Speaker 1: Welcomed Unobscured, a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Minky.
Speaker 1: Doctor Joshua Sanborn is a historian of Russia in the
Speaker 1: twentieth century, and if you want to understand World War
Speaker 1: One from a Russian perspective, you simply can't miss his books.
Speaker 1: If you've listened through this season of Unobscured, you already
Speaker 1: know what an expert he is on imperial state politics
Speaker 1: and the nasty mess the Royal family found themselves in.
Speaker 1: But Dr Sandborn's books and his conversation with this season's
Speaker 1: writer Carl Nillis, covers so much more than that. His
Speaker 1: scholarship is a deep exploration of the connections between war
Speaker 1: and politics in the Romanov Empire and the way that
Speaker 1: the bloodshed rippled out across all of Russian society, from
Speaker 1: high to low. So it's a pleasure to offer you
Speaker 1: this conversation. But strap in because this train moves at
Speaker 1: one hundred miles an hour and we're headed for the
Speaker 1: Eastern Front of the Great War. This is the Unobscured
Speaker 1: Interview series for season four. I'm Aaron Minky for Unobscured podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Carl Nellis, and I'm joined today by Dr Joshua Sanborn.
Speaker 1: Dr Sandborn is professor of history at Lafayette College in
Speaker 1: eastern Pennsylvania. He has been recognized with numerous awards for
Speaker 1: his teaching and scholarship, including a fellowship from the National
Speaker 1: Endowment for the Humanities. In two thousand three, he published
Speaker 1: Drafting the Russian Nation, Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass
Speaker 1: Politics from nineteen o five to and more recently he
Speaker 1: published Imperial Apocalypse, The Great War and the Destruction of
Speaker 1: the Russian Empire with Oxford University Press. Dr Sanborn is fantastic,
Speaker 1: His writing is great. I hope you grated and check
Speaker 1: out his books if you're interested in really digging into
Speaker 1: the history of this period. Um, it's fantastic to have
Speaker 1: you joined us on Unobscured. Dr Sanborn, welcome. Oh, it's
Speaker 1: great to be here. Thanks for inviting me. So let's
Speaker 1: start kind of from that general picture of your work, UM,
Speaker 1: maybe with Imperial Apocalypse in particular, that you've written a
Speaker 1: fascinating book here on the internal dynamics of the late
Speaker 1: Russian Empire, especially the significance of the resistance to Russian
Speaker 1: control in the border countries, but all the ramifications of
Speaker 1: that as well, can you say a few things about
Speaker 1: what brought you to this work in particular? Sure. Yeah,
Speaker 1: As as with many scholar careers, it sort of follows
Speaker 1: a certain kind of trajectory. UM. I got interested in
Speaker 1: Russia and in Russian history actually back in high school.
Speaker 1: I grew up at the very end of the Cold War,
Speaker 1: very interested in what was happening in terms of arms control, disarmament,
Speaker 1: as very concerned about UM, the way the world was
Speaker 1: headed and the possibility of of nuclear war between the
Speaker 1: two superpowers. I was firmly convinced that UM better better
Speaker 1: relations between the two countries were necessary. By the time
Speaker 1: I graduated college in the Soviet Union was ending, and
Speaker 1: so when I was in graduate school in the middle
Speaker 1: of the nineteen nineties, that same conflict wasn't present. But
Speaker 1: but I certainly had already caught the caught the Russia hug,
Speaker 1: and I did have this interest in UM in UH
Speaker 1: in thinking about security and thinking about UM military affairs,
Speaker 1: not from the perspective of a military practitioner, of an
Speaker 1: officer or people that that work in in in the
Speaker 1: defense departments saying, but from the perspective of someone that
Speaker 1: wanted to look at military affairs UH through through a
Speaker 1: broader lens, through social, political, or cultural lenses. So UM,
Speaker 1: that's how I got onto the topic of military conscription.
Speaker 1: Of chapters in there not only about about conscription itself,
Speaker 1: but also about women and UH and women soldiers in
Speaker 1: World War One, about draft resistors and conscientious objectors. It
Speaker 1: allowed me to sort of think about a lot of
Speaker 1: the ways that that nationhood was constructed through the performance
Speaker 1: of violence. UM. And so that was what that that
Speaker 1: book was about. And one of the things UM, as
Speaker 1: I was doing the research for that book, I realized
Speaker 1: that there was a real UM opening and a real
Speaker 1: potential UH to write a book about World War One. UM.
Speaker 1: The centennial World War One was coming up. I published
Speaker 1: this book on the Hunter the anniversary of the UH
Speaker 1: the start of the war, and there were other historians,
Speaker 1: many other historians who were who were also developing projects
Speaker 1: at this time. UM and I began this project as
Speaker 1: sort of, UM yeah, a an investigation of life in
Speaker 1: frontline zones. I was really interested in the civilian experience,
Speaker 1: what happened to civilians that we're living in these occupied
Speaker 1: territories who were subject to deportations, millions of whom became refugees, um.
Speaker 1: Were tossed back and forth between these empires and had
Speaker 1: this really interesting political experience as nationalism really sort of
Speaker 1: grew in the period too UM. And so I moved
Speaker 1: from that to to a larger conception of the war,
Speaker 1: not just as a lived experience, but also as this
Speaker 1: moment of decolonization. At this moment where European empires, UM,
Speaker 1: we're collapsing, the big Land empires were collapsing, the German Empire,
Speaker 1: the Austriungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Russian Empire.
Speaker 1: And what relationship did the did the war have to that?
Speaker 1: In other words, was it just sort of the final
Speaker 1: blow or was it something more more substantial? And so
Speaker 1: that was that was what was beginning to govern the
Speaker 1: way I then structured and wrote the book m HM.
Speaker 1: And if someone who is not a historian or is
Speaker 1: not a specialist was to pick up Imperial Apocalypse, UM,
Speaker 1: what would you hope that they would take away from
Speaker 1: reading it? So, if if that was the idea coming
Speaker 1: in to discover, what would you hope that a reader
Speaker 1: would come away thinking about the relationship between the end
Speaker 1: of European empires? And Yeah, so in the first place,
Speaker 1: it was an attempt to give especially English language readers,
Speaker 1: the possibility to learn more about the war looked like
Speaker 1: from the Eastern Front. Um. There have been many works
Speaker 1: actually written on the Eastern Front, but most of the
Speaker 1: ones that sort of had a um uh an ability
Speaker 1: to sort of look at the thing in the whole
Speaker 1: um uh. Many of those were quite dated back to
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies, and the archives had opened since then.
Speaker 1: There were a lot of new ways about thinking about
Speaker 1: Russian politics and the Russian Revolution um and so this
Speaker 1: is a relatively compact way for them to get to
Speaker 1: know what's going on on the Eastern Front. So I
Speaker 1: talked about the stical things that are going on and
Speaker 1: talk about these social experiences, but I also talk about
Speaker 1: the military events um and and and and all of
Speaker 1: these are are tightly linked. As as I try to
Speaker 1: show in the book, that you can't actually understand um
Speaker 1: what's happening on the front without understanding what's happening in
Speaker 1: the home front and vice versa. So that's the first thing,
Speaker 1: this sort of compact understanding of of of the Eastern
Speaker 1: Front and World War One UM and the second thing
Speaker 1: is to understand this relationship between empires, wars and revolutions. UM.
Speaker 1: Empires are not just big states. There are states that
Speaker 1: are built around the principle of inequality. Right, one political
Speaker 1: society is dominating other ones UM. And the metropolitan centers
Speaker 1: are privileged, whether you're in London or in St. Petersburg,
Speaker 1: And the colonial spaces are dominated, right, whether you're in
Speaker 1: Ireland or in Poland. Right, those are places that that
Speaker 1: you are not UM, you know, sort of experiencing equality
Speaker 1: in the in the years building up to DA fourteen.
Speaker 1: And this domination is enacted by the state UM. And
Speaker 1: so when wars weakened states, as they sometimes do, and
Speaker 1: they definitely did in Eastern Europe at this time, you
Speaker 1: get opportunities for different kinds of political futures, including social
Speaker 1: revolutions which we see in the in the period, but
Speaker 1: also nationalist bits for independence. Would you briefly describe the
Speaker 1: role in that imperial context that autocracy played in Russian
Speaker 1: life and maybe in Russian life and consciousness, or you know,
Speaker 1: kind of a cultural history approach to it UM at
Speaker 1: the end of the eighteen hundreds into the early nineteen
Speaker 1: dred How would you characterize the relationship between the czaars
Speaker 1: and the people they ruled. And and this is a
Speaker 1: little curve of maybe on the question that I handed you,
Speaker 1: But would you want to make a distinction between the
Speaker 1: relationship between the oars and the people in the center
Speaker 1: of Russian and thestars and the people elsewhere? Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: this is a this is surprisingly difficult question to answer. Actually,
Speaker 1: it's it's hard to know what the relationship between that's
Speaker 1: are and the people were. Um uh, in large part,
Speaker 1: I mean, if you were right, there no surveys, there
Speaker 1: are no polls, there are no there's no way to
Speaker 1: really get at this question. And so much of what
Speaker 1: we have is the representation of the autocracy itself for
Speaker 1: how it wanted that relationship to be, how it wanted
Speaker 1: it to look, and they had a lot of resources
Speaker 1: in order to sort of have that happen. Indeed, in
Speaker 1: the years building up to World War One, there are
Speaker 1: a series of celebrations um that sort of Um yeah,
Speaker 1: they they they they heightened this um that they were
Speaker 1: intended to heighten this bond between the monarch and the people,
Speaker 1: and these build up to the um the term centenary,
Speaker 1: the anniversary of the Romanov dynasty itself in nt UM
Speaker 1: and so they have big celebrations that always always are
Speaker 1: trying to stress this bond between that's Are and the people.
Speaker 1: And generations actually of historians have um have sort of
Speaker 1: accepted this in a lot of ways. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: have accepted this notion that, yeah, there was this thing called, um,
Speaker 1: you know, popular monarchism where the peasants they loved That's Are.
Speaker 1: They might not like their landlord, but they love their
Speaker 1: It's Are. That's Are represented Russia for them, UM. And uh,
Speaker 1: there's just not a lot of evidence to to support that. UM.
Speaker 1: There's not a lot of evidence to suggest that it
Speaker 1: wasn't there either, UM, other than what actually ends up
Speaker 1: happening in the war. And so my argument ultimately is
Speaker 1: that you know, when you see this revolt against it's Are, UM,
Speaker 1: you start to get these signals UM. And indeed these
Speaker 1: have been building for years that um. Uh that that peasants,
Speaker 1: who you know, the farmers, Russian farmers throughout the empire, UM,
Speaker 1: are not satisfied with UM with That's Are. Do not
Speaker 1: look at him as a little god, do not look
Speaker 1: at them him as their as their little father. UM.
Speaker 1: And so you know, it's kind of hard to know
Speaker 1: that now the relationship between um that's are in ethnic
Speaker 1: Russians and and and those on the periphery UM that
Speaker 1: is certainly different um and and that's going to vary
Speaker 1: widely depending on where in the Russian Empire you are.
Speaker 1: So nationalism uh and anti Russian nationalism is developing more
Speaker 1: strongly in certain places than in others, most notably in
Speaker 1: Poland um Uh, but also beginning to develop that by
Speaker 1: the time we get to the twentieth century in places
Speaker 1: like UH, like Ukraine and in the Baltic State it's
Speaker 1: uh and even to a certain extent, um more broadly
Speaker 1: into sort of the Asian territories of the Russian Empire too.
Speaker 1: M um And I guess, you know, just finally, I
Speaker 1: guess if I were to characterize this relationship, I think
Speaker 1: the thing we have to remember is that this relationship
Speaker 1: is distant. That's are always wanted to see this as
Speaker 1: an intimate relationship, but but it was a distant one.
Speaker 1: You know, most people, of course never saw that's aar
Speaker 1: um And you know, they lived their lives in their
Speaker 1: local regions, in these local contexts, and that's oar was
Speaker 1: something that was was very far away, and they had
Speaker 1: and they thought had very little impact, probably on their lives. Um.
Speaker 1: One movement in the prelude to the collapse of the
Speaker 1: Russian Empire was the process called Russification or Russianization. You
Speaker 1: write that it entailed assaults on churches, language schools. At
Speaker 1: the precise moment when the Great reforms from the eighteen sixties,
Speaker 1: we're creating conditions in which the social basis of nationalism
Speaker 1: could develop. Would you give us kind of a brief
Speaker 1: overview of Ruscification, Um, it's relationship to nationalism maybe, and
Speaker 1: especially beyond the metropole of the Russian Empire. Yeah. Sure. Um.
Speaker 1: The first thing we have to keep in mind is
Speaker 1: that the Russian Empire was created before nations were born,
Speaker 1: including the Russian nation. UM. So nationalism is a fairly
Speaker 1: late development historically, not just in Russia but but everywhere.
Speaker 1: We can see its early growth among elite educated populations
Speaker 1: in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, but it's not really
Speaker 1: until the late eighteenth century and especially in the nineteenth
Speaker 1: century that it begins to take off in Europe, in
Speaker 1: the America's and of course the Romanov dynasty had been
Speaker 1: founded in the seventeenth century. UM, and in the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: It's at the same time that we're seeing not only
Speaker 1: the great reforms in Russia, which you're intended to sort
Speaker 1: of create a more modern empire, um, but we see
Speaker 1: mass industrialization, we see the beginning of mass politics and Russia,
Speaker 1: and certainly it's wide expansion elsewhere in Europe. We see
Speaker 1: mass education take root, um, huge strides in literacy and
Speaker 1: the ability of people to be uh to be reading
Speaker 1: newspaper articles about about what's going on. UM. Now, the
Speaker 1: political power of nationalism, including its ability to mobilize much
Speaker 1: stronger armed forces, was evident quite quickly to politicians UM.
Speaker 1: And so you have all of these pre national multi
Speaker 1: ethnic states, the Habsburg Empire, the romanof Dynasty, the Ottoman Empire,
Speaker 1: all of them are trying to nationalize themselves over the
Speaker 1: course of the nineteenth century. And so their problem is
Speaker 1: in a multi ethnic state, as all of them are,
Speaker 1: as Russia certainly, is they either have to figure out
Speaker 1: how to fashion a multi ethnic national project, that is
Speaker 1: to say, a nation that is not founded on a
Speaker 1: single ethnicity, or to engage in building ethnic nationalism. In fact,
Speaker 1: Russia tried to do both, but it was this latter
Speaker 1: project defending the idea that the Russian Empire was for
Speaker 1: the benefit of ethnic Russians and could be defined by
Speaker 1: Russian characteristics in terms of language and church. That caused
Speaker 1: the problems of Rucification. So, in concrete terms, what roots
Speaker 1: vacation is it's an attempt to uh to to limit
Speaker 1: let's say, um uh Polish participation in politics, UH to
Speaker 1: forbid the publishing of of Ukrainian language texts, UH to
Speaker 1: ensure that local schools, these new schools that are that
Speaker 1: are building, are being taught in Russian with a Russian sylla,
Speaker 1: with Russian curriculum basically right. So that's on a concrete level,
Speaker 1: what what's happening is they're going into these regions and say, no,
Speaker 1: you have to go to a Russian language school. No,
Speaker 1: the Orthodox Church is the preferred church, not not not
Speaker 1: Catholicism or Lutheranism as it as it is for many
Speaker 1: the populations, especially in the west of the Empire or
Speaker 1: islam in in in the large squas of of of Asia.
Speaker 1: They're going into all these regions and they're saying, no, Russian,
Speaker 1: this is the Russian Empire and you have to learn Russian.
Speaker 1: This um And you can see why imperial administrators might
Speaker 1: want to say, okay, well, look, Ukrainian nationalism is as
Speaker 1: a problem we have to figure out. Let's solve it
Speaker 1: by by teaching all these Ukrainian kids Russian history and
Speaker 1: the Russian language, and maybe we'll we'll sort of forestall it.
Speaker 1: But in fact, it was the visit that took place
Speaker 1: at the very moment. Like people before the nineteenth century
Speaker 1: didn't think of themselves as Ukrainians, they didn't think of
Speaker 1: themselves as Russians. They thought of themselves as peasants or
Speaker 1: as Christians, but they didn't have these these strong ethnic
Speaker 1: identifications that that that linked them to these political projects.
Speaker 1: So the very moment they're learning about this their their
Speaker 1: their earliest the earliest political experiences is one of imperial
Speaker 1: oppression basically, and so this helps to generate these ethnic
Speaker 1: nationalists on the periphery. They had long tried to say, hey,
Speaker 1: you guys are all Ukrainians, and the Ukrainians will be like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I'm kind of a peasant, I'm kind
Speaker 1: of a Christian. And now they're coming along and now
Speaker 1: they finally have the proof. They're like, see, your Ukrainians,
Speaker 1: the state is punishing for being a Ukrainian. Now they say, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: now I see you mean like I can't go to
Speaker 1: the church I want to go to. My kids are
Speaker 1: speaking some weird language when they come home from school
Speaker 1: with a weird accent, right like that, all of that
Speaker 1: becomes too much more concrete for them. And so as
Speaker 1: a result, rusification, which is intended to to limit the
Speaker 1: spread of ethnic nationalism, actually helps to develop it, especially
Speaker 1: in the western borderlands Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Lava Estonia. This
Speaker 1: is where a lot of the roots vacation is happening,
Speaker 1: and where you see this huge surge and nationalism at
Speaker 1: the end of the nineteenth century. And you write this
Speaker 1: is later on in your work, especially in nineteen sixteen,
Speaker 1: about events in Central Asia. Um. Do we know much
Speaker 1: about how Siberia experienced specification? Um? Yeah, So Siberia is
Speaker 1: an interesting case. UM. And you know what had happened
Speaker 1: over the course of conquest in Siberia Um, from the
Speaker 1: sixteenth into the into the seventeenth centuries. Basically, UM, is
Speaker 1: that there had been especially in the north. The further
Speaker 1: north you went, they tended to be very small communities
Speaker 1: that got conquered and sort of incorporated into into the
Speaker 1: Russian Empire and also settled by by ethnic slaws. Again,
Speaker 1: there there wasn't a strong sense of there are a
Speaker 1: lot of sort of people we were now called ethnic Ukrainians.
Speaker 1: We are doing this colonizing work out in out in
Speaker 1: Siberia and elsewhere. Um. The more you got on the
Speaker 1: big rivers in Siberia and and especially down towards towards
Speaker 1: Central Asia, you you had more a large scale and
Speaker 1: settled Muslim communities, the remnants of the Mongol Empire basically
Speaker 1: and um and and those were places where they had
Speaker 1: a much more complicated time um sort of dealing with
Speaker 1: these this question of russianists and honestly, especially from the
Speaker 1: early nineteenth century, Uh, the goal was, the goal over
Speaker 1: the centuries of the Russian administration was let's let's not
Speaker 1: do things to make people upset. We don't have a rebellion.
Speaker 1: So if people want to go to their own church, fine,
Speaker 1: who cares if if Muslims go go to a mosque,
Speaker 1: We we're not going to force them to go to
Speaker 1: an Orthodox church. They go to a mosque, as long
Speaker 1: as they're paying taxes and they're not rebelling, um, you know,
Speaker 1: and their elites are basically on board. We're we're fine
Speaker 1: with all of this and so. But you know, it's
Speaker 1: only in the nineteenth century again that you start to
Speaker 1: see these pressures towards um, towards greater assimilation in a
Speaker 1: certain way. And this is more possible for the ones
Speaker 1: that are closer to or conceived of as more possible
Speaker 1: for for those who are closer to the to the
Speaker 1: Russian Empire and had been conquered much earlier, especially along
Speaker 1: the Volga, the so called tatars Um along the Vulgar River,
Speaker 1: than it is for the newly conquered territories in the
Speaker 1: middle of the nineteenth century and what's called Turkestan at
Speaker 1: the time, what's now Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, parts of Kyrkistan. So,
Speaker 1: so this region is newly conquered, um. And and this
Speaker 1: is a very special it's it's it's a colonial territory.
Speaker 1: It's it's treated um as sort of you know, as
Speaker 1: sort of the British retreat a colony in Africa or
Speaker 1: in Asia. M Um. So starting to look a little
Speaker 1: more detailed towards war and revolution and war and revolution again. Um,
Speaker 1: would you say a few words about how the nineteen
Speaker 1: o four Russo Japanese War and the Revolution of nineteen
Speaker 1: o five. Well, in your book you say it transformed
Speaker 1: the international balance of power. And we you know, when
Speaker 1: we're talking about World War One, when we're talking about
Speaker 1: the downfall of Russia, we have to understand the rest
Speaker 1: of Japanese War and what change in Russian life and
Speaker 1: governance in nineteen o five. Can you talk about how
Speaker 1: those things were linked and what happened beyond the borders
Speaker 1: and of Russia. Right, Yeah, So, so the Russo Japanese
Speaker 1: War happens at a very let me start with the
Speaker 1: international question first, it happens at a very volatile moment internationally, Um,
Speaker 1: you're in the midst of this huge arms race which
Speaker 1: is going to culminate in in World War One, the
Speaker 1: rise of of new powers challenging sort of the pre eminence,
Speaker 1: let's say, of the of of especially of the British Empire.
Speaker 1: That the story of sort of the German challenge to
Speaker 1: the British Empire is well known, and we're fully in
Speaker 1: the midst of that by by nineteen o four and
Speaker 1: in nineteen o five. But also you're seeing emerging powers
Speaker 1: elsewhere in the world. Most notably Japan UM which is
Speaker 1: striving to be sort of the first non European member
Speaker 1: of the Club of Great Powers UM. At this stage
Speaker 1: they're not quite there. They have they have established um
Speaker 1: UH dominance in in East Asia that in they want
Speaker 1: to war against China. The Qing Empire is is certainly
Speaker 1: um in the midst of of fading on the verge
Speaker 1: of collapse, which we'll do in a couple of years UM.
Speaker 1: And so Japan is clearly um UH the most significant
Speaker 1: power and they want to be recognized as such. And
Speaker 1: what happens as China becomes a target of global imperial
Speaker 1: control UM you know, you start to have the push
Speaker 1: for concessions, not only among the British, who had had
Speaker 1: concessions for a while, but also among the Russians. The
Speaker 1: Americans now are are are are are trying to take
Speaker 1: take take part in this scramble for China. Japan is
Speaker 1: really trying to assert itself as as a regional power
Speaker 1: and and hopefully as as a global power. And and
Speaker 1: this um UH. The European powers are generally unwilling to
Speaker 1: do this, and Russia is for a varide of reasons,
Speaker 1: especially unwilling to do this and part of this has
Speaker 1: to do with Nicholas himself. Um. He had done a
Speaker 1: tour before he became sorrow when he Saraevitch in into Asia,
Speaker 1: had traveled through through Japan, held a series of quite
Speaker 1: openly racist views towards towards the Japanese um and and
Speaker 1: did not want to think about the Japanese as a
Speaker 1: potential um imperial threat to to Russian imperial power um And.
Speaker 1: This leads to a series of diplomatic incidents and then
Speaker 1: finally to a surprise attack by the Japanese in nineteen
Speaker 1: o four upon the Russian political Pacific fleet in Port
Speaker 1: Arthur And this results in a disastrous war for Russia.
Speaker 1: They lose. They have three main naval fleets in the
Speaker 1: in the Pacific and the Baltic and in the Black Sea.
Speaker 1: They lose two of them. The third one is bottled
Speaker 1: up in the Black Sea because they can't get through
Speaker 1: the Straits um but their Pacific fleet is sunk. Basically
Speaker 1: at the beginning of the war, they send their Baltic
Speaker 1: fleet all the way around the world. The Japanese sink
Speaker 1: it to in the Straits of Sushima. Um And they
Speaker 1: lose almost all these All the major land battles, and
Speaker 1: so it's it's a complete disaster. And what it triggers
Speaker 1: is this mass mobilization not only for for a military
Speaker 1: for the military, but also kind of a political mobilization.
Speaker 1: At the same moment, you have a political crisis in
Speaker 1: nineteen o five, so it leads to revolution, or it
Speaker 1: helps lead to revolutionary events those have also social revolution
Speaker 1: has been developing on its own track basically in Russia
Speaker 1: at the same time, from the eighteen sixties onward. UM
Speaker 1: and so you have the culmination of this political mobilization
Speaker 1: around social issues, especially with the rise of of of
Speaker 1: important Marxist parties UM. But also you have the this
Speaker 1: UM this international crisis, and this all explodes in this
Speaker 1: in this massive revolution in nineteen o five UM, which
Speaker 1: leads to very famous events one called Bloody Sunday in
Speaker 1: January nineteen o five and which um UH peaceful protesters
Speaker 1: are are shot by UM by by palace guards basically
Speaker 1: at the command of the Czar UM and and it
Speaker 1: leads very nearly to the UM to to the end
Speaker 1: of the romanof dynasty in nineteen o five. And it's
Speaker 1: only because of the efforts of especially competent conservatives, especially
Speaker 1: one named seraghe Vitam, who both signs the peace treaty
Speaker 1: gets out of the war with Japan and the summer
Speaker 1: of nineteen o five and also convinces that's are to
Speaker 1: sign a new um UH basically set of agreements with
Speaker 1: society that allows for the formation of a parliament. That
Speaker 1: that begins UH sends Russia down the road towards potentially
Speaker 1: a constitutional monarchy. It's only that that basically cools things
Speaker 1: off in the fall of nineteen o five. And once
Speaker 1: sort of the moderate and liberal opposition is appeased by
Speaker 1: these by these constitutional um quasi constitutional measures, then they
Speaker 1: can go after the left wing with in in earnestness
Speaker 1: and and and this is what Piotr Stelipin, who will
Speaker 1: eventually become Prime Minister, becomes famous for, is sort of
Speaker 1: helping to lead this repression against left wing groups who
Speaker 1: do not want to UM see peace in nineteen o five. UM.
Speaker 1: Within Russia, you write that that year and those events
Speaker 1: that you just talked about, UH flip a switch in
Speaker 1: Russian politics. UM. And you've started to describe a little
Speaker 1: bit about what those things were. UM, could you just
Speaker 1: give a little bit more of a sense, maybe from
Speaker 1: the lived perspective or or however you want to take it,
Speaker 1: what it felt like to live in Russia at that
Speaker 1: time before the establishment of the Duma and then after, Um,
Speaker 1: you know, obviously, like you said, Nicholas and and the
Speaker 1: government felt like they were making huge concessions, and maybe
Speaker 1: there were others who experienced a big shift. What did
Speaker 1: it feel like? No, this and it it's very important
Speaker 1: moment because, um, look, the Romanov dynasty and the cyst autocracy,
Speaker 1: these were non mobilizational conservative regimes. That is to say,
Speaker 1: they did not want people, even their supporters, out on
Speaker 1: the streets right Their idea of what a public should
Speaker 1: do is that it should be quiet and satisfied. They
Speaker 1: did not want large numbers of people out on the streets,
Speaker 1: um organizing for them. They didn't want political parties, even
Speaker 1: right wing political parties, and the early right wing political parties,
Speaker 1: the monarchist parties that form in Russia are almost I
Speaker 1: mean they say in sort of the organizing documents, we
Speaker 1: wish we didn't have to be a party, but now
Speaker 1: that we have a lament, we sort of have to
Speaker 1: play this game. And um, this is very important to
Speaker 1: understand because it's so different from twentieth century politics. Right,
Speaker 1: we can there are plenty of military dictatorships and other
Speaker 1: and especially fascist dictatorships that rely on public mobilization, right,
Speaker 1: that have these big, you know, torchlight rallies. I mean
Speaker 1: you think about what Hitler is doing in the thirties.
Speaker 1: I mean, it would have made Nicholas a skin crawl
Speaker 1: to think of all those people out there being mobilized
Speaker 1: for political ends. Um, that's not what you know. The
Speaker 1: only way he wanted them, as we see at the
Speaker 1: beginning of the war, is sort of praying with him
Speaker 1: at a moment and then saying, go do your thing. Right.
Speaker 1: So that's his vision of politics, is that power comes
Speaker 1: from him and he gives it to other people, not
Speaker 1: that it flows up from the streets, not that it
Speaker 1: flows up in and he and he's sort of sort
Speaker 1: of sort of part of that mobilizational process. Um. And
Speaker 1: so they had consistently tried to thwart that mobilization. So
Speaker 1: what we see when we see in the nineteen o
Speaker 1: five that we see actually revolutionary activities many many cities
Speaker 1: in the Russian Empire. You have these mass demonstrations, You
Speaker 1: have pitched battles between revolutionaries and and policemen. You have
Speaker 1: large meetings pressing for constitutional change. You have people talking
Speaker 1: about elections and political parties and and you know, recruiting
Speaker 1: people all that stuff. It's just a different mode of politics.
Speaker 1: It's modern politics, its mobilizational politics, and and that's completely
Speaker 1: different from what the Tsars had tried to had tried
Speaker 1: to have over the previous you know, not only previous
Speaker 1: three hundred years, but but but going going back even
Speaker 1: further of course. So so that's the switch that gets flipped.
Speaker 1: Now we're in an era of mobilizational politics, and that's
Speaker 1: really going to inform what happens in World War one
Speaker 1: UM because immediately upon the declaration of war, most of
Speaker 1: the Tsars um people led by military men, who had
Speaker 1: been pushing for a mobilizational um UH structure for years
Speaker 1: for reasons I can go into if you'd like, but
Speaker 1: they had really wanted this sort of active mobilization and
Speaker 1: enthusiasm on the part of the population. UM. Now, when
Speaker 1: war gets declared nineteen fourteen, they say, great, let's mobilize.
Speaker 1: We need to mobilize everybody. And so this old autocratic
Speaker 1: dream of just sort of controlling things from above UM
Speaker 1: is fundamentally just Troid in the very first day of
Speaker 1: the war, and the last person to come to realize
Speaker 1: this actually is Nicholas himself, and that's one of the
Speaker 1: things that that leads to the problems at the end
Speaker 1: of the at the end of the regime. So you
Speaker 1: mentioned that one of the things that happens here is
Speaker 1: the establishment of the parliament, the Numa. Um, could you
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about what it was, how did
Speaker 1: it work, what, what's what's the numa when it gets
Speaker 1: set up. Yeah, it's a very troubled early history in
Speaker 1: particular because again, you know, not only Nicholas, but many
Speaker 1: in the administration sort of have this belief that at heart,
Speaker 1: most people want to be uh, good subjects of that's
Speaker 1: are they They're gonna want to vote for parties that
Speaker 1: that that are supportive of them, that the people are
Speaker 1: behind them. In other words, that's that's what they want
Speaker 1: to believe. And there's just all these rabble rousing revolutionaries
Speaker 1: out there. Um, there's a lot of anti Semitism. So
Speaker 1: they're saying, oh, all the rabble rousing Jewish revolutionaries out there,
Speaker 1: and once the true Russian people have their voice, you know,
Speaker 1: they're gonna they're gonna vote for us. They're still a
Speaker 1: little worried about it. They don't city dwellers very much.
Speaker 1: And so they create this system in which more power
Speaker 1: is given basically to rural areas, and those rural areas
Speaker 1: are also dominated by by the nobility, by landowners. It's
Speaker 1: not one person, one vote. You vote in a certain
Speaker 1: curia in which you know, so you know, let's say
Speaker 1: the peasants in the region get one representative and the
Speaker 1: nobles in the region get get one representative. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: there's you know, peasants and five percent nobles, and so
Speaker 1: it's not an equal sort of relationship there, and so
Speaker 1: you end up with many, many more nobles. And there's
Speaker 1: also an upper house of Parliament that is um. Half
Speaker 1: of it is appointed by that tsar and the other
Speaker 1: half is based on sort of jobs that are also
Speaker 1: basically highly sort Sara has driven so a guaranteed conservative
Speaker 1: upper house and and pro monarchist upper house as well.
Speaker 1: With all of that said, they get the first doom
Speaker 1: elections and um the people vote for moderate or left
Speaker 1: wing parties overwhelmingly, and you have this huge conflict um
Speaker 1: over basic things like land form and lander form obviously
Speaker 1: is uh is just sort of code for saying, we're
Speaker 1: going to take the land from the landowners and give
Speaker 1: it to the peasants that are working it. UM. So
Speaker 1: the landowners hate that idea, but but the Duma wants
Speaker 1: to do it, so they disband the first Duma. The
Speaker 1: second Duma they they do the same thing. Um. It
Speaker 1: doesn't get much better, even though they try to ban
Speaker 1: many of the parties at this time in the second
Speaker 1: Duma UM and and that also doesn't work. And so
Speaker 1: it's only with the third Duma. And this again is
Speaker 1: something that Piotr stileep In um accomplishes uh in in
Speaker 1: seven UM he says, Okay, we're gonna switch this the
Speaker 1: electro system even more. We're gonna wait even more in
Speaker 1: favor of people that we know are going to vote
Speaker 1: for us, and then they get even then, you know,
Speaker 1: it's sort of a moderate system, sort of the the
Speaker 1: it's moderates that are that are that are at the
Speaker 1: heart of that system. And left wing parties are almost
Speaker 1: complete but not completely but almost completely marginalized, and right
Speaker 1: wing parties get get much more, get much more voice.
Speaker 1: In both the third and the fourth dumas UM and
Speaker 1: and those again are gonna last all the way. The
Speaker 1: fourth Duma is the one that that is gonna be
Speaker 1: being played throughout the war. Well. And this speaks really
Speaker 1: to what you were saying earlier about uh, not knowing
Speaker 1: how what the people actually thought of the Czarre that
Speaker 1: when you when you finally get elections, the Duma ends
Speaker 1: up looking like people who want to take land away
Speaker 1: from the established. Yeah. Percent. When you ask people, um,
Speaker 1: do you want rich people to continue to run the lander?
Speaker 1: Do you want to farm your own land? It's not
Speaker 1: it's not unclear clear what they're going to vote for,
Speaker 1: so they're they're definitely anti monarchist at that point. Let's
Speaker 1: talk a little bit more about sleep In you and
Speaker 1: and and and other historians have talked about him as
Speaker 1: the most important political figure of this period. Um, who
Speaker 1: was he and what was his role in governing the
Speaker 1: Russian Empire at this point? Yeah, I mean steleepan Ism
Speaker 1: is a really interesting figure. Um. A lot of people
Speaker 1: end up becoming bureaucrats in the over the course of
Speaker 1: the Russian Empire of varying levels of talent, because this
Speaker 1: was not um, I mean, no sister as a pure
Speaker 1: meritocracy but the Russian imperial bureaucracy definitely wasn't. UM connections
Speaker 1: played a large role. UM. You know, whether you know
Speaker 1: you sucked up to the CSAR and I played a
Speaker 1: large role. All of these things over time meant that
Speaker 1: you had quite a hodgepodge of abilities. UH in that spectrum.
Speaker 1: Stealipin was unusually talented, unusually competent UM and UH and
Speaker 1: this UM this helped account for for his importance in
Speaker 1: in the short period four or five years in which
Speaker 1: he's he's he's prime minister um in UH in this
Speaker 1: quasi constitutional system. Uh. He's assassinated in nineteen eleven UM.
Speaker 1: And I'll talk about that in just a second. He
Speaker 1: comes from the imperial borderlands. UM, he's uh, you know,
Speaker 1: he's he has UM in Lithuania and Belarus. He has
Speaker 1: positions as he sort of moves around the UM the
Speaker 1: sort of UM system by which bureaucrats sort of moved
Speaker 1: from post to post. But he's actually in in in
Speaker 1: Russia and Sarata UH in the nineteen o five revolution.
Speaker 1: And he again distinguishes since off in nineteen o five
Speaker 1: not only by sort of competence but also his his
Speaker 1: brutality against against left wing revolutionaries. And and so it's
Speaker 1: gonna be this mix for him of of on the
Speaker 1: one hand being sort of a competent bureaucrat, but also
Speaker 1: his reputation as being uh sort of especially anti left
Speaker 1: wing and willing to use force against them. That is
Speaker 1: gonna endear him in a certain way to the to
Speaker 1: to the administration and briefly to the CSAR himself. And
Speaker 1: and this is going to allow him the ability to
Speaker 1: try to put forward reforms in the period from nineteen
Speaker 1: o seven to nineteen eleven, which are really quite important ones.
Speaker 1: STI leap In, at the end of the day, is
Speaker 1: a Russian nationalist UM. And nationalism is a mass mobilizational
Speaker 1: structure of the kind that I talked about before. So
Speaker 1: stileep In is trying to figure out how can we
Speaker 1: incorporate nationalism into this empire, make it more participatory, um,
Speaker 1: but also not completely alienate all the non Russians. Um.
Speaker 1: It's a really difficult task. UM. But he knows, and
Speaker 1: he's a modern politician. He he builds, he solicits interest groups.
Speaker 1: You make sure he has their support at various times
Speaker 1: for particular programs and and not others. So you know,
Speaker 1: he's trying to play this politics all the time, both
Speaker 1: with the Dooma and with other people within the Czarist administration. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, their educational reforms, he's moving towards the idea
Speaker 1: of of universal mass education. The most famous one is
Speaker 1: an agricultural reform, in which he wants to break up
Speaker 1: the Russian Commune and build a system basically independent family farmers,
Speaker 1: sort of like the American Midwest in a certain way, um,
Speaker 1: you know, and and and break up the old Russian
Speaker 1: commune UH as a way of sort of stimulating agricultural
Speaker 1: capitalism uh and strengthening Russians. But he also has a series,
Speaker 1: especially in Poland, of of attempts to make sure that
Speaker 1: that Polish nationalists and and also other kinds of nationalists
Speaker 1: don't get too much power. And so he's he's always
Speaker 1: forwarding a Russian nationalist line there um. And he's also
Speaker 1: the author of several military reforms that that are that
Speaker 1: that are also of of importance as he realizes the
Speaker 1: importance of of of the growing arm racing the likelihood
Speaker 1: of of European war in the near future. So Stleapan
Speaker 1: is doing all of these things, um. And he he
Speaker 1: has already earned the hatred of the left, but he's
Speaker 1: also now earning the displeasure of that's are in many conservatives,
Speaker 1: because he is pushing a quite a different system than
Speaker 1: the one that they are imagining. And he's also running
Speaker 1: a foul of entrenched interests within within the CSAR bureaucracy, right,
Speaker 1: these people that get sort of sweetheart deals in terms
Speaker 1: of state budgets, and he's pushing other budgetary budgetary priorities
Speaker 1: for instance. Um and so he begins to be seen
Speaker 1: as this sort of um as an outsider who's causing
Speaker 1: more trouble than is necessary. And um, so he's already
Speaker 1: lost the faith of that ts are by the time
Speaker 1: that he's assassinated in Kiev at the Opera House in
Speaker 1: Kiev in in nineteen eleven, um and so and so
Speaker 1: there's sort of a side relief, almost on an audible
Speaker 1: side relief from the Tsar when he's when when he's assassinated,
Speaker 1: not that he wanted to seem assassinated, but um, there's
Speaker 1: a cide relief because now he can go back to
Speaker 1: sort of a much more traditional set of prime ministers
Speaker 1: who are basically just going to be yes men for
Speaker 1: for him right, that are going to be traditionally sort
Speaker 1: of subservient in a way, and stileap It was clearly
Speaker 1: an independent political force that UM that made that star nervous. UM.
Speaker 1: So you mentioned that Stileapen's attempts not to alienate you know,
Speaker 1: non I think Russian to think about how to keep
Speaker 1: the periphery functioning without revolution building. UM. That's contrasted with
Speaker 1: what Nicholas and Alexandra throw of the territories at the
Speaker 1: center of their vast domain, right versus say, Ukraine in Poland,
Speaker 1: Siberia to the earls and things westwards Europe. UM. If
Speaker 1: if Stileapen was really worried about not alienating people, what
Speaker 1: did Nicholas and Alexandra think, what do we know about?
Speaker 1: How how much of a contrast that was with the
Speaker 1: way the ore stung. Yeah, you know, Nicholas and Alexander
Speaker 1: didn't want to UM didn't want to alienate people either.
Speaker 1: But again, in this traditional view, UM, people just should
Speaker 1: just be loyal subjects of their monarch, regardless of what
Speaker 1: ethnicity they were. UM. And and sort of organizing the
Speaker 1: monarchy around a national basis was um uh was kind
Speaker 1: of problematic for them in some ways I mean to
Speaker 1: be I mean in sort of racial terms ethnic, the
Speaker 1: racial ethnic term which people were increasingly using now by
Speaker 1: their early twentieth center. Over the of course of the
Speaker 1: nineteenth and twentieth century, um, much of the Romanov family
Speaker 1: was was German. Uh. You know, virtually all of the
Speaker 1: stars over the course of the nineteenth century had chosen
Speaker 1: brides from from the German principalities and then and then
Speaker 1: from from Germany itself, and so many of them had
Speaker 1: had had had German mothers. And this has been going
Speaker 1: back for again for for generations, um. And and this
Speaker 1: was starting to become a problem for them, right Alexander,
Speaker 1: it would eventually be sort of be criticized for being
Speaker 1: pro German because she had this German background. Um. But
Speaker 1: it's not the way that earlier dynasties thought. Of course,
Speaker 1: you would marry someone from another You wouldn't marry one
Speaker 1: of your own princes and princes or princesses because that
Speaker 1: would just complicate your domestic affairs. You find royalty or
Speaker 1: elsewhere that that that's where you're gonna find your your
Speaker 1: bride if you are, if you're the heir to the throne.
Speaker 1: So it wasn't a problem, but but increasingly it is
Speaker 1: becoming a problem. And so again you're seeing this distinction.
Speaker 1: As Nicholas and Alexander think about um, Poland and Ukraine,
Speaker 1: they think, well, the polls should be grateful to us.
Speaker 1: We're saving them from the Germans and and the Armenians,
Speaker 1: and the Georgians should be happy that that they're not
Speaker 1: overrun by Turks. And Ukrainians, in their view are just
Speaker 1: sort of Russians with a weird accent, you know, like
Speaker 1: that that was sort of their their view of the world.
Speaker 1: And and and and the notion that these um uh,
Speaker 1: you know, that there might be legitimate in certain senses
Speaker 1: national movements that you had to deal with as a politician,
Speaker 1: in the way that Stelipan was dealing with them was
Speaker 1: um was problematic for them. So so again these are
Speaker 1: and and again it's not as if Stalepin was giving
Speaker 1: a lot of concessions, uh, you know, his his famous
Speaker 1: slogan was that, um uh, you need to build a
Speaker 1: great Russia. This was going to be Russian Empire with
Speaker 1: russianness at its center, but again with an administrative awareness
Speaker 1: that that other political forces were out there that needed
Speaker 1: to be built MH. You mentioned earlier the christ and
Speaker 1: Tenary celebrations for the romana Um. Can you say a
Speaker 1: few more things about that? What did they think they
Speaker 1: were doing with that? How significant did they think it was?
Speaker 1: And but what do they actually signal to the various
Speaker 1: factions in Russian life at the time, whether we're talking
Speaker 1: about peasants or administrators or regional you know, or the
Speaker 1: people in their court internationally? How significant were the Chrishan
Speaker 1: Tennery celebrations to the various parties of it? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it was a an attempt, as I sort
Speaker 1: of mentioned earlier, there's an attempt to have their vision,
Speaker 1: their narrative of the relationship of it's are and the people,
Speaker 1: one that they believed in themselves, be enacted for them
Speaker 1: in front of them. And and when much of this happened,
Speaker 1: you know, there's a great article by a historian, Richard
Speaker 1: Wartman called Invisible Threads about Um about these celebrations, in
Speaker 1: particular about the stars business to visit to customer Um
Speaker 1: a city not not too far from from Moscow in
Speaker 1: which you have these big celebrations and the nobility welcome
Speaker 1: you and the crowds of cheering peasants. This is exactly
Speaker 1: what Nicholas wanted to see, and it's he's able to
Speaker 1: convince himself that that this is um uh, that this
Speaker 1: is the political reality. And so it's dangerous in a
Speaker 1: certain way right when you when you start using your
Speaker 1: own product. But he had always sort of used his
Speaker 1: own product, right, He he was always imbewing himself with
Speaker 1: this notion that he was a popular um Russian star,
Speaker 1: and that stars don't get their authority by being voted
Speaker 1: or survey But but it's just this mystical thing. You're
Speaker 1: born with it, and then and then the peasants recognize it,
Speaker 1: and it helps to to reinforce that now there there
Speaker 1: is you know. Warman also points out in this article,
Speaker 1: you know that there are those that are critical of
Speaker 1: this and saying, you know, you need to you need
Speaker 1: to be have a more complicated sense of what politics
Speaker 1: actually looks like, um, if you're gonna understand this, because
Speaker 1: many people are not happy with this. Indeed, some some
Speaker 1: of the nobility boycott the visit. They're not really visible
Speaker 1: uh to him at that moment, because you know, there
Speaker 1: are big problems and uh, and and sort of having
Speaker 1: these big parades is not solving them. And there's a
Speaker 1: point when King Hacken of Norway, who of course was irrelevant.
Speaker 1: I think, you know, all those related to each other. Uh.
Speaker 1: And this is reported widely in the in the US
Speaker 1: press of the time, and I just found it so
Speaker 1: fascinating that one of his royal relatives was saying, if
Speaker 1: you want to stave off real trouble, you know, he's
Speaker 1: thinking revolution, You've got to let Poland have independence. You've
Speaker 1: got to let the little Russians, you know, Ukraine have independence,
Speaker 1: and you've got to institute these reforms. How would how
Speaker 1: would Nicholas have received something like that? I mean, we
Speaker 1: kind of know he did nothing along those We kind
Speaker 1: of know how he received them, but it would be
Speaker 1: great to have you just say, how would Nicolas have
Speaker 1: received that from another monarch who's telling and hey, institute
Speaker 1: some democratic reforms. Yeah, you know this. I mean it's
Speaker 1: important to understand that when comes along, it's it's at
Speaker 1: you're already having sort of a early crest of this
Speaker 1: decolonizing process. Uh, you're seeing it already in the Balkans um. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, there are two Balkan wars that proceede UM
Speaker 1: World War one and and you see the Ottoman Empire
Speaker 1: being pushed out Uh, not only and not not in
Speaker 1: favor of other empires, but in favor of new nationalizing
Speaker 1: states like Serbia and Bulgaria. UM. So in you're seeing
Speaker 1: the same thing in Britain. The home rule debate over
Speaker 1: Ireland is feverish in the in the months leading up
Speaker 1: to fourteen. And this is the kind of thing that
Speaker 1: was being proposed. And I think this is what Hawkins
Speaker 1: is saying, to write, give home rule, not necessarily independence
Speaker 1: to Poland and Ukraine, but home rule to them, and
Speaker 1: try to make some concessions to have UM something other
Speaker 1: than sort of a completely Russian dominated state, gives some
Speaker 1: voice to your to your stituents. And this fell on
Speaker 1: UM welcome ears. Not not among the c's are UH
Speaker 1: and his family, but but among others in the Russian
Speaker 1: political system who did see this as and especially for
Speaker 1: centrist and left wings, centrist, the Cadet Party, the Constitutional
Speaker 1: Democratic Party, this was their vision that they're pushing what
Speaker 1: that would eventually call federalism UM, a federal solution to empire,
Speaker 1: which is to say, okay, we realize that people don't
Speaker 1: like the empire because Russia has dominated all of you.
Speaker 1: But what if we had a multi ethnic state in
Speaker 1: which everybody had um sort of regional representation and authority
Speaker 1: within their own regions, some sort of federal solution. And
Speaker 1: this becomes the dream of many who don't want to
Speaker 1: give up on the idea of a of a large
Speaker 1: Russian state. But I want to acknowledge that there are
Speaker 1: legitimate political demands by by other ethnic groups within the state.
Speaker 1: And that's kind of the direction that I think Hacken
Speaker 1: is suggesting. And again, that's not something that that that
Speaker 1: Nicholas is inclined to want to want to do. The
Speaker 1: difficulty is that Nicholas himself um, starting in nineteen fourteen,
Speaker 1: become begins to play a much larger role in developing
Speaker 1: ethno politics, to encouraging the idea that you should mobilize
Speaker 1: around your ethnicity and so um. He tries to do
Speaker 1: some of that in the midst of the war as well. So,
Speaker 1: and this is this is the toxic combination that explodes
Speaker 1: over the course of the war. Could you say a
Speaker 1: few more words on that toxic combination? What's going through
Speaker 1: and why is it so bad? Yeah? So, the first
Speaker 1: thing many of these empires do, they're bordering each other, right,
Speaker 1: many of them have the same ethnic groups on either
Speaker 1: side of the Let's take Ukrainians for instance. They're Ukrainians,
Speaker 1: and the Austraungarian Empire their Ukrainians and the Russian Empire. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, there are Poles in the German Empire, there
Speaker 1: are polls in Austerngarian Empire, they're polls in the Russian Empire.
Speaker 1: So the first thing they think of is, Okay, let's
Speaker 1: let's leverage this nationalism. Let's try to defeat our enemy
Speaker 1: by leading to revolutions. So we're gonna try to encourage
Speaker 1: Poles in the Russian Empire to push for independence if
Speaker 1: you're in Germany, and vice versa. The Germans tried to
Speaker 1: convince umh Islamic leaders all over the world that they
Speaker 1: need to launch a jahad against the British and Russian empires.
Speaker 1: That doesn't go anywhere really, But but the idea is,
Speaker 1: let's stimulate nationalism ethno nationalism as a way of undermining empire.
Speaker 1: The problem is, of course, you are also in a
Speaker 1: multi ethnic empire at the polls are also living in Germany.
Speaker 1: So like if you're gonna have an independent Poland, you're
Speaker 1: also and the other side is also doing that, right,
Speaker 1: So pow camps get get aligned around ethnic groups and
Speaker 1: you send them back into their into their countries to
Speaker 1: try to be subversives. And so they all of them
Speaker 1: mobilized nationalism. Um, and it helps, I mean, nationalism grows
Speaker 1: immensely over the course of the war, and all of
Speaker 1: these empires collapse at the end of the war. And
Speaker 1: they helped it happen because this is the exposure combination.
Speaker 1: They because they had to mobilize, and because they thought
Speaker 1: that nationalism was the most powerful mobilizational tool. They encourage nationalism,
Speaker 1: which is anti imperial at its at its core, and
Speaker 1: that that helps break all these empires apart. Mhm um.
Speaker 1: Before you know, on the on the road to war,
Speaker 1: you note that Russian politicians wanted to avoid war. You
Speaker 1: include Nicholas and this of course you even right that
Speaker 1: he was kind of pr Marry among the people who
Speaker 1: thought war would be a bad thing. Um. Can you
Speaker 1: say a little bit about how each of these you know,
Speaker 1: maybe different levels of the blood of the state, of
Speaker 1: the Russian state, Duma, Nicholas, Um, why did they why
Speaker 1: did they want to avoid war? Yeah, all of them
Speaker 1: thought that war was not in their interests, especially in
Speaker 1: the short term. There's no real lobby for war in
Speaker 1: in the Russian Empire. They're they're all very well, look,
Speaker 1: we've already discussed nineteen o five, the last war had
Speaker 1: almost led to the end of the regime. UM it
Speaker 1: caused a lot of problems. They all knew that it
Speaker 1: caused problems. They were trying. They had a large military
Speaker 1: expansion plan that was just underway. Um they were going
Speaker 1: to be much more strong in five years than they were,
Speaker 1: you know, in nineteen fourteen. This was one of the reasons,
Speaker 1: by the way, that Germany wanted to launch war in
Speaker 1: nineteen fourteen, because they also knew that that that Russia
Speaker 1: was going to be much stronger as time went on.
Speaker 1: UM So they didn't want any they didn't want any
Speaker 1: any part of of the war. Uh So, the question
Speaker 1: is how how do they end up in a war
Speaker 1: that they that that they don't want to see. And
Speaker 1: this is a very complicated and much studied process that
Speaker 1: called the called the July crisis uh in which in
Speaker 1: the month before the outbreak of the war, all of this,
Speaker 1: all of this wrangling happens. The short answer to this
Speaker 1: is that UM Russia believes that if it backs away,
Speaker 1: if it lets Serbia be conquered basically by Austria Hungary,
Speaker 1: then they will have lost their seat at the Club
Speaker 1: of Great Powers. They're gonna have shown fundamental weakness and
Speaker 1: they have to show strength. Um. And they knew what
Speaker 1: happened to empires that that that fell out of the club.
Speaker 1: Look what happened to the Ottoman Empire, Look what happened
Speaker 1: to the Chinese Empire. These are places that are being
Speaker 1: you know, colonized and dismembered by by by the victors.
Speaker 1: And so you have to remain a member of that
Speaker 1: great power club. And they convinced themselves that they have
Speaker 1: to stand firm for for Serbia in order to do so.
Speaker 1: So what they tried to do is they try to
Speaker 1: isolate Austria Hungary from Germany right to say, look, you know,
Speaker 1: if we can make this between Russian and Austria Hungry,
Speaker 1: they're going to have to back back down or we'll
Speaker 1: beat them one on one in a war. Um, we
Speaker 1: just don't want war with with Germany. At the same time,
Speaker 1: so what happens over the course of this um of
Speaker 1: this process is they want to they want to sort
Speaker 1: of move from a position of strength. They want to say, look,
Speaker 1: we're gonna We're gonna forcefully say we're going to defend them,
Speaker 1: and that's gonna be a deterrent because Germany probably also
Speaker 1: doesn't want war, and Austria Hungary can't afford to fight
Speaker 1: us alone, so we're gonna try to divide that alliance. UM.
Speaker 1: So they're they're early partial mobilization is only mobilization on
Speaker 1: the border of the Austra Hungarian Empire. UM. Nicholas and
Speaker 1: uh sends telegrams to to to Wilhelm saying, look, I
Speaker 1: don't want war. What can we do to avoid this? UM.
Speaker 1: Nicholas personally again doesn't want to see this, I think
Speaker 1: both for just he doesn't much like war, but he also,
Speaker 1: you know, sees the problems that that it can create. UM.
Speaker 1: But at the end of the day, they say, look,
Speaker 1: we can't back down at this moment, uh and and
Speaker 1: we have to. We have to mobilize because it's gonna
Speaker 1: take us longer to mobilize than than it's gonna take
Speaker 1: Germany to mobilize. So UM, you know this this the
Speaker 1: logic of the end of this process is that they're
Speaker 1: going to move towards a general mobilization, which they continue
Speaker 1: to insist to Germany doesn't have to mean war. We're mobilizing,
Speaker 1: just don't invade us. But Germany insists throughout the July
Speaker 1: crisis any movement towards mobilization is a declaration of war. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: many historians after the fact have also accepted that. They said, look,
Speaker 1: Russia created the war because they mobilized, but it's not
Speaker 1: mobilization isn't a declaration of war. Its only the Germans
Speaker 1: said it. That's that that's the only reason that people
Speaker 1: are are taking it as a declaration of war, right,
Speaker 1: And this gets back to the larger question of why
Speaker 1: Germany wants war at that particular moment, and why Austria
Speaker 1: Hungary wants war at that particular moment, and and and
Speaker 1: that's you know, obviously there's been a lot of discussion
Speaker 1: about that, but but that's how Russia goes to war
Speaker 1: despite the fact that there's no constituency for it within
Speaker 1: the Russian political system. And you've already said a few
Speaker 1: things about why you refer to World War One in
Speaker 1: your book as the Third Balkan War. Would you want
Speaker 1: to elaborate on that A little bit. Yeah, sure, it
Speaker 1: certainly begins that way. Um. As I mentioned before, there
Speaker 1: are two wars that are called the Balkan Wars um UH,
Speaker 1: that were the occasion for getting the Ottoman Empire out
Speaker 1: of the Balkan, out of the Balkan peninsula. These happened
Speaker 1: in nineteen twelve and in nineteen thirteen. In nineteen twelve,
Speaker 1: you get all of these um regions, all these nationalists movements,
Speaker 1: many of which have support from Russia, being able to
Speaker 1: push the Ottomans off. So we're looking at you know, Serbia, um,
Speaker 1: we're a greater Serbia, who are looking at um Uh, Bulgaria, Greece,
Speaker 1: all of these countries, Macedonia. Yeah, while Macedonia is contested,
Speaker 1: Montenegro also being a part of this coalition, and they
Speaker 1: win the war quite quickly against the Ottomans. And this
Speaker 1: is quite clearly an anti imperial war. That is to say,
Speaker 1: it's on the part of nationalist movements, and it's not
Speaker 1: saying we prefer one empire over another. We're saying that
Speaker 1: that imperial rule as such is something that ought to
Speaker 1: be contested. So that's that's why it's kind of a
Speaker 1: decolonizing war. But as with many decolonizing wars. This just
Speaker 1: opens up a new question of regional power and you
Speaker 1: get these new nations states start to act like many
Speaker 1: empires themselves, most notably Serbia in this case, and this
Speaker 1: is what causes the second Balkan War between Serbia and
Speaker 1: Bulgaria over the question of Macedonia Um. And so already
Speaker 1: you see that de colonization isn't an and another words,
Speaker 1: nationalism doesn't just come when the empire leaves. That just
Speaker 1: opens up at the more interesting phase of politics, honestly,
Speaker 1: and the more and the more violent phase frankly, of
Speaker 1: of the politics of the colonization. And so you have
Speaker 1: these first two Balkan wars, and the third wars, as
Speaker 1: we all know, is triggered in in the Balkans in
Speaker 1: Sarajevo with the assassination of the heir to the Austro
Speaker 1: Hungarian throne. This is an assassination that is not random.
Speaker 1: H Franz Ferdinand is in Sarajevo to oversee military maneuvers um.
Speaker 1: They have just recently a next the territory uh they
Speaker 1: had occupied it since since eighteen seventy eight, and they're
Speaker 1: just recently formally next it in nineteen o eight, and
Speaker 1: you have these um uh, these young radicals who are
Speaker 1: inspired both by nationalism but also by the Russian revolution
Speaker 1: nary movement UM now looking to to change the dynamic
Speaker 1: on the ground. These are not the people that kill France.
Speaker 1: Ferdinand are not sponsored by Russia, They're not even sponsored
Speaker 1: by the top Serbian leadership. They are sponsored by the
Speaker 1: head of military intelligence UM, who is trying to run
Speaker 1: his own sort of radical paramilitary revolutionary movement at the
Speaker 1: same time that he's that he's heading military intelligence. But
Speaker 1: Serbia has just had two wars in the last two years.
Speaker 1: They're not in any position to fight Austro Hungary at
Speaker 1: this point, and so they really drive these events and
Speaker 1: and it's and it's for that reason that we have
Speaker 1: this as a third Balkan War. Christopher Clark and his
Speaker 1: well respected and and and and uh and really great
Speaker 1: book Sleepwalkers, talks also about how you have this bal
Speaker 1: Balkan inception scenario that that develops in France, England, Germany
Speaker 1: at the same time over the course of nineteen thirteen
Speaker 1: UM by which they begin to expect that war might
Speaker 1: might happen, and which side they would take if it did. Um,
Speaker 1: and so all of these things sort of come together
Speaker 1: to have this third Balkan War, then metastasize into a
Speaker 1: broader European war, and then of course into a World War. M. So,
Speaker 1: in the as the Russian army mobilizes and conflict begins,
Speaker 1: you write that many Russian officers were already inclined to
Speaker 1: look at the world through ethnic lenses. In we We've
Speaker 1: talked a bit about that already. Um, but you you
Speaker 1: didn't say that the war prompted the high command to
Speaker 1: almost universally deploy an ethnic grid of reliability. Would you
Speaker 1: say a few words about how ethnic suspicions fed fear
Speaker 1: of spies and overtime motivated violence even against civilian populations.
Speaker 1: How ethnic you know, reliability and ethnic lines and divisions
Speaker 1: became so crucial to Russia during the war in the
Speaker 1: Russian military, Yeah, for sure. Um. The as I mentioned
Speaker 1: that they they were already well trained culturally as well
Speaker 1: as professionally to think of the world in ethnic term
Speaker 1: ms Uh. Virtually all of them were anti Semitic. That
Speaker 1: is to say, they held a wide range of beliefs
Speaker 1: about what, um, what Jews believed, what Jews did, and
Speaker 1: especially how Jews thought about the army um. They thought
Speaker 1: that on the one hand that they were um subversive
Speaker 1: in pro German and on the other hand that they
Speaker 1: were all cowardly draft dodgers. So they had this wide
Speaker 1: ranging and very toxic view of of of Jews in
Speaker 1: the region, and they were they believed, not completely unreasonably
Speaker 1: that ethnic Germans, there are plenty of ethnic Germans living
Speaker 1: in the in the Russian borderlands, we're going to be
Speaker 1: sympathetic to the German armies that that we're moving in.
Speaker 1: By the same token, there pan Slavism inclined them to
Speaker 1: think that at the end of the day, the polls
Speaker 1: would rather be part of Russia than part of Austria,
Speaker 1: Hungary or Germany. This was not true for the most case,
Speaker 1: but most of them believed it um And so what
Speaker 1: what they end up doing is um. And this was
Speaker 1: a lot of the archival work I did was looking
Speaker 1: through the sort of cases of of purported espionage in
Speaker 1: these frontline zones. In the first couple of years of
Speaker 1: the war, they go through and counter intelligence agents, they
Speaker 1: will go through and they'll arrest all of the Jews,
Speaker 1: they will deport all the Germans, and then they'll be
Speaker 1: surprised that there are still spies there because they're the
Speaker 1: Germans Austerngarians. They're they're sending polls, but they're also just
Speaker 1: hiring local Russians there, you know, like the the espionage
Speaker 1: is not being conducted solely on on on ethnic terms.
Speaker 1: But that's the sort of grid of reliability that I'm
Speaker 1: talking about here. So when the Russian army moves into
Speaker 1: these territories, and remember many of these territories are on
Speaker 1: the Russian side of the border, but you now have
Speaker 1: this massive amount of troops coming in there, and they
Speaker 1: need to requisition goods, they need to make sure there's
Speaker 1: no rebellions, they need need need to make sure there's
Speaker 1: no espionage. They start basically engaging in ethno politics and
Speaker 1: this ranges from you know, suspicion to deportation to executions. Um,
Speaker 1: your your your political stances is assumed to be flowing
Speaker 1: from your ethnic belonging. So let's talk a little more
Speaker 1: about anti German sentiment. Um, how widespread was it? Say?
Speaker 1: In nine Yeah, Um, anti German sentiment really develops. Well,
Speaker 1: it has a history. Um, already before the war, the
Speaker 1: German communities in the Russian Empire. UM. Many of them
Speaker 1: were UM UH, they retained their German nous, they lived
Speaker 1: in their their own villages UM, and they were often
Speaker 1: quite prosperous. Uh. They're stretched out across the Vulgar River.
Speaker 1: There's many of them in Ukraine. UM. And and also
Speaker 1: there are many UH German businessmen basically in the big
Speaker 1: cities UM who who control a lot of the UM,
Speaker 1: who control a lot of finance and control a lot
Speaker 1: of manufacturing honestly in in in the big cities in
Speaker 1: the in the Russian Empire too. So there's already sort
Speaker 1: of this potential for UM for social antagonism by by
Speaker 1: ethnic Russians who say, why are these guys making all
Speaker 1: the money in our country when we're when when we're
Speaker 1: not able to why are they dominating us? This is
Speaker 1: the propaganda theme is German dominance, German dominance. How do
Speaker 1: we undo German dominance in our country? And this is
Speaker 1: gonna get linked, as I said before to Alexandra, eventually
Speaker 1: the UM because of her German upbringing, but it it
Speaker 1: has its roots much much deeper in these social antagonisms. Now,
Speaker 1: when war gets declared and you have a massive propaganda
Speaker 1: campaign unleashed, all across Europe to sort of demonize your enemies.
Speaker 1: The same thing happens in Russia, and they're good reasons
Speaker 1: why anti Germanism is gonna spread quite quickly in the borderlands.
Speaker 1: The Germans do come in and in a couple of
Speaker 1: notorious incidents, as they had in Belgium, they raised towns,
Speaker 1: they they execute civilians, They do UM a lot of
Speaker 1: brutal things, and and this leads um UH to rumors
Speaker 1: of German beast reality basically spreading throughout UM, spreading throughout
Speaker 1: the big cities in the Empire too. This is gonna
Speaker 1: culminate UM at the very beginning of the big Russian
Speaker 1: defeats in nineteen fifteen, in a series of pogroms in
Speaker 1: Moscow in particular, in which UH not only German but
Speaker 1: virtually all are Many foreign stores um are are are
Speaker 1: attacked UH as as part of by popular mobs and
Speaker 1: looted UM by virtue of being German, and the state
Speaker 1: then moves or to also sequester this property or and
Speaker 1: sees land and factories and such from from from German
Speaker 1: speakers and especially from people who remain German citizens. Mhm
Speaker 1: UM is also when we see a retreat from Poland
Speaker 1: UM by the Russian military. Can you talk a little
Speaker 1: bit about that and who was taking responsibility for strategic
Speaker 1: decisions during night? Yeah. So when the war begins, UM
Speaker 1: Nicholas considers briefly UM going to the front as commander
Speaker 1: in chief himself. There had been a long tradition of
Speaker 1: thinking about the autocrat as the military leader of the country.
Speaker 1: But there was also a tradition, most notably in the
Speaker 1: Napoleonic Wars, of of of of delegating most of the
Speaker 1: command authority or near all the command authority to professional generals.
Speaker 1: And so UM He's persuad did at that point to
Speaker 1: UM to appoint a commander in chief UM. He commit
Speaker 1: uh appoints his his relative, the Grand Duke Nikola Nikolaevitch,
Speaker 1: who had had a military career UM who then assembles
Speaker 1: a staff, most notably his um UH his chief of
Speaker 1: staff UM a guy named General Youanshkyevitch UH. And it's
Speaker 1: they are the head of the so called Stavka or
Speaker 1: or supreme headquarters. But there's significant um Uh. There's significant
Speaker 1: UM influence also for UM front commanders and individual army commanders.
Speaker 1: It's a huge army, and each front has several armies
Speaker 1: under it, and and then each of those commanders are
Speaker 1: are also going to have are gonna have significant authority.
Speaker 1: But ultimately it's going to be Grand Duke Nikola Nikolaevitch
Speaker 1: and his in his chief of staff Youngshkevich. Um. This
Speaker 1: retreat happened, I mean, and much of the reason for
Speaker 1: this retreat um has to do with with mismanagement on
Speaker 1: the part of General Headquarters. Um. It begins near the
Speaker 1: uh sort of the north end of the Carpathian Mountains,
Speaker 1: near the Polish towns of Garliza and tarnough Um. But
Speaker 1: then it's gonna spread all the way first actually kind
Speaker 1: of through through Ukraine before you have the big big
Speaker 1: blow into sort of Congress Poland or or the Russian
Speaker 1: Kingdom of Poland Um later on in the summer of
Speaker 1: nineteen fifteen. UM. And the basic problem is they're not
Speaker 1: able to mobilize reserves to to patch the holes in
Speaker 1: the line that get that get blown apart in a
Speaker 1: couple of these battles. It's this is a consistent problem
Speaker 1: in World War One for all armies, which is that uh,
Speaker 1: they most of them believe that you have to could
Speaker 1: gather these enormous amounts of shells and break a hole
Speaker 1: in the enemy's line and then break through and force
Speaker 1: a retreat that way. But the problem is, once you
Speaker 1: consolidate all of that, they can see you doing that,
Speaker 1: and when you start bombarding, they know where you're gonna
Speaker 1: hit it, and they retreat from it. And then you
Speaker 1: break through the lines, and then the reserves come up
Speaker 1: to to to push you back. So it's quite frequently
Speaker 1: the case, actually on all fronts, that that the first
Speaker 1: line of trenches is taken by by enemies. This notion
Speaker 1: that they never get across no man's land is simply
Speaker 1: not true. Um But the problem is that reserves are
Speaker 1: usually um deployed with sufficient um uh skill that that
Speaker 1: you're unable to develop that breakthrough into something more strategically
Speaker 1: meaningful and um the difference in nineteen fifteen is that
Speaker 1: the Russians mismanage those reserves and they are able to
Speaker 1: achieve this breakthrough. And once you have this breakthrough, you know,
Speaker 1: once you get behind the lines, uh, it forces a
Speaker 1: retreat all across the line so that people don't get
Speaker 1: pinned in between in between two forces. So most of
Speaker 1: the retreat happens um uh you know, not because you're
Speaker 1: being fought from uh, from the troops that are facing you,
Speaker 1: but you're worried about troops coming into the back of you,
Speaker 1: and you have to flee backwards, and then you get
Speaker 1: harassed and chased UM as you're being driven back. And
Speaker 1: this it's gets called the Great Retreat in Russia. They
Speaker 1: basically abandoned all of Poland, UM, much of Ukraine, UM,
Speaker 1: much of Lithuania, much of Belarus. UH. It's it's an
Speaker 1: enormous retreat. It's the most significant um UH offensive in
Speaker 1: in in the European theater really throughout the war. I mean,
Speaker 1: you can make a case for nineteen eighteen and what
Speaker 1: happens on the Western Front, but but that actually is
Speaker 1: less territory than than then you're seeing here in nineteen
Speaker 1: fifteen mm hm. And you're right that this is also
Speaker 1: the real fracture of the imperial political system that occurs
Speaker 1: during the summer of nineteen fifteen. What were those events
Speaker 1: that you know, So if nineteen o five is when
Speaker 1: that mass mass politics, that switch is flipped, but here's
Speaker 1: where we real fracture of empire. What what was it
Speaker 1: that happened here? So nineteen fourteen when the wars declared,
Speaker 1: there's an agreement made by virtually all political parties, excluding
Speaker 1: the far far left like the Bolsheviks, excluding them, but
Speaker 1: virtually everyone else enter what they call a sacred union.
Speaker 1: They said, Okay, we're gonna quit politics, We're gonna disband
Speaker 1: the Duma. Um, We're gonna let the Sarus government run
Speaker 1: the war and we'll get back to our political questions
Speaker 1: when when the fighting is done. But we're gonna let
Speaker 1: that's our fight and run this war effort and his
Speaker 1: administration fight and run the war. In the space of
Speaker 1: uh less than a year, they've runned into the ground. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, there are massive problems with supplies, there's massive
Speaker 1: problems with treating wounded soldiers. There are you have this
Speaker 1: huge retreat. Um, you have the encirclement of the Second
Speaker 1: Army in nineteen fourteen and the suicide of its commander.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's just a disaster that that Thats administration
Speaker 1: has demonstrated that it's incapable of effectively running this war effort.
Speaker 1: And that's um, you know that that problem uh means
Speaker 1: the end of the sacred union. People as patriots have
Speaker 1: to say, look, we can't just sit here and watch
Speaker 1: this happen anymore. We have to get involved, we have
Speaker 1: to do something. And they do this sort a wide
Speaker 1: variety of ways, um from forming you know, sort of
Speaker 1: relief agencies to building hospitals to um a wide variety ways.
Speaker 1: But they also do it politically. They started to say, okay,
Speaker 1: we need to get more involved politically. We have to
Speaker 1: have um, you know, discussions between thats are and his
Speaker 1: administration and these other public figures, especially those prominent figures
Speaker 1: centrist figures in the Duma, who can bring the country
Speaker 1: along and we can maybe start to repair some of
Speaker 1: the some of the damage that's done. So this is
Speaker 1: the movement that happens over the course of the of
Speaker 1: the summer. At the same time, you're starting starting to
Speaker 1: see a reinvigration of the strike wave. Strikes had basically
Speaker 1: ceased in nineteen fourteen, labor unrest had basically ceased, But
Speaker 1: now nineteen fifteen you're starting a number of big strikes again,
Speaker 1: many of them are being shot at by by policemen. UM.
Speaker 1: So you're starting to see that social unrest building again,
Speaker 1: and you you get what gets called the progressive block
Speaker 1: that is supposed to sort of help that's ours administration
Speaker 1: sort of jointly now run the war effort. UH. And
Speaker 1: what happens in nineteen fifteen is this progressive block gets
Speaker 1: built from again on a spectrum from the left to
Speaker 1: the to the conservative right UM and they say, okay,
Speaker 1: we're gonna do this, and at the last minute that's
Speaker 1: our backs out and says, no, this is an aggregation
Speaker 1: of constitutional power. I'm going to disband the DOOMA, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna fire most of my ministers, and I'm going to
Speaker 1: run this war effort and I'm going to go to
Speaker 1: the front personally to do it. So he completely rejects
Speaker 1: this at this political effort to um uh to work together.
Speaker 1: And now the people on the outside are left basically saying, okay,
Speaker 1: what what can we do to try to save our country?
Speaker 1: And that's that's the story of the next sort of
Speaker 1: year and a half is you know, how do they
Speaker 1: continue to try to run the government, how do they
Speaker 1: continue to try to help refugees while at the same
Speaker 1: time saying, look, we're not going to we're not going
Speaker 1: to solve this problem until we get rid of the autocracy. M.
Speaker 1: And it's it's in October of fifteen, after all of
Speaker 1: these events that Nicholas rights to Stanley Washburn, we have
Speaker 1: no public opinion in Russia, and you've already talked a
Speaker 1: little bit about his kind of rejection of ground up
Speaker 1: politics and and the way that he thinks politics should run.
Speaker 1: But you know, so I've asked you here to describe
Speaker 1: what he meant by that. You've kind of already given
Speaker 1: us a picture. Maybe instead, how could he still think
Speaker 1: this like after this summer, after so much clear popular opposition,
Speaker 1: whether it's strikers, whether it's you know, political parties opposing
Speaker 1: him his rule, how can he still think this way? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean the capacity for self deception among humans is
Speaker 1: quite high, you know. It's um and and this again,
Speaker 1: he's for him to recognize that that politics in Russia
Speaker 1: was modern politics, That you do have things like coalescing
Speaker 1: public opinion, that you do have pressure groups, that you
Speaker 1: do have constituencies rather than a passive population that you
Speaker 1: run by divine right. It is fundamentally something that if
Speaker 1: you were to accept that, it would mean he would
Speaker 1: have to accept that he's not a legitimate Sorry, he's
Speaker 1: not a legitimate leader. Um And he's he's unwilling to
Speaker 1: do that. Um And and he doesn't understand it. Right that.
Speaker 1: You know, earlier in this conversation with Washburn, Um, Washburn
Speaker 1: is expressing his his regret over American politics, and he
Speaker 1: says Nicholas sort of blinks and looks at him, says,
Speaker 1: I don't understand anything about your politics, Like he doesn't
Speaker 1: understand how electoral politics really work, even though he's had
Speaker 1: the doom over the last you know, he doesn't understand
Speaker 1: about sort of why, why why Wilson is is in
Speaker 1: trouble or not in trouble, like all of that stuff
Speaker 1: is just um. He just says, I don't understand it. Um.
Speaker 1: It's it's not the way that um uh that that
Speaker 1: he thinks about politics, so um. And that's what he
Speaker 1: means by no public opinion. It's not that people don't
Speaker 1: have opinions. He knows people have opinions, and you know
Speaker 1: that that that there's no consolidation of this in a
Speaker 1: way that would represent the national will. Right, That's what
Speaker 1: public opinion really means. And this is the distinction that
Speaker 1: begins to happen, is that that's a believes that he
Speaker 1: by definition represents the nation and what's happening over the
Speaker 1: course of the war is that Russians are understanding no,
Speaker 1: our national interests, our national identity, our national community is
Speaker 1: defined by us. It's not defined by that'sar. And in
Speaker 1: fact that SSAR is alien to that and and working
Speaker 1: against its best interests. And when and when that finally
Speaker 1: gets realized, that of course makes it untenable for that's
Speaker 1: are to continue. M So you say Nicholas disbands the
Speaker 1: Duma at the time, this wasn't the first time, right,
Speaker 1: How is Nicholas thinking about the Duma relating to it?
Speaker 1: If you're saying, well, there's no there's no public opinion.
Speaker 1: He so, you know, kind of functionally he says, there's
Speaker 1: no Duma either, I'm just gonna run this war. Can
Speaker 1: you say a little bit more about how Nicholas dealt
Speaker 1: with the Douma and and political functionaries below. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean fundamentally, the way he does it is by
Speaker 1: having his his prime minister at um deal with it
Speaker 1: and his other ministers deal with it um. Uh. He
Speaker 1: doesn't want to appear before the Dooma. When he does,
Speaker 1: he normally insults them and and there's sort of bad relations,
Speaker 1: and so he wants to have as little to do
Speaker 1: with them as possible, even the ones that the centrist
Speaker 1: ones UM, guys like Alexander Gutchkov UM, who are basically
Speaker 1: working for to to try to stabilize the system. He
Speaker 1: dislikes them personally. He he doesn't you know, he doesn't
Speaker 1: want to have anything really to do with them, and
Speaker 1: so he kind of insists that his his, his ministers
Speaker 1: do that work. And that's one of the problems in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifteen is that is that the ministers have done
Speaker 1: that work, and and all but one of them basically
Speaker 1: agrees that, yeah, we have to work together with them.
Speaker 1: And so nineteen sixteen, the doom is gonna meet a
Speaker 1: couple more times, briefly early in the year and then
Speaker 1: in a very um explosive section session late in the year,
Speaker 1: in in November leading up to December. UM that UM,
Speaker 1: they're they're going to sort of force their way back
Speaker 1: onto onto the agenda. UM. And so uh Nicholas contents
Speaker 1: himself with thinking, Okay, well, I'm going to be at
Speaker 1: the front. He's actually not doing a lot of the
Speaker 1: military leadership at that point. UM. That's his chief of staff,
Speaker 1: a guy named Mikhail Alexeyeff, who's doing most of that work. UM.
Speaker 1: And um and frankly, um, most of the political work
Speaker 1: in the country is being done outside of the formal
Speaker 1: government itself. That is to say, if you're asking who's
Speaker 1: providing food to refugees, who's building hospitals for soldiers, it's
Speaker 1: actually not the government anymore. It's it's these it's these uh,
Speaker 1: it's these public organizations uh that that that are doing
Speaker 1: a lot of this work. And so politics has moved
Speaker 1: out of the state and into these sort of paris
Speaker 1: statal organizations. You write that one concrete outcome of the
Speaker 1: offensives of nineteen sixteen was that progressive projects for social
Speaker 1: renovation and mobilization could be married to political demands forre dictatorship.
Speaker 1: Just say a few more words on that. Yeah, Um,
Speaker 1: you know there's this What I'm trying to describe in
Speaker 1: that chapter is the development of a kind of technocratic progressivism.
Speaker 1: That is to say, this is not that that um
Speaker 1: progressivism defined by expertise. Um, that you're going to achieve
Speaker 1: progressive goals by having experts determine how to run an
Speaker 1: education system, a healthcare system, or military system for that matter. Right. So, um,
Speaker 1: so you don't need necessarily to have to deal with
Speaker 1: the messy politics of of of mass politics and elections
Speaker 1: and all those sorts of things. And so you're seeing
Speaker 1: these efforts to say, Okay, we know best how to
Speaker 1: fix this war effort because we're experts where government experts
Speaker 1: were scientists or whatever, um and um, and these movements
Speaker 1: to try to fix the war through this, through this
Speaker 1: sort of progressive technocratic lens um lends itself in a
Speaker 1: certain way towards saying, okay, well let's think about how
Speaker 1: we would run the in wartime. And this is definitely
Speaker 1: not the majority of you. I think most progressive um
Speaker 1: want to see something much more um democratic frankly um
Speaker 1: than uh than the autocracy or military dictatorship would be.
Speaker 1: But within the military itself and within Alex say for
Speaker 1: Alex say of himself as the chief of staff, the
Speaker 1: notion that look all of this, all of the Csars family,
Speaker 1: they're causing all these problems, um uh you know, so
Speaker 1: much sort of confusion, um, all of these sort of
Speaker 1: groups running around, we're not coordinating them. Well, we're wasting
Speaker 1: a lot of money. If we just have a military
Speaker 1: dictatorship that is able to to consolidate the war effort, um,
Speaker 1: then we're gonna be able to win the war and
Speaker 1: then we can figure out the politics later. And so
Speaker 1: that's again sort of thinking about it in terms of
Speaker 1: that competence. Now, this is an assumption of military competence
Speaker 1: that is not borne out at One of the points
Speaker 1: I try to make in the book is that throughout
Speaker 1: the military keep military keeps saying, oh, we we know
Speaker 1: best how to do this. If we run it, it's
Speaker 1: going to be orderly, because we're the military things that
Speaker 1: we orderedly. In fact, when the military takes over these
Speaker 1: state functions, they do a really bad job of it
Speaker 1: and at least to chaos in many places. So this
Speaker 1: automatic assumption that the military means order, um, which is
Speaker 1: widespread not only Russia but obviously around the world, is
Speaker 1: sort of a dominant feature of the way that the
Speaker 1: military perceives itself, turns out not to be the case
Speaker 1: many times on the ground, and so, um, you know,
Speaker 1: I think a military dictatorship would have been um, quite disastrous.
Speaker 1: You know, there was already kind of military dictatorship in
Speaker 1: the front line zones, and I described throughout the book
Speaker 1: about the problems that emerged there. So you write that
Speaker 1: on the surface, the period between the great retreat and
Speaker 1: the revolutionary crisis of seventeen was marked by statist But
Speaker 1: how would you sketch out the important changes occurring in
Speaker 1: Russian society? While attention was focused on scrutin, the kadok
Speaker 1: were led of ministerial appointments. He inspired Petrograd kind of
Speaker 1: palace intrigue and suspicion of Germans. What was actually happening
Speaker 1: while the kind of intrigue was taking the focus UM,
Speaker 1: A number of of things are making the experience of
Speaker 1: people in the empire much worse. So if you're in
Speaker 1: the front line or near the front line, UM, you're
Speaker 1: experiencing a lot of personal insecurity in terms of violence.
Speaker 1: You're starting to see a breakdown of social order in
Speaker 1: many of these places, led in many cases by by
Speaker 1: deserting or off duty soldiers. But even far away from
Speaker 1: the front um, one of the key things that happens
Speaker 1: over the course of the war is UM is a
Speaker 1: worsening standard of living driven by rapid inflation UM and UH.
Speaker 1: This is a problem that that curs government can't get around.
Speaker 1: It mismanages its monetary policy, but it also just fails
Speaker 1: to come to terms with the UM. Big changes in
Speaker 1: supply and demand for various things in the Empire over
Speaker 1: the course of the war. Plus they attack many of
Speaker 1: the merchants and and and arrest them right because um,
Speaker 1: because they're suspicious of merchants, and especially of Jewish merchants.
Speaker 1: And so this, all of this leads to UM to
Speaker 1: on the one hand, inflation and on the other hand,
Speaker 1: um good shortages. And so you're starting to see by
Speaker 1: the especially by the time we get to the turn
Speaker 1: of the yr into nineteen seven and team um you
Speaker 1: know breadlines, UM, the discussion of the need for rationing. UM,
Speaker 1: You're starting to see the supply situation deteriorate in terms
Speaker 1: of trains being able to to ship what they need
Speaker 1: to on time. Um. All of these things are are
Speaker 1: beginning to deteriorate, and social relations are also becoming more
Speaker 1: and more poisonous. Ethno politics has done its role there.
Speaker 1: This wide sort of influx of of refugees and the
Speaker 1: difficulties of dealing with them has has helped poison the
Speaker 1: um UM, the social relationships and above all this feeling
Speaker 1: that the rich are doing okay in this war and
Speaker 1: the rest of us are bearing this burden. And look
Speaker 1: at how badly they're managing it. This is becoming more
Speaker 1: and more dominant among all sectors of society. And so
Speaker 1: you know, kind of what who rest Putin thinks should
Speaker 1: be the Minister of you know, of whatever, you know,
Speaker 1: Minister of Interior, let's say, UM, that doesn't have a
Speaker 1: huge bearing on people's lives. You know, they're seeing things
Speaker 1: just just collapsing. And and it's not the result of
Speaker 1: a particular minister any thing. It's the whole structure. It's
Speaker 1: it's autocracy itself that has led them into this problem.
Speaker 1: M Can you describe the class dimensions of women serving
Speaker 1: as sisters of Mercy during the war. We'll talk a
Speaker 1: little bit more about dealing with the wounded and how
Speaker 1: significant casualties were. Um, let's start with sisters of mercy?
Speaker 1: Who were they? And you write really meaningfully about the
Speaker 1: class dimensions of service. Yeah, So women are looking to
Speaker 1: get involved in the war quite early and and and
Speaker 1: many of them quite earnestly, um throughout the war. And
Speaker 1: you know, there are a number of good um recent
Speaker 1: studies of nurses during the war, most notably by Laurie Staff,
Speaker 1: who has done the most extensive work on on them. UM.
Speaker 1: And so you you do end up getting people from UH,
Speaker 1: from UH, from a range of backgrounds serving in medical
Speaker 1: services women UM UM throughout the war. But at first
Speaker 1: there's this expectation that you want to get aristocratic women
Speaker 1: to do it, that that you want to get um
Speaker 1: sort of well behaved, well born women to to do
Speaker 1: this had to do this uh dirty work with with
Speaker 1: wounded and naked men frankly right, UM. And this notion
Speaker 1: that UM that you had to have a certain sort
Speaker 1: of UM social background in order to achieve this well
Speaker 1: UM was was was prominent UM early in the war
Speaker 1: for the Red Cross more than that necessarily than for
Speaker 1: UM sisters are mercy more broadly. But that's going over
Speaker 1: the course of the war. They're going to expand at
Speaker 1: the demand um um growth. It's going to expand more
Speaker 1: and more. And so that that but that that question
Speaker 1: of the social background of these women UM, that is
Speaker 1: not quite so clear and classified mhm UM. In the
Speaker 1: first two years of the war, more than two point
Speaker 1: eight million men are wounded on the Russian side, two
Speaker 1: point five million of them require hospitalization. You've already talked
Speaker 1: a little bit about about hospitals and who was building them,
Speaker 1: and you write that the planned capacity of the medical
Speaker 1: response fell far short and the reality ease fell even
Speaker 1: below the plans. Um. Can you just say a little
Speaker 1: bit more about how failures to treat the wounded contributed
Speaker 1: to political opposition. Yeah, and this was again, this was
Speaker 1: enormously widespread. What happens at the beginning of the war, Uh,
Speaker 1: the scale of casualties um surprises everyone. It shouldn't have
Speaker 1: surprised the Russians as much as it did. There were
Speaker 1: quite large casualties in the Russian research Japanese war. Uh.
Speaker 1: They knew what industrialized warfare could do. But still it
Speaker 1: was you know, at a scale that um that they
Speaker 1: should have planned for more. But the fact was that
Speaker 1: that again that SARS administration was incapable um of getting
Speaker 1: the job done. They the structure didn't allow them to
Speaker 1: do it, the finances didn't allow them to do it. Um.
Speaker 1: And and as a result, you know, they just didn't
Speaker 1: have hospital beds. At the beginning of the war, you
Speaker 1: had trains filled with wounded and dying men that were
Speaker 1: going nowhere. Basically there was no place for them to
Speaker 1: unload their their their human cargoes. Um. And this creates
Speaker 1: immediate crisis and uh, you know up to the very
Speaker 1: highest levels. You know, the royal family itself is besieged
Speaker 1: with with complaints by you know, aristocratic kids are dying
Speaker 1: in these train cards too. It's not just lower class
Speaker 1: people and so so people are complaining quite spaciferously, quite early,
Speaker 1: and they still can't quite get it together. And this
Speaker 1: is when you get this public effort by the Union
Speaker 1: of Towns and Union of Cities. These are again sort
Speaker 1: of public organizations think about them, maybe a sort of
Speaker 1: NGOs or charitable organizations something like that. Um, they're the
Speaker 1: ones that run these fund drives. They they have these
Speaker 1: you know, they go around and people collect money to
Speaker 1: build a hospital and and they're the ones that that
Speaker 1: generate all these extra beds and indeed these these extra
Speaker 1: hospital trains. And that's one of the things that gives
Speaker 1: them um uh sort of prestige moving forward. And indeed,
Speaker 1: the very first sort of um head of the provisional
Speaker 1: government after that start abdicates is the head of this
Speaker 1: Union of Towns of cities because he has this political
Speaker 1: um weight as a result of these efforts during the war.
Speaker 1: Um you've already said a little bit about food scarcity,
Speaker 1: food supply breadlines, um and and how that kind of
Speaker 1: put pressure on the Czar's government. So we can kind
Speaker 1: of step by that, UM. But would you briefly sketch
Speaker 1: for us the events that finally did leave this lead
Speaker 1: these are to step down. Yeah, this is the so
Speaker 1: called February revolution. Um. You know, as as folks probably know,
Speaker 1: the calendar in Russia was was different up until nineteen eighteen,
Speaker 1: so many of these famous revolutionary days actually take place
Speaker 1: in different months now. But in any case, um uh,
Speaker 1: this it begins on International Women's Day, which was a
Speaker 1: relatively new socialist holiday instituted in UH as a result
Speaker 1: of the Triangle shirtwaist fire in New York City. UM
Speaker 1: and uh and and again driven by socialist parties and
Speaker 1: by labor movements as as a way to sort of
Speaker 1: recognize women within within the socialist movement. And UM so
Speaker 1: International Women's Day is provides the the opportunity for many
Speaker 1: women across the city of Petrograd to UM to go
Speaker 1: out on marches and and what they want to protest
Speaker 1: at this point, um is a series of things, the war, UH,
Speaker 1: the Tsarist administration and the fact that their lives have
Speaker 1: now been taken over by increasingly long breadlines. Many of
Speaker 1: them are having to wake up in the pre dawn
Speaker 1: hours to stand in line to maybe get a loaf
Speaker 1: of bread, and then going off to a ten hour
Speaker 1: shift and then bringing that loaf of bread home to
Speaker 1: their kids when maybe they're they're you know, their husband
Speaker 1: is also working or or their husband is off at
Speaker 1: the war. UH and you know, and and this has
Speaker 1: become a completely untenable situation. And they're putting the blame
Speaker 1: for this where it actually belongs on the SAR and
Speaker 1: on the and on the war itself. They're they're not
Speaker 1: wrong about who has led them to this, to this situation.
Speaker 1: And so you actually have um marches of of working
Speaker 1: class women in the working class districts. You have marches
Speaker 1: of middle class women in the more middle class districts
Speaker 1: of the city. But it's the one in the working
Speaker 1: class districts that that gets the most weight because they
Speaker 1: ask big um groups of workers from defense factories to
Speaker 1: join them, and when the defense factories also go out
Speaker 1: on strike and join them, it becomes a crisis for
Speaker 1: for the police in Petrograd. UH. They attempt to deal
Speaker 1: with this um by using UH by by blocking off
Speaker 1: bridges by doing a series of other things. They shoot
Speaker 1: into the crowd at several moments, but then they feel
Speaker 1: that they have to call in the army. The army
Speaker 1: has several barracks in the city and they have to
Speaker 1: call those soldiers up to help them police the city.
Speaker 1: And when they do that, it turns out that the
Speaker 1: soldiers are on the on the side of the protesters.
Speaker 1: You have mass mutinies among the soldiers in the Petrograd garrison.
Speaker 1: They drive the police away, the police throw away their uniforms,
Speaker 1: they flee on trains, they hide um uh, they break
Speaker 1: open the jails, they start burning court records. All this
Speaker 1: stuff is happening. That's are orders troops to be sent
Speaker 1: to from the front to put down the rebellion in
Speaker 1: the city, um, And the first groups of those when
Speaker 1: they arrive in the outskirts, their commanders quickly realized that
Speaker 1: UM that if they said troops into the city, those
Speaker 1: troops are also going to rebel and then they're going
Speaker 1: to have a real problem on their hands. So they
Speaker 1: start to withdraw. And when they withdraw from um from
Speaker 1: from those suburbs, the high command um that CSAR is
Speaker 1: also coming back to to this suburb town where his
Speaker 1: family is living UM and Uh. They put his train
Speaker 1: on a siding in the city called Scoff and they
Speaker 1: convince him that he has to abdicate. UM. So it's
Speaker 1: at the final end of the day, it's his generals
Speaker 1: that that tell him he can can can no longer
Speaker 1: continue UM and that UM and that he has to
Speaker 1: find some and they have to find a way forward
Speaker 1: to to fight the war to a victorious conclusion without him. Uh.
Speaker 1: They think about abdicating in favor of his sickly son
Speaker 1: UM that turns out not to be UM uh feasible,
Speaker 1: then in favor of his brother, who wisely says, this
Speaker 1: is not a job I particularly wanted this moment. And
Speaker 1: so at the end of the day he abdicates in
Speaker 1: favor of no one, and they're you know, in an
Speaker 1: autocratic system, there's no UM, there's no system in place
Speaker 1: to sort of ensure that a non monarch takes place.
Speaker 1: The only group that has been elected nationwide at that
Speaker 1: point is the Duma, and they form what they call
Speaker 1: a provisional committee and eventually a provisional government that says, Okay,
Speaker 1: we're gonna we're gonna hold power until we can have
Speaker 1: a constituent assembly, that is to say, kind of a
Speaker 1: constitutional convention. Uh. Maybe we should wait to do that
Speaker 1: till the end of the war. Um. Things are kind
Speaker 1: of crazy right now, Let's not have a constitutional convention. Uh.
Speaker 1: And that sets up the dynamic for nineteen seventeen, where
Speaker 1: you have, um, this provisional government without any legitimacy, UM,
Speaker 1: now having to deal with this massive wave of political
Speaker 1: demands from from all from all sides. Right, and instead
Speaker 1: of ending conflict, you know, rather than bringing stability the
Speaker 1: following years see revolution, a protracted civil war. UM. But
Speaker 1: I think we'll cover those just kind of in the script.
Speaker 1: I'd like to get to the questions and and how
Speaker 1: you speak on the So UM, would you describe why
Speaker 1: and how the Eastern Front and the really significant events
Speaker 1: we've been talking about today right about, Um, why have
Speaker 1: they been overlooked in his streas of the Great War
Speaker 1: of World War One? Yeah? I think there's uh, there's
Speaker 1: a couple of reasons for that. Uh. First, first of all,
Speaker 1: you know, we're talking largely about English speaking audiences here. Uh,
Speaker 1: And there weren't many English speakers fighting there, And you know,
Speaker 1: there's there's an element of that sort of parochialism, that
Speaker 1: that's always going to always going to slip in. Um,
Speaker 1: there's a desire to see where your boys were fighting
Speaker 1: as the most important places. And that's true both of
Speaker 1: World War One and of World War Two, where you
Speaker 1: know where English speakers aren't fighting, those those are seen
Speaker 1: as not as as as consequential, when uh, in many
Speaker 1: cases they are. So that that's I think that's one reason, um,
Speaker 1: probably the largest reason why it's it's it's not known
Speaker 1: as well, um, there are no victors to write this
Speaker 1: war story on the Eastern front. Um all the empires
Speaker 1: lose all of your German Empire, the Russian Empire, Ottoman Empire,
Speaker 1: as Ungarian Empire. That there's there's no victors to to
Speaker 1: write this history. And indeed in many of these places
Speaker 1: that uh there the system is is hostile to U
Speaker 1: to the regime that preceded it, most notably in the
Speaker 1: Russian Empire. Right, they don't want to tell a heroic
Speaker 1: tale of what happened in World War One, and it
Speaker 1: wasn't a particularly heroic tale. So it's it's not that
Speaker 1: hard for them, not not not not to have to
Speaker 1: do it. So and they do have this heroic moment
Speaker 1: of the revolution that they can talk about. And so
Speaker 1: in Russia that the focus is going to be on
Speaker 1: the revolution UH. In Britain and America it's going to
Speaker 1: be on UH. And France obviously it's going to be
Speaker 1: on on the Western Front. And as a result, the
Speaker 1: Eastern Front um has traditionally been been talked about last,
Speaker 1: especially by English speaking audiences. And that's too bad, um,
Speaker 1: because as I tried to articulately in the beginning of
Speaker 1: the book, I think it's not just sort of another theater.
Speaker 1: I think we see something really important happening here on
Speaker 1: the Eastern Front, which is this process of European d colonization,
Speaker 1: which you're not seeing on the Western front um, and
Speaker 1: and and which but but which is very very prominent
Speaker 1: as we see the rise of not only of social revolution,
Speaker 1: but also of nationalist independent movements and more generally of
Speaker 1: decentralizing movements, of efforts to think about, let's say, what
Speaker 1: a federal state might look like, or or these other
Speaker 1: ways of thinking about a world after empire, and so
Speaker 1: all of those things make the Eastern front um, UH,
Speaker 1: you know, really really important. Do you think that the
Speaker 1: fall of imperial Russia and this this breakdown of empire
Speaker 1: was inevitable in some meaningful sense or is there a
Speaker 1: better way of thinking and talking about what happened? Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is there's a long standing debate within the field
Speaker 1: of of Russian history. That is to say, did uh
Speaker 1: did the war? Uh? Did the war delay revolution? This
Speaker 1: is one argument is that revolution was about to happen
Speaker 1: and delayed it by a few years, or did it accelerate? Um,
Speaker 1: you know, revolution in the end of the empire. UM.
Speaker 1: I tend not to be a historian that thinks in
Speaker 1: terms of inevitability very much. It's it's not a very
Speaker 1: persuasive way for me to think about this, but it's
Speaker 1: you know, the question of of sort of likely outcome
Speaker 1: I've thought about quite a bit um. And you know,
Speaker 1: once the war happens, I think there there are a
Speaker 1: relatively small set of of likely outcomes. Um. Uh. I
Speaker 1: think it's quite unlikely um that uh, that the Tsaris
Speaker 1: regime is gonna preserve itself in a sort of non
Speaker 1: constitutional monarchy, non constitutional monarch form, that is to say,
Speaker 1: it's not going to go back to the way it
Speaker 1: was uh. And you know, I think too much will
Speaker 1: have changed over the course of that. Even if let's
Speaker 1: say no February revolution happens, let's say the Germans decide
Speaker 1: to sign a negotiate a piece in early nineteen seventeen,
Speaker 1: I don't think you're going to go back to that,
Speaker 1: to the status quo ante. I think the most likely
Speaker 1: outcome is is the one that happens throughout Eastern Europe
Speaker 1: after the war, which is a military dictatorship of some kind,
Speaker 1: right wing military dictatorship of some kind. Um. That's that
Speaker 1: seems to be the most likely outcome in it very
Speaker 1: nearly happened in Russia as well. And in Russia, what
Speaker 1: what you end up having is, uh is a left
Speaker 1: wing military dictatorship along with the revolutionary program um. And
Speaker 1: that was obviously not not um uh not not inevitable,
Speaker 1: and it certainly wasn't likely. Um. You know, I don't
Speaker 1: know where you'd put the number at. You know, the
Speaker 1: bullshwicks hit their number. Um. You know, sometimes it happens
Speaker 1: in history that that a non probable thing happens, and
Speaker 1: and I think that's what what happens. A number of
Speaker 1: things have to go quite right for the bulls shwiks
Speaker 1: to to to seize power. Over the course of nineteen seventeen. UM.
Speaker 1: But you know again, um, I don't think that sort
Speaker 1: of I don't see sort of an autocracy surviving into
Speaker 1: the twenty one century. You know if if you know,
Speaker 1: you can see something like the British monarchy, although it
Speaker 1: two is in trouble right now, but you know, you
Speaker 1: can see something like the British monarchy, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: that kind of system. But that would be so completely
Speaker 1: different from what, um, what was present in Russian the
Speaker 1: beginning of twenty century. It's not really the same thing. Hmm. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then finally taking some of what you've written and
Speaker 1: thinking about some of the people we're gonna be talking
Speaker 1: about with this season of Unobscured in our program, you've
Speaker 1: written that state failure does not need to be brought
Speaker 1: on by anti imperial revolutionaries. Imperial states can self destruct,
Speaker 1: either knowingly or unintentionally, and in popular history a lot
Speaker 1: of times, because the focus is on the person of
Speaker 1: Nicholas or Alexandra or resputen Um, the collapse of imperial
Speaker 1: Russia is credited to their personal actions, their personal limitations,
Speaker 1: blind spots, that kind of thing. So to what extent
Speaker 1: do you think any one of these people were directly
Speaker 1: directly responsible for the end of ourist rule. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: the when I wrote that line, I guess I have
Speaker 1: two quick answers to that. So when I wrote that line,
Speaker 1: what I was thinking about actually was the institutional martial
Speaker 1: law at the beginning of the war, which I think
Speaker 1: breaks the back of imperial governance in the borderlands. So
Speaker 1: that's what the first couple of chapters of the book
Speaker 1: are about. What happens. And you take these experience and
Speaker 1: perial administrators and you remove them, or they remove themselves,
Speaker 1: they flee in many cases, and you replace them with
Speaker 1: completely inept basically military officers to try to govern these territories.
Speaker 1: And what you end up with is economic disaster, um uh,
Speaker 1: ethnic deportations. You get a whole series of really terrible
Speaker 1: things that undermines society and state in these in these regions.
Speaker 1: So that's the process of peril self destruction. I'm talking
Speaker 1: about the sort of modus vivendi. Even if it was
Speaker 1: an unpleasant one for Poles and Ukrainians, they were prepared
Speaker 1: to live with it for the long term. Many of
Speaker 1: them were talking about living with it for the long
Speaker 1: term in nineteen thirteen and and that was no longer
Speaker 1: the case by the time to get to nineteen fifteen.
Speaker 1: And that's largely the result of a series of really
Speaker 1: bad mistakes that that are driven from above. Now Nicholas
Speaker 1: makes those decisions, He's not the only one making those
Speaker 1: those decisions about martial law, for instance. Now the question
Speaker 1: of sort of how important the royal family and dress
Speaker 1: putin is, you know, I I I don't see that.
Speaker 1: I mean, they certainly have importance. That is to say
Speaker 1: that Nicholas, at the end of the day does make
Speaker 1: these decisions, and the decisions he makes, um, quite frequently
Speaker 1: are are ones that are going to lead them down
Speaker 1: the road to disaster. A better monarch, a monarch that
Speaker 1: let's say, had Stalepin isn't assassinated or if it isn't, um,
Speaker 1: you know, you can think of a series of quite
Speaker 1: talented Russian politicians, UM, who might have helped prevent this, uh,
Speaker 1: this situation from from from getting to where it did. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Nicholas is responsible for not allowing that to happen, for
Speaker 1: not promoting that that that that from happening. UM. I
Speaker 1: think the sort of the criticism of Alexandra and then
Speaker 1: by extension rasputin. A lot of it is wrapped up
Speaker 1: in quite um uh, I don't know the best way
Speaker 1: way to put it. I mean, a lot of it
Speaker 1: is wrapped up obviously in anti Germanism, a lot of
Speaker 1: it is wrapped up in in in sexism obviously. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know that that's a lot of the criticism that's
Speaker 1: happening for them, um. But it also doesn't reflect the
Speaker 1: fact that I talked about before, which is that the
Speaker 1: decisions they're making in nineteen six after Nicholas leaps for
Speaker 1: the front in the nineties sixteen, let's say they're not
Speaker 1: that consequential. I don't think it actually matters that much
Speaker 1: to the Minister of Interior, Minister of Communications, It's right.
Speaker 1: I just don't think it matters too much. Most of
Speaker 1: the actual work that's being done is being done by
Speaker 1: people that that they don't have control over, especially in
Speaker 1: the military, and so you know, I don't see them
Speaker 1: as that important now in terms of the loss of
Speaker 1: public faith on the part of the Petersburg elite, which
Speaker 1: is something important that the faith of your political elite
Speaker 1: is something important in a political system. It's obvious that
Speaker 1: they have an effect on that. So for sure, they
Speaker 1: have an influence on that. And that's why the you know,
Speaker 1: that's why it's conservatives and and ultra right right wing
Speaker 1: people that assassinate rest Putin, right, is because they're the
Speaker 1: ones that are that are most affected by this right.
Speaker 1: It's it's not left wing terrorists that assassinate your ress Putin, right,
Speaker 1: He's irrelevant to them, you know. It's it's the right wing, uh,
Speaker 1: and the political elite that is that that is most
Speaker 1: consumed by him. But to take a brief counterfactual, maybe
Speaker 1: if Resputin never existed, does the Russian Empire collapse as
Speaker 1: it does? And I think yes, I don't think even
Speaker 1: the timing shifted by that. Um. So it's it's hard
Speaker 1: for me to see that he has sort of a
Speaker 1: large macro effect, even if his micro effect on the
Speaker 1: way that people discussed the revolution and the collapse of
Speaker 1: the empire is quite large, both at the time and
Speaker 1: then afterwards. Because he's an interesting, um, salacious and um
Speaker 1: and controversial figure. It's it's understandable why people want to
Speaker 1: read about and want to talk about him both at
Speaker 1: the time and now. Beautiful, that's great, that lines right
Speaker 1: up with the thesis. Good. Yeah, so that's what I
Speaker 1: have for us, and uh yeah, do you want to
Speaker 1: be respectful of your time and letting you get out
Speaker 1: of here? But terrific. It's a lot of fun. That's
Speaker 1: it for this week's episode of Unobscured. Stick around after
Speaker 1: this short sponsor break for a preview of what's in
Speaker 1: store for next week. When I went away and looked
Speaker 1: and homed in and focused on the very end of
Speaker 1: their lives side pretty much from when they were imprisoned
Speaker 1: at the Alexander Palace, and then I I honed it
Speaker 1: in even closer to the last two weeks of their
Speaker 1: lives in a Kaschemberg in the Party of Haus. I
Speaker 1: suddenly realized it was a really interesting and exciting scenario
Speaker 1: there that had never been explored, which was looking at
Speaker 1: the family really close up. How were they what was
Speaker 1: going through their minds? How did they deal with captivity?
Speaker 1: What were the tensions being trapped in a house in
Speaker 1: western Siberia knowing that probably the writing was on the wall.
Speaker 1: Unobscured was created by me Aaron Minky and produced by
Speaker 1: Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Josh Thayne in partnership with
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio, with research by Sam l Bertie, writing
Speaker 1: by Carl Nellis and original music by Chad Lawson. Learn
Speaker 1: more about our contributing historians, source materials, and links to
Speaker 1: our other shows over at grim and mild dot com,
Speaker 1: Slash Unobscured, and, as always, thanks for listening. Four