21a: Agents of Fortune

It's instructive to compare the United States's birth in 1776 with the birth of the Soviet Union in 1917. Like the founding fathers of the United States, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and the Bolsheviks wanted to create an entirely new  form of government, based on lofty ideals such as equality,  personal liberty and the rule of law.  Like the infant United States, the new Soviet Union was forced to fight bitterly for its own existence, and came close to losing more than once. The similarities end there.

As we will discover in segment 21b: Democracy Fails, the promise of Russia's February Revolution was destroyed by the Russians' lack of any democratic tradition. The Tsarist government was succeeded by two bodies which competed for power: the Provisional Government, which sprang out of the Duma, and the Petrograd Soviet, which represented the workers and soldiers. The various non-Russian nationalities - such as Ukraine, the Baltics, Georgia, Finland, Poland - wanted out of the Russian Empire. The great majority of the Russian Empire's peoples wanted merely to eat and have a place to live. Meanwhile, the unpopular war continued. Should Russia's Provisional Government continue to fight Germany ? Could it continue to fight?

In segment 21c: Lenin and the Bolsheviks we will meet Lenin and the Bolshevik party he built around his towering personality. He hadn't foreseen the February Revolution; in fact he was living in Swiss exile at the time. He was very close to giving up the fight. But the German government, hoping to sabotage Russia's war effort, gave him one-way passage to St. Petersburg with a nice pile of money to spend however he saw fit. Even Lenin's closest associates - men like Lev Trotsky and Iosif Stalin - refused to believe it was time to rise up against the Provisional Government. As always, Lenin got his way, and he was correct.

Segment 21d: Red October shows us just how amazing - if amazing is the right word for an event which caused so much misery - the October Revolution was. The Bolsheviks were primarily bookworks and rabble-rousers, with no military experience and no widespread political support. Their only two advantages were control of the Petrograd Soviet and (as always) Lenin's mad leadership skills. Unfortunately, the Provisional Government was downright inept. How did a handful of zealots based in Saint Petersburg get their hands on the near entirety of the former Russian Empire?