100th Anniversary of the Russian Revolution 10 - Robert Service Full HD

and now I am going to invite Roberts to serve one of the most distinguished historians of Russia and the Soviet Union and who is the author of books on the three great communist leaders and whose latest book is on the last of the Romanovs, if you could perhaps you would like to take over the platform, yes, and now I ask you to respond to the entire conference. I should add that last night he received the first book. new award from the Institute and I gave the lecture in memory of Robert Conquest in which we will publish later and you can read it then, but thank you very much, let me see that you are a glutton for punishment, Robert, thank you very much.

I think everything that has happened. What happened today indicates that, as much as we're all told to worry about fake news, we should also worry about fake history. History is really important if we don't know what happened in the past if we don't spread it. knowledge about what happened in the past then we have no future. It is worth talking about what happened in Russia in 1917 a hundred years ago. It was a tremendous gamble and it is very easy to think of what happened in Petrograd and the big Russian cities as some. It is a kind of historical accident, but if we look at

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ary Russia between the February Revolution and the October Revolution of 1917, we can see that time and time again the enemies of Bolshevism told Lenin, they told Trotsky, they told Baharon, they told all the Bolshevik leaders that they should be very aware of the forces that you are going to unleash, you say that you are going to take us towards paradise in fact there will be a civil war you are going to take over an immensely diverse society and you will win' We will not be able to govern that society without winning a very, very bloody and prolonged civil war and then you will need a dictatorship and the Bolsheviks said no, our dictatorship will only be temporary, it will only be a fleeting phenomenon, then it will be paradise, not only in Russia, but throughout the world, starting with the European socialist

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in all the large and small countries of Europe, so it was a tremendous gamble , but it was not as if Lenin Trotsky and the rest of them had not been warned and had not been warned.

They were not warned by people who were close to them politically but who were democrats and who did not want a dictatorship, they certainly abhorred the whole idea of ​​a civil war, so the Bolsheviks took the risk of being completely irresponsible and the consequences that were predicted in 1917 they were fulfilled and the Bolsheviks stumbled upon the type of society that even they themselves did not know they would build: a one-party state, a state of single ideology, a state that required permanent access to the instruments of mass terror if the interests of the State required it and The extraordinary thing about this is that it was not only a Russian phenomenon in the interwar years, a communist state was founded in distant Mongolia, but very shortly after the Second World War communist states were founded quite well throughout Central and Eastern Europe and Eastern Europe inside and outside the expanded USSR, including Hungary, where we are today, then China, then Cuba, and in all cases the model was more or less the same: one-party state, Single ideology state, terrorist base state and what we have to endure.

What we have in mind is that in all of these countries, not just Russia, the communists were bound to encounter resistance: that a state using the national equivalence of gulags could be as oppressive as it wanted, whether in Asia, Europe or the Caribbean. , however he was obliged to do so. You will find some type of resistance, even if it is passive, because the terror that was used was tremendous and in all those states you will see the same thing: they all had populations with a generalized religious faith, not always the same religion and communism had to deal with the fact. that people wanted to worship in the way they had always worshiped, they wanted to process in public for reasons of belief, reasons of faith, they were also countries that had national traditions, not always a very keen sense of nationality, but sometimes enough sharp enough to make it difficult for an internationalist faith like the secular faith of communism, strong enough for communism to encounter surly but very firm and principled resistance and then, at the lower levels of society, there was clans, there were tribes that were family structures.

They were networks of clientelism that offered a kind of sanctuary from some of the depredations that the first communist administrations began to inflict on their people, this meant that from the beginning communism in all but one country had to deal with national resistance, Even if it was not violent armed national resistance was approved, as was said in Lithuania or Western Ukraine, it was an important and powerful passive resistance and, consistently, the same process occurred in all of those countries, except one in which Communist states attempted to align themselves with elements of the national spirit. that could adapt to communism, those communist states, in other words, moved away from internationalist goals not for lack of internationalist communist belief, but rather so that they could manage their rather non-compliant populations the more effectively they did not do so.

They did it for altruistic reasons, on the contrary, they did it for pragmatic and interested reasons. The only major country that did not success

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y adapt to any type of accommodation to nationalism was the USSR itself because it was the successor. to the Russian Empire and had dozens and dozens and dozens of people, it eventually privileged the Russians, but not to the point of completely getting rid of multinational ideas in its own environment, so they were very difficult states to preserve and that could be use as much powerful terror as you wanted, but you had to do it somehow if you were a communist leader to take into account the fact that there was an enormous amount of passive resistance to what you were doing, in that case you had to be cunning, you had You have to take advantage of some of the characteristics of discontent in all those societies that could make you more acceptable in the languages ​​of each society, so communism took a step forward in the USSR and then in Eastern Europe and then again in China as a promoter of the modernity of the industrial society of universal education of universal welfare did not really satisfy those goals, but it seemed to be a more committed modernizing force for many people in those societies that were being communist, so communism found more internal traveling companions. easily than it should have. and he also offered his fellow travelers good means to make them more easily manipulated, so he created special tents in Dutch hospitals and special hospitals for those people who would compromise the permanent income of the fifth-rate writers so long as they wrote in favor of existing writers. the existing power in all these countries so there was a technique, a general enlistment technique to get fellow travelers who are not communists to enlist in the communist cause and this was very effective for several decades.

This didn't happen in a world. that was indifferent to communism in the early 1920s in Central and Eastern Europe and in Eastern Europe in particular there was a horror at the possible resumption of another Red Army offensive there was a feeling that the march towards the war of 1920 could be repeated and everything we now know from Politburo documents from the 1920s suggests that Politburo members themselves assumed that sooner or later they would have to emerge militarily from international isolation. So what happened and what did the Western powers do regarding this one of the world's great powers?

On the day that the United Kingdom signed a trade treaty with Soviet Russia in 1921, Lloyd George, the prime minister of the time, assumed that this would suffocate Soviet communism by enriching poetry to a sufficiently large sector of the population. of what became the USSR so that communism would simply be discredited by the success of the market economy. Stalin could also see it and at the end of the 1920s he completely abolished a new economic policy and opted for the stabilization of the USSR by imposing a much more vigorous Leninism than even Lenin had had in mind before his death in 1924. and at that time the USSR was able to turn not only to the United Kingdom, actually not much to the United Kingdom, but it was also able to turn to German industry and German agricultural lobbies to trade with the USSR and the USSR was able to advance technologically by starving to its own peasants, making that income available to its own people's commissariat of foreign trade and thus acquiring modern German machinery and equipment.

In 1933, with the coming to power of Adolf Hitler, all this ended. But Germany was replaced by another of the great industrial powers that at that time was suffering from the most terrible economic depression: the United States of America, so the Ford factories were transplanted to the USSR; In other words, the USSR benefited from the need or perceived need of another major economic power to regenerate itself through trade with the USA, the USSR became one of the great world powers as a result of its rejection of the Operation Barbarossa that began in 1941 and Soviet troops marched towards Berlin in 1945.

That made the USSR one of the big three in world politics and, in fact, very soon the United Kingdom stopped being one of the big three and Only the two great superpowers remained and in that case US policy turned towards the desire to contain the USSR in every possible way, short of provoking a third world war in the late 1960s, this was taken a step further with a policy dated and pushed particularly by President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger at the time when it seemed like a way to prevent the Cold War from becoming a hot war and very soon, in the mid-1970s, the fortuitous increase in the price of oil and gas around the world as a result of the decision by OPEC countries to make adjustments to what was going to be available in the world.

The brands had the consequence of pouring new unearned income into the Soviet economy, which the Soviet Union again decided would be an opportunity to do what it had done in 1945 in Eastern Europe in Central and Eastern Europe and expand again particularly In Africa, but to some extent also in South America, it was only with the invasion of Afghanistan in the late 1970s, in 1979, that American policy again adopted a much stronger anti-Soviet stance, first under President Jimmy Carter, who banned all wheat exports to the USSR and then in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan, who effectively revoked the embargo on wheat exports but imposed much more severe restrictions on the transfer of advanced technology and also inaugurated a Strategic Defense Initiative program so it finally became an American and Western point of view that said with the USSR you are now under a real challenge, you have to make serious concessions if you want to deal with us and I think we often read in the media about Mikhail Gorbachev's voluntary decision to initiate reforms in the USSR for idealistic reasons.

I heard some of this today, rubbish, he certainly had ideas or came to have ideas about the need for a different way of running society than he had when he was a young student in Moscow at the state university in the days of Joseph Stalin, But throughout the early 1980s, with the pressure that the Americans and Western economies put on the USSR, it was very obvious to the Soviet Politburo that in the long term it would not be able to compete as a superpower on the world stage. with the United States. that Gorbachev was given his chance in 1985, when all other options had been exhausted and he was given the chance not to end communism but to save it.

Gorbachev came to power telling his own Politburo can I get President Reagan to agree from a policy of peace to a policy of disarmament and he seems to be in favor of this became clear after the Geneva summit very early in Wolf's tenure in power, if I can, if I can do it, we will no longer have to spend money on rockets and tanks to the same extent as before and we will be able to transfer these funds to the civilian sector of the economy, so he had this idea that turned out to be realistic only in one thing.

Reagan was willing to make a deal that was totally unrealistic. The issue was the transferability of the net profit in the Soviet budget to the benefit of the consumerization of the couch economy. The itch just didn't happen, as someone said much earlier today, there were no bananas. I remember very, very well the first bananas in Moscow and it was not until 1992 that they were sold at open market stalls on the streets of Moscow. They were not a rarity. The Russians didn't, but of course they knew a lot about encyclopedias, but they very rarely tried them, so it was a strategic deception, but it was an illusion thatbenefited the world and trash has also been given credit for freeing Eastern Europe from its shackles and again there is an element of truth in all of this but what must not be forgotten is that he was very aware that if they were not removed those chains, would have to somehow rescue the indebted economies of Eastern Europe.

Eastern Europe, particularly Poland, Hungary, East Germany had become massively indebted to Western banks, if then there was no written liberalization of the political order in the liberal era. in Central and Eastern Europe, who was going to pay for it would have to be Moscow and how on earth could Moscow pay for it? He couldn't even financially pay for his own self-reform, so Galbart Jaffa was in a ditch here. the country had been forced to change the metaphor a dead end gorbachev could not afford to pay this also when he met with chancellor kohl in the summer of 1990 he was in capping ham but he needed billions of deutschmarks that the cold would take away even a few billion German marks that coal was willing to give to the USSR, in other words, it had run out of juice, it had run out of the gasoline needed to start the engine of communism and it collapsed in 1991. no The whole world has collapsed yet and the image that I have been portraying is that of a process that seems to be mainly predictable if you eliminate the structures of communism, if you eliminate the one-party state, the single ideology state, if you empty even the half-empty gulag, if you privatize any part of the economy, if you allow civil society to return to a semi-public existence, you no longer have communism, you have a creaky form, a shadow of old-fashioned communism.

But there is a country that has contradicted this universal pattern and that is China. It has maintained the political model of communism. It has a gulag that is even more severe than the Soviet gulag in the 1960s and 1970s. It is the most horrifically oppressive and punitive state in the way it treats dissident thought, the Communist Party is the only party that is allowed to exist an overall hierarchy of power that is straight out of the Leninist playbook and yet at the same time, at this time for the last 20 years, partly with the initial American blessing now with fewer blessings.

In fact, I know that in recent days with quite a few blessings from President Trump, but generally without as many blessings, Chinese communism has become an unprecedented hybrid and the jury is out: is this hybrid a plant that will die underground or It will continue to flourish for decades. Soviet communism lasted seven decades and now so has Chinese communism, but it is more dynamic than Soviet communism. It doesn't seem to have the same messianic impetus. that Soviet communism had not done so yet, anyway, when dealing with foreign countries, it treats them as countries that must be economically exploited for Chinese interests.

That is not the same as wanting a communist world order, which is why Leninism as an energy ology has not survived in any way. In a basic way, at least as far as internationalism in Beijing is concerned, we live in a very, very volatile world right now and we have to keep our eyes open to see what happens next. Some of the greatest legacies of communism are actually in non-Western countries. communist ideologies such as Islamist jihadism, we do not know what will happen next, but one thing is absolutely certain: this conference has been very, very useful in saying how important it is to maintain memory to keep alive the flame of historical truth that we can get and reject the fake story just like we reject the fake news ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much first of all professor

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, thank you very much, in fact, it was wonderful, so I'm not exactly sorry, but it was a wonderful response to the variety of criticisms , arguments and historical truths that We have had so many excellent speakers today and I want to thank you first, but secondly all of them for giving us an intellectual feast.

This will not be the last conference on this topic nor are aspects of this topic in the next year. or two, we will celebrate others, but I want to finish very quickly, therefore and because I think you might want to drink with a story about something that about twenty years ago I was writing a speech with Margaret Thatcher, she was at a conference in Prague and We were including a story, a parable, actually it's not a joke, exactly to explain the impact of communism and revolution, and it's a parable about the Soviet Union and it says that a young man has a bad start in life by murdering his parents and then he declines even further and dedicates himself to robbing people on the streets.

After that, his free-falling character becomes an alcoholic and finally sinks to such a level of moral decrepitude that he sometimes enters a room without first knocking on the door. and that is the history of the Soviet Union after 1917 like that, ma'am. Thatcher made a mess of the parable, she didn't really have confidence in it and then, there in the green room, she said to me, Sorry, I made a mess of the joke, John, and I was uncomfortable with it and I said, well, I know. that you were, I know it was too dry, too harsh, too cynical for your taste and she said oh no, no, that wasn't like that at all, no, the reason was that it was too painful, thank you very much really.