The Real History of Communism: The Russian Revolution

Matt Walsh (0:00)

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Imagine a country where a small group of resentful, unpopular, left-wing radicals seize power and then use their power to deliberately destroy the family.

Crush the church.

Unleash criminals in the streets.

Legalize abortion. Implement no-fault divorce. Enact insane economic policies. Institute affirmative action. Persecute their political enemies. And sow chaos to expand their control.

Sounds familiar, but I'm not describing America.

I'm describing Russia in 1917

You've probably never been to Russia and you probably weren't alive during the Bolshevik Revolution, but let me assure you, you'll recognize it.

And that's because the totalitarian left has not changed its playbook in a century. The tactics, motives and goals don't change over time.

In this episode, we'll break down the eight rules of a communist takeover one by one and survey how those rules overlap what's happening in America today. We'll do so by surveying the history of Russia from 1899 to 1918, a period rarely taught in great detail in American schools despite, or perhaps because of, its obvious relevance to today. To the extent communism is covered in schools at all, it's either in the context of World War II in which communists are presented as the good guys, or in rare cases of honesty, it's about the horrors of communist regimes, gulags, famines, death camps. Now, those things matter, but they missed the more important point, which is how did communist lunatics take over a massive empire in the first place? That question is the central question of our times because those same tactics are being run again right now. As the Spanish-American philosopher, George Santayana, warned, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. And that's the point of this episode. So we don't repeat it. That's why we're doing this.

This is the Real History of Communism, The Russian Revolution.

We're obligated to start this episode by acknowledging that the Russian Revolution, the subsequent Civil War and the rise of Soviet Communism are some of the most complex and intricate subjects in history. The shocking levels of betrayal and intrigue, the complicated Russian names and improbable events illustrate how a country like Russia produces literary geniuses like Dostoevsky or Tolstoy. The country's history really is like a complicated Russian novel. And to make this episode accessible to a large audience, we can't possibly provide every single detail and every single aspect of these major world changing events. What we can do is describe in broad terms what happened and feature specific events that directly relate to our own situation today. And that's what we're going to do. The lessons you'll learn hold enduring truths about humanity that are relevant far beyond politics. If you follow the citations throughout the episode, you'll find books and essays that are good starting points for a more in-depth understanding of what happened. And I highly recommend you do that.

Now, like a lot of history, this story begins with a bad idea. The idea that history is a dialectic centered on a class conflict between oppressors and the oppressed. In the words of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, solving the class conflict could be done only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. This meant the abolition of money, of eternal truths, of nations, of the bourgeois family, which Marx said would vanish as a matter of course and of private property. Under Marxism, you would own nothing and be happy.

Marx's ideological pronouncements were radically at odds with how he actually lived, a pattern you'll recognize from leftists today. For example, Marx actually hated industrial workers. According to Sean McMeekin's book To Overthrow the World, when Marx visited factory workers in the summer of 1845, he was not impressed with the workers' intellectual acumen. When a tailor explained to Marx that they were organizing workers into collectives to negotiate better conditions with their employers, an angry Marx was seen pounding on the table with his fist before touting that ignorance has never yet helped anyone. Marx sustained his lifestyle by taking handouts from his friend Friedrich Engels and collecting inheritance money from family members and wealthy supporters. He called for the abolition of inheritance, of course, for everybody else. Marx employed servants to help his wife with housework, lived in a spacious and comfortable dwelling in Modena Villas in Maitland Park in London, and threw a formal ball complete with gold-rimmed invitations, liveried servants, and a dance band, just as he was seizing the reins of the International Working Men's Association. Marx was a prolific writer and a major public intellectual known for his journalism and political organizing. His books, like Das Kapital, were published in multiple languages and printed throughout Europe. By the 1880s, Marx realized that it was in Russia, home of the strongest autocracy in Europe and also the most baroque and violent political radicalism, that his book was more read and appreciated than anywhere else. Tsarist censors let Russian translations of his book slip through the cracks because they thought it was basically unreadable. Turns out that was a bad call. The book sold very well. On February 8th, 1899, St. Petersburg University students, mostly upper middle-class children of the Russian intelligentsia, planned to celebrate Tatiana Day, the traditional anniversary of the university's founding. According to the historian Richard Pipes, the university's rector banned those celebrations by decree. Students booed the rector for 20 minutes straight and then started to riot. The students pelted the police with snowballs and the officers hit the students with whips. Things spiraled out of control and the students announced a strike. St. Petersburg University socialist groups ignored the situation at first, but quickly realized what an opportunity it was. They could co-opt the riots for their own purposes. And so they did. Radical left-wing strike leaders brought in the aims of the unrest, moving it from a protest against university administration to opposition against the entire political system. They convinced many students that the entire system of government had to be burned to the ground. Within days, all major institutions of higher learning in the empire were shut down. 25,000 students boycotted class. The government arrested the strike leaders, but university officials started making concessions for the students, and this led to a tit-for-tat cycle of protest, repression and concession. For decades, Russian universities had been incubators of extremism and radical ideology. This period was defined by radically escalating political violence, often committed by students. One former student who had been expelled from various universities decided to exact vengeance on behalf of his comrades. His name was PV. Karpovich. On February 14th, 1901, Karpovich entered the reception area of the Ministry of Education, where the education minister was addressing the public. Karpovich shot the minister in the neck with a revolver, mortally wounding him. The next year, in April 1902, a former student turned socialist revolutionary named Stepan Balmachev assassinated the minister of the interior, triggering a drastic expansion of police powers. As a contemporary academic named Prince E. N. Trebetskoy put it, the student strikes of 1899 marked the beginning of the general crisis of the state. Russians didn't realize it at the time, but the old order was coming to an end. This was the start of the Russian Revolution. And its immediate cause wasn't an uprising of starving peasants and industrial workers, but of radicalized privileged young students driven by political ideology and resentment of the system that created them. Now, the lesson is obvious. By failing to take the student protests seriously, university administrators and the czarist government allowed them to spiral out of control and into something different. This is the first rule in a communist takeover. Any revolution can become your revolution.