Best Podcasts on the Russian Revolution & Bolshevism

The Russian Revolution of 1917 was one of the most consequential events of the modern era — a seismic rupture that brought down a three-hundred-year-old dynasty, ignited a ferocious civil war, and gave birth to the world’s first Communist state. Explaining History has published over thirty episodes on the revolution and its aftermath, tracing the crisis of the old order, the collapse of the Provisional Government, Lenin’s seizure of power, the Red Terror, and the Bolshevik state’s long shadow across the twentieth century.

Browse the episode collections below, embedded directly for easy listening. New episodes are added regularly as the archive grows.

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The Road to Revolution

Russian Proto-Fascism 1903–7

The prolonged crisis of the Russian Empire in the early twentieth century produced revolutionary pressure not only from the left but from the reactionary right. Extreme antisemites, Slavophiles and defenders of Orthodoxy merged into the fascist Union of Russian Peoples — and their street fighters the Black Hundreds.

Hunger and the Russian Revolution 1917

The First World War placed the Russian Empire’s food economy under impossible strain. Railway chaos and peasants unable to sell their produce at fair prices caused the food supply to break down entirely — and with it, the entire edifice of Tsarism.

Was the Russian Revolution Inevitable?

Moving beyond the simple narrative of “peace, land, and bread,” this episode explores the competing schools of historiography that have shaped our understanding of 1917 — from Soviet determinism to the revisionist arguments of Richard Pipes and beyond.

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1917 — The Year of Two Revolutions

The Global Shock of the February Revolution 1917

How did the events of February 1917 reverberate far beyond Petrograd? Drawing on Robert Service’s Spies and Commissars, this episode explores the chaotic collapse of the Romanov dynasty and the fragile dual powerDual Power The political condition in Russia between February and October 1917 in which power was contested between the Provisional Government (representing the liberal and democratic forces of the February Revolution) and the soviets (councils of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies). It ended when the Bolsheviks seized power in October. The February Revolution of 1917 produced an immediate institutional paradox. The Provisional Government — initially led by Prince Lvov, later by Kerensky — claimed sovereign authority as the successor to the Tsar. The Petrograd Soviet, a council of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies formed simultaneously, held the practical loyalty of the capital’s factory workers and crucially the garrison, which had mutinied against the Tsar. Soviet Order Number One, issued in March 1917, instructed soldiers to obey the Soviet’s orders unless they contradicted the Provisional Government’s — placing the loyalty of the armed forces in an institutional no-man’s-land. For eight months, Russia was governed by this unstable duality: the Provisional Government made decisions the Soviet could block, while the Soviet commanded loyalties it chose not to exercise. The system’s fundamental instability was the question of the war: the Provisional Government committed Russia to continuing the First World War (partly to maintain Allied support and international credibility), while the soviets across Russia increasingly demanded ‘peace, land, and bread.’ The Bolsheviks understood the dual power structure better than anyone and used the Soviet as the institutional base from which to seize power in October, effectively claiming to act on behalf of a Soviet authority rather than seizing the state in their own name. The concept of dual power has influenced revolutionary theory far beyond 1917. It describes a situation that arises in many revolutionary transitions: the collapse of the old order creates a vacuum that cannot be immediately filled by a single authority, and competing power structures proliferate, each with different sources of legitimacy and different social bases. The dual power condition is inherently unstable — the two powers must eventually converge, with one absorbing or destroying the other. In Russia’s case, the outcome was determined by the Provisional Government’s commitment to the war and by the Bolsheviks’ skill in positioning themselves as the instrument of Soviet authority. In later revolutions — Iran in 1979, where Khomeini’s Revolutionary Council coexisted briefly with a provisional government; Egypt in 2011, where the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces coexisted with elected civilian institutions — the dual power phase produced similar instability and similar resolution through the dominance of whichever force controlled armed coercion. that replaced it — and how governments and exiles around the world struggled to make sense of what was happening.

British and American Journalists and the Russian Revolution

During the chaos of the First World War, a generation of British and American correspondents in Russia astutely predicted the failure of the Provisional Government. Some, like Arthur Ransome and John Reed, went further and became passionate advocates for the new Bolshevik regime.

The Russian Revolution: Beyond Petrograd and Moscow

What happened when news of the revolution reached the empire’s rural areas? How did the non-literate peasantry engage with this change? How did the Russian Orthodox Church carry the message — and what did the empire’s non-Russian peoples make of it? An essential episode on the fragmented, uneven experience of revolutionary change.

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Building and Defending the Soviet State

Lenin’s Red Terror 1918

How did Lenin assert control over Russia in the aftermath of the October Revolution? The Bolshevik government used hunger and terror to force social and political change — targeting the old bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. This episode explores the Red Terror, the establishment of the Cheka, and the policy of War CommunismWar Communism Full Description The economic system imposed in Soviet Russia from 1918 to 1921, during the Civil War, characterised by the nationalisation of industry, the forcible requisitioning of grain from peasants, the suppression of private trade, and the militarisation of labour. War Communism was partly an emergency response to the demands of the Civil War and partly an attempt to leap directly to a communist economy. The resulting famine and economic collapse prompted Lenin to abandon it in favour of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921. Critical Perspective War Communism was a catastrophe that killed millions through famine and economic collapse — but it also, paradoxically, won the Civil War by enabling the Bolsheviks to feed and supply the Red Army. The debate about whether it was an emergency improvisation or an ideologically motivated attempt to abolish capitalism at a stroke reflects a deeper ambiguity at the heart of the Bolshevik project: the tension between pragmatism and revolutionary ideology that would define Soviet politics for decades..

The Origins of the Soviet Camps 1917–21

Following the Bolshevik seizure of power, class-based terror and repression of political enemies became central to the party’s attempts to establish itself. This episode traces the earliest improvised camps — of which there were 107 by 1920 — and their role in the civil war and the consolidation of Soviet power.

Bolshevik Russia and the Paris Peacemakers 1919

While revolution and civil war tore the former Russian Empire apart, the British, French and American leaders at the Paris Peace Conference were deeply uncertain about how to deal with Lenin’s government — and what role a revolutionary Russia might play in the post-war order.

Lenin and Ukraine 1917–19

Lenin had no intention of granting national independence to Ukraine or any of the other non-Russian nations of the former Tsarist empire. This episode explores how the Bolsheviks responded to the Ukrainian national movement during the Russian Civil War — with consequences that echo to the present day.

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Global Impact and Legacy

Wilson, Roosevelt and the USSR

Democrat presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt both hoped the USSR could become a constructive part of the post-war world orders they sought to build. Both men were willing to overlook many of the violent excesses of Lenin’s Bolsheviks and StalinStalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (18 December 1878 – 5 March 1953) was a Soviet politician, dictator and revolutionary who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. Read More’s terror — assuming a more liberal Russia might yet emerge.

The Afterlife of Leon Trotsky’s Politics 1940–1982

When Trotsky was murdered by an NKVDNKVD Full Description The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) was the Soviet secret police from 1934 to 1946, responsible for political repression, the administration of the Gulag, and the terror purges of 1936–1938. Under Nikolai Yezhov during the Great Terror, the NKVD executed approximately 750,000 people and arrested over 1.5 million. It also conducted mass deportations of ethnic minorities and operated a network of foreign intelligence and assassination operations. Critical Perspective The NKVD institutionalised the principle that the state’s survival required pre-emptive destruction of potential enemies. Interrogation protocols routinely used torture to extract confessions — not to discover truth but to perform it. The show trials of the Old Bolsheviks, in which loyal communists confessed to absurd crimes, demonstrated that no loyalty to the party could protect an individual once designated an enemy. agent in 1940, his ideas lived on through the Fourth International and the American Socialist Workers Party. His critique of the USSR — that the revolution had been killed in its infancy and replaced by a bureaucratic state — shaped the global left for decades.

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Related Collections

The Russian Revolution connects to some of the most important topics in twentieth-century history. Explore these related collections:

• Stalin and the Soviet Union — the Bolshevik state under Stalin: collectivisationCollectivisation Full Description: The policy of forced consolidation of individual peasant households into massive, state-controlled collective farms. It represented a declaration of war by the urban state against the rural peasantry, intended to extract grain to fund industrialization. Collectivisation was a radical restructuring of the countryside that abolished private land ownership. The state seized land, livestock, and tools, forcing independent farmers into kolkhozy. Resistance was met with brutal force, including the “liquidation” of wealthier peasants (Kulaks) as a class. Critical Perspective:This policy fundamentally altered the relationship between the people and the land. It treated the peasantry not as citizens to be supported, but as an internal colony to be exploited. By establishing a state monopoly on food production, the regime gained the ultimate lever of social control: the power to grant or withhold the means of survival, leading to man-made famines used to crush regional nationalism and resistance.
  Read more, the Great PurgeThe Great Purge Full Description:A campaign of political repression and persecution that targeted the Communist Party itself, the military leadership, and the intelligentsia. It was a mechanism to consolidate absolute power by eliminating all potential rivals, real or imagined. The Great Purge (or the Great Terror) was characterized by widespread police surveillance, show trials, and arbitrary executions. It specifically targeted the “Old Bolsheviks”—the original revolutionaries who had served with Lenin—replacing them with a new generation of bureaucrats who owed their loyalty and positions solely to the supreme leader. Critical Perspective:This event marked the final betrayal of the revolution’s democratic potential. It created a society paralyzed by fear, where denunciation became a survival strategy and trust between citizens evaporated. By decimating the experienced military command and the intellectual elite, the purge severely weakened the state’s capacity, leaving it vulnerable on the eve of foreign invasion.
  Read more, and the GulagGulag Full Description:The government agency that administered the vast network of forced labor camps. Far more than just a prison system, it was a central component of the Soviet economy, using slave labor to extract resources from the most inhospitable regions of the country. The Gulag system institutionalized political repression. Millions of “enemies of the people”—ranging from political dissidents and intellectuals to petty criminals—were arrested and transported to camps to work in mining, timber, and construction. Critical Perspective:Critically, the Gulag was an economic necessity for the Stalinist system. The “Economic Miracle” of the Soviet Union relied heavily on this reservoir of unpaid, coerced labor to complete dangerous infrastructure projects that free labor would not undertake. It signifies the ultimate reduction of the human being to a unit of production, to be worked until exhaustion and then replaced.
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• The Cold War — from the Soviet Union’s emergence from the Second World War to the fall of the Berlin Wall
• The First World War — the global conflict that broke the Russian Empire and made the revolution possible
• The Spanish Civil War — Soviet intervention and the contest between fascism and anti-fascism in the 1930s
• Fascism & the Far Right — the ideological rival that shaped the global stakes of the Soviet experiment
• Browse all topic collections →

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