144 All Power to the Soviets

The History of the Twentieth Century

Mark Painter

History

4.8 • 719 Ratings

🗓️ 10 February 2019

⏱️ 35 minutes

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Summary

With the Bolsheviks relentlessly criticizing the Russian government, the question of war aims came to the fore. When the liberals in the government couldn't give a straight answer, a cabinet shuffle followed, giving socialists more power than before.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Vladimir Lenin arrived in Petrograd on the night of April 16, 1917, and proceeded at once to the former Koshesenskaya Mansion, which the Bolsheviks were now using as their headquarters.
0:32.0	In the small hours of April 17th, Lenin addressed to the gathered party faithful in a 90-minute speech, in which he
0:39.2	rejected the view of the other Russian socialist parties, that the provisional government should
0:44.0	be supported for now, with a long-term goal of advancing Russia from a bourgeois democratic
0:49.0	government to a socialist one once the country was ready, in the fullness of time.
0:55.2	The provisional government was barely a month old, but for the leader of the Bolsheviks,
1:00.2	it had already outlived its usefulness. Lenin called for a new era of socialism, and he
1:06.6	demanded it now. No waiting, no compromises, no delays, now. Welcome to the history of the 20th century.
1:19.2	Music The
1:30.3	The Oh! Episode 144, All Power to the Soviets.
2:02.1	With the Emperor deposed, millions of Russians wanted to know why they were still being asked to fight the Great War, not least to the 7 million soldiers on the front lines.
2:14.6	You'll recall that the provisional government, in the person of its foreign minister,
2:19.1	Pavel Milyukov, has been walking a fine line here. The Petrograd Soviet and the socialist
2:25.3	factions that make up the Soviet were all adamant that war is not to be fought for the old
2:31.1	imperialist reasons of territorial expansion. The new Russia fights only in
2:36.5	self-defense. Right. But there was that Sykes-Picot agreement out there, the one in which the
2:45.2	Allied powers had mutually agreed that Russia would finally get control of the Bosporus after the
2:50.3	central powers were defeated.
2:52.4	I talked about this in some detail back in episode 120, and if you've been listening to the podcast
2:57.6	from the beginning, you know that this has been a central aim of Russian foreign policy for
3:02.6	at least 50 years now, and has more than a little to do with the great power rivalries in the Balkans that
3:09.0	led to this mess of a great war in the first place. With Britain and France, Russia's opponents
	...

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