Oct 12, 2026 · 54 min · 23 segments
On the night of October 10th, 1917, a revolutionary disguised as a priest slipped into an apartment in Petrograd and browbeat his comrades into an armed insurrection. The revolutionary in question was…
Victor SebestyenGuest
Dan SnowHost
Because I want Victor's to really, let's focus on the communist, the Bolshevik revolution.
We've got mass desertions, people aren't obeying their officers on the front line, hyperinflation, bread lines.
Sometimes historians, political thinkers are looking for the kind of deep substructural reasons and the ideas swirling around.
But on this occasion, in the cold winter, the beginning, the first few months of 1917, people are just starving to death and are getting really pissed off about it and start rioting, trying to break into shops.
You end up with just a spontaneous breakdown of order in one of the most important cities in the empire, in the imperial center.
And normally what happened, the Romanovs always brought out, whenever there was trouble, they brought out their praetorian guard, the army, to guarantee their safety and to guarantee the Republic of this time.
What was happening was there were a whole load of deserters from the army.
And the army, it was a mutiny in most of the... guards regiments in the army that really caused that revolution.
And they'd just been put into the meat grinder in various offensives which had sort of wiped out the old elite of this Russian Imperial Guard, who had been the sort of backstop of the Roman officers, say, for centuries.
Because I want Victor's to really, let's focus on the communist, the Bolshevik revolution.
We've got mass desertions, people aren't obeying their officers on the front line, hyperinflation, bread lines.
Sometimes historians, political thinkers are looking for the kind of deep substructural reasons and the ideas swirling around.
But on this occasion, in the cold winter, the beginning, the first few months of 1917, people are just starving to death and are getting really pissed off about it and start rioting, trying to break into shops.
You end up with just a spontaneous breakdown of order in one of the most important cities in the empire, in the imperial center.
And normally what happened, the Romanovs always brought out, whenever there was trouble, they brought out their praetorian guard, the army, to guarantee their safety and to guarantee the Republic of this time.
What was happening was there were a whole load of deserters from the army.
And the army, it was a mutiny in most of the... guards regiments in the army that really caused that revolution.
And they'd just been put into the meat grinder in various offensives which had sort of wiped out the old elite of this Russian Imperial Guard, who had been the sort of backstop of the Roman officers, say, for centuries.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.