All language subtitles for The Russian Revolution - YouTube

It's been a century
since the Russian Revolution

and the formation of the world's
first communist state.

But how did it happen?

How could the mighty Romanov dynasty,
that lasted for 300 years,

fall to a ragtag group of revolutionaries,

who brought with them Joseph Stalin
and a brutal reign of terror?

Lenin understood it wasn't
your numbers that mattered,

it wasn't your popular support
that mattered,

you just paralyzed the country
by occupying the key points,

and then you take over.

Revolutions don't happen
from the dispossessed and the starving,

they happen from the middle class,
and it's always been true.

But at the heart of the Russian Revolution

lay a very personal battle

between Lenin's Ulyanov family
and the royal family,

who were determined
to retain autocratic rule.

The tsarina used to say
that Russia likes to feel the whip.

There was always the feeling
that the tsars

had the divine right of kings,

they had a sort of God-given obligation
to rule themselves and the autocrats.

So, there wasn't really space
for democracy.

The disaster that's happened
to Russia since

is substantially down
to mistakes made by Nicholas II.

He is utterly, utterly useless.

He was a man who shouldn't have been tsar.

He wasn't suited
to the onerous task of monarch.

The errors made by the tsar
would bring an empire to its knees.

But no one could have predicted
that Vladimir Lenin

would be the man
to seize control in the chaos.

Lenin understood that power
is constrict in certain knots,

that you take over a railway junction,

you take over a telephone exchange,
and you've already got a city.

Lenin was in a tradition

of Russian leadership,
and was a very strong part of it.

He had a profound effect on Russia
that we are really still feeling now.

1917 in a sense recasts
the ideological map of Europe.

As the century progresses,
the ideological map of the world.

March the 13th, 1881, Saint Petersburg.

The tsar, Alexander II, is on his way
to his army's military roll call.

He's traveling in a bulletproof carriage,
gifted to him by Napoleon III.

It had proved necessary as the tsar
had faced numerous assassination attempts

during his reign.

Many people wanted

to get rid of the tsar
and his government.

But the fact that in middle of
the 19th century you had two inventions...

...the revolver
and high-explosive dynamite,

both of which were widespread in Russia,

which enabled quite amateurish people
to get together

and organize an assassination.

This is really a kind
of sustained terrorist campaign.

There are multiple attempts
on the life of the tsar,

attempts to blow up his carriage.

One terrorist, over a period of months,
working as a carpenter

in the Winter Palace,
manages to plant a body of explosives,

which very, very nearly kill Alexander II.

I mean, 11 people are killed,
about 56 are injured.

It's sort of those moments where he was
in the wrong room at the right moment,

as it were,
and the explosion just missed him.

But this time,
the tsar would not be so fortunate.

Alexander's legs are shredded,
his stomach cut open by shrapnel.

His dying body is carried
to the Winter Palace,

where his family, the Romanovs,

who have ruled Russia
for nearly three centuries,

are horrified to lay their eyes upon him.

He only lasted 90 minutes,

and the bomber himself, also,
lasted 90 minutes.

His legs were blown off, too.

The assassination of Alexander II,
it's kind of Russia's 9/11.

I've read newspaper reports that come out
in the days after the assassination,

and they are astonishingly graphic
about the physical damage

inflicted on Alexander's body.

They sort of start talking
about the shattered legs

and the tendons hanging out and stuff.

What they're describing is this wound

that has been inflicted
on the body of the state,

you know, so,
the king's two bodies clearly there.

The group responsible

for this attack
is Narodnaya Volya, the People's Will.

The conspirators would be hanged
for their crimes,

but the movement would continue,

and it would soon attract the attentions
of one Aleksandr Ulyanov,

eldest son of the Ulyanov family
and elder brother to Lenin,

the man who would eventually
eliminate the Romanovs completely.

But in 1881,
the People's Will's predictions

do not come to pass.

There is no great revolution
following the death of Tsar Alexander II.

He's succeeded by his son,
Alexander III,

who, upon viewing his dying father,

vows
to never let the same fate befall him.

Despite the enormous unrest,
Russian autocratic rule would continue.

Alexander III considered
Alexander II way too lenient.

I mean, he'd liberated the serfs.

So, Alexander III decided
to come down hard on Russia,

and he was anyway
a very sort of forceful character

who used to bend forks
in knots at the table.

And he apparently was able to walk
through doors without opening them.

He was a huge man.

And undermined his son, unfortunately,
by calling him girly

when the tsar was a child,

and I don't know that the tsar,
Nicholas,

ever emerged from that repression
from his father

and that sort of undermining.

Alexander III has a very bad press.

People say stagnation, reaction,
and all that is true.

On the other hand, there were
some good things about Alexander III.

He never declared war on anybody,
unlike Alexander II,

who's extremely aggressive,

made war on the Turkish Empire,
on the Chinese.

He also listened to his ministers.
He may have been a reactionary,

but he appointed some
very competent ministers,

and, in his reign, Russia railways
became one of the best service in Europe,

Russian post office, too.

He was a boring man
and he liked the bottle,

but there were things to be said for him.

It seems sort of counterintuitive,

but Russia was actually
a fantastically dynamic society

in lots of ways in this period.
Really from its defeat in the Crimean War

in the 1850s, it understands
that it has to industrialize

if it is to remain competitive
on the international stage.

So, the defeat in the Crimea at the hands
of the French and the British

laid bare the fact
that Russia was an undeveloped state.

Its peasant armies were no match
for the Western powers,

and so, if Russia wants to remain
in the game, it needs to industrialize.

Russia was modernizing
at an extraordinary rate,

but its political system
remained deeply autocratic,

unlike almost all other European nations
of the era.

Because of the conditions
of Russia at the time,

normal, middle-class families

weren't allowed any form
of political expression at all.

That was the main problem.

So, any normal, middle-class family,

the son would have entered
the revolutionary,

the radical political sect.

There was a wave
of repression against Russian radicals,

oppositionists, and so on.

Some of these people
are clearly dangerous.

Some of these people have plotted
to kill the tsar,

members of the Imperial Family, or,
you know, regional governors and so on.

There's a general paradox
that a dictatorship,

as long as it's strict and severe,
is safe.

The moment it starts to liberalize,

it gives an inch
and the people take a yard.

Once the people detect a weakness,

or a division,
then the whole thing starts to fall apart.

One such person
who got caught up in this radical world

was Aleksandr Ulyanov,
known to his family as Sasha.

He was the eldest Ulyanov son,
and elder brother to Vladimir Lenin.

The Ulyanov family
was not a typical family.

There was a very small caste
of civil servants in Russia,

and the father was a schools inspector.

And he'd reached a position

in the civil service
that gave him the rank of a noble.

That was a very, very small percentage
of people in Russia.

But they weren't that rich.

Lenin's elder brother, like Lenin himself,

brilliant intellectually, covered in
gold medals from school and university,

and he joined a student group,
and they decided to make a bomb,

and attempted to kill Alexander III.

The plan is to assassinate
Alexander II's heir, Alexander III,

when Alexander III is going
to be attending a ceremony

to commemorate the assassination
of his father.

And Aleksandr Ulyanov, he's the kind of,
you know, master bomb maker.

The People's Will

was more of a mystic
than an ideological association.

The idea if we bring down the very top,

they'll all be so terrified
that the system will disintegrate

and they'll be a sort of peasant uprising
out of which a new order will arise,

but they had begun to read Marx.
The trouble with reading Marx, of course,

is Marx predicted the last place
there'd be a revolution would be Russia.

So, it was still that romantic idea
of kill the tsar

and everything will naturally reform.

A bomb that's packed with pieces of metal

that have been dipped in strychnine
to inflict maximum number of fatalities.

I mean, that's worth remembering.
But the plan is undone by the Okhrana,

and they have wind
of the attempt on the tsar's life,

and the terrorists are arrested
and rounded up within a matter of days.

Of course they were sentenced to death.

Alexander III very generously said,

"Those that repent, I will reprieve.
Those that don't repent, I will hang."

Sasha said, "That would be going against
my principles to ask for a reprieve."

His mother begged him to.

The hanging of Sasha, that is often seen
as what motivated Lenin.

Often these things
are personal, not political.

When his brother was arrested,
his mother rushed to the city.

Vladimir, the future Lenin,
tried to organize transport

to get her to the nearest train station,
and he traced around bourgeois Simbirsk

to try and get someone
who would go with his mother.

Absolutely all of them refused,

and that changed his entire perspective
about bourgeois liberals

and the other middle class,
and it was-- That was overnight.

And from then on,
he just abused the liberals,

and the way the family
were snubbed because of this

changed him as much as any other politics.

Sasha Ulyanov was hanged
on the 20th of May, 1887.

Lenin entered the underground
revolutionary movements

following the path laid out
by his brother,

and just like Sasha,
Lenin would be tracked

by the secret police
of the Russian Empire, the Okhrana.

Every country had
a spy organization, of course,

but Russia was the first one
that had an entire massive organization

to suppress dissent
wherever they seemed to find it.

They had a vast operation
to open people's mail.

The Russian secret police
had agents everywhere.

It not only had departments
in Saint Petersburg and Moscow

and most of the main cities,
it had a French department, as well,

keeping an eye on the exiles.

The Okhrana always kept an eye on them,
tailing them round Europe.

You had to stay one move ahead.

So, you spent 16 years effectively
going from one bolt-hole to another,

always one step ahead
of the secret police.

On the biggest influences
on Lenin, before he read Marx,

was a novel
by a guy called Nikolay Chernyshevsky

called What Is to be Done?

It's a pretty lousy novel,

but the hero is a selfless,
devoted revolutionary

who gives himself up to the cause
and walks 20 miles a day,

does 150 press-ups,
abstains from alcohol.

And he modeled himself
on this character quite deliberately.

Lenin always said this book,
which he'd read one summer five times,

influenced him more
than anything by Marx.

Lenin was forced to cover his tracks

as he traveled around the country,

trying his best avoid the attention
of the authorities.

At the same time, Nicholas,
the heir to the throne,

was also on his travels
around the Russian Empire and beyond.

It was a voyage of great fanfare,
but it came to a shocking end in Japan.

His father tried
to give him some responsibility,

decided it wouldn't do any harm to put him
in charge of the Trans-Siberian Railway.

So, he'd crossed Siberia,
went all the way to Vladivostok,

and then he was sent
on a mission to Japan,

which ended disastrously,
because Nicholas was suddenly attacked

by a Japanese policeman...

Tsuda Sanzō, who took out his saber
and slashed him on the head,

and did quite a considerable amount
of damage.

Otsu, as far as I could see,
was a bit of a one-off.

I didn't feel that it was a movement
amongst the Japanese against the tsar,

who the Japanese themselves
were horrified by.

Japan had only been open
to Europeans for about 35 years

and there was a general
xenophobic suspicion.

This Japanese policeman thought himself
as a samurai defending Japanese honor.

Nicholas took it very well,
he just stood there smoking,

refused even to sit down to be bandaged,

but, in fact, a large part of his skull
had been cut out

and he suffered from headaches
ever afterwards.

And it may well have prejudiced him
against the Japanese

because after that,
in his correspondence,

he refers to the Japanese as macaques,
as monkeys,

and he became convinced that
they were utterly inferior to the Russians

and therefore could easily be conquered
in any future war.

The Otsu incident may have been
a near miss for the Romanov family,

but it was a foreboding of things to come.

Just a couple of years later,

Tsar Alexander III
would suddenly fall ill.

He passed away at the age of just 49,

leaving behind his thoroughly
unprepared son Nicholas

to inherit the throne.

Alexander died fairly unexpectedly
of kidney disease

when he was still in his 40s.

I mean, Nicholas had expected
to have another 20 years

to prepare for this onerous responsibility
of ruling this enormous empire.

The problem was the successions.

That's the problem
with a hereditary monarchy,

the monarch has to die at the right time.

When Alexander III died--
And he was only 49.

-- his minister said,
"It was a pity he didn't die much earlier,

so, we had a boy tsar,

who couldn't make any decisions
for at least ten years,

or much later,
so that Nicholas could've grown up a bit."

But Nicholas was always
somewhat infantile.

He was terrified when his father died

at the prospect of having
to take on so much responsibility,

for which he had really received
very little training.

Just a week after his father's burial,

Nicholas married Alix of Hesse,

a German princess,
who would became Tsarina Alexandra.

Her background would prove challenging
for the Romanov family during World War I.

But Nicholas's enormous problems
as monarch started far sooner than that.

In fact, from the day of his coronation,
he was off to a dreadful start.

At his coronation in Moscow in 1896,

there was a big park called Khodynka
in western Moscow,

and the government had arranged
for coronation mugs

and little bags of goodies
to be given out.

The fencing and the gates were all wrong,

and so, when the crowds pressed
to receive their goods,

there's a terrible crush.

Some 1500 people died,
and that was a terrible tragedy.

That night there was a party
at the French Embassy,

and he didn't want to go to it,
but he was persuaded to go to the event,

and it was forever held against him
as deeply insensitive.

He had to rely
on his ministers to advise him.

But fundamentally from day one,
the job of being tsar

was pretty much agreed
and dictated by his wife.

She was very entrenched in the concept
of autocracy and their divine right.

Nicholas was struggling
in his new role as tsar,

but the man who would eventually
replace him as ruler of Russia

was in a far worse predicament.

Lenin had been captured by the authorities
and was charged with sedition.

In 1897, he was sent to exile in Siberia
for three years,

which could often be
a far less challenging experience

than might at first appear.

He was sent to
the quite pleasant town of Minusinsk.

He had his wife with him,
he had his mother-in-law,

he had a monthly allowance,
on which he could keep a cow,

and a serving maid.

He had a maid of 12,
whom he paid one ruble a month,

and kept her in a sort of cage
under the stairs.

So much for Bolshevik egalitarianism.

He writes home,
saying that he's ice skating and shooting,

and maintains this phenomenal level
of correspondence

with a kind of conspiratorial network now
that really stretches

across the Russian Empire
and beyond to Europe.

Once you were there,
you were housed quite nicely.

In Russia people never felt
that prisoners were to be avoided,

have a friendly chat with a murderer.

People used to go
to the prisons at Easter,

as people go to the zoo
to feed the animals.

It was not a bad life.

Lenin's exile ended in 1900.

He would soon begin his travels
across Western Europe,

where he would meet
other Marxists and dissidents

who were playing the downfall
of the Russian monarchy.

But for now, Lenin
and these agitators seemed insignificant.

There were far more pressing concerns.

The Russian Empire was surrounded
on two sides by rising military powers.

To the west, Kaiser Wilhelm,

under whose rule Germany had been unified
in 1871.

To the east, Emperor Meiji,
whose restoration of Japan in 1868

had forged another
rapidly industrializing state.

The first battle would be with Japan
in 1904.

Few world observers expected
an Asian military

to challenge a European power
at this time.

Japan's surprising success in the conflict
fueled social unrest throughout Russia,

which came to be known
as the 1905 Revolution.

The Russo-Japanese War
was very bad for morale,

because the Russians were trounced,
and their fleet was destroyed.

And that didn't help the tsar
in his bid to be popular.

A war being lost was a mixture
of embittered soldiers and sailors,

whose lives had been just thrown away
in a hopeless war against the Japanese,

an appalling disgraceful defeat.

Coming home finding that factories
weren't paying properly and so on,

there were shortages
and there was general disarray.

And it was an opportunity
for disaffected soldiers

to organize themselves.

The response to the civilian unrest

and demands for reform would be brutal.

Imperial troops opened fire
on the protestors.

The events of Bloody Sunday,
as it came to be known,

would damage Tsar Nicholas's
reputation forever.

Well, the Bloody Sunday
Massacre was, in some ways,

typical of Nicholas II's reign,

that either he had to have much more sense
or he needed a good spin doctor,

and he had neither.

The revolutionary parties
are all caught off guard by 1905.

Nobody predicted Bloody Sunday.

Uh, it's clear that the war, you know,
is going disastrously with Japan.

There was no real sense that Russia
had reached a kind of turning point.

This was a spontaneous protest
that then ended in a bloodbath,

because the tsarist authorities
attacked the protestors.

He wasn't there
when the troops opened fire.

He just responded very badly.

He sensed that he was getting less popular

and when he became known
as Nicholas the Bloody,

he started to spend most of his time
at the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoye Selo,

which was about 15 miles away
from Saint Petersburg.

He realized there might be
a threat of assassination.

1905 had been a dreadful year
for the Romanovs,

but the protest did eventually die down,

and, crucially, the Russian armed forces
remained loyal to the throne.

A peace treaty was declared with Japan,

with a deal brokered
by U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt.

Lenin and his accomplices across Europe,
just like everyone else,

had been caught completely off guard
by the events of 1905.

Out of nowhere,

it seemed that the revolution they were
searching for was occurring spontaneously.

But in the end,
the tsar remained in power,

and although a parliament called the Duma
had been set up in response,

it was flawed from the beginning,

and Nicholas had the ability
to veto any and all legislation.

There had been anger and resentment,

and, also,
they were losing a war against Japan.

That was big profound shock to the system,

and that changed the middle class's view

about the kind
of political system they had,

and the autocracy substantially.

That, "We're so useless,
we can even lose a war against Japan,"

that had a really profound impact.

Lenin says that, you know,

"My generation won't live
to see the revolution."

You know, there is this sense that
this was like a one-shot deal,

and we blew it.

We weren't organized enough,

we weren't able
to give direction and purpose

to what was a sort
of spontaneous popular uprising.

Lenin, even right up to 1917,

was quite despairing that revolution,
as his vision of revolution,

was ever gonna actually happen
in his lifetime.

So, 1905 was kind of a dry run
for what might come later,

but it wasn't planned as a revolution.

For now, the tsar seemed safe.

The war had come to an end,

and the revolutionary fervor
had died down.

But it was not to last.

In the next few years,
both the Romanov family and Ulyanov family

would be introduced to figures

that would prove critical
in Russia's future.

For Lenin, it was a Georgian
named Ioseb Dzhugashvili,

later to be known as Stalin,

although upon first appearance
Lenin was unimpressed.

Lenin was the leader
of that Bolshevik section,

and was already, you know, the top man,
and Stalin was a nobody, really.

At first Lenin hardly noticed Stalin,

but later on in Vienna he noticed Stalin
was a very, very useful handyman.

Lenin had a sort of rather patronizing
view of non-Russians,

so, he called him
"this wondrous Georgian."

Stalin was regarded as extremely useful.

He was some sort of gofer, you know,
he never refused to do anything.

He was always happy to kill, to rob,
he never balked at anything.

He could do things physically,
get into a fight.

Lenin quite admired that about Stalin,
he was as tough as anything.

He had a quality of intimidating people

and above all,
he hardly ever talked, unlike Trotsky.

That's why Stalin
and Trotsky never got on.

Stalin's secret was
to appear far less knowledgeable,

far less intelligent, than he really was.

He understood a lot of languages.

He was an extraordinary judge
of character.

Stalin's secret was not
to find the strongest people

to work with him.

The strongest people might want
to succeed you.

He always chose the omega male.

He had his sort of allies with him

and he knew how
to make people feel they needed him.

A year later when they met again, Lenin
couldn't remember any of his other names.

He literally didn't remember meeting him.
But he made himself very useful,

particularly when they needed
to raise money.

The Romanovs were also
about to come into contact

with a mysterious figure

from the fringes of the Russian Empire,
Rasputin.

Tsar Nicholas's only son Alexei,
the heir to the throne,

had been diagnosed with hemophilia.

The tsar and tsarina were searching
for anyone who could help their ailing son

and Rasputin seemed to be the only figure
who was capable of doing so.

He met them initially at a tea
with the so-called Black Sisters,

who were the Montenegrin princesses,
Milica and Anastasia,

who had invited him
to Milica's palace for tea.

Then it was several months afterwards
that Alexei fell

and was bleeding badly,

and they thought of asking Rasputin to try
and heal him,

and he did.

But the questions always remain
as to how he cured him or even if he did,

or whether
he just calmed the Tsarina down,

because she believe he was a man
of God.

There's also an interesting thing

that aspirin was beginning
to be used as a painkiller,

and Rasputin
was always very against medication

and he recommended they not use aspirin,
and that might have helped.

If Alexei had not been a hemophiliac,

history could have been quite different,

because it created such resentment,

the invitation of Rasputin
into the Imperial Family,

that that in itself helped bring about
the downfall of the dynasty.

Rasputin's presence would cause scandal
in Russia.

Endless rumors began to spread

about the exact nature
of his involvement with the Romanovs.

First of all he was kept a secret.

The press was forbidden to mention him,

which immediately made people think
there was something terrible going on.

Until about 1912 when press restrictions
were abolished in Russia

and it was impossible
to stop the papers printing everything,

and then Rasputin sold papers.

The journalists absolutely loved him.

You could follow him,
you could get all sorts of stories

from restaurant owners,
from prostitutes about his behavior.

Police would sell their stories to him.

He became the sort of
news-making phenomenon.

In 1911, there were letters
disseminated around by an old friend,

which had very passionate notes
to Rasputin from the tsarina.

You know, "I kiss you warmly,"
things like that.

Rasputin's presence was bringing

the Romanov family reputation into ruins.

But in 1913, a chance to repair
some of the damage seemed possible.

That year marked 300 years of Romanov rule

and huge tercentenary celebrations
were planned

that would hopefully boost public morale.

However, yet another assassination attempt
would soon undo everything.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand
was gunned down in Sarajevo.

World War I was about to begin.

Russia's failure against the Japanese
nearly brought an end to Nicholas's rule.

He would not survive a defeat
against the Germans.

Considering the Germans already
had the British

and the French to cope with...

with their enormous empires
of Indians and Algerians and so on,

and that very soon
the Americans would come into the war,

you would've thought Russia
would've had hope.

But the Russian Army was a peculiar army

in that the officers were enthusiastic,
but the soldiers were not.

The soldiers had been,
many of them, part of a defeated army,

most of them had nothing
against the Germans whatsoever,

and they didn't see them as an enemy.

The corruption in the civilian area,

where no boots were produced,
no rifles produced,

and so, soldiers were told to go in

and pick the first rifle and pair of boots
off the corpse in front of you.

There were desertions,
and murder of officers, and so on.

I think that it was generally
considered a disaster

when he decided to take over the troops
and get rid of Grand Duke Nicholas,

who was probably a very good general.

He was certainly a more imposing figure
than the tsar.

And that did apparently
leave the tsarina and Rasputin in charge.

The war was an absolute disaster
for Russia.

An autocrat has gotta be judged
on the autocrat's decision,

and it was a disastrous decision.

And an even bigger decision was

he put himself in charge
of the military strategy,

which was a terrible mistake,

because once it goes wrong,
he's the only one you can blame.

And there was a stalemate
on the Eastern Front.

The Germans had already
occupied large tracts of Russia.

There was absolutely no will
amongst the army to carry it on,

desertions were on a massive scale,

there was almost no way
for a Russian victory.

The winter of 1916
not only saw the chill

of inevitable defeat for the Russian Army,

it also saw a shocking
and painful loss for the Romanovs.

Certain members of their extended family

would not tolerate Rasputin's influence
over the tsar and tsarina any longer.

There was growing resentment
within the Romanov family

among the relatives,
who were absolutely appalled

at Alexandra's close relationship
with Rasputin.

Because they believed all the gossip,
as well.

And it reached a point
where they were saying,

"Well, not only have we got
to get rid of Rasputin,

this evil Machiavellian influence,

we've actually got to get rid of her
and lock her up in a nunnery."

She was causing a lot of trouble.

It was the aristocrats

who felt that Rasputin was bringing
the whole Romanov name down.

One of the problems here
was that nobody knew why

Rasputin was always going to court,

and it was to cure the boy, Alexei.

But because nobody knew
that Alexei was ill,

nobody could tell the aristocrats
why he was still being welcomed at court.

Rasputin was blamed
as being a German agent.

They were convinced he was giving advice
to the Tsar to make peace,

at least with the Germans.

So, a conspiracy was formed

with the connivance of many people
in the government.

Two of the assassins both left
quite detailed memoirs

and descriptions of the killing.

There are quite a few discrepancies
in both the memoirs.

He ended up in the river,
but he was tipped over a railing,

and he ended up with a lot of wounds
on his face and head.

And nobody's sure whether it was
because he was beaten up or whether...

Whether it was trying
to transfer the body.

The plotters were incompetent,
they didn't know how to handle guns,

they couldn't even kill him efficiently.

And, eventually, it took three bullets
before they finally killed the poor man.

It was an ignominious way
to get rid of Rasputin.

At the time,
they were greeted as national heroes.

Everyone thought they'd saved Russia
by killing Rasputin.

Rasputin's time at court
had come to an end in brutal fashion,

and it would not be long
before the Romanovs themselves

would also be seen off
in equally bloody circumstances.

Just as in 1905, during the disasters
of the Russo-Japanese War,

civil unrest was about
to break out in Russia.

The historic city of Saint Petersburg

would see the beginnings
of the February Revolution.

It had been renamed Petrograd,
literally "Peter's city," in 1914,

as Saint Petersburg had been thought

too Germanic a name at a time of war.

But the new designation did nothing
to contain the revolutionary fervor

that was unleashed in the city.

It soon became so overwhelming

that Tsar Nicholas II
was forced to step down.

He couldn't quite accept
how bad the crisis was.

He had this passivity
and resistance to crisis.

He had to be driven to abdicate,
and he finally did.

But the tsarina always believed
that had she been with him

she would have been able
to dissuade him from abdicating.

He really hoped he was doing
a kind of grand gesture to save Russia,

and so, it was done
out of a genuine love of country.

With Nicholas having vacated the throne,

a power vacuum was created in Russia

with two major factions
in Petrograd fighting for control.

On one side was a council
of workers and soldiers

known as the Petrograd Soviet,

which soon counted
Leon Trotsky as a member.

On the other side was
the Russian Provisional Government,

which had been quickly established
by ministers who'd served under the Tsar.

They would move the Romanov family
to Siberia for safekeeping,

but soon nowhere in Russia would be safe.

The Provisional Government represents
a vision of a liberal Russia

where you'd have a community
of citizens who are given equal rights,

but you probably enshrine a liberal order
based around representative government.

The Soviet represents
a very different kind of Russia.

The Provisional Government made
a halfhearted attempt

to continue with the war.

But because it couldn't come
to a decision,

it couldn't get the economy going,

it couldn't satisfy even the housewives
for bread and so on.

So, more and more dissatisfaction.

Lenin was in Zurich at the time.

Someone entered his rooms
in his lodging house and said,

"Have you heard there's a revolution?"

At first he didn't believe it,
then he did.

And he wanted to get back to Russia
as soon as possible.

From the moment the war started,

Lenin was totally against the war.

His line was,
"Better that this country should lose...

The better that kaiserism wins
than tsarism continues."

So, he was basically saying
his own country should lose the war.

Lenin was in a difficult situation.

In order to get from Switzerland to Russia

to take advantage
of the February Revolution,

he would have to travel through Germany,

with whom his country was at war.

A complicated deal would have
to be brokered.

I would say it wasn't Lenin
who made his move,

it was the German High Command
that made the move.

He had been offered
kind of inducements from the Germans.

They'd offered him money,
and he'd always refused it.

But now he was less scrupulous.

He agreed to the famous sealed train
through Germany.

In the German point of view,

it seemed
like a perfectly reasonable tactic.

Lenin didn't make the deal.

Lenin never got his hands dirty.

Lenin never directly did something

that might be politically damaging.

The deal to get him
and his cohort of followers

back to Russia when revolution broke

was negotiated by intermediaries.

So, he had to go on this torturous journey
up through Germany,

across to Sweden,
all the way up through Sweden,

to Finland and down.

That train deposited Lenin

at the Finland Station
in Saint Petersburg.

Now, if the Provisional Government had
had the sense

to turn up with a small group
of people to meet him

and arrest him on the spot...
But they couldn't get around to it.

They were incredibly inefficient.

Lenin's genius, when he arrives
at the Finland Station

and he gives a speech
from the armored car,

he calls for all power to the Soviets.

And that's not a call for direct democracy

rather than representative democracy.

That's a call for
this much more brutal exclusive vision

of a revolutionary future,
in which everyone who was on top before

will now be at the bottom.

The dual power system meant
that everything had to be agreed

by the Soviet
and the Provisional Government,

which led to paralysis.

Lenin was very, very good at using this.

He was incredibly skillful
at the black arts and propaganda,

and used it rather brilliantly.

And he loved the revolution,
this part of the revolution.

The Bolsheviks do nearly
overplay their hand, you know.

In the July Days, they do try
to stage an uprising in Petrograd,

and it is crushed.

In the middle of July,
Lenin is charged with treason.

There is information
coming out about money

that the Bolsheviks accepted
from the Germans.

So, he's under arrest,
and he escapes to Finland,

and is out of the country
for quite a lot of the while,

then comes back and insists,

"There is no power in this country.

Let's take over the railway station,
and the post offices, and power is ours.

It's there for the taking.
Take it from the street.

We can do it."

Lenin's belief
in the profound weakness

of the Provisional Government

would prove justified.

Russia's October Revolution had begun,

and the Bolsheviks's attempt
at a coup d'état would spark a civil war

that would last until 1922.

Without Lenin, there wouldn't
have been a Bolshevik Revolution

and there wouldn't have been
any second revolution.

And he pushed and pushed and pushed
his party members with him.

They were very, very reluctant,

because they were scared of being shot

or they're scared it wouldn't work.

There wasn't one particular spark
that week or that month that led it,

it was Lenin saying, "This is our chance."

Lenin's regime is a government
that's born in war.

So, really, it's helpful
to think about the period,

I think, from 1914 to 1921,

as one of continuous warfare.

The Bolshevik party
at the beginning of 1917

is about 20,000 people.

By the end of the civil war,
it's about 1.3 million.

And most of the new recruits are men

whose formative administrative experience
has been in the army.

They are militarized in their psychology.

The actual revolution in Russia,

initially, was very much in Petrograd

and of course Moscow.

The way in which it took hold
across rural Russia

was really very anarchic and violent.

And there were horrific scenes
of peasants rampaging across estates,

burning the manor houses down,

slaughtering the occupants,

killing all the cattle
owned by the landowners.

It was very savage.

The resistance took too long
because most the army and the navy

were so demoralized that
they came over to the Bolshevik side.

They were very, very happy

to go around the hospitals,
shooting ministers.

There was a general murderous feeling
about the government

which Lenin just released.

Lenin was quickly becoming
the most powerful man in Russia.

He'd agreed to an end
to the war with Germany

with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

And his new secret police were commencing
a strategy of violent repression

that would become known as the Red Terror.

The now-deposed Romanov family
were being held in safekeeping

by the Provisional Government.

Attempts had been made
to send them into exile,

but the efforts were to no avail.

Soon, the tsar, his wife and children,
and his last remaining staff

were captured by the Bolshevik forces
and sent to Yekaterinburg

where they were kept in strict isolation.

At around midnight on July the 17th, 1918,

the family were awoken and escorted
into the basement of the house.

This once all-powerful dynasty

had authorized the execution
of Sasha Ulyanov,

Lenin's elder brother.

But now the tables had been turned,

and the Romanovs were no more.

The tragedy is that they had 11 assassins

for 11 people to be shot.

And when it came to it,
I think the assassins were quite drunk,

and nobody wanted to shoot the children,

so, they shot the tsar and tsarina first.

And the children had
a most horrifying death

you could ever imagine or inflict.

And that was brought about
by their loving parents,

just indirectly over the years.

Who could have imagined that
those innocent children would be murdered?

This was why it was so horrifying
when it happened.

No one ever imagined those children
would be so cruelly murdered.

There's no paper trail,
but we pretty much know

it would never have happened
without Lenin agreeing to it.

No one was gonna kill the Romanovs
without Lenin's say-so.

Nicholas II's mother, the Dowager Empress,

was able to escape the carnage
on a ship leaving from the Crimea

along with other members
of the extended Romanov family.

But the dynasty that ruled Russia
for over three centuries

had come to a vicious end.

By 1922, the civil war in the country
had also reached its conclusion,

with the Bolsheviks victorious
and a new Soviet Union established.

Lenin began cementing
power as soon as he started.

His organization was so good

that he had the common soldiers
and sailors,

and above all he had the secret police.

He had Trotsky,
who I think the real genius,

to take a whole lot
of disillusioned deserters,

you then create a Red Army,

one of the most brilliant armies
in the world.

With Trotsky's military genius
and Lenin's organization and subversion,

I think he consolidated all the time.

He absolutely used terror.

Not only that,
he was very, very good at lying.

He was very skillful about
building majorities,

building groups loyal to him.

After the revolution, people were saying,

"Yes, we need a republic and we need,
you know, a constitution and all that,

but we still need a firm tsar, as well."

They kind of wanted the two.

They couldn't quite
disassociate themselves.

It's this idea
of the protective all-embracing tsar

who looked after the nation.

There is always gonna be
this tendency towards the abuse of power,

because the party acknowledges
no checks at all on its own behavior.

There's no independent judiciary,
no independent press,

there's certainly no political opposition.

So, there is always going
to be this kind of tendency

towards a sort of degeneration
into ever more absolute power.

But Lenin would not hold onto
this new position for long.

He suffered a debilitating
series of strokes,

and died on the 21st of January, 1924.

Ioseb Dzhugashvili,
now known as Joseph Stalin,

saw an opportunity laid out before him.

The Russian Revolution of 1917
changed the world forever.

The Romanovs had been usurped,

and the largest country on earth
was a communist state.

The man who would become
the most powerful dictator in history

was now cementing his position.