Russia The Wild East

Russia: The Wild East 'The Rise and Fall of the Soviets' (BBC Audio) by Martin Sixsmith
Historical Consultant: Professor Geoffrey Hosking | Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown | A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
Publisher: BBC Audiobooks Ltd (4 Aug 2011) | ISBN: 1408468530 ; 1408468522 | Language English | Audio CD in MP3 / 128 kbps | 340 MB

"Russia: the Early Histories (Title Tbc)".

Episode 1 - Rurik, founder of Rus (18 April 2011)
In a major new series Martin Sixsmith traces 1,000 years of Russian history.

Episode 2 - A Church for the State (19 April 2011)
Martin Sixsmith explores the significance of Russia's adoption of Christianity.

Episode 3 - Prince Igor and the Polovtsians (20 April 2011)
Russia struggles to survive as the warring Polovtsians threaten its borders.

Episode 4 - The Mongol Yoke (21 April 2011)
The Mongol hordes invade Russia.

Episode 5 - Moscow - The New Capital (22 April 2011)
Martin Sixsmith charts the rise of Moscow and the reign of Ivan the First.

Episode 6 - Ivan the Terrible (25 April 2011)
Martin Sixsmith paints a portrait of Ivan the Terrible, the Tsar with absolute power.

Episode 7 - Enter the Romanovs (26 April 2011)
Martin Sixsmith describes how a new dynasty, the Romanovs, claimed absolute power.

Episode 8 - East into Siberia (27 April 2011)
Martin Sixsmith tells the story of how Siberia became a key part of Russia's empire.

Episode 9 - Peter the Great (28 April 2011)
Martin Sixsmith paints a portrait of Peter the Great, the architect of Russia's future.

Episode 10 - A Window on the West (29 April 2011)
Martin Sixsmith visits St Petersburg, Peter the Great's 'window on the West'.

Episode 11 - Catherine, Lover and Reformer (2 April 2011)
Martin Sixsmith assesses Catherine the Great's reputation abroad and legacy at home.

Episode 12 - Rebellion and Punishment (3 May 2011)
Martin Sixsmith tells how a fierce rebellion turns Catherine from reformer to reactionary.

Episode 13 - Napoleon Marches East (4 May 2011)
Martin Sixsmith puts Napoleon's siege of Moscow in context: looking back and to the future.

Episode 14 -Decembrist Revolt (5 May 2011)
How victory against Napoleon bred further desire for radical reform.

Episode 15 - Defeat and Disaffection (6 May 2011)
Martin Sixsmith shows how the iron fist crushes nationalism in Russia's overblown empire.

Episode 16 - The Downtrodden Serfs (9 May 2011)
Over 700 years successive Tsars had extended the grip of Russia on new territory. The Empire needed a huge peasant class to work the land, and out of this need came the underdog of Russian society - 17 million serfs, or, as they were also called, souls. The plight of the serf pricked the conscience of the Russian intelligentsia, and for writers they were a fact of life that in the 19th century became a cause.

As pressure for change mounted, this programme traces the role serfdom has played in the history of Russia. As early as Kievan times in the 11th and 12th centuries, slaves were a valuable commodity. In many ways serfdom had been a relatively benign arrangement between landowner and peasant - and despite the many stories of brutality, the music that emerged is surprisingly joyful. "The inherited willingness to pull together in the face of shared problems helped the nation expand into an empire and defend itself against its enemies," argues Martin Sixsmith. "But it also hindered the development of private property, political freedoms and the law-governed institutions that Western Europe was beginning to take for granted."



In the 19th century serfdom had developed into the worst form of slavery and by the 1850's abolition was under serious discussion in Russia and America. An emerging Russian intelligentsia expressed their own guilt over the horrors of serfdom. But unpicking centuries of class division would have to wait for the 20th century before it erupted.

Historical Consultant: Professor Geoffrey Hosking

Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown
A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.

Episode 17 - The Murder of the Tsar (10 May 2011)
The cultivation of Russia's great lands depended on the labour of millions of serfs, and they had for hundreds of years been at the very bottom of the social ladder. But, under a new Tsar, it seemed, at last, that their lowly place was going to change. On March the 3rd 1861 Alexander II took a step that many tsars before him had considered taking, but had always drawn back from.

The Manifesto on the Emancipation of the Serfs did something that had petrified previous rulers: it offered freedom to twenty three million Russians who for centuries had been little more than slaves. The liberation of the peasants was the biggest shake-up in Russian society since the time of Peter the Great. It affected nearly every member of the population, placed the whole economic and social structure on a new footing, and created shock waves that would rumble through the nation for decades.



The reform was long overdue. Peasant unrest had been growing since the end of the Napoleonic invasion, turning to violent uprisings during and after the recent military disaster of the Crimean War. The Manifesto is full of pleas for restraint that betray the very real fear of conflict. But as Martin Sixsmith points out, the Emancipation was 'a botched job - too little, too late - it disappointed and angered nearly everyone'.

And in 1881 an extremist revolutionary threw a bomb at the Tsar's carriage with fatal results. "Why," asks Sixsmith "did the man who brought emancipation, peace and the possibility of democracy in Russia end up with his legs blown off, his face shattered, bleeding to death?' The question's all the more poignant because in the minutes before he set off on his last, fatal carriage ride Alexander had just put his signature on a document that could have changed Russia forever.

Episode 18 - Seeds of Revolution (11 May 2011)
In 1881 an assassin's bomb, thrown into the carriage carrying Tsar Alexander II, ended his life with an act of extreme violence. Despite Alexander's good intentions of reform, anger over the power of the ruling class had blazed into the open. The punishment for the assassins was unsparing.



Following on from the assassination, Martin Sixsmith looks at the origins of the revolutionary movement in Russia - and where it would lead. He begins with Camus' description of the execution of Alexander II's assassins in St Petersburg. The perpetrators belonged to the People's Will Movement, which had declared a merciless, bloody war to the death.

Sixsmith looks at the rise of socialism through the writers of the time, such as Chaadayev and Herzen. Their diagnosis of Russia's social and political backwardness crystallized a deep-seated ideological schism. By the 1840s both Westernisers and Orthodox Slavophiles agreed change was needed .... it was just that they had very different ideas of the form it should take, and they missed their chance.

In a few turbulent years, the cautious liberals were swept away by a new generation of angry radicals - Men of the Sixties - "much less squeamish and much readier to use violence to impose their views". Nikolai Chernyshevsky's book What Is To Be Done? published in 1864 determined the future of the whole revolutionary movement. The plot glorifies the 'new men', disgusted by tsarist society and selflessly dedicated to socialist ideals. The love affair of the two principal characters climaxes not in bed, but in the founding of a women's cooperative. Its glorification of 'cold blooded practicality and calculating activity' set the tone for the violence of the coming years and Lenin himself regarded it as a pivotal precursor of Bolshevism.

Episode 19 - Censorship and Suppression (12 May 2011)
The assassination of Alexander II in March 1881 resulted in sheer panic amongst the ruling elite - revealed in the private correspondence between Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the right wing conservative adviser of the new tsar, and Alexander III.

Within days of ascending the throne, Alexander denounced his father's plans for a quasi-liberal constitution, thus signalling the end of yet another of Russia's brief flirtations with the ideas of liberal democracy and a return to the autocratic rule, which has always been her default position.



In an argument which Martin Sixsmith suggests is as relevant today as it was in 1881, Pobedonostsev contends that the vast size of Russia and its many ethnic minorities mean Western style democracy can never work there. Under his influence, censorship was tightened, the secret police reinforced and thousands of suspected revolutionaries packed off to Siberia. Ethnic tensions were met with a campaign of forced Russification which fostered resentment and sowed the seeds of future conflict in regions like Ukraine, the Caucasus, central Asia and the Baltic Provinces.

Alexander wanted to unify the country by turning a Russian empire into a Russian nation, with a single nationality, a single language, religion and sovereign authority. He had a pathological fear of political opposition and was quick to declare emergency rule, suspend the law and restrict civil liberties. For a while revolutionary activity was driven underground, and to the countryside. But it never went away and it returned with a conviction that if the people were not ready for revolution it must be brought about and imposed on society by a clique of dedicated professionals.

Episode 20 - The Last Tsar (13 May 2011)
It is the turn of the century and the days of Imperial Russia are numbered. Nicholas II was crowned in May 1896. Nearly 1400 men, women and children were crushed to death in the crowds at his coronation, which was quickly seen as a bad omen. Within a year, disturbances had broken out in Russian universities and the Socialist Revolutionaries were disrupting government by murdering senior government ministers close to the Tsar. Double agents used their privileged position to mount further assassinations.
By the end of 1904, Russia was close to turmoil and a strike at the Putilov Engineering works in St Petersburg spread quickly to other factories. Within a month a hundred thousand workers had downed tools.



Dmitry Shostakovich's eleventh symphony - The Year 1905 - portrays the bloody culmination of the strikes on Sunday the 9th of January, when soldiers opened fire on protesters bringing a petition to the Tsar, leaving more than a hundred dead in the snow.

And trouble at home was soon to coincide with disaster abroad. Aggressive expansionism in the far-east had brought Russia into conflict with Japan, and the catastrophe of Tsushima in which Russia lost eight battleships and four cruisers, with 4000 men dead and 7000 taken prisoner. That and the uprising in Odessa, immortalised in Eisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin, dealt Tsarism an immortal blow from which it would never recover. Suddenly the mighty tsarist system didn't look so mighty after all.

The resulting concessions introduced by the Tsar were seen as an admission of the regime's fragility. As Martin Sixsmith hints, 'It wouldn't take much for the whole edifice to come crashing to the ground.'

Episode 21 - Too Little Too Late (16 May 2011)
In the final week of the first part of BBC Radio 4's major new series on the History of Russia, the momentum is all towards revolution.

After centuries of unbending autocratic government Nicholas II creates an embryonic parliament - an astounding leap forward. Unrest abates and the economy recovers. Martin Sixsmith reflects, "For a brief moment the vision of the Russian empire as a sort of British constitutional monarchy looked enticingly possible. Had it been offered earlier and more willingly - it might just have worked."
Instead it is seen as too little too late.



Sixsmith stands where the revolutionaries stood and paints this picture: "On the 18th of October 1905, a young Jewish intellectual with a small goatee beard, a thick head of black hair and intense dark eyes rose to address an unruly assembly of striking workers here in the Technological Institute in Saint Petersburg." That man was Lev Bronstein, better known by the pseudonym Leon Trotsky. He and Lenin were agitating for the whole Tsarist system to be swept away.

After the assassination of his uncle, Tsar Nicholas retreats from public view for eight years, but remains under the influence of his wife and her faith in the maverick and dissolute holy man, Grigory Rasputin. When the Prime Minister is assassinated at Kiev Opera House, imperial Russia's last attempt at political liberalism comes to an irrevocable end.

Episode 22 - The Centre Weakens (17 May 2011)
Tsar Nicholas 2nd's reign at the beginning of the 20th century had already been marked by the shedding of workers' blood, and political weakness. Revolutionary voices had been raised, and an unstable Europe would break out into the First World War. The seeds of instability had been sown 40 years before, but it would be Nicholas who would reap the disastrous harvest.

Martin Sixsmith tells the story of Russia's part in the First World War through Solzhenitsyn's novel August 1914. Solzhenitsyn takes issue with Tolstoy's belief that individuals cannot shape history and argues that there was nothing inevitable about the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Greater determination and better leadership could have made things turn out very differently.



Sixsmith comments, "In many respects 1914 was a last opportunity for the tsarist regime to save itself. The war was popular and its cause had united many elements of a divided society. For a brief moment, peasant resentment and workers' demands took second place to the overriding imperative of defending the motherland. But the mood of national unity was soon to be shattered by political shenanigans, tsarist incompetence and further setbacks on the battlefield."

By 1917 patience with the Tsar had run out, the strain of the war effort led to food shortages, profiteering and inflation. The hated figure of Rasputin had been assassinated the previous year but it was not enough to save the monarchy. Discontent was turning to revolt. Sixsmith concludes, "The unity of 1914 was long gone; the old myths of loyalty to the tsar could no longer hold society together. Tsarism was rotting from within and the only question was who or what would trigger its collapse."

Episode 23 - The Year 1917 Dawns (18 May 2011)
1917 is the year etched into Russian history. The First World War had caused disillusion amongst the military and the workers. Tsar Nicholas the 2nd believed blindly in his autocratic right to rule, but enemies were all around him, and the eventual victor - Lenin - was biding his time at a safe distance.

Shostakovich's Symphony 'The Year 1917' provides the backdrop for this most momentous year in Russian History. The February Revolution of 1917 was, like the earlier peasant revolts of Stenka Razin and Pugachev, a spontaneous uprising against a hated regime. Contrary to the Soviet account of the period, Martin Sixsmith argues "It was unplanned, uncoordinated, and the professional revolutionaries were left trailing in its wake."



But, with his kingdom crumbling, Tsar Nicholas the Second is portrayed, through letters to his wife Alexandra, as strangely detached. He barely mentions the revolution that was about to end Tsarism in Russia, as if willing it to go away by concentrating on other, minor inconveniences. Finally the Romanov dynasty, that had begun in the heroic glory of 1613 and celebrated its third centenary with great pomp just four years previously, came to an end in the banality of a provincial railway siding where Nicholas was forced to resign.

In the Tauride Palace in Saint Petersburg from where Martin Sixsmith tells the rest of the story, Nicholas's portrait was unceremoniously ripped from the wall of the Duma chamber. Sixsmith walks from the palace's right wing, where the Duma deputies announced they were creating a new government, to the left wing where hundreds of workers, soldiers and peasants were gathering - the two groups jostling to fill the vacuum. The time was crying out for someone to seize the initiative; he was already waiting in the wings.

Episode 24 - Lenin's Return (19 May 2011)
Chaos follows the abdication of the Tsar, and it is into this chaos that Lenin returns from exile. The programme opens with a series of telegrams from the German foreign ministry which reveal that Berlin saw Lenin as a 'secret weapon', a 'dangerous virus' that would foment revolution forcing Russia to withdraw from the war, and so the Germans put him on the legendary sealed train bound for St Petersburg.



But Lenin was most certainly not in control. No one was in control. Tsarism had collapsed but the revolutionaries were far from united. The Provisional Government was trying to create Russia's first western style law-governed state: their "liberal idealism was impeccable," muses Martin Sixsmith, "but the middle of a world war with revolutionary chaos on the streets was not the easiest moment to introduce democracy."

The opposition was divided between the Mensheviks who wanted to go through a phase of capitalist democracy before true revolution ushered in the nirvana of socialism. The Bolsheviks, at that stage minor players, had more idea of what they wanted to destroy than what they wanted to create. But Lenin seized the moment: "All power to the soviets!" was his dramatic conclusion that has resonated through Russian history. He was already plotting a Bolshevik coup to take control and boldly promised Land, Peace, Bread and Freedom. This gave him the popular support he needed to have a real chance of taking power.

But then he ran away. Sixsmith draws on comments by Nikolai Valentinov, a friend of Lenin, which hint at a manic depressive side to Lenin's character to explain it. It puts things on hold, the Bolsheviks go underground, but by October, the pressure for change was unstoppable.

Episode 25 - Revolution! (20 May 2011)
The signal for the Revolution was given on October 25th by the battleship Avrora, still moored at the St Petersburg quay where she was anchored in 1917.



In the concluding programme of the first half of BBC Radio 4's major history of Russia, Martin Sixsmith argues that between the February and October Revolutions of 1917, Russia missed her only chance for real change. He says, '1917 has long been seen as a turning point in Russian history. February put an end to tsarist rule and October inaugurated the era of proletarian socialism. But I believe the real chance for change came in the brief period between the revolutions. The Provisional Government was committed to the introduction of liberal parliamentary democracy, respect for the law and individual civil rights.'

But the Provisional Government did not survive, and under Lenin and Communism, the country's 1000 year history of autocracy would continue. Sixsmith quotes the writer Vassily Grossman who says, 'In 1917, the Russian soul had been a slave for a thousand years... the path of freedom lay open, but Russia chose Lenin.'
Sixsmith identifies widely differing versions of the events of 1917, untangling the myth and the reality.

Eisenstein's iconic film 'October' dramatizes the storming of the Winter Palace, but in fact it was defended by a smattering of teenage cadets. There wasn't much heroism or bloodshed, and it was all over in 24 hours. But it was the beginning of a power struggle between competing revolutionaries, and, in the next part of his history, coming to BBC Radio 4 in the Summer, Martin Sixsmith will describe how the Bolsheviks would consolidate their monopoly on power. They would create a repressive Communist state that would last for over seventy years until it was, in 1991, overturned.



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