From Bloody Sunday to Bolshevik Power

Julian Mercer

[calm] Welcome to the show. Elena, I keep thinking about January 1905: a winter march to the Winter Palace, families in the crowd, led by Father Gapon, carrying a petition to the tsar... and Cossack soldiers open fire. Around 200 protesters killed. For me that’s the moment the imperial façade cracks audibly. [long pause]

Elena Vasiliev

[softly] And the petition itself is so revealing. They still address Nicholas II as “our ruler,” asking for justice, protection, universal suffrage, fairer taxes, an 8-hour day. That’s what makes the 200 dead so devastating — they came like subjects pleading, not an army storming a gate.

Julian Mercer

Exactly. And Russia had been storing up this kind of explosion for years. Roughly 82% of the population were peasants, farming with old methods, burdened by taxes and debt, while the state remained autocratic, censorious, and suspicious of reform. Industrialisation had begun, yes, but unevenly — railways thinly spread, cities growing faster than living conditions could handle, workers overcrowded and politically angry.

Elena Vasiliev

[questioning tone] Let me try to say that back. On paper, huge empire, Romanov dynasty, army, church, all the grand props of permanence. But underneath, the majority is poor, hungry, and badly represented. So “stable” really means... stable from a palace window?

Julian Mercer

[warmly] That’s beautifully put — stable from a palace window. And then the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 to 1905 humiliates Russia abroad. A European great power loses to Japan, and suddenly incompetence is visible. After Bloody Sunday you get strikes in major cities, attacks on officials and landlords, the Potemkin mutiny, unrest in Georgia and Poland, Jewish communities demanding equality. It’s not one protest; it’s an empire discovering its seams. [short pause]

Elena Vasiliev

The Potemkin mutiny is one of those details that sticks. A battleship crew mutinies — that is not just “public discontent.” That’s the machinery of state beginning to wobble. And Nicholas answers with the October Manifesto: a Duma, freedoms of speech, assembly, worship, legalization of parties and trade unions. For a brief second, it looks like the empire might bend instead of break.

Julian Mercer

For a brief second, yes. The October Manifesto split the opposition. Middle-class liberals, the Octobrists, were largely satisfied. Peasants were won over somewhat when land payments were reduced and then ended. But workers in Moscow and St Petersburg were repressed for striking, killed or arrested. Then comes the real turn: the Fundamental Laws of 1906. Nicholas reasserts autocratic power, controls the Duma, keeps the upper hand.

Elena Vasiliev

[skeptical] So the Duma exists, but with the tsar’s hand still on the lock. Only men over 25 could vote, electoral districts were unequal, and an appointed chamber could veto measures. That’s not parliamentary government in the British or French sense. That’s more like constitutional scenery.

Julian Mercer

[chuckles] Constitutional scenery — yes, I may steal that. The first two Dumas achieve little and are dissolved. The third and fourth do some social reform, but never truly master the government. And alongside this half-reform comes Stolypin: repression first, reform second. He used executions so widely that the hangman’s noose became known as “Stolypin’s Necktie.”

Elena Vasiliev

“Stolypin’s Necktie” is one of those phrases you don’t forget. Two thousand five hundred executions between 1906 and 1911 — that number tells you what sort of order this was. He also tried to create a more prosperous peasantry, less revolutionary, more conservative. But even there, it’s mixed: some wealth rises, taxes rise too, and industrialisation keeps pushing people into towns.

Julian Mercer

And that mismatch — between display and reality — is really the story before 1914. Nicholas II convinced himself his rule was secure. There were Romanov celebrations, loyal institutions, a growing economy in places. Yet strikes rose again, the Lena Goldfields massacre in 1912 reignited anger, and even establishment voices were warning that the system was drifting toward disaster.

Elena Vasiliev

[reflective] I think this is the part that feels horribly modern, actually. “Stability” is often just the period when a state still controls the symbols — ceremonies, uniforms, anniversaries — but no longer commands trust. In an archive you see this all the time: the official paper says order; the private letter says bread queue, fear, humiliation. Those are very different countries occupying the same map.

Julian Mercer

[softly] Yes. An empire can look like a fortress on the postcard and still be rotten in the beams.

Elena Vasiliev

[urgent] And then World War I takes those rotten beams and lights a match. Prices rise by 400% by 1917. Moscow needs 2,200 wagons of grain a day and by February 1917 only about 700 are getting through. That is not abstract mismanagement — that is hunger measured in missing train cars.

Julian Mercer

And the battlefield is no kinder. Early defeats like Tannenberg in August 1914 shatter morale. Russia has men, but poor leadership, shell shortages, transport breakdowns, obsolete methods. Then in August 1915 Nicholas II makes the fatal decision to take personal command of the army. No military training, no real grasp of strategy, and from that moment defeats belong to him personally.

Elena Vasiliev

[leans in] August 1915 is the date, isn’t it? Because it also leaves the capital in the hands of Tsarina Alexandra and Rasputin. And whatever the truth of the court gossip, politically it’s poison: a German-born empress, an unpopular mystic, ministers churned through a collapsing system. Even elites start speaking about the monarchy with open contempt.

Julian Mercer

Right. By late 1916 and early 1917, confidence is draining from above and below. The Duma criticizes the government. Workers are hungry. Soldiers are exhausted. Then Petrograd tips. On 18 February 1917 there’s a strike at the Putilov steel works. Rumours of bread rationing spread. On 23 February — International Women’s Day — women join the protest, demanding bread and rights. Within days it becomes a general strike.

Elena Vasiliev

And 23 February matters because it breaks the old assumption about who starts revolutions. Not a secret committee in a cellar, but women in bread lines stepping into the street. Then on 25 February soldiers fire on strikers... and very soon after, other soldiers refuse. That refusal is the hinge.

Julian Mercer

[firm] Absolutely. On 27 February the Petrograd Soviet is formed, while Duma figures create a provisional committee. Nicholas can’t get back to Petrograd. On 1 March, Soviet Order Number One effectively places the military under the Soviet’s authority, not the old regime’s. And on 2 March 1917, Nicholas II abdicates. The astonishing thing is how few people are willing to defend the autocracy at the end.

Elena Vasiliev

So now Russia has two centers of legitimacy in the same building, practically in different wings of the Tauride Palace. The Provisional Government, led first by Prince Lvov and then by Kerensky, says: we will govern until a Constituent Assembly. The Petrograd Soviet says: we represent workers and soldiers NOW. That dual power sounds unstable because it is unstable.

Julian Mercer

And the Provisional Government makes its gravest choice: it continues the war. That, more than anything, wrecks it. No peace, no bread, no land redistribution. Peasants seize land from aristocrats and the Church. Food distribution fails. Soldiers, already radicalised by defeat, become more receptive to the Bolsheviks’ anti-war message.

Elena Vasiliev

[curious] Which brings us to Lenin on the sealed train from Switzerland in April 1917 — one of history’s great railway entrances. He returns and issues the April Theses: “Peace, Bread, and Land,” and “All Power to the Soviets.” Those are not subtle slogans, but they are devastatingly efficient.

Julian Mercer

[matter-of-fact] Efficient is the word. Lenin is a skilled writer and speaker, but also disciplined about organisation. He wants a tightly controlled revolutionary party with clear goals. July brings a wobble — the July Days in Petrograd, demonstrations by workers and soldiers, sailors at Kronstadt establishing their own government, and Lenin is branded a German agent and flees to Finland. It looks, briefly, as if the Bolsheviks may have overreached.

Elena Vasiliev

Then comes Kornilov in August 1917. General Kornilov marches on Petrograd claiming he’ll save Great Russia, restore order, crush Bolshevism. Kerensky sees a military dictatorship coming and, in a move of almost operatic irony, arms the very forces he fears — including Bolshevik-linked workers.

Julian Mercer

[excited] Yes! And this is the great reversal. The Bolsheviks gain credit as defenders of the revolution against Kornilov. They become heroes of resistance. Their support rises in the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets. Lenin returns from exile with renewed authority, and Trotsky — brilliant speaker, recent convert from the Mensheviks, now chairman of the Petrograd Soviet — begins to turn sympathy into machinery.

Elena Vasiliev

Machinery is the exact word, because Trotsky’s Military Revolutionary Committee sounds defensive, almost bureaucratic, but it becomes the operating system of insurrection. Let me see if I’ve got it: workers, Red Guards, soldiers, transport routes, key points in Petrograd — all coordinated through the MRC under the cover of protecting the revolution?

Julian Mercer

Almost — and the “under the cover” part is crucial. In October 1917 the seizure of Petrograd is startlingly easy. Bridges, stations, routes, telegraph points, the Winter Palace isolated. A British newspaper later observed that ordinary life went on with “a tinge of indifference.” Trams stopped in one area, but ran not far beyond it. That detail is unforgettable: revolution in one district, routine in the next street.

Elena Vasiliev

[softly] A tinge of indifference. That’s not the image people expect. Not barricades everywhere, but a capital where the old government is so hollow that the palace is barely guarded and officials inside simply drop their weapons.

Julian Mercer

Which is why the argument never quite ends. Trotsky insists it was a mass insurrection, not a conspiracy. And there is real support: workers, soldiers, peasants hearing “Peace, Bread, and Land.” But the actual takeover in Petrograd is also narrow, disciplined, highly organized, driven by Lenin’s urgency and Trotsky’s logistics. A vacuum was exploited with remarkable skill. [long pause]

Elena Vasiliev

[reflective] So maybe that is the sharpened question. If millions wanted the old order gone, but a tightly organized minority decided the exact hour, seized the telegraph, surrounded the Winter Palace, and announced power in the name of the Soviets... when does a revolution stop being popular uprising and become a coup?