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mold the proletarian movement.

And now, look, I don’t wanna point out the obvious here, but I think that the Russian Communist Party has strayed quite a bit in the interval between Marx and Stalin. The Communists absolutely opposed other working class parties. They did have interest separate and apart from those as the proletariat as a whole. They absolutely developed sectarian principles of their own which they used to shape and mold the proletarian movement. I think that the critics of the Russian Communists, inside and outside the Party, inside and outside the Soviet Union have a fair point here. The inner party, the Central Committee, and the Politburo, they cut themselves off from that base. No matter how many times the Central Committee and the Politburo declared that the Communist Party was identical with the proletariat, it’s very clear they were not. They developed into a run of the mill ruling clique with their own interests. This had been clear since at least 1918. And whatever else the Communist Party was and the Soviet Union were, it was not by and for for the workers. The Soviets had long ago been co-opted and were controlled by political appointees representing the party interests, not that of the workers. The spontaneous participation of the workers, it was over before the bullet holes were even patched up in the winter Palace. That’s why the Kronstadt Rebellion happened, it’s why there was a whole Worker’s Opposition movement inside the Party. And what happened to those who tried to give voice to the workers? They were repressed, expelled, and ultimately liquidated once and for all in the Great Purge.

Now, in terms of the little list of objectives that Marx and Engels put in the Communist Manifesto, admittedly, the Russian Communists did pretty well. They abolished private property, they set up universal free education, they centralized credit, communications and transportation in the hands of the state. Marx and Engels also explicitly called for the “establishment of industrial armies especially for agriculture,” which Stalin could point to anytime he wanted to justify collectivization.

Now, when they got down to the brass tacks of what communism meant, Marx and Engels wrote:

The distinguishing feature of communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. Modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products that is based on class antagonisms and on the exploitation of the many by the few.

Now, obviously the Russian Communists succeeded in eliminating bourgeois property, but I am among those who believes that the elimination of such property was never meant to be an end unto itself. It’s why they made it clear that they wanted to abolish this system of exploitation of the many by the few, whether in the workplace or in the state or in the family, that the dictatorship of the proletariat so often invoked and so often misunderstood meant to them simply the first moment in history when the many would rule the many. Bourgeois property and capitalist exploitation needed to go because it was a legal and economic system that locked into place this system of the few ruling the many for their own benefit. And unfortunately, again, to look at the system that wound up prevailing in Russia first under Lenin, and then Stalin, that the few did not continue to rule the many. They abolished bourgeois property, sure, but was their dictatorship of the proletariat the rule of the many over the many, or was it simply a dictatorship? It’s impossible to look at the Soviet Union as it was ultimately constituted under Stalin and not recognize that the revolutionary dream of a world free of a tyrannically exploitive ruling class composed of a tiny fraction of society ruling over everybody else had gone unfulfilled. It is a dream that remains unfulfilled. We still live in a world in search of an answer to the conundrum posed by Bukharin: liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice, but socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.

So that’s it. As far as the Revolutions Podcast goes, this will be my final narrative episode, the last time I’ll tell you about the who and the what and the when and the where of revolutionary history, with a little why and how thrown in for good measure. By my account, which is probably not exactly right, I’ve written and edited and recorded 320 of these narrative episodes from the kingdoms of Charles Stewart… fuckin’ Charles, man… to Stalin’s Great Purge, I’ve written somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.5 million words, give or take. I’ve enjoyed writing and reading and sharing every one of those words. Telling these Revolutionary stories has been my life for nine years, but the story is now over now.

Now, the podcast isn’t over, and when we come back in a few months, I’ll do my wrap up episodes. But those are gonna be essays that are reflective and thematic, not narrative. The story is over. This is the final chapter.

But even though the podcast is going to end, I’m not going anywhere. And you’ll notice that published right alongside this episode is some information about a book tour and speaking engagements that will start up in September and October, a tour that will run concurrently with the last run of episodes. And after that, it’s just more podcasts, more books, more of whatever else I happen to dream up. And I’ve still got a lot of dreams left.

But the tenth and final season of the Revolutions Podcast is now done. The Russian Revolution, all 103 episodes of it, it’s over. And I’ll see you on the other side.

 

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.34: The Wave of Protest

Bloody Sunday was a watershed moment in Russian history. As news of the massacre spread, Russians reacted with shock, horror, and anger. Bloody Sunday invited the whole empire to join an aggrieved reappraisal of the tsarist regime that was now failing as disastrously at home as it was abroad. And as if the truth itself wasn’t bad enough, rumor swirled the Father Gapon had served as a pied piper to lure workers into a murderous trap laid by Bloody Nicholas, the admittedly unfair nickname that had been hung on the tsar after his coronation, but which now seemed more apt than ever. Outside Russia, the rest of the world learned that the Russian army had murdered a bunch of peaceful demonstrators, and the international condemnations of the tsar were loud and uniform. Faith in the regime was at an all time low. Faith that this could end only with political and economic reform was at an all time high.

But the exact end result of all of this would depend a lot on how it was handled by the tsar and his ministers. And folks, let me tell you, they are not going to handle it very well at all.

As I mentioned last week, Nicholas reacted to Bloody Sunday like it was an unfortunate natural disaster. It was a tragic accident. To the extent that he believed that somebody might be to blame, he placed that blame on revolutionary agitators, agitators who had led his people astray. The response from the Empress Alexandra was even more obtuse: she wrote her sister saying in effect that she and Nicholas were the real victims. Her heart went out mostly to her husband, who was now bearing a terrible weight thrown on him by a few malcontents in the capital, even as the rest of the empire still loved them as ardently as ever. She wrote among other things, “Petersburg is a rotten town… not one atom Russian. The Russian people are deeply and truly devoted to the sovereign.” Such were the rationalizations inside the imperial family.

Meanwhile, back in St. Petersburg, all those workers who — let me just check, yep, are in fact, a bunch of Russians — were reeling from Bloody Sunday, but not at all broken. Because one thing Bloody Sunday did not do was end the workers’ strike. In the midst of all of Sunday’s drama, it was easy to forget the simple fact that their petition had never reached the tsar. Their demands were still unaddressed. So the workers woke up on Monday morning and still refused to do their jobs. And now they were joined by even more workers, people who had remained on the job thus far now quit in angry solidarity, and this included at the gas works and a critical power station. The general strike that had begun on January the third was not just ongoing, it was bigger than ever. Nothing had been solved. Everything was worse. And on top of that, Father Gapon had been forced to flee the country, taking with him the great idea that had previously animated the strikers, the tsar is good and he will help us.

To deal with the immediate problem of unrest in the capital, the tsar promoted General Dimitri Trepov to be the new governor general of St. Petersburg. A veteran cavalry officer, Trepov had been the head of the Moscow police since 1896. He was a staunch and reliable conservative, and had been a vocal critic of Mirsky’s liberal approach, saying that it would cause more problems than it would solve, and after Bloody Sunday, this seemed like a bang on assessment to Nicholas. So Trepov was moved to St. Petersburg to get the situation back in hand. Martial law now prevailed in the capital with police and troops patrolling unusually empty streets. Trepov also ordered the police to round up all known revolutionary agitators and suspects. Trepov proved to be a steady enough hand that his star was now on the rise. In a few months, he would be given the additional title of assistant minister for internal affairs, which put him in charge of the national police service. Along the way, he would become one of Nicholas’s most trusted personal advisors — and Sergei Witte, who remained politically sidelined despite his own self confident belief that he was the only man who could fix the empire, would soon be bitterly describing Trepov as the real dictator of Russia.

But the regime now had a lot more to grapple with than just St. Petersburg workers. Bloody Sunday triggered a vast wave of protests, worker strikes, street demonstrations, and demands for economic and political reform. This wave of protests spread through three principle channels: the workers, the intelligentsia, and this whole other can of worms that I’ve been giving short shrift to in the series so far, and that’s the minority nationalities on the periphery of the Russian empire. Poles, Finns, Germans, Armenians, Georgians, and Jews, who chafed under tsarist rule and who were after not just economic and political reform, but national liberation.

However, one channel that these mass protests in January and February 1905 did not travel through was the peasantry. Now, there were some exceptions here and there, but in the main, this political emergency was mostly an urban phenomenon, which did help Alexandra stay convinced that real Russian still loved them, because people who lived in cities, weren’t real Russians.

So in the industrial labor channel, between January the 10th and January the 20th, strikes broke out in more than 30 cities, and eventually included some 500,000 workers off the job. And that was more than every combined strike since the beginning of the tsar’s reign put together. These strikes were spontaneous and unorganized, and happened far too quickly at this stage for the revolutionary socialist agents to lead or direct them. The vast majority of these strikes were also peaceful, though in Saratov and Kiev, there were clashes with local authorities, probably due to the particularly heavy concentration of SRs in those two cities.

The worst incident was in Riga, Latvia, where a workers’ march on January the 13th was fired on by soldiers resulting in seventy deaths, some from gunfire, some who were trampled, and a bunch who drowned when they ran for cover onto a frozen river and the ice broke.

But in the main, we are not here talking about people throwing up barricades and storming fortresses. These were peaceful strikes, not insurrectionary uprisings, which is a good thing for the local authorities, because this was an unprecedented spread of urban unrest and they had no coherent plan for dealing with any of it.

Now, as I just mentioned, the SRs and the Social Democrats, be they Bolshevik or Mensheviks, were forced to play catch up. They had always been predicting a revolution would break out, and when it actually broke out, they were not expecting it. As we saw last week, their initial attempts to get in there and take over the workers’ movement in St. Petersburg had been rebuffed. But after Bloody Sunday, they did start having more success, because they were able to persuasively argue, you tried groveling to Bloody Nicholas and look where that got you. But the agents making that case to the workers inside Russia were now operating mostly independently from the senior émigré leaders who we’ve been talking about so far, right? Plekhanov and Martov, Lenin, Chernov, Struve. All of them elected to remain abroad, rather than rush home. They were all known to the Okhrana and would likely have been arrested the minute they stepped foot back in Russia, plus it was not at all clear this was the revolution they had been waiting for. It might all blow over before they even finish their travel arrangements so they elected to stay put. The only major exception to this was Trotsky, who concluded that he did not want to miss out on the action, so he shaved his beard, acquired a false passport, and traveled incognito to Kiev in February of 1905. And thanks to this, Trotsky will be much more directly involved in the Revolution of 1905 than the rest of his émigré comrades put together.

As events were moving too quickly for that émigré leadership to issue timely orders, the agents inside Russia had to improvise a response. But nearly everyone focused on ramping up their agitation efforts, to spread ideas and demands and promises, to radicalize the workers who were now well primed by Bloody Sunday to be radicalized, and most importantly, to tie the worker grievances to a socialist revolution. But at this point, they were neither of the leaders nor the principle organizers of anything. They were just along for the ride.

Spreading alongside these labor strikes was the second channel of unrest: the intelligentsia. And January and February 1905 saw a concurrent intelligentsia strike that included all the educated professionals we talked about in Episode 10.32, who had been pushing for political reform since the spring of 1904. Bloody Sunday now gave these reformers a bloody shirt to wave around and say, see, this is what we’ve been talking about. This isn’t just about a badly run war, but scandalous murderous ineptitude at home. We demand political reform. We demand elections and civil rights and a national assembly.

So all those same professional organizations and local zemstvo and union municipal councils that had supported the zemstvo back in the fall of 1904 issued new statements condemning the regime and demanding an end to autocracy. To back up these demands, they too refused to work. Students and professors walked out of the university classrooms together; lawyers refused to show up in court; all those statisticians and agronomists and clerks working for the zemstvo stayed home. Instead they held more meetings and more banquets, jeering the tsar and cheering reform. They also held fundraisers for the striking workers to try to link these two movements together. And of course, all of this was being covered by the press, and so the drumbeat call for reform spread, and the censor’s office was revealed to be ill-equipped to handle this much disruption to routine publishing habits. They simply couldn’t handle the flood of material. Successful censorship had always been based on fear of punishment leading to preemptory self-censorship, but now that fear was gone. And after Bloody Sunday, literate Russia was reading one message: shame on the tsar, we want reform.

The strikes and protests of labor and the intelligentsia then landed in the peripheral parts of the empire where it combined with the third channel of protest, the minority nationalities. I have not, as I said, fully developed this as much as I probably should have, and I’ll have to rectify that, but for now, let’s just say that in Poland, angry nationalistic sentiment was rooted in the original partitions of Poland, and had been hardened by years of abusive conflict with the Russian authorities. So when, for example, the wave of strikes reached Warsaw on January the 11th, it was infused with this extra burst of nationalist patriotism, and so there was more violence amongst the published strikers than there was amongst the Russians. Up in Finland, meanwhile, there was a well-organized revolutionary underground, just waiting to break loose. And remember I mentioned in passing in Episode 10.32, that it was Finnish revolutionaries who had brought the anti-tsarist groups together to form that Paris block back in September, 1904. And I just noted that one of the most violent clashes in these weeks was in Riga, Latvia. And there’s a reason for that.

Similar themes of national liberation existed among Armenians and Georgians down in the Transcaucasus, as calls for economic and political reform were joined by attacks on the foreign occupiers. For these minority nationalities in the multi-ethnic Russian Empire, liberation did not just mean liberation from tsarist oppression, it meant liberation from foreign oppression.

The people who attempted to fuse all this together into a coherent movement was… the Union of Liberation, who were perfectly positioned to unite all of these forces, intelligentsia, liberals and workers and radicals, socialists, nationalists, SRs, Social Democrats — all of the channels that were now erupting in protest. This was the stuff that a national popular front could be made of, and the Union of Liberation had been trying to achieve that since 1903. Nearly everyone now agreed that the first necessary step was sweeping democratic reform and an end to tsarist absolutism. That was a minimum plan they could all agree on. Now, whether you wanted to stop there or go further to the dictatorship of the proletariat or stateless agrarian socialism, that didn’t matter. For the moment they were all headed in the same direction, so they may as well all push together. And besides, it was taken for granted among the Marxist agitators that this was probably the beginning of that first bourgeois democratic revolution that would pave the way for the second socialist revolution, so helping the liberal constitutionalists tear down tsarist autocracy had always been a part of their plans.

But though the Union of Liberation was doing a good job fusing together radical members of the intelligentsia, they all still struggled to make contact with the working classes. Even though the workers were now willing, even eager, to listen to scathing attacks on the tsar, they were still suspicious of attempts to turn their legitimate economic and social grievances into ammunition for a political project they didn’t really care about. They were on strike to improve their miserable lives, to address hunger, disease, injury, overwork, and overcrowding. So for them, this was about an eight hour work day, better sanitation, medical facilities, better wages, an end to arbitrary fines, maybe pensions, collective bargaining, schools for our kids. That was their minimum plan, not a parliament or a constitution. But that said, as long as their minimum plan was addressed, they were for sure willing to turn out in support of political reform, and maybe, even political revolution.

These waves of strike and protest spread so fast that the tsarist regime could hardly keep up. And despite all their long standing paranoid tendencies, it does not seem that anyone had ever seen fit to draw up a coherent national plan of action if a large-scale revolution broke out. So there was confusion about what should be done. Lines of communication and jurisdiction were unclear. And few definitive orders were coming from the top, which is not great if you’re allegedly running a highly centralized police state. So provisional governors mostly charted their own paths, many of them invoking their authority to declare a security emergency that would suspend anything resembling civil rights, due process, or judicial accountability. In a few places, as I said, there was violence between police and protestors, but for the most part, things were peaceful. And who knows how far things would have gone if violence had erupted right then and there in January. Because nobody really had any idea what they were doing, and remember, the Russian army is still focused mostly on getting their butts kicked in Manchuria. They’re not in any position to impose empire-wide martial law.

So one of the reasons direction from the central government was lacking was because, well, first they were caught totally flat-footed, but also because the ministry was undergoing a shakeup. Responsibility for a crisis like this was under the purview of the minister of the interior, but Mirsky was now discredited with the tsar. So he handed in his resignation on January the 15th, a resignation which was accepted coldly, and without even a parting handshake, Nicholas had only ever appointed Mirsky under duress and had never been happy with his constant whining about the need to appease the liberal intelligentsia. And to replace Mirsky, the tsar elevated a conservative Moscow noble named Alexander Bulygin. But though Bulygin was a staunch supporter of orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality, and had spent the last few years adamantly opposing all liberal reform proposals, this was mostly through unexamined habit, rather than rabid reactionary fervor. And though the appointment of Bulygin was taken by that liberal intelligentsia as a sign that the tsar was going to attempt to retreat to traditional conservatism, Bulygin was not Plehve. He was not going to be that reactionary, and given the circumstances, it really wasn’t going to be possible to be that reactionary. But the change in leadership at the Ministry of the Interior in the middle of this crisis did hamper the ministry’s ability to provide leadership to the rest of the empire.

The regime did get a brief moment to catch its breath though, because these initial strikes had a shelf life. Even as their workplace demands went unaddressed and unmet by the bosses or by the tsar or by anybody else, the St. Petersburg workers had been on strike since January the third, and despite fundraising efforts by their new allies among the professional classes, they simply couldn’t go on not working. They would die. So inside the capital, workers started returning to their factories as early as January the 14th, just five days after Bloody Sunday, with almost the whole city having returned to work by January the 18th. And this was still as other strikes were getting going in other parts of the empire. But those later strikes, which began after the initial strikes in St. Petersburg ended, also had a shelf life. A permanent general strike was never sustainable. And by February the first, the wave of industrial strikes was over. And the revolutionaries were disappointed that things had petered out so quickly, but they did take heart that maybe this was the giant first step forward towards the revolution they so ardently desired.

But though the workers are now returning to their factories, it was not, oh, things are fine again, even in the myopic halls of the Romanov palaces. Even the staunchest conservatives agreed that there would be no getting out of this without some public concessions by the tsar. But this was going to have to be handled with care. The tsar was dealing with humiliation at home and abroad. They had to figure out how to navigate not just the immediate disturbances, but how to repair the regime’s long-term legitimacy.

Now through all of these discussions, Nicholas always kept a firm eye on the war with Japan, praying, literally praying, like, a lot, for good news. If defeat abroad had undermined his regime, maybe victory could save it.

But until that good news came in, there were three things that needed to be done simultaneously: calm the workers inside the capital, calm the empire generally, and calm the international banking community, because the minister of finance is now reporting that Bloody Sunday had sent Russia’s credit into free fall. So remember how I said that, unlike Louis the 16th, Nicholas wasn’t yet dealing with financial pressures? Well, now he is.

But even with all of this in front of him, at one point Bulygin was stressing the need for concessions, and Nicholas said, and I’m quoting here, “it’s like you’re afraid a revolution will break out.”

And Bulygin said, “your majesty, the revolution has already begun.” I mean, at least Louis understood something was amiss when he asked if it was a revolt and told “no sire, it’s a revolution.”

So the brain boxes inside the Ministry finally came up with a brilliant way to solve the problem of the St. Petersburg workers: the tsar would meet them face to face to express his concern and understanding. But that didn’t mean going to the workers, or even going to St. Petersburg, which was far too unsafe. No, what they decided to do was go out and pick thirty-four subservient and reliably docile workers and put them on a train to the imperial residence at Tsarskoye Selo on January 19th.

For Nicholas, this would be the first time he had come into direct face-to-face contact with the working class. And when he met them, he felt obliged to play the role that god had ordained for him: the stern but benevolent father. Nicholas read to these workers a pre-written address that turned out to be a paternalistic lecture about how they must not allow themselves to be led astray by evil revolutionaries, especially in a time of war. Then he said he felt terrible about what happened in St. Petersburg, but that he would be a generous father, and forgive everyone on all sides for what happened. And then he finished by saying, “I have heard your complaints and I will work to improve conditions for you. Now go home and tell your friends and coworkers that you have met me, that I forgive them all, and I will try to help you all.”

When they departed, the tsar and his ministers agreed that it had gone splendidly, and this would be a major turning point. But it really was not. This meeting was accompanied by no other public promises or declarations, the vast majority of people were scarcely aware it had even taken place, and when these thirty-four workers told people about their trip to meet the tsar, their friends and coworkers were incredulous — he forgives us? You have got to be kidding.

What everyone really wanted was a great big acknowledgement that something was going to change. The last thing they had heard from the tsar were some very vague promises back in November in response to the Zemstvo Congress, that were inadequate at the time and now seemed laughably inconsequential. Because since then, we’ve just had a bunch of bad news from Manchuria, including the fall of Port Arthur, then a general strike in St. Petersburg, then Bloody Sunday, then a nationwide strike. And still, nothing from the tsar. No official acknowledgement of any of these events. So the Russian people were just sitting there like Ted Knight in Caddyshack: well, we’re waiting. But Nicholas and his ministers were feeling the same unhurried lack of urgency that had gotten them into war with Japan. At one point to prove that they were in fact working on an official response, the tsar authorized the ministry to print minutes from their deliberations, which was a fairly unprecedented show of transparency for the tsar, and he figured it would appease the carping liberals, but instead it turned out to be quite the self-own, because these minutes showed in stark black and white, that the ministers were dawdling, petty, out of touch, and neither working hard, nor on issues that mattered.

Then on February the fourth, 1905, everything got upended again. Nicholas’s eldest uncle grand Duke Sergei, the effect of patriarch of the Romanov clan, was leaving his Moscow apartment in a carriage when a member of the SR combat organization threw a bomb inside. Sergei was blown to pieces, just like his father the Tsar Liberator. Nicholas was shocked and horrified. It really was a personal blow. Sergei had been a rock in Nicholas’s life. The tsar’s sadness turned to fury when he found out that the mood in the streets was not sympathetic or remorseful about the murder of a senior member of the imperial family, but instead muted silence, and even glee, that old Sergei who was mostly hated by the people, was dead. Nicholas was furious at how unsympathetic and downright mean everyone was being in this time of mourning.

And I do want to say, just before we wrap things up today, that there had been a lot of debate among the revolutionaries on the efficacy of terrorism, mostly on the strategic level. Whether it was really advancing the revolutionary cause, or inviting a reactionary blowback ala the 1880s. But one thing you have to grant in retrospect is the assassination campaign of the SR Combat Organization after 1902 did a lot to bring about the Revolution of 1905. At least, indirectly.

Because look, their first major kill was that Minister of the Interior in 1902, which lead the tsar to elevate Plehve, and Plehve turned out to be such an arch-reactionary that he drove conservative reformists into the ranks of the liberal opposition, and drove liberal constitutionalists in to the ranks of the revolutionaries. Then the SRs killed Plehve in 1904, which led directly to the arrival of Mirsky, which we now understand to be a major turning point that further advanced the political springtime that had opened up, and pushed events forward towards the Zemstvo Congress, and then ultimately to Bloody Sunday. And now here again, Nicholas is getting ready to publish concessions meant to calm the waters, and the assassination of his uncle made him so upset that he couldn’t help but mix these concessions with resentful admonishments of the people, admonishments that were going to screw up the tone that he was trying to adopt.

Now were other factors much more important in bringing about the Revolution of 1905? Yes, of course. The war, the buildup of anger in the working classes, bloody Sunday itself. But looking back and mapping out the course of events, the SR Combat Organization assassinations definitely played their part, and all the while these assassinations were being orchestrated by Yevno Azef, who was a paid police agent who could have been stopped at any time. It’s just wild how history works sometimes.

So after the death of Sergei, Nicholas finally got around to putting the finishing touches on the public pronouncements that were meant to address the rolling crises that had been ongoing since the spring of 1904. To his ministry’s dismay however, Nicholas took all their work, did some final editing himself, and then released some proclamations to the public on February the 18th without ever giving them a chance for one last look. So, they found out what the final results of all their deliberations were the same time everybody else did.

And those final results turned out to be three somewhat contradictory documents. The first was a longish manifesto that called on the people to rally around the principles of traditional autocracy. This is where Nicholas admonished everyone for behaving so disgracefully, and for following ill intentioned leaders who wanted to quote, “create a new government based on principles alien to our fatherland.” This defiant, stubborn, and resentful tone was not what anyone was expecting, but this was not a fatal error. It merely muddled the waters. Because alongside that manifesto, the tsar issued another decree that formally acknowledged the right to petition, that people were allowed to present proposals on how to improve lives and the working of the government. This was in fact, a big concession that the tsar would at least listen to them.

Then finally later in the day, he issued a third public document, a copy of an order to Minister of the Interior Bulygin to begin drafting a proposal that would allow for the most trustworthy people to elect representatives to participate in the initial planning of potential legislation. Basically a place where the petitions might be boiled down to concrete proposals. This one would all be very limited in scope, but it wasn’t nothing. Nicholas is retreating from pure absolute autocracy here. He’s going from truly stubborn in flexibility to saying, okay, fine. We’ll find a place for the people’s voices somewhere. But it was also very confusing, because the tone of the manifesto was very different from the tone of the other two decrees, and so suspicion and confusion were as much the reaction out there in the Russian Empire as the joyful embrace of the tsar’s political retreat.

The imperial acts of February the 18th, 1905 the set the tone for the next several months. The invitation to petition led to a flood of petitions. And it was taken by many as an opportunity to more formally and openly organize to discuss the empire’s problems and then submit proposals for reform. And if we keep going with our French Revolution analogies, this period resembles nothing so much as the invitation from Louis the 16th to his subjects to submit those cahiers de doléances, those grievance lists in 1788. And just like in 1788 and 1789, the petitions of 1905 would ultimately be crafted and positioned to advance the cause of… constitutional reform, which was favored by the professional classes. And like the leaders of the third estate, the liberal constitutionalists would soon be riding high.

In the midst of this swirl of brainstorming political reforms, Nicholas and the Russian Empire were dealt further devastating blows. Nicholas had prayed and prayed for good news from the far east, but instead, as we will see next week, Nicholas is going to get the worst possible news at the worst possible time.

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.102: Dizzy with Success

After the Troika of Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev ousted Trotsky from the inner circle of the Communist Party, Joseph Stalin immediately turned and aligned with Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky to oust his erstwhile allies Zinoviev and Kamenev. We ended last week with the defeat of the United Opposition at the end of 1927. And this week, Stalin’s little Politburo quadrille will continue without interruption. As soon as he dispatched Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, Stalin turned on a dime, and iced out Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky.

This latest turn, however, would be about more than just power games inside that thin stratum of the Communist ruling class. Ditching the right wing of the party, Stalin will storm to the left, and force through economic and social reform so massive they transcended the meaning of the word reform. This would turn out to be nothing less than a full blown social revolution. A revolution from above, to fulfill in a matter of years what friends and enemies, allies and rivals, supporters and critics, believers and skeptics, all thought would take a generation if not a century or more to accomplish: transforming Russia from a land of backward peasants into an advanced industrial superpower.

Before 1917, Russian agriculture was famously, infamously, backward. Peasant communes owned land collectively, but doled it out to individual families in strips. A single family’s allotment of land was not even contiguous, but instead spread out all over the place. A strip here, a strip over there; it was grossly inefficient. And this is to say nothing in the fact that the methods, tools, and habits of Russian peasants had changed very little over the centuries. A medieval peasant would’ve felt right at home in most Russian villages in the early 20th century. Grain was sown and reaped by hand with the help of some scraggly farm animals. Now granting a few exceptions here and there, the industrial revolution had just not come to Russian agriculture. Their production per acre was among the worst in the world. Most peasants never rose above farming for bare subsistence, and if they did, it was only to meet taxes and obligations imposed by the tsar and the landed aristocracy. The grain surplus that fed the hungry cities and gave the tsar a little something to sell on the international market mostly came from noble estates, where land was consolidated and worked by hired rural laborers, specifically to produce crops for the market.

The leaders of Russia had always been well aware of the sorry state of their economic productivity. Going all the way back to the Crimean War, the tsar’s ministers understood their grossly inefficient agricultural sector and their almost non-existent industrial sector had become an existential threat to their power. Russia believed itself a great power, the natural peer of Britain, France, Germany, and Austria, destined among other things to eventually defeat the Ottoman Empire and rule Eurasia. But those other powers advanced in great leaps and bounds in the latter half of the 19th century, while Russia’s economic, military, and political inadequacies were put on display for all to see.

This is why the serfs had been freed in the 1860s, why Sergei Witte had gotten the green light to pursue rapid industrialization in the 1890s, why Pyotr Stolypin got the green light to pursue the total transformation of Russian agriculture after the revolution of 1905. The Witte boom gave the Russian Empire something resembling in industrial base, but Stolypin’s land reforms had proved much less successful, as they faced tenacious resistance from peasants hostile to his vision of individual landed proprietors working hard in the pursuit of individual profit.

Stolypin’s reform project was undone first by his assassination, then by the upheavals of World War I, and then buried by the Revolution of 1917. For the peasants, the revolution had only ever meant one thing: the land is ours now. Far from the dramatic stages of the revolution — the Winter Palace, the Smolny Institute, and the Kremlin — the peasants carried out their own revolution on their own terms. They claimed the greatest estates owned by the aristocracy and the church and the tsar and redistributed it to themselves as they saw fit. In the chaos of 1917, no political power in Russia could have stopped this peasant revolution, even if they had wanted to. It’s why Lenin and the Bolsheviks so quickly promulgated the Land Decree confirming the peasant’s land seizures in plain and simple terms. There was no sense alienating the peasants right out the gate. The Bolsheviks were in no position to alter the course of this land revolution.

Yet.

Now we know that deeply cynical motives lay behind the Land Decree because “all land to the peasants” was never the Bolshevik way. The agricultural platform of the Bolshevik Party had always called for mass nationalization of property, followed by the merging of atomized communes into large modern farms owned by the state, operated for the benefit of all, producing the material abundance socialism and communism required. This is one of the issues that set the Bolsheviks apart from the Mensheviks and the SRs during the years of emigre quarreling. The Mensheviks and the SRs really did favor a program of “land to the peasants,” not land to the state. It was why, come October 1917, they spluttered so incredulously as Lenin copied and pasted the SR land program. They knew he didn’t believe in “all land to the peasants” because he had spent fifteen years attacking the program of “all land to the peasants.”

But Lenin’s object was power. Consistency is a consolation prize for losers.

The chaos of the Civil War prevented the Bolsheviks — now Communists — from carrying out their ultimate objectives. They just had to hope the peasants would continue producing enough food surpluses to feed the cities and the Red Army. In the early days of 1918, Lenin and other senior Communists believe the peasants might volunteer to work twice as hard and grow vast surplus to feed the revolution. And from what I’ve read of their notes and correspondence, they were genuinely put out such voluntary exertions were not forthcoming, when in exchange for those efforts, the Communists offered them… nothing. With no intermediate option and no time to devise one, the Communists turned directly from encouraging voluntary efforts to demanding grain at gunpoint. Their armed food detachments violently crashed around the Russian countryside taking all the grain in livestock and leaving behind only trauma and bodies.

As the Civil War wrapped up in 1920 and 1921, the effects of War Communism were stark. Russian agricultural production was worse than it had ever been. There was drastically less land under cultivation, yields were meager, surpluses non-existent. There were no reserves at all. The Communists ruled an empire of subsistence farmers who then fell victim to a catastrophic famine in 1921 and 1922. This was one of the major impetuses for the NEP — the belated acknowledgement that they had to offer the peasants some incentive to work harder and grow more. In this case, it would be the right to sell their surpluses for profit, to use that profit, to invest in more land or better tools. To use it to buy manufactured goods or imports from abroad. After the abject bottoming out that was the famine of 1921-1922, agricultural yields improved in the 1920s until they were back up to the level they had been before World War I. The Soviet Union saw its peak harvest in 1925-1926, coming in at about 77 million tons of grain.

But individual landed proprietors growing crops for profit wasn’t communism. It wasn’t even the SR or Menshevik program. It was just capitalism, plain and simple. For all their struggles in a decade of socialist revolution, the Communist Party found itself totally upside down, defending a growing population of rural capitalists, private property owners, and individual profit seekers. This is what had driven the Left Opposition so crazy about the NEP, when the political conflicts of the 1920s weren’t reducible merely to personality conflict. Why is the Politburo of the Communist Party so dead set on protecting capitalists? I mean, you unfocus your eyes a little bit, and it becomes difficult to see the difference between Stolypin’s program in 1907 and the official Communist Party line of 1927. Is this really what we came here to do?

The Left Opposition’s reward for raising such obvious concerns about the very identity of the Party and the revolution was to be declared counter-revolutionaries and expelled from the Party. Trotsky, the greatest living Communist of them all, and second all-time only to Lenin himself, was banished to Kazakhstan. Then he’d be deported to Turkey, on his way to a life of permanent exile spent wherever he could find someone willing to host the most dangerous revolutionary in the world.

On the industrial front, things weren’t much better. As we know from the jillion odd episodes of this series on the Russian Revolution, the origins of Russian industrialization lay way back in the 1890s, when Russia strategically aligned with France and then Britain. In exchange for the Russians planting an army on Germany’s eastern flank, the French provided loans that allowed Russia to buy the latest industrial technologies, machines, and parts, then hire foreign engineers and managers to help them build and maintain factories, mines, and railroads. These loans were not only backed by the Russian army though, and tsarist Russia exported close to ten million tons of grain a year, much of it from the Ukrainian breadbasket, these agricultural exports providing the economic profits to pay their debts to the French and the British.

The industrialization of Russia proceeded rapidly in the last decade of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century, bringing rapid social economic and political changes that so explosively fueled the Revolution of 1905. But though the industrial growth of the Russian Empire was practically exponential year over year, it was only because they started from such humble beginnings. The working classes of Russia doubled, triple, quadrupled, but they were still a tiny handful compared to their peers in Britain, France, Germany, and Austria. They were tiny compared to their own population. The entire population of the industrial working class and the Russian Empire was just a few percentage points in a vast ocean of rural peasants. And we know that most of them were peasants themselves, passing fluidly from factory to farm and back again, following business cycles and growing seasons like migrating birds, heading south for the winter and north for the summer. It will remain forever a great historical irony that the first great communist revolution succeeded in this land of farmers.

But simplistic historical irony aside, World War I did double overnight the size of the Russian working classes and crammed them tightly into the centers of political power. It’s not actually that hard to grasp why the Russian proletariat was able to exercise such a disproportionate influence on events. I mean seriously, how many times have we seen a couple thousand bakers randomly throw up barricades in Paris and overthrow entire regimes, quote unquote French revolutions that most of the French population didn’t even find out about until like a week later? Overwhelming pressure brought to bear on pressure points is what matters in a revolution.

But. After peaking in 1915 and 1916 and 1917, Russian industry collapsed. The end of the war, the chaos of the Civil War, the economic blockades, the loss of financing, the lack of exports, the scarcity of raw materials and fuel, the shutdown of mines, the total collapse of the rail system, all combined to collapse Russian industry. The recently formed legions of industrial workers handed in their hammers and returned to their sickles, the communist revolution ultimately turning workers into peasants, rather than peasants into workers.

Grappling with the devastated industrial sector was a huge concern for the Communist Party in the 1920s. As with the Land Decree, the party abandoned as quickly as possible their professed program of democratized factories run by and for the workers. All power to the Soviets and all that. The exigencies of the Civil War and the priority of bare survival in a world surrounded by hostile powers left little room for idealism. The factories of Russia had to be run efficiently. Make things. Meet quotas. That meant a return to the old days of bosses, managers, and highly trained specialists calling the shots. The workers would be left with nothing to do but follow orders and wonder what the revolution had even been for. But, wonder about it, hopefully not talk too much about it — that might get the Cheka knocking on the door.

The market turn of the NEP only cemented these old systems of industrial organization. Factories, mines, and railroads were nominally owned by the state, but leased to private firms to direct and manage, a strange bedfellows partnership of revolutionary communists and industrial capitalists, hopefully to their mutual benefit. This too is what the Left Opposition had been on about through the 1920s. What the heck are we even doing? Is this really what we came here to do? We’re communists!

But industrial capacity did grow in the 1920s. Factories came back online, mines reopened, railroads were repaired. Normalization of relations with Britain and Germany and France opened back up opportunities for import, export, and financing. In 1928, the industrial working class numbered close to 3 million spread across 2000 nationalized factories, just a little bit more than their numbers in 1913. After ten years of war and revolution, they were finally back where they started.

But this was a big problem for the Soviet Union in the late 1920s, because where they started was still way behind everyone else. Not only that, while the Soviet Union merely crawled back to where they had been before World War I, their rivals in the west were leaping beyond their pre-1914 industrial levels. The USSR was behind, and every day, falling further behind.

The NEP was supposed to solve these problems, to be the bridge to the communist future of mass abundance and shared prosperity. The NEP was supposed to boost agricultural production, which would boost industrial production, which would further boost agricultural production. But it was slow going, and it was supposed to be slow going. According to Bukharin, they just had to accept the snail’s pace and work with it. Incremental growth would come over years and decades, but they would grow.

But just as Stalin delivered the killing stroke to the Left Opposition in late 1927, he was reading alarming reports that they weren’t growing. They were in fact facing a serious shortfall in grain procurements. They were millions of tons short of expectations. This would cause destabilizing scarcity in the cities and in the army. Then more immediate procurement numbers in November and December 1927 proved to be even more alarming. They were down 50% from the same time last year. From a high of 77 million tons in 1925 and 1926, the harvest of 1926-1927 would fall to 73 million tons. The harvest of 1927-1928 would subsequently fall to around 70 million. The Soviet Union was heading back into widespread food scarcity. With his rivals on the left defeated politically, Stalin was now free to pick up their economic policies to deal with the crisis. And given everything everyone had said about everyone else since the death of Lenin, Stalin’s turn would be shockingly abrupt.

As late as November 1927, Stalin gave a speech where he said, “To pursue a policy of discord with the majority of the peasantry means to start a civil war in the village, making it difficult to supply our industry with peasant raw materials, disrupt the supply of agricultural products to the working class, undermine the very foundations of our industry.”

But while touring western Siberia in late January 1928, a scant two months later, Stalin gave a secret speech to local party officials that signaled his intention to do exactly what he had just said it would be crazy to do: pursue a policy of discord with the majority of the peasantry. In this address, he said, “what is the strength of the Kulak? Not in the fact he was born strong, nothing of the kind, but in the fact that his farming is of a large scale.”

And this was the key. The prosperous peasants did not prosper because of individual initiative or an entrepreneurial spirit or an admirable work ethic, as old Stolypin had believed, but the material fact of the size and scale of their operations. Consolidated farms worked with modern equipment yielded higher production. This is something the Bolsheviks had always believed. Improvised responses to various crises over the years had left the Communists presiding over the consolidation of agriculture they sought, but under the auspices of individual proprietors. Now Stalin was saying, no more.

“We are a Soviet country,” he said. “We want to implant a collective economy, not solely in industry, but in agriculture. There remains only the path of developing large scale farms of a collective type.” And this would be the new edict. He said, “Unification of small and tiny peasant household farms into collective farms for us is the only path.”

This speech marked the beginning of collectivization, a policy, which as I said at the beginning, would be so massive that it transcends the meaning of the word reform. Stalin now aimed for nothing less than the complete transformation of traditional Russian peasant life. The end of traditional Russian peasant life. When all is said and, collectivization is arguably the most revolutionary thing that happened since the revolution began. Everything else that’s fallen into place since 1917 has produced an autocratic political system running a network of appointed bureaucrats, backed by a strong professional army and insidious secret police, overseeing a multinational empire, trying to industrialize and modernize. I mean, I know I’m intentionally papering over differences to make this point, but still, it’s a point worth making. There are lots and lots of cultural, political, and economic continuities between tsarist Russia and Soviet Russia. Men make their own history, but they do not make it in circumstances of their choosing, et cetera, et cetera.

There never is, and never was, and never will be, a cataclysmic year zero. It’s a revolutionary myth. But this? Collectivization? This comes pretty close.

To the extent that Stalin abruptly changed policy, it was to return to his roots as a lifelong Bolshevik, to rebrace policies that Bolsheviks had pursued since before the Revolution of 1905. The NEP was the deviation. Collectivization was a return to form. If you’ll recall in the episodes about War Communism, the Bolsheviks had briefly tried to establish state owned and managed collective farms, but the schemes were effectively abandoned, as they realized they were making history, but not in circumstances of their choosing. After the revolution, the peasants owned more than 3 million square kilometers divided into about 25 million individual holdings. To the extent that collectivization was taking place, it was undertaken by individual households under the NEP. In 1922, consolidated farms accounted for about 2% of all rural land. By 1927, that number was up to 25%. But it was individually held. Meanwhile, only about 1% of land in the Soviet Union remained publicly collectivized in any discernible way.

So in the collectivization, Stalin now saw it would take time, patience, and perseverance. And once Stalin move towards collectivization filtered through the party, Soviet planners figured they could get that 1% number to maybe 15% after five years. Full collectivization in a generation, maybe two. But anything faster than that would be crazy. It would be impossible.

Following this logic, at first the pace of collectivization was slow. Through 1928 and 1929, the collectivization plan was barely even acknowledged as official state policy. But it was now policy. And it had specific goals: first and foremost, it was meant to improve agricultural production. The grain procurement crisis of 1927 and 1928 was a shot across the bow. The Soviet Union was now seven years into the NEP, and it was still struggling to feed itself. Stalin took it for granted collectivized farms would be more productive, especially once they were provided with the latest farm machinery and run with the latest scientific practices. Indeed, beyond simply producing enough food to eat, the further assumption was that the vast surplus is created by collectivized farms could be sold on the international market, providing funds to pay for more industrialization, which would in turn make more and better machines that would further improve agricultural yields. It was, on paper, a never ending feedback loop of increasing abundance and prosperity. The communist revolution finally, delivering on its promises.

Now, if we look back to the 1890s, we can see this is in many ways a return to the Witte Program. Use agricultural exports to finance rapid industrialization. But it wasn’t just the old Witte Program with a red star pinned to its cap. There was a political component that was very, very important. Despite the positions he had taken in the turf wars with the Left Opposition during the 1920s, Stalin was not insensible to the political threat posed by the growing class of prosperous peasants the NEP was openly fostering, the great Kulak boogeyman of the Communist Party imagination. Prosperous farmers were almost by definition class enemies of the Communist Party, and their reconciliation with the Soviet regime was tissue thin. The more Kulak wealth grew, the more influence they would have over state policy, the more independent they would become of state control, and the more likely they would be to challenge Communist Party supremacy.

And then of course, in the final analysis, there is an ideological component to collectivization. It would mark the elimination of private property, individual ownership, and exploitive profiteering. They were, after all, communists. Maybe it was time to start acting like it.

Initially there was a vague hope collectivization could come about peacefully, with peasants persuaded to voluntarily combine their land, tools, livestock, families, and embrace a new way of life. But the party also expected the necessity of threats, of course, and coercion, especially against the group that had prospered the most and therefore had the most to lose: the Kulaks.

Now, Kulak had always been a vague term, a loose pejorative rather than a strict economic category. But the platonic Kulak owned a large consolidated farm, had plenty of livestock, multiple barns and houses, and most importantly, hired labor. That, more than anything else, was the ideological definition of the Kulak as a rural capitalist: owners of the means of production who hired wage workers and then sold the fruits of that labor for personal profit. Seizing Kulak property would accomplish the economic, political, and ideological goals of collectivization in one fell swoop, and as such, they expected resistance. To achieve these critical goals in the face of expected resistance, Stalin let loose the secret police, who were now rebranded from the Cheka into the GPU.

They targeted Kulaks under Article 107 of the Soviet Constitution, which prohibited grain speculating. The GPU would go around accusing Kulak households of illegally hoarding grain in a time of scarcity. Sometimes it was true, sometimes it was false, sometimes there were reasonable explanations and sometimes not, but the systematic result was that by the early spring of 1928, the GPU had made about 16,000 arrests throughout the USSR. Grain was confiscated, property seized, heads of household sentenced to prison; all their neighbors put on notice that this was the punishment for resistance. And this was only the beginning.

Collectivization of farms was only the agricultural component of Stalin’s great socioeconomic revolution from above. It was meant to support and drive the other great component of the plan, the industrial component. As we discussed two episodes back, the Left Communist theorist, Yevgeni Preobrazhensky, preached the necessity of rapid industrialization. As Stalin surveyed the Soviet Union’s place in the world in 1928, he suddenly took up Preobrazhensky’s ideas wholeheartedly, even after kicking Preobrazhensky out of the party for having said it in the first place.

But in short, the USSR was falling behind. And this was not merely about losing some international contest to see who can make the most widgets in a single fiscal quarter, it was about the political and military security of the Soviet Union. Now, as you may know, Stalin was himself personally quite a paranoid guy, but the Communist Party in general saw themselves surrounded and besieged by hostile forces eager to crush them, this had been their mentality since the beginning of the revolution, since before the revolution. There were new enemies like French and British and American capitalists, old enemies like Germany, Poland, and Turkey, all of whom they imagined to be forever knocking at the gates. Out in the far east, Japan was clearly preparing to make major moves in Manchuria. Stalin and the other leaders of the Party fully expected there to be another great war. Industrial capacity was war-making capacity, so to industrialize was a matter not just of economic growth, but national security.

So in late 1928 and early 1929, the Party rolled out the Five Year Plan, or what we now call the First Five Year Plan because there will be more than one of them. The First Five Year Plan was essentially a set of declared benchmarks for every sector of industry: this many more factories, that much more electrical capacity, this many more tractors, that many more miles of railroad track. Now all the goals in the First Five Year Plan were set insanely and impossibly high — like, let’s grow the GDP by 20% every year non-stop. Entire industries, factories, mines, electrical plants, telephone lines were set to be built from scratch. Entire cities were expected to rise from bare ground overnight. And no amount of, um, sir, this is crazy, would dial back expectations. The only way to keep your job, your place in the Party, and possibly stay outta prison, was to deliver.

So the first year of the First five Year Plan chugged, along with a kind of nervous energy, as officials and managers and workers and engineers tried to keep pace with expectations from the top, which sometimes meant doing the work, and sometimes meant falsifying records, double counting inventory, cranking out obviously defective merchandise to make it look like they were hitting their targets. Stalin himself urged them all on with a kind of relentlessly paranoid fear of what would happen if they failed. The rush to industrialize was always presented in terms of breaking a military siege. The survival of Russia, the Soviet Union, and the revolution was always at stake. In July 1930, he gave a speech where he said, “Either we will vanquish and crush them, the exploiters, or they will vanquish and crush the workers and peasants of the USSR.”

The following year, he made this point again: “We are a hundred years behind the advanced countries,” he said. “We must make good this gap in ten years. Either we do it, or they will crush us. The slogan always and everywhere was “we must catch and overtake the west.” To naysayers, they would brag, “there is no fortress the Bolsheviks cannot storm.” So everything from simple nuts and bolts to steel blast furnaces and power plants were put on impossible-to-meet quotas, under the logic that if you aim for the moon, even if you don’t make it, you’ll go pretty far. Forgetting, perhaps, that if you aim for the moon and fall short, you might also die in the endless vacuum of space. Or the gulags. Whichever.

Now there’s no telling what would’ve come of the Five Year Plan, whether it would have been sustainable at all or collapsed under the weight of its only-on-paper successes, had it not been for the great boon to Soviet fortunes that landed in their lap at the end of the 1920s: the Great Depression. Here, finally, was the fatal crisis of capitalism Marx had long predicted. The Great Depression was an absolute boon to the PR fortunes of the Soviet union. We are the future, they are the past. And look at them, they’re dying just like we said they would.

But beyond the propaganda hay they were able to make of the Great Depression on a more practical level, western businesses suddenly started taking calls from Soviet officials. Now, even during the NEP years, foreign companies had not been eager to do business in or with the Soviet Union. Western banks were not interested in financing their projects or issuing them loans, the investments were simply too risky. Plus, Soviet officials made no secret of their intention to overthrow western capitalism by violent revolution, so western capitalists weren’t eager to do business with them. But now all the western capitalists were essentially bankrupt, and suddenly ideological differences ceased to matter. When Soviet officials came round in the early 1930s saying, hey, we wanna buy what you’re selling or, hey, you want to help us build a power plant up in the Ural mountains, you took that call. Everyone from the Ford Motor Company to Caterpillar to DuPont and a bunch of others signed deals to help build up industry in Russia. They provided technology, expertise, and materials to build the USSR showcases of the Five Year Plan. Steel plants and power plants, production facilities for cars and trucks. They re-equipped factories to build tractors. Nothing helped build Communist industry better, faster, and cheaper than the complete and utter ruination wrought by the Great Depression.

And though the targets of the Five Year Plan were absurd, and there was at least some degree of Potemkin village style flimflammery out there, the ultimate gains were undeniable. During the whole of the Five Year Plan, the Soviet Union built or rebuilt a thousand new factories. Before World War I Russia produces zero machine tools of their own; by 1930, they were cranking out 20,000 a year. The full-time working class population then doubled and doubled again. And by the end of it, 12 million rural peasants had been resettled in cities or industrial areas. Moscow grew from 2 million inhabitants to nearly 4 million. In terms of raw industrial capacity, the USSR was on its way to becoming second only to the United States in the world. But there was an ugly underbelly to all this: endemic waste, accidents, environmental destruction, inefficiencies, undertrained, under-skilled workers and managers attempted everything at a breakneck pace, so there were injuries and there were mistakes. There were deaths. The products they made to hit quota were often qualitatively terrible, and even then quotas were missed regularly. One tractor factory was supposed to produce 2000 tractors in the third quarter of 1930, and instead they managed to make only 43, and even these weren’t any good. An American engineer on site said that after 70 hours of work, they’ll just fall apart.

But joking aside, the Five Year Plan was no joke. For all its costs, human, environmental, and economic, for all its waste and inefficiencies, for all its absurdities and cruelties and nonsense, the industrialized Russia that would head into World War II and the Cold War may have been born during the Witte Boom, but it fully came of age during the Five Year Plans. Stalin laid this all out boldly in November 1929, when he wrote an article about Russia’s great turn:

We are advancing full steam ahead along the path of industrialization to socialism, [he wrote] leaving behind the age old Russian backwardness. We are becoming a country of metal, a country of automobiles, a country of tractors, and when we have put the USSR on an automobile, the peasant on a tractor, let the worthy capitalists who boast so much of their civilization, try to overtake us. We shall yet see which countries may be then classified as backward and which are advanced.

Or as the Emperor Augustus may have put it, Stalin intended to find Russia a country of dirt, and leave it a country of steel.

Now you may be asking yourself, what did Bukharin think about all this? He had after all spent years in close alliance with Stalin successfully blocking anything that resembled agricultural collectivization and rapid industrialization. So how can Stalin just now up and do this? Well, the new appointees to the Politburo to replace there are now exiled comrades were all Stalin’s men, and they voted as Stalin wanted.

Bukharin was at first in disbelief, and he tried to reason his way through it. He argued, “collective farms, which will only be built over several years, will not carry us. We will be unable to provide them with working capital and machines right away.” And as we’ll see, he wasn’t wrong about that. But Bukharin found himself occupying the seat once occupied by Trotsky and Zinoviev and Kamenev. Cut out of the decision making loop, Bukharin was also caught in the same trap that had befallen his former comrades. He wouldn’t breach Party rules to publicly oppose the Politburo’s decisions. He gagged himself. He muzzled himself. He publicly went along with Stalin to avoid accusations of engaging in forbidden factionalism, but it was all in vain. Stalin started calling Bukharin and his allies “right deviationists,” whose policies, which had been the Party line for years, were now suddenly reactionary and counter-revolutionary. They were accused of being “a capitulation group, advocating not for the liquidation of capitalist elements of the city and countryside, but for their free development.” Which, Bukharin could only say, yeah, that was the point of the NEP, you agreed with me like a week ago.

But eventually, Bukharin slipped up. Kamenev revealed to Stalin that Bukharin had come around to enlist him in possibly joining a new anti-Stalin group. And the writing was on the wall. By the end of 1929, Bukharin was voted off the Politburo entirely. The next year his comrade Rykov suffered the same fate. Now, they weren’t expelled from the Party, but they were in the political wilderness, cast out by Stalin, who was now completely and permanently cementing his position as the autocratic heir of Lenin.

Meanwhile out on the agricultural front, the ramping up of the Five Year Plan and the expulsion of the right deviationists coincided with a more aggressive push for collectivization. Far more aggressive. Sadistically aggressive.

Now through the end of 1929, only about 7 or 8% of households had been collectivized. And though Kulaks were targeted for arrest and confiscation and harassment, it wasn’t carried out with a kind of all encompassing brutality yet. This all changed in November and December 1929. It was no longer enough to merely target Kulaks. They had to be eliminated.

At a meeting of agrarian delegates in December 1929, Stalin spoke ominous words that Pravda published two days later. Grain yields were still too low and agricultural production had to be improved. So Stalin asked, “What is the solution? And then he answered: the solution is to make agriculture large scale, make it capable of accumulation, of expanding production, and in this way, transform the agricultural base of the economy.”

Well, okay, that’s nothing new though, that’s what he started saying in early 1928. But then Stalin also said, “We have gone over from a policy of limiting the exploiting tendencies of the Kulak to eliminating the Kulaks as a class.” a few days later, memos went round to the secret police asking for proposals, suggestions, and plans on how to intern a lot of people all at once, how to round people up and move them quickly, how to build and run labor camps. Subordinates were encouraged to be creative.

Stalin then issued secret circulars to local party agents of a new policy we call Dekulakization, using criminal courts, local police, secret police, Party activists and regular soldiers, if necessary, to force the peasants to collectivize, to completely dispossess the Kulaks as a class, so that they simply no longer existed. As for the millions to be identified as Kulaks, they would be rounded up and deported to industrial sites or mines up in the Urals or way out in Siberia. While laying these plans, the Party also called for activist volunteers from the ranks of the urban working class to go to the countryside and encourage villagers to voluntarily join collective farms. They got tens of thousands of volunteers to fan out across the Soviet Union in early 1930 to pitch the peasants on collective farms. And so, I’ll be darned, look at that. We’ve come full circle. Fifty years later, and we’ve got a bunch of revolutionary socialists once again going to the people.

There were a few differences though. These cadres, which were eventually known as the Twenty-Five Thousanders, because they wound up being about 25,000 of them, were not total strangers to the villages. Most of them had been born peasants and only later joined the industrial workforce. So, this wasn’t about weirdo strangers coming to town, it was about sons and daughters returning home. And they were, of course, not there to challenge the state, or to call for its overthrow, but rather to enforce its will. They descended on the countryside in January and February 1930 in preparation for the coming spring. And one of them made the very simple pitch: those who want to join the collective farm sign up with me, those who do not want to join, sign up with the police chief. Anyone who resisted or talked back or refused might be beaten up, their property trashed, subject to all manner of abuse, including rape, including murder.

Meanwhile, the police made upwards of 140,000 arrests between January 1st and April 15th, 1930 alone. The conduct of the Twenty-Five Thousanders, plus the secret police’s agents zealous rush to meet deportation quotas, sparked quite a backlash, as you can imagine. Peasants resisted as much as they possibly could, as they always did; so much so that Stalin tactically retreated in March of 1930, writing an article titled Dizzy With Success. In this article, he chastised the conduct of the collectivization agents. With a dead straight face, he wrote:

The collective farm must not be imposed by force. That would be stupid and reactionary.

Then Stalin asked:

How could there have arisen in our midst such blockheaded exercises in “socialization,” such ludicrous attempts to overleap oneself, attempts which aim at bypassing classes in the class struggle, and which in fact bring grist to the middle of our class enemies?

Once again, Stalin answered himself:

It could have arisen only as a result of the blockheaded belief of a section of our Party: “We can achieve anything!”, “There’s nothing we can’t do!”

They could have arisen only because some of our comrades have become dizzy with success and for the moment have lost clearness of mind and sobriety of vision.

It’s almost as if Stalin was talking about himself. But he wasn’t. He was engaging in one of Stalin’s favorite pastimes, finding other people to blame for his mistakes.

But by briefly letting up the pressure on the peasants, they felt free to take Comrade Stalin at his word. Those who had “volunteered,” quit the collective farms and the proportion of collective households almost immediately dropped from 56% on March 1st to just 24% by the middle of summer. And so Stalin reissued orders to go back to threats and arrests and deportations. And he would not waiver from this line again. According to official statistics — and here official means, probably kind of sketchy — by the end of 1930, about 33% of the land was collectivized, and Stalin issued bold demands for that to double and triple practically overnight. He said by the end of 1931, we should be at 80% collectivization in the most fertile regions of the Soviet Union, and at least 50% everywhere else. Then, his people went out and did it.

In total, by the end of 1931, about 67% of the land was collectivized; by the end of 1932, it was 77%; by the end of 1933, it was 83%; and by the end of the 1930s, practically all the land in the Soviet Union had been collectivized. At least on paper. At least according to the official statistics.

As collectivization expanded, so too did the definition of Kulak. The number of actually rich, actually prosperous peasants had never been that large. But officials still had arrest and deportation quotas to meet. So now everyone with an extra cow, a slightly better shovel, or some store-bought consumer goods now qualified as a Kulak. Police agents also hit on the novelty of calling people ‘henchman of the Kulaks,’ which counted just about anybody, anyone who took wages to work, or refused to turn in a neighbor to the police, or who just irritated a local official. They were all now classified as henchmen of the Kulak, themselves up for arrest and confiscation and deportation. Police sweeps became vast, with little oversight or control or attention. All told, about 5 million people would find themselves dekulakized, and a total of about 30,000 heads of various households were not just deported, but summarily executed.

So the question is, where did those five million people go? You can’t just stash five million people under a rug someplace. But. You already know the answer. Because this is the dawn of the gulags, labor camps that sprouted up throughout the most desolate and godforsaken parts of the Soviet Union. The arrested and dispossessed, sometimes individuals, sometimes whole family, sometimes whole villages, were loaded onto cattle trains and taken across the country and redeposited in these camps. Now in the beginning, this was just about removal and internment, but as it coincided with the industrial Five Year Plan, some creative comrade suggested that the Kulak swine could be put to good work. They could build factories, work mines, clear and build roads. So, they became de facto slave labor. And they built metallurgical combines and tractor plants and other glorious monuments to the Five Year Plan. Living conditions were horrendous. Those who even survived the journey to the camps died of starvation and disease and exposure. Those who tried to flee were subject to recapture, abuse, punishment, and execution. Eventually a government department had to be created to oversee this growing network of labor camps, and the agency was called the Chief Administration of the Camps, a name that was shortened to the acronym in Russian, GULag, from whence the camps take their name.

Deported peasants resisting collectivization form the first population of the camps. But as we’ll see more especially next week, the gulags became the repository of all identifiable enemies of the state: intellectuals, scientists, writers, artists, anyone who might make a peep about anything. And so during the years of collectivization in the Five Year Plans, the regime developed a penchant for political show trials. What had begun with the Trial of the SRs in 1922, and which would be brought to sublime perfection during the purges and terrors of the later 1930s, went through an intermediate period of refinement in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The main targets of these show trials were anyone who resisted or criticized regime policy, or who happened to be a convenient scapegoat at a convenient moment. Mainly this meant engineers, statisticians, scientists, and project managers, anyone who still carried the taint of bourgeois capitalism or who had begun their careers under the old regime, all those technical experts who had been brought back to prominence by the NEP were now brutally smacked down.

So at regular intervals, newspapers would trumpet the latest revelation about the latest batch of secret enemies who had been caught trying to sabotage the Soviet Union. They were all called wreckers, as in people trying to wreck the economy to weaken the state. There was the Shakhty Trial against some mining engineers in 1928 accused of blowing up a coal mine that had in fact been scheduled for detonation for safety reasons. There was the Academic Trial of 1929 to 1931, which targeted researchers and professors. There was a thing called the Industrial Party Trial of 1930, where some scientists and engineers were accused of plotting the overthrow of the government. There was a thing called Menshevik Trial of 1931, which targeted statisticians inside the State Planning Office who were accused of trying to sneak Menshevik policies in through the back door. There was this Springtime Affair of 1931, which discovered thousands of enemies in the army and navy, mostly officers who had served in the armies and navies of the tsar. The message to the public was always the same: there were foreign powers hell bent on overthrowing the Soviet Union, who suborned these inside wreckers and saboteurs to soften up Russia by exploding economic dynamite. Confessions would be extracted by the use of torture and threats to family members. They then confessed their crimes in open court, and the sentences were a term in prison, but sometimes it was straight up execution. All of this would be publicized in the papers. And then a few months later, a new shocking revolution would lead to a new trial of new conspirators.

Most of it was nonsense. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, every major power in the world had been sucker punched in the gut by the Great Depression. They were not hell bent on overthrowing the Soviet Union. In the Industrial Party Case, defendants were accused of collaborating with two specific anti-communist Russian emigres, both of whom had died years earlier. The prosecutors also accused them of trying to elevate this other guy to be the head of state of a new bourgeois republic, except he too was long dead. But that didn’t matter. It was guilty verdicts all around. Off to the gulag you go. Except for you. It’s the firing squad for you.

Now, incredibly none of this — the collectivization, the arrests, the deportations, the labor camps, the absurd show trials — were the worst humanitarian disaster to hit the Soviet Union during these years. For that, we need to turn to our old friend… famine.

Whatever collectivization’s alleged theoretical benefits, the immediate effect was total disaster. At the end of 1930, economic planners believed the USSR’s agricultural production would push over a hundred million tons of grain. This huge jump would be the result of collectivization and mechanization and modernization. But instead, Bukharin turned out to be right. Even with the industrial push of the Five Year Plan, the promised equipment was never delivered to the collective farms. Or if it was, it just broke down. All these farms were also badly mismanaged. There was no scientific rigor or use of the latest techniques. All the most experienced farmers, all the people who were up on those latest techniques? Well, they’d all been loaded into cattle cars. Then, 1931 opened with an unseasonably cold spring, followed by a summer drought, which means crop failure.

Now for the whole of the Soviet Union, a normal good harvest would be somewhere in the high 70 million tons a year. In 1931, it wound up being somewhere between 57 and 65. Stalin himself appears to have believed that collectivization and mechanization would solve all the grain production problems, and he both deluded himself and was deluded by reports he was given by his subordinates, because he’d created a disinformation trap for himself, by encouraging his subordinates, to delude him, out of fear of displeasing him.

In response, Stalin did what Stalin did best: blame anyone but Stalin. Stalin blamed the grain shortages on… Kulak sabotage. He accused them of hoarding grain and destroying livestock. He accused them of being saboteurs and wreckers deliberately trying to destroy the revolution. And this is when the arrests and deportations related to collectivization really went into overdrive. But this didn’t fix the grain shortage, or save anyone from famine. The government tried to shift grain around to hard hit areas, but they steadfastly refused to call for international aid, as Lenin had done during the famine of 1921-1922. All told, about 40 million people were affected by the food shortages and mortality rates skyrocketed. The centers of the famine were similar to the famine of 1921-1922: the Ukraine, the Don River, the Northern Caucasus, and Kazakhstan. When things got really bad in 1932, all the government could do was issue a law imposing the death penalty on anyone caught hoarding or stealing grain, any amount of grain. That included children trying to pick edible bits from already cleared fields.

The famine of 1931-1932 turned out to be even worse than the earlier famine. Something like 8 to 12 million people died from starvation or starvation related diseases. It was, in short, a horrific catastrophe. And so, far from ushering in a golden age of abundant prosperity, Stalin’s policies were now immediately responsible for millions of deaths. Now, granted, some of this is natural causes — the cold and the heat and the drought — but nothing turns natural disasters into humanitarian disasters faster than political malfeasance, and Stalin was a master of political malfeasance.

One of the other great legacies of the famine was a new system of internal passports for travel inside the Soviet Union. To contain people in affected areas, allegedly to prevent them from spreading diseases and taxing resources in other areas, the regime started issuing travel papers, internal passports. Now, the Soviet government had already imposed various kinds of internal travel bans over the years, and the police had gotten pretty good at drag nets and chasing people trying to escape from the collective farms or the gulags. But now it was all systematized and regularized. And the way it went at first is that people who lived in towns or cities, or who were workers or members of the bureaucracy, got passports. Peasants did not. And without the passports, they couldn’t travel. This meant they couldn’t legally leave their homes. And it didn’t take long for them to openly speak of the obvious implications of this new system: they were serfs again. They were bound to the land, forbidden to leave. They were trapped for eternity unless some lord now styling himself a Communist Party official, gave them permission. Almost exactly seventy years since the Emancipation of the Serfs, and they were right back where they started. Long live the revolution.

Now the famine of 1931 and 1932 was very bad, but it was particularly bad in two places of note: Ukraine, and what is today Kazakhstan. The total population of what was then the Kazakh Autonomous Republic was about 6.5 million people. And of those, somewhere between 1.2 and 1.4 million died. In a year. That is an appalling and grotesque percentage of the population. In Ukraine, the death toll was around 3 and a half or 4 million from a total population of 33 million. In Ukraine, this famine is referred to as Holodomor, derived from “to kill by famine” or “the terror famine.” The idea is that in Ukraine’s case, the famine was not just an accident or negligence, but a deliberate policy by Stalin’s government. It was meant as punishment to break the Ukrainians for their years of bucking Communist Party authority.

Now that historical question of whether it’s deliberate murder or negligent homicide is an ongoing debate, now more than ever. Some historians say Stalin screwed over everyone without any particular target, in mind. Others can point to a systematic tendency to deny aid to Ukraine, to blacklist certain areas from help, to export grain from Ukraine to other places, that all adds up to a pretty clear picture. Now it’s above my pay grade to render judgment on all this, but what is not up for debate is that Stalin’s policies killed a lot of Ukrainians. The only thing that’s up for debate is whether this was the result of stupid, indifferent cruelty from a stupid, indifferent, and cruel man, or deliberate and sadistic mass murder, committed by a sadistic mass murderer.

So this period of the late 1920s and early 1930s, from say 1928 to 1932, is referred to as the Great Turn. And as I said, the combination of forced collectivization and the Five Year Plan produced a socioeconomic revolution that no revolution had up to that point really come close to achieving. I mean, the French Revolution didn’t accomplish anything like this. Stalin imposed a whole new way of life for over a hundred million people, peasants and workers who now found themselves living in a brand new world. But the cost was, and is appalling. Tens of millions of dead. Millions more arrested and deported to labor camps. Everyone else, reeling from the trauma. And the benefits hardly justified the price. Collectivization was a failure on its own terms. Russian agriculture remained poor and inefficient. And the peasant revolution was crushed. They were now rebound to the land. They were serfs again. Meanwhile, the industrial leap was real, but man, there are other better ways to industrialize. The history of any industrial revolution involves horrific abuses of people, an enormous cruelty and suffering, Stalin beats ’em all on that score. He makes Carnegie and Rockefeller look like Mother Teresa

Next week will be our final episode on the Russian Revolution series as Stalin himself writes the final chapter of the revolutionary period in Russia. Having imposed this great revolution from above with his new cadre of supporters who were entirely dependent on his patronage to stay in power and stay alive, it was time to purge all the old Bolsheviks and anyone else who might threaten his rule.

Because what are you gonna do? Have a great revolution without a great terror?

 

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Episode 10.101: The United Opposition

When Lenin died in january 1924, everything changed, and everything stayed the same. Lenin had been the center of gravity in the Bolshevik Party since its inception more than 20 years earlier. With that center of gravity removed the major political moons that had orbited Lenin in all these years — Zinoviev, Kamenev, Stalin, Trotsky, and the rest — careened wildly through space, pulling away from each other or crashing into each other seemingly at random. So obviously in that sense, everything changed, and would never be the same.

But as they careened and crashed, a kind of political celestial mechanics provided some underlying order to the apparent randomness. Because the object of all these moons was to become the new center of gravity. Because the party Lenin built was built for Lenin to lead. It had always been premised on the existence of a single leader with unmatched authority, influence, and power. As the 1920s unfolded, Joseph Stalin slowly but surely built up his political mass until he became the new center of gravity. And just as it had been with Lenin, loyalty or hostility to Stalin now became the defining feature of Soviet politics.

Those habitually loyal and deferential to Stalin stayed in the party. Those who disagreed with him or opposed him were driven out. So, after Lenin’s death, the Communist Party wound up in a completely different place than it had been before, but also in exactly the same place it had been before: with Comrade Stalin taking Comrade Lenin’s place as the center of gravity around which the party spun.

At first, the Politburo of the Communist Party tried to keep Lenin fixed as the center of gravity, afraid of what his death meant for the Party, for Russia, and for the revolution. Instead of following instructions and giving Lenin a simple private family burial, they resolved to turn him into a permanent fixture of Russian life, to turn him into a kind of secular icon or saint for Russians to worship as a replacement for the icons and saints of the Orthodox Church. Lenin’s image was plastered everywhere. He was referenced constantly. The various political battles of the 1920s and the 1930s were always waged in terms of who most accurately reflected Lenin’s original vision. Unlike most religions, Leninism, the ideological faith, became detached from Lenin the actual man. His own statements were emphasized or suppressed to fit the changing needs and desires of whoever happened to be controlling the church — I mean, Party — half the time. Shortly after his death, they renamed Petrograd, leningrad. The name that it would bear until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

And then they went so far as to embark on a kind of lunatic scheme that I’m sure most of you are aware of, to embalm and preserve Lenin’s physical body. After some trial and error with the preservation process, they finally concocted the right mix of chemicals, and so Lenin’s corpse was embalmed and placed in a mausoleum in Moscow, the flesh and bone of Lenin the actual human being turned into an artificially preserved destination for the pilgrims of communism. It also gave the new leaders of the Party a chance to stand beside Lenin anytime they needed to remind the world that they were Lenin’s true disciples, unlike the heretics and the Judases out there who had betrayed his legacy. And though the rituals and ceremonies at Lenin’s mausoleum would stay the same over the years, who remained a faithful disciple and who was branded an incurable heretic would change with absurd regularity.

As we all know, the man who would always be the faithful disciple and never the heretic, at least while he lived, was Stalin. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that Stalin’s ascendancy to sole dictatorship was already underway before Lenin died. His incremental consolidation of power had begun way back when he entered the Orgburo in 1919, and skillfully exploited his hiring and firing prerogatives to promote allies and reassign rivals. This process accelerated when he became general-secretary of the party in 1922, and the slow patient, but persistent process of promoting his friends and demoting his rivals, or supporters of his rivals, or friends of his rivals, continued.

Now this could have all come to an abrupt end in 1923 or 1924. The poisonous words in Ilyich’s letter about the secretary could have been the end of him. The other members of the Politburo could have taken the recommendation to remove Stalin to heart, and removed him. But Stalin was both skillful and lucky. He was lucky that Trotsky was right there to seem like an even bigger and more obnoxious threat to the other grandees of the party, and skillful enough to exploit it. At the 13th Party Congress in May 1924, Lenin’s testament was circulated to the various delegations to their shock and consternation. But then in a carefully choreographed show, Stalin offered to resign his post while Zinoviev and Kamenev led the Congress to refuse that resignation and reaffirm their faith in the general secretary. Only later did they realize they probably missed their last best opportunity to stop Stalin’s rise to power, a mistake many of them would pay for with their lives.

In the battle for control of the Party, and the right to emerge as the true heir of Lenin, Trotsky did himself few favors and seemed almost begging to be isolated by everyone else. His relationship with Zinoviev was so toxic that they hadn’t spoken to each other privately in years. In October 1924, Trotsky had a chance to possibly seize the political initiative. Back in more collegial days, the Politburo had approved plans to publish an addition of Trotsky’s writings from 1917. As a preface to this collection, Trotsky wrote a sixty-page essay called Lessons of October that emphasized his close collaboration with Lenin, and how the two of them had persevered in carrying out the revolution in the face of vacillating hesitancy and fearful opposition from other leaders, most obviously Zinoviev and Kamenev. Trotsky sought to make 1917 the test upon which Lenin’s true disciples were evaluated, to nullifies Zinoviev’s and Kamenev’s claim to Lenin’s inheritance, because while they had been with him the longest, that was meaningless, because they had not been there when Lenin needed them most. Trotsky, meanwhile stood right by his side.

Now much of what Trotsky wrote was true, but as usual, he wrote with dismissive arrogance and a distinct lack of generosity. So while Lessons of October may have been cathartic and scored a few tactical hits against his rivals, strategically, it proved to be a major, perhaps a fatal setback. The bond of solidarity of the Troika — Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev — had been slowly dissolving throughout 1924. Lessons of October re-solidified them almost immediately. Their alliance had been uncomfortable, and Trotsky came along and helpfully reminded them why they needed to stick together.

So the Troika spent the last months of 1924 assailing Trotsky from every angle. During his fifteen years at odds with the Bolsheviks prior to 1917, Trotsky had left a long and very public trail of abuse of Lenin, ridiculing him, attacking him, mocking him, all of which need only be dug up and passed around to make Trotsky look terrible in the eyes of Party members who had no conception of the dynamics of old emigre politics, who barely even knew that Bolsheviks and Mensheviks had once been two wings of the same party. They also blasted Trotsky for his conduct during the Civil War, highlighting his arbitrary abuses, poor decisions, and how he got good comrades killed, or executed them unnecessarily. By the end of 1924, Trotsky’s reputation was in ruins. In response to all this, all he could do in January 1925 was resign as commissar of the army and navy, that critical post he had held since March of 1918. Trotsky could lay rightful claim to having almost singlehandedly organized victory in the Russian Civil War, completely remaking the Red Army and traveling relentlessly from front to front until victory was secured. But now, after nearly seven years, he was unceremoniously dumped overboard. No one rejected his resignation or begged him to stay. Without Lenin around to protect him anymore, there was nobody to protect Trotsky.

To keep up appearances and to ensure Trotsky remain bound by rules of Party discipline, he retained his seats in both the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Politburo. And though he had plenty of friends and supporters inside the Party, to say nothing of the general public, in those all important committee rooms, he was isolated and alone.

But not for long.

Almost the minute Stalin successfully marginalized Trotsky, he turned on the other two partners of the Troika, Zinoviev and Kamenev, supposedly the senior partners of the Troika. And turning on them turned out to be easier than they could have imagined. In early 1925, there were only seven voting members of the Politburo: Trotsky, Zinoviev Kamenev, Stalin, plus three others: Mikhail Tomsky, Alexey Rykov, and Nikolai Bukharin. All Stalin had to do was come to an agreement with Tomsky, Rykov, and Bukharin, and they could ignore Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev completely. The way the Communist Party had been built, the way the USSR had been built, meant that the tiniest shifts in interpersonal relations inside these all important committees had major political and economic ramifications.

So one day Zinoviev and Kamenev woke up to discover they were no longer invited to the little pre-meetings that would arrange policy votes for the official Politburo sessions. Just weeks earlier, they had been the ones holding these little pre-meetings. Now, they were helplessly cut out. This shift in the balance of power in the Politburo meant a shift in policy to the right. Now labels like right and left are always a bit arbitrary, especially in this context, as we’re still talking about a bunch of Communists, not actual right wing anything, but in this context, Bukharin and his group were understood to be the right, while the opposition would be understood to be coming from the left.

Bukharin now representing the right wing of the Communist Party was surprising, as he had first burst onto the scene back in 1918 as a leader of the left Communists. He had vehemently opposed the treaty of Brest-Litovsk as a betrayal of the international proletariat. And while he quickly softened that line to avoid associations with the Left-SR revolt, he stayed on “the left” and was a vocal defender of war communism throughout the Civil War. He rationalized the coercive appropriations as vital to the war on a practical level, and wholly in keeping with Marxism on a theoretical level. Over the past several years, Bukharin’s stature had grown — he is after all, now sitting on the Politburo — and he was considered the brightest theoretician in the party. He drafted books and essays that became the basic texts of the Communist Party.

But by the end of the civil war, Bukharin concluded, as Lenin did, that war communism needed massive correction. In the end, all it had gotten them was a ruined economy, peasant revolts, and mass starvation. So when the NEP came around, Bukharin hopped over and became its chief defender however much it might rank them, it was far better to incentivize peasants to grow grain surpluses by offering them the chance for personal material enrichment, rather than simply confiscating those surpluses, which years of war communism had proved would drive the peasants to stop growing surpluses.

But as he defended the principles of the NEP in 1925, Bukharin committed something of a verbal faux pas that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Believing that the major industrialization projects that would bring about full socialism and communism could only come after a slow and steady accumulation of national wealth that would begin by encouraging the peasants to seek profit in what they grew, his policy prescription was, “enrich yourselves,” which in French, is enrichissez-vous, literally the words that François Guizot had used during the July Monarchy, when he was asked how people were supposed to make their voices heard in a closed regime run by bourgeois oligarchs. He did not say we’ll expand the franchise or increase democracy or make the government more responsive, he said, “Enrichissez-vous,” which everyone took to mean, once you have wealth, your voice will count. I mean, there’s a reason Guizot gets specifically namechecked at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto, and Bukharin using exactly the same phrase allowed his enemies to make permanent hay of his ill chosen echo of one of the original bête noires of communism. But Bukharin’s point was that the USSR needed to grow its wealth and capital somehow, if they were gonna catch up to the Western powers who had spent centuries running exploitive, colonial empires that accumulated the capital for their economic growth and prosperity.

This question of capital accumulation was vitally important, because in 1924 and 1925 Stalin and Bukharin’s ruling group started tossing around the idea of Socialism in One Country. The idea of Socialism in One Country had been percolating in the communist subconscious going back to 1919, when they first had to face the realities that global revolution wasn’t inevitably surging throughout the world. As we have discussed ad nauseum, all Bolshevik ideology prior to the revolution was premised on Russia being one part of a larger revolutionary whole, that they would eventually get the resources they needed to turn backwards Russia into modern Russia from their friends in neighboring revolutionary regimes. But now years had passed. And they were still basically alone. Revolutions in the west never came. The Poles had stopped the Red Army cold at the Battle of Warsaw. The most recent attempts to launch a revolution in Germany had failed miserably. So, the Stalin/Bukharin clique switched gears, and began saying, hey, we don’t need the west. We can do it all ourselves. Sure we’ll continue to push for international revolution, but in the meantime, we can and must build socialism in one country.

This flew in the face of longstanding Bolshevik ideology and triggered a major pushback inside the Party from what has become known as the Left Opposition. This opposition was not formed by cranks or second rate losers. It included major figures of international communism like Trotsky and Karl Radek, as well as revolutionary heroes like Vladimir Antonoff and Nikolai Muralov, who had literally led Bolshevik forces guns in hand during the October Revolution. These were people who had literally put their lives on the line for the Bolshevik revolution, and whose courage and resiliency and revolutionary credentials could never be challenged — although, of course they would be.

The leading theorist of the left opposition was a guy called Yevgeni Preobrazhensky. In contrast to Bukharin’s theory of slowly building capital by favoring the peasant farmers Preobrazhensky advocated rapid industrialization. Industrialization now. Right now. At all costs. Full communism required a modern industrial economy with its food problem solved by collectivizing all land and turning it into giant mechanized farms, cranking out huge grain surpluses that would both feed Russians and be able to sell something abroad for profit. Profits they could immediately turn and reinvest in further industrialization projects. But like Bukharin, Preobrazhensky committed his own verbal miscue that haunted him and the Left Opposition, because he said that his plans required the exploitation of the peasants, that the party should embark on a kind of internal colonial project that would force the Russian peasants to play the part of exploited colonized people. State taxes and the price of manufactured goods would be set purposefully high, so that any and all wealth the peasantry might accrue for themselves would be necessarily directed right back to the state, who would use it to grow industry.

Most of 1925 was taken up with this debate about economic policy and relations with the peasants. Stalin sided with the right wing, and thus the Politburo maintained those policies supportive of the NEP model of growth. The left, not unreasonably, said all this policy would do is build the economic wealth and political power of class enemies of the proletarian revolution, namely the Kulaks and the NEPmen whose reconciliation with the Communist Party was transparently thin. Bukharin’s plan of enrich yourselves would probably take it to the point where they’d be able to challenge the Communists for political supremacy.

Bukharin, meanwhile, could reasonably tell the left, all you’re doing is calling for return to war communism, and we all know where that leads. We already tried exploit the peasants, and all it did was create violent unrest and lead them to abandon making surpluses entirely, so that not only did we not grow the economy and improve our manufacturing infrastructure, but we actually drove ourselves into a massive famine. Better to let the Kulaks get a little bit rich if it meant everybody’s lives could be improved, and the whole economy grew. Because otherwise it’s misery, chaos, failure, and we all get overthrown.

On account of being iced outta the Politburo, Zinoviev and Kamenev found themselves by default in the opposition. Although their votes no longer mattered in the Politburo, they were still incredibly influential, and Zinoviev in particular held other institutional positions of power. He was head of the Party in Leningrad, and he remained chairman of the Comintern. Throughout 1925, he and Kamenev followed Trotsky’s journey from imperious autocrat to plaintive democrat as soon as they got kicked out of the inner circle of power. They joined together with no less a figure than Krupskaya, the oldest of the old Bolsheviks, who is now carrying the further mantle of Lenin’s widow. They all attacked Stalin’s tightening grip on the party, that strangled free debate and creative discussion. They also joined the Left Opposition’s attacks on Bukharin’s policies that heavily favored the peasants over the workers, which Zinoviev was able to use to great effect from his position in Leningrad, that most heavily proletarian of cities.

Now, a vital point that we have to make here is that these debates were not taking place out in the open, or in public view. They were waged internally between factions of what Lenin had called that thin stratum of the Party. A cohort numbering in the mere thousands. Now that they ran a one-party state, every Communist leader considered it vital to maintain a public facade of party unanimity. Even those opposed to Stalin and Bukharin did not consider going public with their attacks. As I said last week, this self fastened muzzle kept someone like Trotsky from using his most valuable weapons against the ruling clique: his popularity, his fame, and his oratorical skills. And so too it would be for Zinoviev and Kamenev. They wanted to fight for their positions and regain power, but they were never going to call on the people to join them in this effort. In fact, as members of the Central Committee and the Politburo, they were forbidden from freely expressing themselves to the people without permission. Going public with criticism of the Party risked the greatest punishment of all: expulsion from the Party.

So despite bitter disagreements, and an awareness on all sides they were playing a high stakes winner-take-all contest for control of the Party, Russia, the Soviet Union, and the revolution, there restrict limits on how far the opposition would go to defend themselves. This put them permanently on the backfoot, as Stalin, Bukharin, and their allies were free to trumpet their own views as official policy whenever and wherever they wanted.

Going into the 15th Party Congress in December, 1925, there were stirrings, at least inside the party, of a genuine desire to debate openly the policies of Stalin and Bukharin’s clique. Zinoviev and Kamenev found influential allies in the senior leadership, and they came into this Congress ready to demand greater freedom inside the Party, and a review of Bukharin’s economic policies. But they discovered Stalin was way ahead of them. He had long since ensured this Congress would be packed with delegates of loyalty to him and Bukharin. His years of hiring and firing, promoting, and demoting had produced a compliant Congress who had come to do as they were told, not think for themselves. Zinoviev brought with him a loyal delegation from Leningrad, but practically everyone else in the room opposed the Opposition. Their attempt to dramatically carry the party away from Stalin was met with jeers and heckling. They were so thoroughly routed that Kamenev was demoted to non-voting member of the Politburo, and the Central Committee voted a Stalin loyalist named Sergei Kirov to take over the Leningrad Party from Zinoviev. Trotsky, meanwhile, just watched and did nothing. Having himself been pushed out with the gleeful connivance of Zinoviev and Kamenev, he watched from the wings with at least a liiittle bit of Schadenfreude. He did not speak for or against anyone. He just watched, silently, as events played out.

But after his two old foes had been laid low, the simultaneously natural and unnatural inevitability came to pass. In the spring of 1926, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev aligned with one another. Now this was natural, because their only hope of victory against Stalin and Bukharin was joining forces. That was obvious to all of them. But it was unnatural, because they had spent so much time wailing away on each other that it was tough to even sit in the same room. They had crossed the line from policy debates to ad hominem personal attacks years ago. Repairing that damage was not just about making political compromises, but healing emotional wounds, and those wounds did not easily heal.

But still, in the summer of 1926, they emerged as what became known as the United Opposition, which was open to just about anyone who happened to oppose Stalin and Bukharin for just about any reason. And this opposition, too, was not a bunch of scrubs. A good number of the most preeminent old Bolsheviks joined them, and Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev still had enormous influence in moral authority. But by 1926, Stalin had stacked the deck of the Party so adroitly that it probably didn’t matter how well they played their hand, they were gonna lose. The Party apparatus itself was now staffed top to bottom with men and women appointed by Stalin because they were loyal to Stalin. Younger members who had joined after 1917, who cared little about what the old guard thought, and who knew full well that their own career power and prestige were based on Stalin’s personal patronage? They were never gonna support anybody but Stalin. Stalin was their meal ticket, and everyone knew it.

But still the United Opposition fought hard to win control of the Party. Now there were of course, ideological components to this fight: what foreign policy to pursue, what economic policies to pursue, whether to favor peasants or workers, whether to have more or less political freedom. Should we do enrich yourselves or exploit the peasants? But while these ideological disputes were real, what mattered most was who had power and who didn’t. Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and the Opposition attacked whatever Stalin and Bukharin and the right did because Stalin and Bukharin were in power, and the opposition was not. And in circumstances like these, one must say white to black, up to down, hot to cold, and always, in every case, framing it not as white or black, up or down, hot or cold, but right or wrong. And conversely, the ruling group denounced, degraded, and lambasted everything the Left Opposition stood for. Their crazy push to bring back forced requisitions, collectivized farming, rapid industrialization at all costs, even it meant the brutalization of the peasants — how could we even consider going back to that?

Foreshadow alert.

And so while they fought hard, the opposition only lost ground. In July 1926, the Central Committee voted Zinoviev out of the Politburo. Shortly thereafter, they eliminated the position of Chairman of the Comintern, leaving Zinoviev with no institutional base of power at all.

This left only Trotsky alone in the Politburo with a single useless vote. And he did not last much longer. In October 1926, he and Stalin got into a heated argument at a Politburo meeting, which was immediately followed by a Party conference that booted Trotsky from the Politburo. Now, for reasons of control and appearance, the Opposition leaders remained in the Central Committee, but now that they were out of the Politburo, they were told if they challenged the Politburo, they would face that fate worse than death: full expulsion from the party. Total political excommunication.

Despite these setbacks, there was still reason to hope going into 1927 the United Opposition would ultimately win. They were, after all, career revolutionaries. They had faced what appeared to be certain defeat numerous times and had yet somehow come out on top. All it took was a shift in perception or a major setback for the government to break through. And in the spring of 1927, they absolutely believed they were on the verge of success, thanks to disastrous events in the Chinese Revolution.

Now, before we go on, let us pause here one second — and I’ll share a heavy sigh that I will not be covering the Chinese Revolution — [heavy sigh] — but if I had covered the Chinese Revolution, we’d probably be in some episode in the early to mid period, say episode 876 or something, where the Nationalist Kuomintang Party has formed a united front with leftist elements, like the small Chinese Communist Party. Stalin was all for this united front, and he used his control of the Comintern to push the line on his Chinese comrades. Stalin confidently said they would squeeze the Chinese bourgeoisie like a lemon and then discard them. And he believed this is how it was gonna go… right up until the moment it didn’t. Conflicts in the KMT between left and right led General Chiang Kai-shek to affect a purge of leftists and communists, culminating with the Shanghai Massacre of April 1927, which saw right wing forces, brutally attack workers, labor unionists, and communists in Shanghai, with a death toll numbering in the thousands. It’s often pointed to as the beginning of the Chinese Civil War.

International communism was scandalized by the affair, and Trotsky, Zinoviev, and the rest of the Opposition were appalled by the news. But they were even more eager to fix the blame for the massacre squarely on Stalin, who had effectively led the Chinese communists to the slaughter by constantly recommending passive obedience to the KMT. Trotsky was now able to gather eighty-four prominent Russian Communists to draft a declaration of opposition to a litany of regime policies, co-signed by another 300 prominent members of the party. He also went and appealed to the Comintern to come adjudicate their complaints against the leaders of the Russian Communist Party.

Now, adjudicating such disputes had always been one of the ComIntern’s functions, but it had only ever been used for the small satellite parties, not the Russian mothership. But it looked like the beginning of the oppositions comeback, and so Stalin moved quickly to quash it. Anyone who signed on to this most recent declaration found themselves reassigned to new posts, often positions abroad that took them out of Russia entirely. Kamenev, for example, was appointed ambassador to Italy, where he would have to endure whatever humiliations Mussolini dreamed up for him. One popular opposition member was sent to a post in Manchuria, but when he departed, an impromptu gathering of thousands saw him off at the station, and this seemed to signal that the fight may be moving out into the street.

Fearing that Trotsky and Zinoviev would use their positions on the Central Committee to reveal damning details about the business in China, Stalin convened a party tribunal in July 1927 to expel them from the Central Committee. The charges were, first, Trotsky’s appeal to the Comintern, and then second, that impromptu gathering at the train station. Trotsky easily fended off the charges, saying on the one hand, he had been following rules agreed to by everyone when he appealed to the Comintern; and as for the incident at the train station, the Politburo itself said these reassignments were totally routine and there was nothing untoward about any of it, and so having a bunch of people come gather to see off someone who the Politburo continued to maintain was a good comrade? How could that be considered an unauthorized act of opposition.

At this meeting, Trotsky also opened up an attack that helps bring the Revolutions Podcast full circle. Everyone was well versed in the French Revolution, and they all believed that different moments, characters and movements from the French Revolution were effectively archetypes for all revolutions. Since going into the Opposition, Trotsky in particular had been banging the drum that Stalin represented the Thermidorian Reaction of the Russian Revolution, that a clique of self-interested bureaucrats were overthrowing the true revolution and replacing it with something venal and reactionary. And because it’ll help tie together the whole podcast now that we’re coming to an end, I’m gonna quote at length some passages from Isaac Deutscher’s biography of Trotsky, specifically volume two, The Prophet Unarmed, where he quotes at length Trotsky speech during this tribunal. Deutscher writes:

Shortly before the opening of the proceedings, Solz [that is, Aaron Solz, the leader of the tribunal] conversing with one of Trotsky’s associates and trying to show him how pernicious was the Opposition’s role, said, “What does this lead to? You know the history of the French Revolution — and to what this led: to arrests and to the guillotine.” “Is it your intention then to guillotine us?” the Oppositionist asked, to which Solz replied: “Don’t you think that Robespierre was sorry for Danton when he sent him to the guillotine? And then Robespierre had to go himself…. Do you think he was not sorry? Indeed he was, yet he had to do it….”

Once the tribunal got going, Deutscher writes:

Having surveyed the major questions at issue, Trotsky wound up with a forceful evocation of the French Revolution. He referred to the conversation, quoted [before], between Solz and an Oppositionist. He said that he agreed with Solz that they all ought to consult anew the annals of the French Revolution; but it was necessary to use the historical analogy correctly:

And then we quote Trotsky:

During the great French Revolution, many were guillotined. We, too, brought many people before the firing squad. But there were two great chapters in the French Revolution: one went like this, [the speaker points upwards] and the other like that [he points downwards]…. In the first chapter, when the revolution moved upwards, the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks of that time, guillotined the Royalists and the Girondists. We too, have gone through a similar great chapter when we, the Oppositionists, together with you shot the White Guards and exiled our Girondists. But then another chapter opened in France when … the Thermidorians and the Bonapartists, who had emerged from the right wing of the Jacobin party, began to exile and shoot the left Jacobins…. I would like Comrade Solz to think out his analogy to the end and to answer for himself first of all this question: which chapter is it in which Solz is preparing to have us shot? [Commotion in the hall.] This is no laughing matter; revolution is a serious business. None of us is scared of firing squads. We are all old revolutionaries. But we must know who it is that is to be shot and what chapter it is that we are in. When we did the shooting, we knew firmly what chapter we were in. But do you, Comrade Solz, see clearly in which chapter you are preparing to shoot us? I fear that you were about to do so in… the Thermidorian chapter.

Troskey then went on to say:

Do you think that on the very next day after 9 Thermidor they said to themselves: we have now transferred power into the hand of the bourgeoisie? Nothing of the kind. Look up the newspapers at that time. They said: we have destroyed a handful of people who disturbed the peace in the party, and now after their destruction the revolution will triumph completely. If comrade Solz has any doubt about it…

And then salts interjects to say, “You are practically repeating my own words.”

And Trotsky responds:

… I shall read to you what was said by Brival, a right Jacobin and Thermidorian, when he reported on that session of the Convention which had resolved to handover Robespierre and his associates to the revolutionary tribunal: ‘Intriguers and counter-revolutionaries draping themselves with the togas of patriotism, they had sought the destruction of liberty; and the convention decreed to place them under arrest. They were: Robespierre, Couthon, St. Just, Lebas, and Robespierre the Younger. The Chairman asked what my opinion was. I replied: those who had always voted in accordance with the principles of the Mountain… voted for imprisonment. I did more… I am one of those who proposed this measure. Moreover, as secretary, I hasten to sign and to transmit to you this decree of the Convention.’, That is how the report was made by a Solz… of that time. Robespierre and his associates—these were the counter-revolutionaries. ‘Those who had always voted in accordance with the principles of the Mountain’ meant in the language of that time ‘those who had always been Bolsheviks.’ Brival considered himself an old Bolshevik. To-day, too, there are secretaries who hasten to ‘sign and transmit.’ To-day, too, there are such secretaries…

Then he went on to say:

The odour of the ‘second chapter’ now assails one’s nostrils … the party régime stifles everyone who struggles against Thermidor. The worker, the man of the mass, has been stifled in the party. The rank and file is silent. [Such had also been the condition of the Jacobin Clubs in their decay.] An anonymous reign of terror was instituted there; silence was compulsory; the 100 per cent. vote and abstention from all criticism was demanded; it was obligatory to think in accordance with the orders received from above; men were compelled to stop thinking that the party was a living and an independent organism, not a self-sufficient machine of power…. The Jacobin Clubs, the crucibles of revolution, became the nurseries of Napoleon’s future bureaucracy. We should learn from the French Revolution. But is it really necessary to repeat it?

So a couple of things about all that. Trotsky’s take on the reign of terror — that it was originally a force projected upwards at Royalists and Girondists — is a teensy bit sketchy. Sure, prominent Royalists and aristocrats were definitely caught up in the Reign of Terror, like say Louis the 16th, and Mary Antoinette, but the move against the Girondins was hardly a “upward thrust,” it was much more of a sideways jab, and which Trotsky himself clearly associates in the Russian context with the purge of the Mensheviks and the SRs, actions which he approved of. But unmentioned is the fact that the Reign of Terror was also always pointed downwards, at peasants and journalists and shopkeepers or parish priests, who provided the vast majority of the names of the victims of the Reign of Terror, long before Thermidor. The Jacobins always pointed upwards, but the guillotine always fell downwards. And, in fact, Thermidor was precipitated by those who wanted to stop the Reign of Terror, even if, as we know many of those Thermidorians had been hypocritically the worst of the terrorists.

Now Trotsky also compares himself and the left opposition to Robespierre and the true Jacobins. He criticizes the Jacobin machine for becoming too rigidly bound by enforced top-down dogmas where the slightest deviation or criticism could get your name put on a death list, while, with all due respect to Comrade Trotsky’s scholarship, to say that such things befell the Jacobins after Robespierre’s death would perhaps suggest a closer review of the Jacobin party under Robespierre’s leadership. Now, there is something to the idea that Stalin was building a cynical Bonapartist-style dictatorship that didn’t care about anything but staying in power, and was thus planning to bring the heroic revolutionary period to a close. But, let’s peek ahead just a few years and see if Stalin is planning to wind down the revolution with his newly won dictatorship. As we’ll see next week, that’s not the case at all. And in fact, Stalin would do most of what Trotsky was attacking him for failing to do. And in fact Stalin is about to implement one of the all time leading revolutions from above, not retreating, going backwards, or compromising, but going forward at speeds generated by the sacrifice of millions of lives, defended by a reign of terror that surpassed the original.

Trotsky portrayed himself as the noble Robespierre betrayed by venal bureaucrats of a new Directory. That was the chapter he thought they were in, that was the role he thought he was playing, but really, he’s just the victim of a sideways thrust of one revolutionary faction against another. And if anyone is Robespierre in this analogy, it’s Stalin. And that means Trotsky is probably just another Girondin, set to go have his final supper in the Crypt of the Conciergerie.

Now, even though this tribunal was under Stalin’s direction, they hesitated to go too far, and they did not boot Zinoviev and Trotsky from the Central Committee yet. They warned them though to cease their factional attacks on the Politburo. But sensing weakness, the Opposition instead prepared for a showdown at the 15th Party Congress, which was set for December 1927. They drafted a whole separate platform, and demanded the right to openly debate that platform and circulate it among party members. But of course, the Politburo forbid this the Opposition ignored them, and set to work printing copies anyway, a fact that was quickly uncovered by the GPU, who appeared to catch the Opposition red handed. And even worse, one of those busted at the printing press was a former officer of the White Armies, which seemed clear proof that the Opposition was no better than Kornilov or Kolchak. They were enemies of the revolution. The hilarious part, though, is that it was soon revealed that this former White officer was the police agent planted in the group to inform on. That his presence there was not a shocking discovery, he was their guy on the inside. So, if collaborating with former White officers was a crime, it was mostly the regime’s crime.

By late October 1927, Stalin moved beyond calls for Trotsky and Zinoviev to not just be kicked out of the Central Committee, but out of the Party entirely. Trotsky dared them to go forward with this expulsion. He was betting that Stalin was on the verge of overreaching, and that this would backfire.

And so that brings us to the events of November 7th, 1927, the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution. Now, though they did not plan on anything too huge, the Opposition and their supporters decided to use the opportunity of public marches in the streets to unfurl banners and chant slogans in favor of the Opposition and against Stalin. They had posters that read things like “read Lenin’s Testament” or “down with the Kulaks,” y’know, anything that made Stalin’s ruling group look bad. But the secret police, the regular police, and Stalin aligned activists pounced on anyone carrying unauthorized banners, and street scuffling ensued in Moscow and in Petrograd. This scuffling made it look like the Opposition had launched a violent protest, but mostly it was just because they were getting jumped by the regime’s forces and fighting back. Victor Serge, the former anarchist turned Bolshevik, who was now a supporter of the Left Opposition, was there in Leningrad. He said that while he maneuvered amidst the crowd, he shouted, “Long live Trotsky and Zinoviev!” but that this call was met only by silence, until enemies of Trotsky and Zinoviev called, “To the dust bin with them,” a deliberate callback to Trotsky’s own declarations against Russia’s Girondins, the Mensheviks and the SRs, back in 1917, who he was now destined to follow because, it was his factions turn to be declared counter-revolutionary heretics and purged.

The response from Stalin to the events of November 7th was swift. He went straight for the jugular, convening another Party tribunal and calling for Trotsky and Zinoviev to be expelled from the Party entirely for inciting an insurrection. This time, the tribunal did not hesitate. And so in November 1920, ten years after the great October Revolution, two of the most prominent Communists in the world, two men, who had their own claim to being the true heir and disciple of Lenin, were excommunicated, expelled from the Party. It was a shocking turn of events, especially as nearly all of this infighting had been kept under wraps. And so if you were just a regular person going about your business, one minute, everyone was united in solidarity and Trotsky and Zinoviev where heroes of the revolution, and the next minute, they were demons who had been exercised from the party.

Now, Zinoviev would not be able to face this expulsion and he’d come crawling back on bended knee, but Trotsky, never would. Trotsky never could. This was the beginning of the end of his revolutionary career in Russia, and his association with the Russian Communist Party he had done so much to put in power. Kicked out of the Kremlin immediately, and then out of Moscow, he was ordered to internal exile in Kazakhstan, where he would spend a year before being departed from the USSR entirely, never to return.

Ironically, Stalin and Bukharin’s triumph over their rivals in the United Opposition coincided with an abrupt shift in power and in policy. Next time, having triumphed over the Left Opposition politically, Stalin will suddenly embrace all of their policy proposals as if he has not just spent the last few years ceaselessly attacking them. He will turn and train his political guns on Bukharin and the right as he pushes the Soviet Union towards rapid industrialization, five year plans, and mass collectivization.

 

 

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.100: History Never Ends

10.100. I am just laughing at the absurdity of all this. We are a long ways from wherever I started this podcast back in 2013. 12 to 15 episodes a series, I said. It’ll be simple, I said. I really want to switch gears and not do anything as insanely large as the History of Rome, I said. Now even after I let the genie out of the bottle and the French Revolution ran for 55 episodes, it did not even remotely occur to me that I would approach that many episodes ever again, let alone blow past it so long ago, I can’t even see it in the rearview mirror. We have been doing the Russian Revolution series for three years now — three calendar years — which is just about as long as I expected the entire podcast to run, all series combined, when I first launched the show almost a decade ago. This is truly insane, thanks very much for sticking around. But, uh, let’s start bringing this mother in for a landing, shall we?

Now, one of the great lessons I hope you’ve taken away from this series — the whole of Revolutions and the whole of the History of Rome if you listened to that — is that history just keeps happening. Things just keep happening one after the other in an unbroken continuum. Crises, conflicts, accomplishment, setbacks. Old people retire and die, new people are born and replace them. Any random historical year could appear in one biography in the final pages, covering the final days and death, in another biography, in the first pages, covering birth and early childhood. Historical causes produce historical effects that then become historical causes of the next historical effects. As World War I originated in the Franco-Prussian War, which came from 1848, which gained from the Napoleonic Wars, which came from the French Revolution. Drawing invisible lines to divide up eras and periods in ages is an absolutely artificial exercise, as one day simply follows from the next in a seamless transformation from one day to the next. History passes one day at a time, one hour at a time, one minute at a time, one moment at a time. And there’s never a break. There’s never a pause. It’s just the relentless passing of time since the beginning of time.

Now, because history is always happening, there is always something happening. Something to deal with. Something exploding, something imploding, something beginning, something ending. But there’s always, always, always something that comes along and derails carefully laid plans and forces people into that place that humans eternally live, but are eternally trying to escape; that place where we must scramble and improvise responses to unexpected events. Ever since October 1917, for example, Lenin and his comrades had been aiming for this thing they called “the breathing spell,” the moment of relative peace, tranquility and regularity where they would be able to implement their program free of mortal threats to the Soviet regime. This was the logic behind the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk: make peace at enormous cost because we need a breathing spell. This was the great prize to be wondering the Civil War: if we defeat all our enemies, we shall be able to finally work in peace.

But this breathing spell they yearned for was a mirage. And it’s always a mirage. We all know from our own daily lives, that fabled next week or next month or next year when we will finally be able to do all the things we have to put off today, because we’re too busy, too harried and dealing with too many other emergencies big and small — sudden deadlines that force us to drop everything, unexpected events that just upend our lives. Except when we get to that next week, and next month, and next year, we find the same set of unexpected emergencies, often the same type and category that have stalked us throughout our lives, and we are forced back into our natural state of scrambling a reaction and improvising a response. And despite this, never quite being able to give up the fantasy that next week, next month, or next year, it will be different. That we’ll finally get that breathing spell.

But there’s never going to be a breathing spell. That’s not how life works. That’s not how history works.

If historical breathing spells existed, by all rights the Russian Communist Party should have been long into one in the summer of 1923. By 1921, they had survived the end of World War I, the Civil War, and every other uprising, invasion and crisis that had threatened their new regime. But instead, it just continued to be one damn thing after another. There was a catastrophic famine, an economic crisis, conflict within and between nationalities and classes and political factions. And now here in 1923, it was just more of the same. Always, always more of the same. And stop me if you’ve heard this before, but in 1923, the conditions endured by the industrial working classes of Russia, in their factories and mines and railroads, were becoming intolerable and threatening violent upheaval. There was a broader economic crisis sweeping central Europe that might open the door for the long hoped for worldwide communist revolution. And along with this, there stood poised the real possibility that Russia was about to be dragged back into a war between the Great Powers, a war that should have been unthinkable as they were all just five years removed from the Great War, but which was somehow a very live possibility by the fall of 1923.

So, there’s no breathing spell. There’s never going to be a breathing spell. There was only history over and over and over again forever.

So, yeah, unrest in the industrial sector? It’s been a constant companion of our series going back to the days of the Witte boom in the 1890s. As I mentioned a few times over the past several episodes, since the beginning of World War I, the Russian working classes have been absolutely battered. When the war came, the ranks of the proletariat practically doubled overnight, as every factory in Russia turned to cranking out coats and boots, guns, trains, equipment, and munitions. Russian peasants flocked to the cities to fill jobs. The urban population grew exponentially through 1914, 1915, and 1916.

But then, it all came crashing down. By the dawn of 1917, scarcity and inflation produced a rolling social crisis that smashed through the industrial economy, and then smash right through the tsar. No fuel and no resources meant factories shut down and workers were laid off. Inflation meant their wages were worthless. Crop failures and the destruction of the railroads meant there was no food to buy anyway. So the explosive growth of the proletariat since the 1890s — and then especially after 1914 — popped like a bubble. And when it popped, the factories went idle, the workers fled back to their villages, depopulating the cities and leaving behind only the demoralized and shellshocked remnants of the industrial working class, often families who simply had nowhere else to go.

Now, I’m not saying there’s a causal relationship here. But one cannot help but notice the ironic demographic correlation to the great Communist revolution of October 1917. As outlined by Marx, this revolution was meant to be driven by the inexorable transformation of agricultural peasants into industrial workers. But since October 1917, the opposite has occurred. Workers are turning back into peasants.

What was left of the Russian working class was so demoralized and exhausted that their angry convulsions in the spring of 1921, convulsions that had sparked the Kronstadt Rebellion, feebly dissipated in a matter of days. They were no longer able to sustain the kind of energy that had driven 1905 and 1917. Afraid of this briefest of flickers, the Communist Party leadership then set to work making sure it never happened again. Leadership jobs and all the labor unions went to loyal members of the Party; those were among the key patronage positions now doled out by General-Secretary Stalin. The job of the union bosses were to keep the workers working, not press their claims for abuse, mistreatment, and exploitation. Meanwhile, the Ban on Factions issued by the 10th Party Congress had been specifically aimed at the so-called Workers’ Opposition, that nascent faction inside the Party that wanted to advance and defend the working classes against the policies of a Central Committee that seemed totally divorced now from the proletariat it claimed to represent.

As if to drive home the point that the Communist Party was no longer in any sense the party of labor, the signature economic reform initiated to grapple with the great economic dislocations caused by a decade of war and conflict, the NEP, was specifically designed to favor the peasants over the workers. It was meant to favor the bosses over the workers. The bourgeoisie over the proletariat. The turn to market economics led the Soviet regime to expand their policy of leasing state owned factories, mines, or railroads to private operators. The idea was that these operators were the ones with the technical knowledge and experience to run the factories, mines, and railroads efficiently and productively. In practice, it meant they were inviting back the same set of engineers and managers who had run everything before the revolution. So much so that by the spring of 1923, the revolution itself appeared to be a cruel joke. In 1917, the revolution had promised control of the factories would be handed to the worker soviets. This was the very essence of workers owning and controlling the means of production. But this promise had been forgotten ages ago. And the reality was, they were abused, exploited, and controlled by the same old bosses, now working in profitable partnership with the grandees of the Communist Party. On the factory floor, in their canteens, and in their depopulated and dilapidated working class neighborhoods, the urban labor force of Soviet Russia bitterly referred to the NEP as the New Exploitation of the Proletariat.

So two years after the unrest of 1921, the griping of the workers in Moscow, Petrograd, and other cities once again gave way to active agitation. Opposed by the Communist Party and the union leaders the party appointed, working class dissidents took matters into their own hands. In many cases, these leaders were themselves longstanding Party members. They weren’t reflexively anti-Communist outsiders. A few of them had joined the Bolshevik faction way back in 1905, their membership cards older than all but a few of Lenin’s closest followers. But they did not come from the intelligentsia set who ran the Party, and they fumed at the hard turn away from representing worker interests. This was meant to be a revolution by and for the proletariat. Workers of the world, unite! All power to the Soviet! Does anyone even remember these slogans?

All the senior leaders could do is offer the deeply unsatisfying assertion that because the Communist Party was the party of the workers, they must be… the party of the workers or something.

As Zinoviev wrote in an article in 1923, “A party can be a workers’ party in its composition, and yet not be proletarian and organization, program, and policy.” Uh huh. And how’s that again?

So, despite the Ban on Factions, clandestine groups formed to press the interests of the forgotten proletariat. One called the Workers’ Group and the other called Workers’ Truth. In July and August 1923, they organized wildcat strikes, labor shutdowns, opposed and condemned by official union leadership. This was all incredibly vexing for the leaders of the Communist Party, because at that same moment, they were watching a similar rise in worker unrest over in Germany and concluding it meant that revolution was in the air. And if such conditions meant that a revolution loomed over Germany, what did it mean for Russia?

Now, since we’re here, let’s pop over to Germany, because 1923 was a year of major crisis for the young Weimar Republic, even more so than the young Soviet regime. Reparations payments under the Versailles Treaty compounded the devastation wrought by World War I, leaving the German economy in shambles. As we’ve seen, the British tried to ease the punitive burdens in the interest of general peace and stability — and the interests of the British economy — but the French government adamantly opposed any changes. Their economy was also a devastated shambles and it required German money and capital and manufactured goods to rebuild. Plus, there was the unspoken belief that these reparations payments were simply repayment, plus interest, of the reparations Germany had imposed on France after the Franco-Prussian War. Which, as you’ll recall, was an amount calculated by Bismarck to be identical to the amount Napoleon had imposed on Prussia in 1807, because this is all just one unbroken continuity of history. Causes becoming effects becoming causes becoming effects.

Anyway, by the end of 1922, the Germans fell behind their scheduled obligations. The official reparations commission created by the Versailles Treaty declared Germany in default, leading the French and Belgian armies to move in and occupy the Ruhr Valley in January 1923. Both as punishment and as guarantee for future payment.

As the Ruhr Valley contained something like three quarters of German iron, steel, and coal production, the occupation triggered the collapse of the German economy, a crisis of political legitimacy for the German government, and an international diplomatic crisis that might turn into the guns of August all over again. It was among the several triggers for the infamous run of hyperinflation that rocked the very shallow foundation to the Weimar Republic. And by hyperinflation, we mean hyper inflation. German marks weren’t hit by five, ten, or twenty percent inflation. Not even a hundred percent. That’s nothing. We’re talking about thousands of percent, millions of percent, infinity of percents. By the end of 1923, it took literally billions of German marks to get back one single U S dollar. This was an economic apocalypse that triggered a massive social and political crisis, and revolutionaries on both sides, right and left, licked their lips hungrily.

So in the same summer of 1923 when workers in Moscow and Petrograd were launching small wild wildcat strikes, a massive strike wave broke across Germany, including somewhere between three and three and a half million people. It forced the government to resign, caused European leaders to fret about total systemic collapse, and led radical groups across the political spectrum to arm and mobilize. Including, for example, a small clique of cartoonishly second rate reactionary clowns down in Bavaria.

For the self-proclaimed leaders of the international Communist revolution in Moscow, events in Germany seemed like a golden opportunity to finally harpoon their great white whale. Ever since Marx and Engels had Written The Communist Manifesto back in 1848, industrial Germany had been considered the epicenter of the proletarian revolution. As we’ve discussed at length, all the Russian Marxists going back to Plekhanov, Axelrod, and Zasulich assumed any hypothetical Russian revolution would be a precursor to, or an ancillary project of, the main event in Germany. Nearly all European socialists thought like that. As the German SPD took the lead in the Second International, it was practically axiomatic that the proletarian revolution would be a German-speaking revolution. The failure of the German revolution to materialize during and after World War I had forced the Bolsheviks to improvise new policies, but it never led them to give up hope that in the end they were just holding ground until the real revolution broke out in Germany. With the French occupation of the Ruhr Valley and the massive strikes exploding in the summer of 1923, all the disheartening setbacks since the Spartacist Revolt in 1919 seemed to be on the verge of a dramatic reversal.

As the head of the Comintern, the Third International, Comrade Zinoviev was all in on staging what he referred to as a German October. Now, not all his comrades were as eager as he was — they were skeptical of the supposed strength of the German Communist Party and the supposed weakness of their enemies — but Zinoviev pushed the Party to send money, agents, and all manner of support to stage a revolution in Germany. For Zinoviev, the possible benefits of a German revolution were enormous: as Lenin faded towards death, someone was going to wind up filling his shoes, and Zinoviev saw no reason why it should not be… Zinoviev. If the revolution truly widened beyond the borders of Russia, his role as chairman of the Comintern would make him the preeminent Russian Communist, far more than possible rivals like Trotsky and Stalin. Plus, if Zinoviev daringly and forcefully pushed for a successful revolution in the face of skepticism and doubt, he could at least partially shake the heavy weight he had born since opposing the October Revolution back in 1917 — opposition Lenin had just reminded everyone in the Politburo about with his dictated testament. Not that they ever needed reminding. And so in the summer of 1923, Zinoviev pushed and pushed for a German October.

Now while they were all discussing how to harness angry worker [energy] in Germany, the leaders of the Communist Party wanted to repress it at home, Now back around the trial of the SRs, the Cheka had rebranded itself as the State Political Directorate and was now known as the GPU, but they were still essentially the same operation led by the same people and staffed by the same people. They were still tasked with internal political security and served as the regime’s Secret police. Now ordered to root out the causes of the workers’ strikes, the GPU first tried to prove links to the Mensheviks or the SRs, But, one of the consequences of so thoroughly purging the Mensheviks and the SRs was that no links could be found, because no links existed. One of the drawbacks of crushing all your enemies is that they are no longer around to blame for all your problems. So, agents of the GPU followed leads into the Workers’ Group and Workers’ Truth, and found most of them, as I said, were long standing members of the Communist Party. The GPU struggled to find anyone willing to turn them in, and found many party members even in the middle rungs of the leadership unwilling to help the GPU root them out. It was one thing to use the secret police to target monarchists and liberals and SRs; quite another to turn them on our own people.

But in September 1923, the GPU finally pinpointed their culprits, and carried out a police sweep to lock up the leadership of both groups. Their ultimate punishment, however, was mild: mere expulsion from the party. Gulags and midnight executions had not yet come to the party itself.

Amidst the debates about what to do about encouraging the workers in Germany to revolt while discouraging the workers in Russia from revolting, the leadership of the Communist Party found itself in a novel position: for the first time ever they had to grapple with major political dilemmas without Lenin. They had always argued and bickered and disagreed both among themselves and with Lenin, but Lenin had always been their undisputed leader. But now Lenin is laying out at the Gorki Estate, immobile and non-verbal, and he could not lead them anymore. They had to figure all this out for themselves. And that meant not just settling matters of policy administration and governance, but also figuring out how to get along with one another without Lenin’s presence. As mutual resentment and conflicting ambitions ran them headlong into one another, Lenin was not there to be the ultimate authority that they all acknowledged, the arbitrator of all debates.

So for example, Trotsky listened to and respected Lenin, but he exhibited habitual contempt for his other comrades in the Politburo. And the feeling was mutual. Trotsky had never really been one of them. Lenin’s not unjustified insistence that Trotsky was irreplaceable had both been Trotsky’s greatest protection inside the Party, and also a major source of ongoing resentment. You know, daddy likes him best, even though he’s a stepchild. Trotsky, for his part, remained ever aloof, and did not deign to hang out with his Politburo comrades socially. And as I’m sure you all know, if a bunch of coworkers get together to drink, gossip, and talk shit, which members of the Politburo routinely did, you’re probably the one they’re going to gossip and talk shit about if you’re not there.

Now, if you know even a little bit about Russian politics in the early 1920s, you know that what’s about to happen is that Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin are about to form a unified triumvirate. A troika, in Russian parlance, to the explicit and purposeful exclusion and marginalization of Trotsky. But this troika was just one temporary alliance organized within the long game that would decide who among them would claim Lenin’s mantle as the preeminent leader of the party. During this long game, which got going in earnest here in 1923, everyone believed they were using everyone else, and alliances would form, dissipate, and realign as circumstances dictated, and each played their own hand. It was not inevitable that the first move would be against Trotsky. In the summer of 1923, it actually looked like Stalin would be the first to go. Krupskaya handed Zinoviev a copy of what they were now referring to as ‘Ilyich’s letter about the secretary,’ which was tantamount to Lenin, using his dying breath to say get rid of Stalin. As the letter circulated, the other members of the Politburo discussed doing just that. There were a bunch of clandestine meetings and exchanges of very passive aggressive correspondence that seem to be moving against Stalin. But probably because Zinoviev ultimately disliked and feared Trotsky more than he disliked and feared Stalin, instead of taking the poison dagger Krupskaya had given him and using it to slit Stalin’s throat, he instead got together with Stalin and Kamenev to form a working majority inside the Poliburo, specifically at Trotsky’s expense.

In September 1923, the Central Committee of the Party met for a full session to discuss the German question. After being briefed on the readiness of the German communists and the state of Russian national defenses — as the Allied Powers might invade in the event of a Russian backed revolution in Germany — the Party approved plans to launch a communist insurrection in Germany on November 9th, the anniversary of the German revolution of 1918. A small group of senior party officials was dispatched to Germany to oversee preparations and coordinate the uprising. But after discussing this, a motion then followed to revamp the Military Revolutionary Committee, which had been chaired by Trotsky since the October Revolution, and which was understood by everyone to be one of his bases of power. The motion would enlarge the council, and put Stalin on the board.

Stalin (error: Trotsky) took this as a direct and unexpected attack on his dignity and authority. He dramatically responded by announcing his resignation from all posts in both the Party and the state, and demanding that he be allowed to decamp for Germany to serve as, as he put it, “a soldier of the revolution.” But after discussing the matter, the Politburo, now controlled by the troika of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin, rejected both his resignation and his request to go to Germany. If Trotsky left all his leadership posts, he might become an uncontrollable loose cannon. Trotsky’s greatest asset by far was his popular appeal. His oratory soared above everyone, and his powerful biting words had made him a great champion of the people both in 1905 and 1917.

Now it’s unlikely Trotsky would have tried to rally the people against the Soviet regime as he had once rallied them again Tsar Nicholas and Alexander Kerensky, but still. It was better to keep him muzzled by party rules prohibiting leaders from unauthorized speechmaking than just letting him wander around free. And as for Germany, if Trotsky went to Germany and led a second great revolution, there’d be no stopping him. So they stopped him. The Troika refused his resignations and refused to allow him to go to Germany. At a meeting of the Politburo shortly thereafter, Zinoviev crowed right to Trotsky’s face, “Can’t you see you’re in a ring? your tricks no longer work. You’re in a minority. You’re in the singular.”

Trotsky could see that he was being boxed in, and that his situation prevented him from launching public broadsides against the party. So instead, he sent a fiery internal memo on October the eighth that opened his new period as leader of an amorphous and purposely ill-defined opposition to the Troika. Turning sharply on his former defense of rigorous discipline and top-down chains of command, Trotsky now attacked the increasingly bureaucratic spirit of the party. He said functionaries are being appointed from on high who just mindlessly carry out orders. The old spirit of open debate and collective decision making was giving way to a rigidly calcified apparatus that couldn’t think for itself and was thus losing its spontaneity, creativity, and adaptability.

Now one need not struggle too hard to see Trotsky’s turned from defender of labor armies and one party dictatorship to more open democratic decision-making coincides with him being pushed off the topmost rung of the Party. Throughout his life, Trotsky’s single most consistent position was that he was right and everyone else is wrong, and so he had no problems switching procedural forms to ensure that his voice was always heard loud and clear. Because he was right, and everyone else was wrong.

Within days of Trotsky’s letter, another letter followed. Now this one was not technically signed by Trotsky, but his fingerprints are all over it. This is the so-called Declaration of the Forty-Six, which was signed by you guessed it, Forty-Six members of the Communist Party, who critiqued the Politburo and the Central Committee. The declaration opened with an absolute broadside, saying:

The economic and financial crisis beginning at the end of July this year, with all the political consequences flowing from it, including those within the Party, has mercilessly revealed the inadequacy of the Party leadership, both in the economic realm, and especially in the area of inner party relations.

They then proceeded to attack the Politburo on two fronts. First picking up the banner of the angry workers, the declaration attacked the industrial policy of the NEP, saying it was insufficiently committed to Communist principles. What Russia needed was not markets and bosses, but more rational planning. But second, echoing Trotsky’s letter, they attacked the Central Committee for allowing one small faction to dominate all offices and appointments, and then declare themselves immune from criticism in the name of Party unity. They said,

If the situation which has developed is not radically changed in the very near future. The economic crisis in Soviet Russia and the crisis of the fractional dictatorship within the Party will strike heavy blows to the workers’ dictatorship in Russia and to the Russian Communist Party. With such a burden on its shoulders, the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia and its leader, the Russian Communist Party, cannot enter the field of the impending new international shocks in any other way than with the perspective of failure, along with the entire front of proletarian struggle.

The authors of the Declaration of the Forty-Six cleverly tried to turn the question of factionalism back around on the Politburo, saying, you are actually the ones engaging in factionalism, not us. But this cleverness was no match for the stark reality of the Party rules they had all proved back at the 10th Party Congress. The Central Committee had total discretion to determine what counted as unauthorized factionalism and what did not. The Central Committee was controlled by the Politburo, which was in turn now controlled by the Troika. At a session of the Central Committee at the end of October, which was packed by Stalin with allies, Trotsky and the other Forty-Six were all denounced for their heretical factionalism. The Ban on Factions, and the rules enforcing it would be unchanged and upheld. Forever after, this would be the method of purging internal enemies of whoever happened to control the Politburo.

But the Troika was not yet a totally monolithic force, and Trotsky, the Forty-Six, and others who found themselves on the wrong side of the Troika, would continue to try to dislodge them. We’ll talk more about this next week when we discuss the rise and fall of the so-called Left Opposition.

As this was all playing out, Moscow got heavy news from abroad. The agent sent to Germany to organize and lead the revolution reported that the situation was far worse than they had been led to believe. There were not nearly as many Communist Party members or groups or weapons as had been supposed. Those forces loyal to the government probably outnumbered them twenty to one. The Bolsheviks had won in October 1917 because nobody was willing to fight for Kerensky’s government, and so a handful of guys with machine guns could pull it off. But that was not the case in Germany in 1923. In fact, a state of emergency had already been declared, local police had been forced to give way to the w, which had no love at all for any kind of left radicalism. On October 23rd, the leaders of the group sent in to lead the revolution pulled the plug on the revolution. They sent backward to Moscow saying the whole thing has to be postponed.

Now one small communist group in Homburg did wind up trying to move forward, but they were quickly and easily crushed. There would be no German October. It turned out to be just another miserable failure as the white whale swam away.

It was only small comfort that their enemies on the right fared no better. In that same November of 1923, that small clique of cartoonishly second rate reactionary clowns in Bavaria got together in a Beer Hall and tried to copy Mussolini’s March on Rome. They too failed miserably and were all arrested in what turned out to be a dismal fiasco. Tossed in jail, exposed as a bunch of cartoonishly second rate reactionary clowns, they were, thankfully, never heard from again.

As I said before, when it comes to history, the beginning of one biography often overlaps with the end of another. One person’s start line is another person’s finished line. And for Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the end was now at hand.

The third stroke in March 1923 had knocked him completely out of commission. There were no more arguments about whether he was trying to work too hard. He wasn’t able to work at all. He could communicate now only by gesturing and was confined to a wheelchair on days when he felt able to get up and move around. Daily victories were simply staying alert and happy, eating and drinking while listening to Krupskaya or his sister read him books. Bad days were full of vacant depression where he seemed more dead than alive. The only real hope left to him and his family was simply that he would recover enough to control his own body and speak his own thoughts clearly.

But as the weeks and months passed, there were more bad days than good. And the truth was, he was slipping away. In October 1923, as his comrades intrigued against each other and the ever elusive German revolution was pronounced ever elusive, Lenin insisted on traveling the ten miles up to Moscow one last time. He didn’t tell anyone he was coming, he had no meetings with any of the old Bolsheviks, he just toured the Kremlin one last time and went back to Gorki, exhausted but satisfied.

After New Years, his doctors tentatively suggested he might actually be getting better, but Krupskaya was more attuned to him and more pessimistic. Starting on Thursday, January 17th, she wrote:

I began to feel something terrible was coming. He looked horribly tired and tormented. He was closing his eyes frequently and went pale. But the main thing was that somehow the expression on his face changed. His gaze became somehow blind.

On January 21st, 1924, Bukharin happened to be at Gorki visiting, and described what he saw:

Lenin. [he said] was propped up on a pillow in a sleigh and watched while a group of workers on the estate went out hunting. He was in good spirits, clearly enjoying himself. There were a few things he enjoyed more than a hunt. When a retriever brought back a bird to one of the workers near the sleigh, Lenin, raised his good hand and managed to say, “Good dog.”

But that night after returning to his quarters and drinking some broth, Lenin started to slip into unconsciousness. Krupskaya wrote, “… at first I held his hot, damp hand and then just watched as the towel beneath him turned red with blood and the stamp of death settled on his […] face.”

He had suffered a fatal brain hemorrhage and died just before seven o’clock on January 21st, 1924. Lenin was dead.

More than any of the other leaders of any of the other political parties or factions that we’ve talked about in this series — that includes Tsar Nicholas, Alexander Kerensky, Victor Chernov, Pavel Milyukov, Sergei Witte, Pyotr Stolypin, his old mentor, Plekhanov, all of whom had enormous personalities that filled every room they stepped foot in — none of them defined their political parties and factions the way Lenin defined his. Above and beyond any defining ideology or policy or worldview of the Bolsheviks, the Bolsheviks were the party of Lenin. So much so, that in the days after the infamous Second Party Congress in 1902, the difference between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks could be described almost entirely by one’s own personal feelings about Lenin. Those who continued to support his leadership were Bolsheviks, those who thought he was far too dictatorial, bullying, and close-minded were Mensheviks. Very little else separated them at the time of the first rupture. It was the thing that ruptured them.

Lenin’s stamp on his party meant that his party resembled his own personality. The Bolsheviks were hard, disciplined, sarcastic, blunt, and dismissive, but they were also ever practical, flexible, and adaptable. But Lenin’s domineering personality meant that the whole party structure was designed to fit the leadership of a domineering personality.

Now as we’ve seen, Lenin was not a straight up dictator inside of his party. His particular brand of megalomania was of a peculiar sort. Inside the party, he got his way through the force of persuasion, strong arming people, insisting, very occasionally wooing and coaxing. And if on occasion he lost votes to his comrades in the Central Committee on a matter of policy, he gave way — as for example, when they decided to boycott the elections to the Duma when he thought they should run candidates. But as the years passed, those who disagreed with Lenin typically fell out of favor and out of the Party. And mostly all that was left in the end were those whose deference to Lenin was a matter of habit. And we should note that in the end the Bolsheviks did run candidates for the Duma.

Thus deference to a strong leader was ingrained in the Bolshevik Party, now the Communist Party, from the beginning. As was the way Lenin built the party on the basis of Congress’s elections and committees and yet always seeming to get his way, by manipulating those votes or packing the committees with people who voted the way he wanted. Trotsky noted this from the very beginning, and just after the split in 1902, observed of Lenin’s methods, “In the internal politics of the party, these methods lead to the Party organization substituting itself for the Party, the Central Committee substituting itself for the Party organization, and finally the dictator substituting himself for the Central Committee.”

He wrote this way back in 1902, but it describes almost perfectly the Troika’s move to take over the Communist Party now that Lenin was fading, dying, and then dead. For good or ill, the Bolshevik Party was Lenin’s party. And even though Lenin was now gone, the party he had built remained ever the same.

Now the Russian Revolution was not the work of a single man. It was obviously an impossibly convoluted set of events that sprawled across decades and swept up literally millions of people great and small, who all contributed to how the revolution unfolded. But we can for sure say this: more than any other single person, the Russian Revolution was defined by Lenin. There are few moments in history when you can really say, oh yeah, that one person caused this particular massive historical event. But the October Revolution is that way. The October Revolution does not happen without Lenin. He was absolutely going out of his mind, pushing his comrades to do it, to take power, even in the face of heavy doubt from those comrades and nervous resistance from the rank and file of his party. Now, obviously, even the October Revolution is work of tons of people, but the core drive to do it, the engine that produced the October Revolution — not the February Revolution, mind you, but the October Revolution — came from Lenin. And had he died or been arrested or been detained coming back from Finland, the October Revolution does not happen. And so love him or hate him, revere him or loathe him, Lenin’s singular impact on world history can never be doubted.

But now Lenin is dead and gone. And next week, the Communist Party, the USSR, the international communist revolution, will have to move on without their indispensable man, who has now gone to that graveyard that is full of indispensable men. Next week will be the first of our three final wrap-up episodes, and it will revolve around the great duel between Stalin and Trotsky for control of the Communist Party, the USSR, and the international communist revolution. Because even though we are ending this and drawing a line in the sand that says over there is revolution and over there is early Soviet history, there never is a break in history. There’s never a pause. It just keeps going one day after the next.

And so even though the revolution is ending and Revolutions is ending, history never ends.

 

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Episode 10.99: The Testament

As he approached his 52nd birthday in the spring of 1922, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was breaking down. The decades of stress, exertion, rage, passion, resentment, despair, fear, doubt, exaltation, and responsibility had finally caught up with him. These decades passed in a succession of days and nights of obsessive single-minded focus and relentless work, with the ever-present threat of arrest, execution and assassination hanging over his head. Lenin was plagued through all these years by headaches and insomnia, exacerbated by a bitterly caustic disposition and frequent bouts of rage. His temper flaring beyond control at longtime enemies, supposed friends, this turn of events, that constant irritation. This was not a healthy lifestyle. Now, unlike many of his comrades — Zinoviev in particular — Lenin’s unhealthy lifestyle was not defined by hedonistic vice. He wasn’t a glutton. He exercised, rarely drank, and forbid people to smoke around him. It was instead defined by the monomaniacal drive of a man who treated both his mind and his body as mere conduits for work, and of the mega maniacal drive of a man who believed that if you wanted something done right you had to do it yourself. 20 years of life and the revolutionary underground, followed by five years as de facto dictator over a revolutionary state in constant violent turmoil, had taken its collective toll. In the spring of 1921, Lenin emerged from all those potentially cataclysmic stresses we talked about worn down to the breaking point. At which point he broke.

In the summer of 1921, the inner circle of the Communist Party had to reckon with the fact that the boss could no longer maintain a full workload. Aware that more than anyone Lenin was the indispensable man of the revolution, his closest comrades in the Politburo — Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, and Stalin — demanded that he take a vacation. Ever the workaholic, Lenin tried to put them off, but finally relented in August of 1921. He took a holiday out to the Gorki Estate, a neoclassical country mansion about ten kilometers south of Moscow. The estate had been expropriated after the Soviet government moved to Moscow and set it aside for Lenin. He had first used it to recuperate from Fanny Kaplan’s assassination attempt in 1919. After that, he visited the mansion sparingly, spending most of his days and nights in the Kremlin, working, working, always working. But unbeknownst to Lenin as he arrived for the extended holiday in the summer of 1921, Gorki would more and more be his primary residence during the final two and a half years of his life.

Because this holiday didn’t really help much. He returned to Moscow in October still unable to work full days, still plagued by headaches, insomnia, numbness in his extremities and bouts of forgetfulness. In February, 1922, he wrote to Clara Zetkin, “Unfortunately I am very ill. My nerves are kaput.”

Among all the other things that needed to be dealt with in early 1922 — the ongoing famine, the negotiations with the Germans that would lead to the Treaty of Rapallo, the conference of the Three Internationals, the upcoming trial of the SRs, and just generally trying to rebuild Russian society — Lenin also turned his attention to the state of the Communist Party. It was very clear he would not be around to manage things forever, and the Party must be put on firm footing if the revolution was to survive his death.

He was well aware of the fact that at present the Communist Party was not a gigantic popular force drawing strength, power, and authority from some huge proletarian working class. In March 1922, Lenin wrote to Vyacheslav Molotov, a future Soviet foreign minister, but at this moment, a younger Communist recently elevated to the Central Committee and made a non-voting member of the Politburo, “If one does not wish to shut one’s eyes to reality, one ought to admit that at present the proletarian character of the Party’s policy is determined not by the class composition of the membership, but by the enormous and undivided authority of that very thin stratum of members who might be described as the Party’s Old Guards.”

This thin stratum Lenin described was composed of Bolshevik true believers, who, with a few notable exceptions like Trotsky, had joined the party long before 1917. They were a small group of professional revolutionaries turned state officials who were now responsible for the success or failure of their vision of the revolution.

Lenin’s great concern was that with few truly reliable party leaders in charge of everything, that personality, conflicts, petty grudges, or personal beefs between just a small handful of those leaders would cascade into total political apocalypse. As Lenin said to Molotov, “Even the slightest dissension in this strata may be enough to weaken its authority to such an extent that they should forfeit their power of decision and become unable to control events. At all costs, therefore, it was necessary to maintain the solidarity of the Old Guard.” Occupying a position not unlike George Washington, Lenin was the one guy in the Party that every faction, clique, and member listened to and respected. The danger of a fatal rift to the party after the bony hands of death remove the unifying linchpin of Lenin was all too apparent.

But though the pitfalls of having too few reliable leaders was obvious, the problem was not easily solved by throwing the doors open and inviting new blood into the ranks. As we’ve noted several times, when the Communist Party became the ruling party after 1917, membership in the Party brought perks and privileges and a measure of security. Better food, better lodgings, better pay; all at a time of acute deprivation, scarcity, and chaos. Naturally, this led to people joining the Party who weren’t even close to ideological true believers. They just wanted a steady job as a clerk somewhere and access to the Party commissary. And of course pure self-interest could extend to shadier motives: the opportunity for graft, corruption, and abuse of power.

To combat this and maintain the ideological purity of the Party, they carried out periodic purges, internal reviews of members that culled out those who failed to meet some basic standards. That quote I used from episode 10.86, about old Bolsheviks being terrified at being kicked out mainly because they would lose their right to reside in the National Hotel and other privileges connected with this, was in response to a 1919 purge that kicked out fully half the members of the Party. In 1921, they conducted another review and expelled 200,000 people, about a third of the total Party membership, for various infractions like indolence, malfeasance, or corruption, but now including past associations with the Mensheviks, SRs, and other rival parties as meriting expulsion.

So, this was a struggle to strike a balance between keeping the Party open enough so that minute differences between a handful of leaders couldn’t wreck everything, but not so open that the Communist vision was sacrificed to petty careerism. In an effort to bring some centralized regularity to the practical logistics of the Party, lenin initiated the creation of a new post called General Secretary of the Party. This was meant to be an administrative job, accepting or rejecting members, hiring and firing staff, organizing meetings, planning congresses, dealing with the mountains and mountains of paper reports and communications. The Politburo and the Central Committee would still decide all matters of policy; the job of the general secretary would be to ensure that policy was properly carried out.

The post of general secretary was specifically created for Stalin, who had proved his loyalty, determination, and administrative abilities to Lenin several times over, as both head of the Orgburo and also head of a Party branch called the Workers and Peasants Inspectorate, which was tasked with overseeing the State Civil Service to prevent endemic sloth and corruption, which was reflecting badly on the Soviet state. At the 11th Party Congress in the spring of 1922, Stalin was appointed to this new position of general secretary of the Communist Party. Nobody realized what a massive point of political leverage Stalin now controlled.

Neither Lenin nor Stalin nor anyone else took this appointment to be an anointment of Stalin as heir apparent. There was no heir apparent. And if there was one, the betting money was still on Trotsky. Trotsky was by far the most famous Party leader. Ever sent his explosive entrance onto the world stage during the October Revolution, when he, even more than Lenin, was the face of the Bolshevik Party, Trotsky had been the most visible Communist leader. He was the head of the Red Army during the civil war, he engaged in international diplomacy, he traveled extensively making speeches, writing articles, delivering radio addresses, reviewing military installations and economic development. Most people outside the inner circle of the Communist Party likely took it for granted that Trotsky was Lenin’s successor. But inside the inner circle, it was a different matter. To the real Old Guard Bolsheviks like Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin, Trotsky was still a newcomer, a latecomer, who had joined them only after fifteen years of trading insults and mutual denunciations. Their attacks on one another were a matter of public record. Now, ultimately Trotsky had seen the light and Lenin repeatedly impressed upon his comrades Trotsky’s indispensability, but that only added to the personal grudges growing up amongst them, precisely the grudges Lenin worried about.

Meanwhile in the spring of 1922, the Lenin himself was growing sicker by the day. Eventually doctors imported from Germany surmised he may be suffering some kind of lead poisoning from the bullet still lodged in his neck from the assassination attempt by Fanny Kaplan. So on April 23rd, 1922 — the day after his 52nd birthday — Lenin underwent surgery to remove this bullet. The surgery itself was a success, but while he recovered from the procedure, the underlying condition it was meant to fix remained. Because as we now know, he wasn’t suffering from lead poisoning, but instead from a disease that was absolutely wrecking his brain cells. Just about a month after the surgery, the first great hammer fell. While out at Gorki recovering from surgery, Lenin suffered a major stroke on the night of May 26th, 1922. The result was partial paralysis on his right side, temporary loss of speech and motor functions, and severe lapses in memory and cognitive ability. In the days that followed, he retained self-aware consciousness, but was no longer able to do simple physical and mental tasks. When he found himself unable to perform basic arithmetic, Lenin issued his first of many requests that in the event of total paralysis, incapacitation, or mental degeneration, they administer cyanide.

So while Russian media was consumed with the sensational trial of the SRs in the summer of 1922, the chairman of the people’s commissars was out at Gorki, recovering from an undisclosed stroke. After the first uncertain days when death did seem imminent, Lenin started to recover over the summer. By July, he was allowed to have visitors and read newspapers again, although his closest comrades and the Politburo forbid him from doing any serious work in case it disrupted his recovery. They put newly minted General Secretary Stalin in charge of enforcing Lenin’s isolation, tasked with keeping papers, callers, petitioners, and questions away, and preventing the workaholic Lenin from trying to do an end run around these precautions and resume an active schedule too soon. This latest assignment made Stalin one of Lenin’s most frequent contacts during these final years — and by design, one of his only contacts during these final years, allowing Stalin to build an image of quite literally being Lenin’s right-hand man with no one else even in the picture. Trotsky, meanwhile, stayed away and not even once did he visit Lenin at the Gorki Estate, a mistake he would not be able to later undo when it came time for his final showdown with Stalin.

Lenin, meanwhile, sought to balance the authority granted to Stalin by pressing Trotsky to become deputy chairman of the people’s commissars. Now there were a few deputy chairman already, but given Trotsky’s stature, if he took the title deputy chairman, it would be a clear public nod that Lenin believed Trotsky was a viable successor. But rather than take this job, Trotsky refused it. After being pressed to take it several times in 1922, Lenin finally offered it one last time in September, and Trotsky adamantly turned it down. Now this somewhat inexplicably refusal to become deputy chairman of the people’s commissars may have stemmed from Trotsky’s unwillingness to take what he considered an inferior title, and it may also have been driven by the keen awareness that if he took the job, his personnel would be controlled by general Secretary Stalin, Trotsky’s most persistent personal rival. But whatever the reason, it left Lenin disappointed, and Trotsky without a clear institutional claim to being Lenin’s anointed heir. It was another mistake he would not be able to later undo.

By the fall of 1922, Lenin had recovered more than anyone could have reasonably hoped back in May, but was far from recovered back to his old strength. He would in fact, never recover his old strength, and when the fifth anniversary of the October Revolution came round in November 1922, Lenin was unable to attend the celebrations. But he was able to make a few other public appearances, including a speech at the Bolshoi Theater at the end of the month, lending hope that he was back to his old self. But one French Communist in attendance said, “Those who were seeing him for the first time said, this is still the same Lenin. But for the others, no such illusion was possible. Instead of the alert Lenin they had known, the man before them now was strongly affected by paralysis. His features remained immobile. His usual simple. rapid, confident speech was replaced by a hesitant jerky delivery.”

Indeed, instead of marking his return, the speech of the Bolshoi Theater would be among Lenin’s final appearances in public.

While residing in the Kremlin in mid-December 1922, Lenin suffered what was probably a series of small strokes that permanently ruined his ability to write. He could now only dictate to a small circle of secretaries headed by Krupskaya and Lenin’s sister Maria, who oversaw his daily routine and took down his words in the limited time allotted to him by the doctors. After a series of small medical incidents, the second major hammer fell: on the night of December 22nd, Lenin suffered his second major stroke, leaving him totally paralyzed on his right side and severely limiting his ability to think and speak.

But despite this second major medical catastrophe, Lenin was not done yet. Though confined to a bed, he was alert enough to want to keep grappling with the political affairs of the day — specifically, the political affairs of the day involved a highly complicated intraparty squabble over policy and personnel down in Georgia. I do not want to get bogged down in the details of the Georgian affair as it is a very messy can of worms, but both sides in the controversy wanted Lenin’s support, and Stalin — who definitely was on one of the two sides — was outraged to find Lenin secretaries asking for a dossier compiled by rivals on the other side. In late January 1923, he and Krupskaya got into an argument over the phone where Stalin apparently berated her for breaching the health protocols that were supposed to keep these kinds of controversies away from Comrade Lenin, though one suspects that was only partly why Lenin was so irritated, as he was definitely not a disinterested party in the Georgian affair.

It is worth noting, however, that while controlling Lenin’s access to information was obviously advantageous to Stalin, he also requested to be relieved of these duties on February 1st, because more than anything, it was turning out to be an annoying hassle. The Politburo however rejected his request, and instructed Stalin to maintain his vigil over the chief.

Still not fully recovered from the second stroke, the third hammer fell on the night of March 9th, 1923. A third major stroke laid upon Lenin the familiar litany of results: total paralysis on the right side, complete loss of speech, mental confusion, and an inability to communicate. The inner circle of the Party went into an acute state of emergency as they were justifiably afraid that this was it. Lenin is about to die, and we’re going to have to grapple with the fallout. And we’ve known going back to the early days of the history of Rome, just how critical these moments of political succession are, especially when no heir has been named — and at the moment, no heir has been named.

Lenin tried to hasten his own demise by once again demanding cyanide, but Stalin refused to carry out the instruction, and his comrades in the Politburo concurred that they should simply wait and see.

So in March of 1923, Lenin was knocked totally out of commission on the eve of the 12th Party Congress. For one of the only times in his long tenure as leader of the Party, Lenin would not be in attendance. But even in his absence, Lenin was the dominant personality. His oldest Bolshevik comrades, Zinoviev and Kamenev, both paid almost embarrassing honor to the great leader, setting the groundwork for what would become the cult of Lenin where he was an embalmed relic representing heroic, revolutionary infallibility. Even absent the third stroke though, Lenin was not going to be at the 12th Party Congress, and the other members of the Politburo agreed that it was vital to show the delegates to the Congress, nothing but iron clad solidarity from the leadership, preventing any of the various opposition factions from prying open an opportunity. This public solidarity would cover over widening personality conflicts among them, most especially surrounding Trotsky, who was increasingly critical of his comrades, and as a result, increasingly isolated. Trotsky had only a few true allies left in the Central Committee, and none at all in the inner circle of the Politburo. And with Stalin now serving as general secretary of the Party, this was not going to change anytime soon.

But for the moment, none of them saw a public rift for or against Trotsky as being in any of their interests. So they did indeed present a united front to the 12th Party Congress. Trotsky agreed to mute his criticisms, and to give no hint to opposition elements in the Party that he might lead them against the Old Guard. Rising to speak on behalf of a motion confirming their unified solidarity, he said, “I shall not be the last in our midst to defend this motion, to put it into effect and to fight ruthlessly against all who may try to infringe it. If in the present mood the Party warns you emphatically about things which seem dangerous to it, the Party is right, even if it exaggerates. Because what might not be dangerous in other circumstances must appear doubly and trebly suspect at present.”

Still inside the inner circle, Trotsky, zealously defended the leadership’s ability to be right no matter what, including the facts. This was a position Trotsky would support right up until the moment he realized he had been pushed out of the inner circle, whereupon he would begin to champion those calling for more democratic openness inside the Party.

But he was not there yet.

In exchange for not criticizing his fellow members of the Politburo at the 12th Party Congress, Trotsky was allowed to present his pet economic theories as the official party line. This appears now to be quite literally academic, but Trotsky apparently considered it a far more weighty proposition at the time. Most famously, he presented the new economic crisis facing Russia, which he dubbed the Scissors Crisis. The Scissors Crisis was not a shortage of scissors — although there probably was one — but rather an alarming divergence of prices for industrial goods and prices for agricultural goods. Basically, with the industrial sector only partially rebuilt, the cost of producing goods and their resulting scarcity drove prices up, while a recent bountiful harvest — partly thanks to grain provided by the American Relief Administration — meant food prices were falling. Plotted on a graph, the diverging lines looked like a pair of open scissors. What it meant in practice was that even if the peasants sold all their surplus, they would not have enough to buy any of the things they needed to buy. This might once again, lead them to conclude that there was no point in producing surpluses, which was a major cause of the recent famine. Plus, it would prevent the industrial sector from generating enough revenue to drive further expansion.

Trotsky’s answer to this was to push for more rational planning inside the industrial sector while still operating inside the NEP framework. Not wanting to inflame the peasantry after several years of antagonism and famine, though, Trotsky called upon the working classes to bear the sacrificial brunt of policies that would reduce the price of industrial goods — up to and including slashing their wages. He said, “There may be moments when the government pays you no wages, or when it pays you only half your wage, and when you, the worker, have to lend the other half to the state.”

So what we have here is Trotsky telling the industrial proletariat — whom the Communist Party is meant above all to represent, and who have spent the last several years getting absolutely hammered by scarcity, unemployment and mistreatment — yeah, we need you to suffer some more for the good of the revolution. This was justified by noting that such imposed hardships were different from those imposed by bourgeois states, because the Communist Party was after all the party of the workers, not the party of the bourgeoisie, and so really, this was the proletariat voluntarily imposing hardships upon itself. This was no doubt a great comfort to the working classes of Russia, especially since the leaders of the Communist Party had recently worked so hard to destroy the Workers’ Opposition Movement inside the Party, which was specifically organized to look after the interests of the proletariat.

During the period immediately before and immediately after the 12th Party Congress, where Lenin’s absence was so strongly felt, those closest to him suddenly began producing new pronouncements from the incapacitated leader. These pronouncements took the form of notes allegedly dictated back in late December 1922 and early January 1923. The first set was produced on April the 16th, while the 12th Party Congress was going on, and it was a soul searching denunciation of great Russian chauvinism, coupled with a demand to treat minority nationalities with dignity, respect, and autonomy, which set him against centralizers in the party. Lenin openly worried that the terms of the newly created USSR would serve Russian interests at the expense of those nationalities.

“It is quite natural,” the notes read, “that in such circumstances ‘the freedom to secede from the union’ by which we justify ourselves will be a mere scrap of paper, unable to defend the non-Russians from the onslaught of that really Russian man, the Great-Russian chauvinist, in substance a rascal and a tyrant, such as the typical Russian bureaucrat is. There is no doubt that the infinitesimal percentage of Soviet and sovietised workers will drown in that tide of chauvinistic Great-Russian riffraff like a fly in milk.”

These notes on the nationalities also read, “Were we careful enough to take measures to provide the non-Russians with a real safeguard against the truly Russian bully? I do not think we took such measures although we could and should have done so.

Then, Lenin took a direct shot at Stalin: “I think that Stalin’s haste and his infatuation with pure administration, together with his spite against the notorious ‘nationalist-socialism’ played a fatal role here. In politics spite generally plays the basest of roles.”

And just to be clear, by nationalist-socialism, we here mean those socialists who wanted to incorporate autonomy of nationalities into the system, as opposed to pure centralizers who wanted to overthrow such national differentiations. So, we are not talking about the national socialism that you might be thinking of.

Now in everything I’m about to say next, I have to say that I’m heavily influenced by the case Stephen Kotkin makes in his biographies of Stalin, that the providence of all of this miraculous dictation from Lenin is dubious at best. Unlike all the other dictation produced around the same time, the typed up notes, suddenly produced in the spring of 1923, do not have matching handwritten originals in the archives, nor do they bear Lenin’s initials, which he typically use to mark that, yes, this was in fact coming from him. Other dictation from the same period has both of these markers of authenticity, but not these later documents that we are here talking about. They were simply typed up and asserted to be Lenin’s words. There is another curious example of this back in March, just before Lenin’s third stroke, where he apparently demanded Stalin apologize to Krupskaya for berating her over the phone that one time. This document too lacks Lenin’s initials and a handwritten original.

Now far more explosively than comments on the nationalities, in mid-May, Krupskaya produced Lenin’s remarks on the advisability of expanding the ranks of the Central Committee to fifty or a hundred members. This document too was allegedly dictated back in December 1922 just after Lenin’s second stroke. The notes have no official title, but they later became known as Lenin’s Testament, because in addition to his comments about the advisability of expanding the ranks of the Central Committee, he also made observations about several senior members of the Party. The notes read, quote:

Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary-General, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution. Comrade Trotsky, on the other hand, is distinguished not only by outstanding ability, he is personally perhaps the most capable man in the present Central Committee, but he has displayed excessive self-assurance and shown excessive preoccupation with a purely administrative side of the work.

Of his oldest comrades. Lenin said only:

… the October episode with Zinoviev and Kamenev was, of course, no accident, but neither can the blame for it be laid upon them personally, any more than non Bolshevism can be upon Trotsky.

As Kotkin notes, this is an extremely backhanded absolution of Zinoviev and Kamenev’s opposition to the October Revolution — because though they were the oldest of the Old guard, when that great test of October came, they both failed at miserably

he also mentioned two younger leaders, Nikolai Bukharin, and Georgy Pyatakov. He said:

Bukharin is not only a most valuable and major theorist of the Party, he is also rightly considered the favorite of the whole Party, but his theoretical views can be classified as fully Marxist only with great reserve for there something scholastic about him [ he has never made a study of the dialectics and I think never fully understood it.]

… Pyatakov is unquestionably a man of outstanding will and outstanding ability, but shows too much zeal for administrating and the administrative side of the work to be relied upon in a serious political matter.

Both of these remarks, of course, are made only for the present, on the assumption that both these outstanding and devoted Party workers fail to find an occasion to enhance their knowledge and amend their one-sidedness.

None of this is exactly a ringing endorsement of any of the principal claimants to Lenin’s mantle. And while. Trotsky perhaps comes off the best, as the most capable man in the present Central Committee, and Bukharin gets noted as the favorite of the whole Party, neither is without their major faults. Lenin’s former deviant Menshevism was plainly noted, as was Bukharin’s apparent immaturity. Then, to make sure there was no mistake, a further short addendum to this text, allegedly dictated in the first week of January 1923, took dead aim at Stalin:

Stalin is too rude [the addendum said] and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a Secretary-General. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead, who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite, and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc. This circumstance may appear to be a negligible detail, but I think that from the standpoint of safeguards against a split and what I wrote above about the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky is not a minor detail, but it is a detail which can assume decisive importance.

Now these explosive remarks were not like printed in Pravda or anything like that, but they landed like a bombshell inside the close knit ranks of the inner party. With his practically dying breath, Comrade Lenin was saying, get rid of Stalin.

But the thing is — and here’s where I’m following Kotkin — it’s very likely Lenin didn’t say any of this, and that the little clique of secretaries around him cooked these remarks up themselves, with Krupskaya as the most likely mastermind. She herself was staring down life without Lenin, and her own antagonistic relationship with Stalin may have led her to want to knock him down a peg or two; perhaps in favor of Trotsky, perhaps Zinoviev, perhaps Bukharin, anyone but Stalin.

But to be clear, this is all conjecture, based on the notable lack of evidence confirming that these notes were dictated when and where and by whom they were alleged to have been dictated. But whether they were actually Lenin’s words or not, they were taken at the time and afterwards to be Lenin’s words, and they caused an enormous amount of turmoil inside the inner party, inside that upper stratum that Lenin himself was so concerned might be destroyed by personality conflicts that would, in turn, destroy the entire revolution.

Next week, we will reach the final chapter of Lenin’s life and the final chapter of our highly detailed accounting of the Russian Revolution, because I’m going to use that chapter to mark the end of the revolutionary age, and the beginning of simply the early history of the USSR. Now the revolutionary work was of course not over, and there will be three more additional episodes that take us through the great purges in the 1930s. But the revolution would now be directed from above rather than from below. It would be a political, economic, and cultural revolution waged by a government instead of against a government.

Lenin had managed to live long enough to see his revolution come to pass, and after many decades of relentless work, it is time to extinguish his revolutionary torch.