 So, good afternoon. Thank you so much for joining us today on this sunny Saturday afternoon. Thank you for everybody in person for joining and a big hello to those online joining wherever you are around the world. Before I introduce my speakers, I just want to go through some housekeeping apologies if some of you have heard this before. We'll be taking questions towards the end of the session. For those here in person, there'll be a mic roving around. For our online audience, do submit questions on the question box. It's below your video. Online audiences can also use the tabs above the video to buy and have a browse of speaker books. The event will also have live captioning and there'll be BSL interpretation for those who need it. For those online, look at the tabs below the video. On the morning of the 24th of February last year, all of us witnessed something that had not been seen for generations. War on European soil when Russia invaded Ukraine. I use the term witness deliberately because history is not confined to textbooks. We experience history as it unfolds. Whether it's on live blogs on our phones or watching our news anchors on television. My name is Shafi and I'm a journalist. I like to think of my job as similar to that of a historian. We observe, we interpret and we report. For many years, I covered British politics and the comforts of that here in London. Two months ago, I swapped life in London to live in Estonia where I'm now just a two hour drive from the Russian border and I've been observing the spillover effects of Russia on its European neighbors. And like many of its neighbors, Estonia was annexed into the Soviet Union and reemerged as independent in 1991, weirdly the year of my birth. And you speak to anyone above 32 and they will tell you this in fluent English and these are direct quotes I've had. Do not be so naive about Russia. Indeed, you Western Europeans are incredibly naive about Russia's past as well as its present. So here's a chance to rectify some of those concerns today. What you're about to hear is not a talk about Vladimir Putin or the KGB. Rather, it's an attempt to understand modern-day Russia at its embryonic stages because to understand Russia as it is today, we must understand its beginnings. So our two guests each bring their own sets of expertise. We have Sansny Beaver. His books include Stalingrad, Berlin, D-Day, the Battle for Spain and Second World War. So Anthony is a historian of war and he's received major prizes in the UK and abroad. And he's sold more than eight and a half million copies so far. And we have Clive Meiery, the BBC's chief news correspondent. He's had a career spanning more than 30 years across the globe from Africa, Asia, Europe and was the former Washington correspondent. I'm sure many of you remember watching Clive at the onset of the Russian invasion in Kiev last year. I'm informed that Clive won a Royal Television Society Award for that recently. So before I hand it over to both Sir Anthony and Clive, please could you give our guests a warm round of applause. Thank you so much for that introduction. Sir Anthony, I'm a fan. I've been for a long time. So it's a pleasure for me. We'll part each other on the back. Congratulations on a wonderful book full of rich detail as to be expected from Sir Anthony, vividly bringing to life this momentous moment in 20th century history. Most people I think are aware of who the Reds are and the whites, maybe even the blacks, the anarchists. In all of this, who eventually fell out with the Reds, then there are the Greens. The local militias opposed to the Reds and land requisitioning at the time opposed to the whites and foreigners who were involved in the conflict, the British, the French, the Americans and so on. This was a global conflagration, which is something I think we should remember. You make brilliant use of course of diaries, Kofiev, Gorky, Vladimir Dimitrivich Nabokov, the great writer's dad, to one of Tolstoy's daughters, then of course the archive research across Russia. And of course you dedicate the book to Luba Vinogradova, the Russian historian who helped put all this together. So this might sound like a weird question to begin with, but I'm going to ask it anyway. How do you decide what you're going to put in and what you're going to leave out? A very good question and not an easy one necessary to answer. You're always conscious, especially when you're dealing with such horrors as one's dealing with here. You know, do you run the risk of writing what some people would describe almost as war pornography because of the horrors? On the other hand, I would follow Vasily Grossman's reaction when he wrote about Treblinka. He said it's the duty of the writer to write it and it is the civilian duty of the reader to read it. Now, whether I'm not suggesting that people are obliged to read it by any means, but I think that you really do have to present it. And there's a particularly important reason why one needs to bring out these horrors because, and it was also, in many ways, the reason why I wrote the book in the first place, not because of the horrors, but because all historians I think now more or less recognise that the First World War was the original catastrophe of the 20th century. But it was the Russian Civil War with this, it's very horrors, it's destruction, it's cruelty, sadism in many cases, created such a vicious circle of fear between left and right that we saw really the way that it dominated or at least led to the 20th century with the Spanish Civil War and then the Second World War. And really the split between left and right, the fear on the right of the middle classes that they were going to be annihilated as Lenin had promised or the fear on the left was that the white country reaction would crush liberalism and socialism in every form. This sort of Manichean split which was created really did affect Europe and beyond. And that is why I think one really does have to emphasise those horrors. I mean obviously there are one or two which are so ghastly that you feel you've done enough anyway in terms of signalling what it is. But it also links in with something which I'm sure we'll talk about which is trying to understand why it should have been so much more horrific for example in the Russian Civil War than in the Spanish Civil War. Where yes they would put people up against a wall from the other side and shoot them. But that was partly out of fear but also to prevent them coming back to shoot them. In Russia there was an element really of as I say sadism. And one needs in a way to understand where all this comes from because obviously it is not just a question of the Russian Civil War but we saw it in 1945 or in the revenge of the Red Army as it advanced into Germany. And of course we are seeing it in Ukraine as well. Yeah we'll get into the horrors a little bit later on but how difficult is it telling this particular story without getting bogged down in political ideology. Trotskyism Leninism Stalinism and so on. How important is it to try to keep the aims of the protagonists simple and straightforward. Again I think it is important to try to clarify things a little. I mean actually every book on the subject of the Russian Revolution has usually come from political historians emphasizing the ideological splits whether within the central committee of the Bolshevik party or whatever it might be. Because that's their expertise. Well I came from a different direction actually Orlando Fygis who is a very old friend said you know it is about time that somebody actually read it from a military point of view because we haven't really seen that at all. So that was that encouragement you might imagine very much in the early days. I think the thing to do is I think one can I hope I haven't oversimplified it but I think one's got to be able to explain how Lenin out of his simple brilliance I mean Lenin's brilliance was his ability to spot the weaknesses in others and in the situations. And he shared incredible foresight when it was the question of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Germans in March 1918 which for the Germans it was the biggest success of the whole of the First World War. Suddenly they were occupying almost a third of the European Russia if not more and the whole of Ukraine. But Lenin realized it was worth the humiliation when everybody else in the Bolshevik party refused to do it. So one's got to understand what Lenin's real identity and real objectives were and how he achieved it and he certainly he certainly managed it. But he when you've got somebody who knows exactly what they want to do and everybody else is sort of rather confused and worrying about sort of democratic niceties or whatever. I'm afraid the person who knows where they want to go has a distinct advantage. Indeed. I mean was there a sense that in writing this book you were perhaps de-mystifying the communist mythology surrounding the revolution to to an extent. The storming of the Winter Palace is a good example I think. I think most of that had been done already. It really actually started in sort of 1991-92. I mean General Volker-Gonov's biography of Lenin was the very first which actually showed that Lenin was just as ghastly as Stalin and all of the horrors that we always associate with Stalin whether the secret police the gulag or whatever actually it all started under Lenin. So Lenin has had a very easy ride usually of course supported by Soviet mythology during all of those Cold War years. But it didn't take very long for people to realize that actually that was that really was mythology rather than reality. I mean you capture very profoundly I think the chaos and audities and black humor sometimes of war. Your description of the panic before the Red Army arrived in Odessa for instance the panic of trying to to get out of the city on the last evacuation ship which reminds me of Sudan. Now those left behind hiding their spectacle so that they don't look like they're intellectuals. Dressing like peasants you know hiding books growing beards. There is an absurdity to war isn't there. To conflict that is is part of the experience of conflict. Yes an experience is really what one needs to do. I mean I think what we think that the duty of the historian is to understand and to try to sort of pass on that understanding. And for that you've really got to give a flavor of what it's like at the time. I mean you're absolutely right to signal the whole thing about spectacles. You know that as far as the peasants the workers who'd had absolutely nothing and been so badly treated. They needed some sort of symbol in a way for identifying what they thought were their class enemies. And for many of them of course you didn't wear a tie. That would have been too much of a giveaway or a hat. But spectacles too would basically put you in the category of what Lenin described as basically the sort of liberal bourgeoisie of the intelligentsia. Which meant you were also on the on the killing list. Scary stuff. Yes. But I mean one's got to understand the sort of the really deep deep divide. Yeah. And the effects that it might have because we from our position today cannot imagine it otherwise. How difficult is it to get under the skin of the passage. Very very hard. I mean you know you can I mean there are some there being some wonderful books. I mean obviously you can imagine but not just history books but obviously some of the great some of the great novels of the past to understand how for many of the peasantry the idea of the Tsar and autocracy and the Orthodox Church were sort of you know permanent fixtures which they could never imagine doing without until the opportunity started to come which was really in sort of 1917 and the the disintegration of the Russian of the Tsarist army. Russian history had shown how there was an incredible forbearance amongst the peasantry of the suffering that they absorb the suffering that they went through. And then they would explode in actual anger when one had the sort of poker chair for a bellion or whatever it might be. And this is very much what Alexander Pushkin described as you know Russian Revote senseless and merciless. But it is getting that perspective from writers. Yes. From others because of course you know peasants necessarily perhaps you know illiterate wouldn't have written stuff down they wouldn't have left an old their own personal records of what's going on. But then in the 19th century I mean you had the sort of many of the young students sort of went to the country they went to the person tree and they would turn up with tremendous idealism and in in the villages and the peasants in many cases would actually chase them out or basically denotes them to the police because they knew that they were going to be trouble if they started if they started listening to them but also because to be suddenly told well actually we should all get away with the existing structure was something which was too much for them to imagine and they found that distinct distinctly alarming. But you know they had so many reasons for resentment. But unfortunately this turned into sort of massive destruction in all directions whether it was the burning of manor houses and even the destruction of livestock when it wasn't necessarily stolen. I mean Brestlytovs you've mentioned that a little bit. The treaty in 1918 Russia withdraws from World War One and it's interesting it's talking about trying to find comedy in all of this. I'm afraid that's tough. At the conference with the Germans to discuss terms like you know where I'm going with this one. The Russian delegation included intellectuals soldiers but they forgot to include any peasants. So they way lay a random chap off a farm. I don't know how they get him en route and they persuade him to come along to the conference. And he's at the grand dinner at the end of the day and he's asked whether he wants red wine or white wine. And he says whichever is strongest. I wonder Brestlytovs that treaty. Is that the beginning of everything that we're seeing today. Is it the beginning of the Russians trying to desperately to get back those territories that they lost as a result of that treaty in the Second World War. Is that the original sin to a degree of what we're seeing now in Ukraine. I don't think it had it had a big effect at the time. What one has to remember was that unlike the Finns who were able to seize the opportunity. And the opportunity came where we've heard I mean it's ridiculous but Putin blames Lenin for having offered the possibility of self-determination to the different populations and all nationalities of the Russian Empire. And what he didn't realize was that actually the Finnish whites were going to be far better organized and actually have the military experience because they'd sent a lot of their guys to Germany and they'd been serving in Jäger regiments. And so they were able to form themselves into a very effective force. And that's where the Soviet Union lost Finland. Ukraine I mean Petliura and the Ukrainian nationalists were very small in terms of numbers on the ground and they had really no forces at all. Very, very few. And the few troops they had when they marched through Kyiv were all dressed in costumes from the opera, from the opera of the operationary Cossacks, which sort of produced, of course, rather contemptuous laughter amongst the great Russians, of course they called themselves, who looked down on the little Russians. Ukraine didn't really have a chance for a very long time but its culture still sort of kept going, thank goodness, under, in a way, almost underground. But I think that it was, let's face it, it was the, or the famines of the 30s started by Stalin, which really, I think, created this sort of angry political nationalism rather than just the cultural nationalism which on the whole had sort of existed up until then. And Ukraine did have a distinct culture? Oh, yes it did, it certainly did. I mean, you know, it had some of its great poets, it had painters and so forth. But of course they were sort of seen just as sort of, you know, local regional regional characters from a perspective from Moscow. And as a result then, what Putin is saying today is incorrect. It's not, it's only distinct culture, it's not God, it's own distinct heritage, that's all nonsense. Oh, it is. I mean, what I find ironic in a way is that Putin goes on about sort of that Kiev was the origin of Russian culture. Well, I mean, from that point of view then Russia should be part of Ukraine. I mean, you know, it's a ludicrous, it's a ludicrous argument. And we've had one ludicrous argument from him after another. I mean, as for his lecture the year before the invasion, a lot of that written by Medinsky, the former culture minister, who's an idiot of the first water. I mean, I'll give a very quick example. Putin is desperate to get Kazakhstan back. So he spent a fortune making this film called Panfilov and His 28 Men. And this is an extravaganza war movie showing how just 28 soldiers under the command of a Russian, they were all Kazakhs, of course, managed to hold up a German Panzer Division. Well, the head of the National Archives of GAF said, well, we know this is total rubbish because in our archives we've got this report from a journalist with the Red Army newspaper saying how this whole story was invented for propaganda reasons. Medinsky immediately said, anybody who doubts this story, even if it's untrue, is below slime. I mean, that gives you an idea if you like the intellectual quality of some of the people surrounding. But I think the interesting thing we might always forget, which is another paradox, of course, is that Putin is an inheritor of the white Russian tradition, not the Reds. There were the white Russian exiles and they were the ones who came up with this whole idea of holy, slav, orthodox, Russia, which had the right to dominate the whole of the Eurasian land mass, as Dugan said, you know, from Vladivostok to Dublin because of their spiritual superiority. But as I say, this came from the whites and you've only got to look at the Kremlin, which has not a single symbol of the Soviet Union really left in it, just statues of Tsars and of course Putin's palace on the Black Sea, which is entirely gold double-headed eagles. And that sort of ties into the suggestion that it's the Russian empire he's trying to constitute, not the Soviet Union. I mentioned a little bit about the Americans and the Canadians and the French and the Serbs. I mean, this is a global conflict, isn't it? Just talk a little bit about that. Well, it wasn't, I mean, most of them didn't really do any fighting. I mean, the British, the only people who really did any fighting on, say, for example, the British, which is quite a large contribution purely in material terms, i.e. Churchill to help the whites, were giving them the spare ammunition and uniforms and guns or whatever left over from the First World War, because one has to remember that up until the end of, more or less, of 1918, we couldn't get into the Black Sea because of the Turks. And so it was only really with the Turkish surrender that that was possible. But the Japanese landed 84,000 troops altogether in Vladivostok, because they wanted to take over part of the maritime region in the Far East. Nowadays, what are we seeing? We're seeing we know that Xi wants to get Vladivostok back, you know, as, which quite rightly one can understand, you know, going back to the unequal treaties of the 19th century. So, I mean, if you like, Putin, Putin is having, sitting down to tea with the tiger when he's dealing with Xi, but he's got no option. I mean, it's interesting because you talk about, there's a section of the book called The Fatal Compromise. And that is where all these outsiders are trying to sort of, you know, influence events. Do you see any parallels between that outside influence and now, in the sense that some weapons are being sent, moral support is being sent, but there aren't troops on the ground. And as a result, you end up with this, well, we might win, we might not win, we're not sure situation. Well, you're once never sure and especially not in a civil war. But I think on the whole one can say that actually NATO and Jens Stoltenberg, the Secretary-General, have actually handled things pretty well considering the complications of the circumstances. You know, that they have not gone too far, too fast when it's a question of provoking, or to avoid the danger of provoking the Russians too far. But at the same time, at least enabling Ukraine to defend itself. Where we go next will rather depend on, obviously, the Ukrainian counter offensive coming in the, in the spring. But I think that actually the coordination now is far, far better than in, say, 1919, which was really was the sort of the crucial year of the Russian Civil War. I mean, the communications were ridiculous. I mean, you have Admiral Kolchak in Siberia, you have General Danikin down in the south and the Caucasus, and Yudinich in the Baltic, and quite often it took three weeks for any message to pass between them. And this is why Churchill was getting it wrong so often was because simply he didn't have the information at the time. And of course, shall we say, a certain amount of, a certain amount of over optimism on Churchill's part. As Lloyd George put it, he said, Churchill is the grandson of the Duke, was bound, the grandson of the Duke was, of course, rather bound to be opposed to those who were killing Grand Dukes in every direction, you know. But I just, but I just wonder if that, I mean, you, you believe then that the, the pace of Western support for Ukraine at the moment, you know, taking eight, nine months before they decide they're going to send them leopard tanks, for instance. You know, that weariness makes sense or is it simply creating and continuing the war in a way that means that the Russians are simply not being dealt with as quickly as possible. Well, you're quite right, one can argue it both ways. And there's certainly an element of, one should say even moral cowardice, you know, for Germany having got it so badly wrong in the past, in terms of the threat coming from the East and the belief. I mean, it's amazing how we keep repeating the same mistakes. Before the First World War, the Great Best Seller was Norman Ang Hell's book, which argued that war in Europe was absolutely impossible. This was coming out in 1910 and republished in the beginning of 1914. War in Europe was unthinkable because we were so integrated through commerce and communications. Well, we hear Angela Merkel doing exactly, making exactly the same mistake. We don't get dictators. We don't get dictator syndrome. The British and the French in the 30s could not believe that anybody would be stupid enough to want another war in Europe after the First World War. And they actually totally underestimated Hitler. And that again is why we underestimated Putin's determination to take back Ukraine by force. You mentioned at the beginning atrocities and the way that the war was prosecuted, the revolution and then the civil war. The violence in your book is graphic and it's from all sides. That needs to be acknowledged. The routine hacking of men, women and children to death, mutilations, eye gouging, castration, nailing, epaulets to men's shoulders, raping nurses, people roasted over fires, putting blast furnaces strung up by their limbs, mass starvation. I was in Butcher. This would be exactly a year ago. And we saw the mass graves and one wonders if what I saw is simply the continuation of a Russian way of prosecuting wars or is just war prosecuted by anybody horrible anyway? War is certainly never pleasant to any question of degrees of horror. But one does need to get looked back into Russian history to try to understand why Russian forces do not follow the same sort of code of conduct as say Western European or American forces. I mean, obviously, we've known of American and even the British atrocity and so forth. So it isn't a question of trying to pretend that it never happens. But on the whole, it's a question of whether it's the general run of things or whether it's exceptional. In the case of Russia, I think that a number of historians not all agree but would go back to the 13th century and the Mongol invasions which a gave the Russians the impression that the world was against them that they were surrounded and this mentality of sort of Russ Contramundum. But it was also the fact that the Mongol way of war was a war of terror which meant mass murder of civilians, mass rape, mass destruction of towns and cities as if that was the only and the most cost-effective method of warfare. So where do the changes come? Well, I mean, let's face it, it was pretty horrific through most of the Middle Ages where if a city was put to the store it was stored after being captured or even worse in the 17th century the wars of religion in Europe were just as horrific as anything which the Russians are perpetrating. But there was one particular difference, I think, and it was that in Europe we did have the Enlightenment which started to change ideas and of course there were many more humanitarian developments in the 19th century like the invention of the Red Cross and a whole lot of other aspects. I mean, what we do have tended to underestimate is also how badly the Russians treat their own people. We've seen this in Ukraine. I remember in the early 90s when I was in Russia of the way that of the conscripts for the Russian army there were up to 5,000 suicides a year because of the way they've been bullied and treated and all the rest of it. And Russian generals just thought this was funny. I mean, they simply laughed in the idea of that. And what do we see in Ukraine? We see mobile crematoria so to be able to conceal the number of soldiers, mass graves without their bodies being returned to families. And I mean, you know, when you get to Prygoshin and Bardner and the idea of sort of, you know, you beat your, you beat any deserter to death with sledgehammers. Well, I mean, that comes actually straight out of the SS playbook where the SS had this idea that Kameraden Edzing, which meant a lesson in comradeship, meant that anybody who deserted had to be beaten to death by their own comrades. And it is that sort of mentality. It will also explain perhaps why, for example, a British or a French or an American army would never have survived at Stalingrad. But... Well, it worked. I mean, that's the bottom line. It worked. Being that brutal. It was that brutal. But I mean, in many cases, it was also genuine self-sacrifice, as well as total terror of the consequences if you did run away. So, I mean, you know, when you have an army, which is prepared to shoot down, for example, Russian children, the snipers were ordered to shoot down Russian children at Stalingrad because they were being bribed. I mean, they were starving. They'd been trapped behind German lines. They were being bribed with a crust of bread by a soldier simply to fill their water bottle in the vulgar. So... Well, civilians were targeted by snipers in Sarajevo. Yes. That happened there, too. I also wonder if the extreme level of violence is sort of tied in with everything you've said, but also tied in with the fact that this was an ideological war, the revolution and the civil war. It was about ideas. So, you were not just defeating another human being. You were defeating an ideology. And to a degree, that makes it even more important to crush it and to crush it violently. Lenin realized right from the start, don't mess with ideas, as far as talking to the general population. He just used sound bites. And, in fact, in the book, I mean, to describe the way that young carters, young Bolshevik carters, are being taught, sound bites, sound bites, sound bites, don't get involved in any discussion. And it was far more effective than that ticked away. And it was the way that Lenin dehumanized his opponents. They were lice. They were vermin. They were rats. They deserved to be crushed, which was so effective. The Whites actually had no ideology, really, apart from getting back, restoring the old ways. And that's why red terror and white terror were rather different. I mean, white terror, actually, was just bitter resentment at having had the states burned down or things stolen from their houses or whatever it might be. But red terror was, in many cases, like also in the Spanish Civil War, when you are in an area where you know you're not actually in a firm majority. And then people will adopt methods of terror certainly to cow the population. I mean, when you come across some of these characters, vividly... Are we onto the psychopaths? Yeah. I mean, you know... Tunga and Stamban, please. The Cheka madman. Sienko. Yes. Slashtov. You know, I love this description, Anthony. He had the air of an overgrown and corrupt cherub. An eccentric general, Cacain Addict, who took his pet crow in a cage into battle. Yes. When you come across these characters, do you just think this is going to be a great book? It's going to be amazing. No, but you watch, where do they come from and what are they today? Where do they come from? Exactly. I mean, when you come across them, what do you think? What goes through your mind? Well, you know that war, and especially civil war, will always bring the most violent and often, quite often, the maddest to the surface, because they're the ones who stand out. I mean, not just Slashtov, but, I mean, Skorot, who, with his wolf-sotnia of Cossack, Cossack. The psycho-Cossack. The psycho-Cossack. I mean, you know, the Cossacks were terrifying. I mean, literally terrifying. There's no doubt about it. I probably still are today, but anyway. And he actually was handed over by the British, handed back to Stalin, along with a lot of the Cossacks in the end of 1945, and of course, was executed then. Most of them didn't survive. Ungern-Sternberg, I had a whole other chapter on Ungern-Sternberg who was the worst of the lot. I mean, totally mad. He was basically a Buddhist, but at the same time, so he was such a ferocious anti-Semite, he made him look an absolute quarboy in comparison. I mean, as you say, I mean, some of these characters are simply astonishing. Ungern-Sternberg was, I mean, some of them were brilliant cavalry commanders. But I mean, they should have been locked up at the moment, though, well, in fact, they should have been locked up before the war started. But in fact, they should certainly have been locked up as soon as the war ended. But in most cases, they were arrested and then executed. Yeah. I mean, is there anyone that comes out of the book where you think, you know, this is a person who's honorable, who's decent, who was trying to do something? Well, yes. General Kappel, who was one of the few white generals who really was, I think, an admirable man, he was not one of the hard-line Tsarist officers. I mean, he was basically a right socialist revolutionary, which meant basically he was sort of a moderate socialist, who was literally loved by his soldiers and admired by everybody else. And Putin had his body returned to Russia and reburied, as well as Denekin, who was the great commander in the South. So, again, this was the thing of Putin's admiration, really, for the white cause. Talking about the white cause, was it doomed to failure? Yes. Because it's such... There you go. Let's move on. It was such a disparate group of, you know, anti-red, anti-this, anti-that, but not really working together. No, you're quite right. I mean, the question of the white alliance, which I can only describe it, is there were sort of three basic elements to it. One was what was called Komuch, which was basically those socialist revolutionaries who still believed in the constitutional assembly to forgive the Bolsheviks for having destroyed their one chance of democracy in Russia. But they, of course, were a minority, and when it came to military affairs, they were bound to be outvoted, out-commanded, if you like, by all of the white generals who had joined up with the... With Doniki or with Kolchak. So, you have the czarist officers and generals. The most militant, actually, were the young lieutenants or whatever who'd seen their livelihoods destroyed, taken away, their inheritance from their families and all the rest of it. And they were the sort of really angry bitter ones. The old generals tended to be thoroughly corrupt. They were just trying to make enough money during the war so as to pay for their exile, because I think most of them knew that they weren't going to win. And then the third element, of course, of the Cossacks. Well, the Cossacks were actually the most ferocious, and in many ways the most effective of the lot, but they weren't interested really in fighting outside Cossack territory. So whether in Siberia or whether in the Caucasus and the Don Basin. You know, they weren't very reliable from that point of view. So you have this basically alliance, which is in many ways incompatible. The irony is, but there's a lesson to it, of course, if you look at the Spanish Civil War, you have total unity on the white nationalist side under Franco, which of course is far more effective in military affairs. But you don't get that on the red side because they were all quarrelling amongst each other. In the Russian Civil War it was exactly the opposite way around. That's a really interesting comparison. I mean, do you see any, are there any connections between Tsar Nicholas in the sense that they are surrounded by their own echo chamber, that they're being given information that they want to hear, that they're not necessarily fully aware of what is going on outside? Well, Tsar Nicholas II frankly was, I mean, he was somebody with so many complexes. I mean, even before becoming Tsar, he was short and all of the other grand dukes in the Romanos were all incredibly tall. And he actually said in a pathetic way to one of his cousins, who's going to take orders from a dwarf? He had no confidence at all. And the terrifying thing was, of course, that his wife, the Empress Alexandra, of course was a far stronger character and dominated him completely. But that's, should we say, that's really another story. Around Putin, and this is actually in a way, I think, how to compare it slightly with the Soviet Union and it's actually one of the frightening things, is that even in the Soviet Union, you may have had a big boss, whether Stalin or whoever, or Brezhnev later on or whatever, but there was always a line of succession if things were going to go wrong. There is no line of succession here. I mean, yes, we may see a palace coup or revolt. Do we see Patrushev or even more gobsave that's from Prigoshin? But the thing is that Putin has created so many different organisations on the basis of divide and rule. So you didn't have just the GRU, Military Intelligence or the FSB or the SVR, which is Foreign Intelligence. You also have the Wagner Group, which is increasingly unpredictable and it's leader in mortar. You have the Army and you also have the National Guard, which responds directly to Putin himself. So his only interest is actually staying in power, which does make negotiation of any form almost impossible. And I mean, I was discussing actually with a sort of big strip about from a couple of days ago, about one of the real dangers is that in Cold War One, we could have usually trust what Chinese and Russian Communist leaders had said. When they had given their word on something, they usually stuck to it. We're now in Cold War Two and you cannot count on that anymore. They are prepared to break their word at any moment. And this is actually making conventional diplomacy almost impossible. And as a geopolitical change, that is deeply scary. And it makes concluding the war necessarily potentially around a negotiating table very hard. Yes. I mean, I thought that Zelensky was going to threaten Crimea so as to use that as a bargaining chip. I was ticked off by another British ambassador who'd been ambassador in Ukraine before, who was extremely impressive. And she said to me, listen, you're wrong, in fact. Zelensky is so angry about your trust, so angry about the whole of the setup. And I'm sure this probably corresponds to what you discovered in your time in Ukraine. That he's not going to stop until he's got every single soldier out of Crimea. Now he can do it by cutting off Crimea, both Perikop and the Kurch bridge and then the water and all the rest of it. But, you know, will that still be a basis? Because Putin, and actually I'm also, most Russians, not just Putin, see Crimea as sort of existential Russia. And I'm not sure that they would ever accept it. At the same time, Zelensky has also got his own constituency of his people and they have been through all manner of privations. Yes. And to hand over Crimea would be rewarding aggression, wouldn't it? Well, that would be, going back to 1914, you're right. I mean, say rewarding is difficult. The Russians wouldn't see it in that way. Well, no. We have to see, there are two totally incompatible perspectives, you know, on the status of Crimea. And as far as the Russians are concerned, you know, Catherine the Great, Potemkin, Sevastopol or whatever, that, you know, Crimea was always Russian. And just because Khrushchev decided on a whim to hand it over to Ukraine, they didn't regard us as relevant. And there is an element of truth in that. I mean, not that I believe that actually the only way to end the war, in fact, is for Zelensky to take Crimea because for Putin that would be the worst disaster imaginable, because his popularity rating went right up over to the, well into the 90s, as you will remember, when they did occupy Ukraine and got away with it, to lose it would be. But also at the same time, again, that is very much of a risk in terms of escalation. All right. I think we should get a few questions. And we've got quite a few. I'm going to start here. Because I know lots of people have been in touch who've been listening in and watching online. Okay, this is from Penelope Blake. Yep. And she says, could a revolution ever happen in the UK? Interesting point. I would have said, and I think sort of, you know, to certain degree, Tocqueville was sort of made the observation, which I think is absolutely right. He said, the most dangerous moment for any regime, which has been autocratic, is when it starts to liberalise. And that's absolutely true. Isn't that about it? But as we saw in the February revolution in 1917 in Russia, a revolution will then you really work when the ruling regime has completely lost confidence in itself. So for the to be a, for a revolution in this country, or in any country, frankly, it would have to depend upon the complete collapse in confidence of the existing regime and system. So I think as things stand at the moment, as we can see from the polls, even though, you know, republicanism obviously has crept up since the Queen Elizabeth's death. But I think that was all predicted well in advance, and everybody imagined that would be the case. I don't think we're going to, I don't think we're going to, I would be very surprised to see it here. Sure. All right, so sorry, Penelope. It ain't happening, girl. It ain't happening. Right, okay. We're going to take some questions from the floor now. Uh, there was a gentleman up, we'll go with a chap with a stripy shirt on there. Forget a microphone to him. Thank you. And then the lady in pink will go to you now. And in the front? And in the front, lady in yellow. That's the lady in pink. The front there. Okay, so. Thank you very much. Do you think there was a meaningful chance that the provisional government could have lasted? And created an actual democracy in Russia? Or was it doomed from the start? I think it was doomed from the start. One remembers the great Alexander Herdson's remark about the pregnant widow, and the idea that there is this moment of, well not moment, actually period, of total danger for any form of reform in between the collapse of the old regime and the creation of a new regime. And this was the trouble in Russia. You have the, obviously the sort of the intellectuals, most of the politicians, even the conservatives, were all desperate to have a constituent assembly there, what would eventually become their sort of dooma, or a new version of the dooma through universal suffrage. But the problem is that with the destruction of the police and of the whole of the governmental mechanism of the Tsarist state, you have ministers in the provisional government who are called ministers there, sitting in ministries or whatever, but they have no control whatsoever over events. I mean they have levers which frankly aren't attached to anything. And this was one of the problems. So they lost control. In the countryside the person said, well are we taking over the land or aren't we, and then they were told by even the leaders, the left socialist revolutionaries, right socialist revolutionaries, who were the main political parties for the peasantry. They were saying, listen, you've got to wait until the constituent assembly is ready and then we've got to make a decision based on that. Well, not surprisingly, they became very impatient and they didn't see why they should hang around. And that was why also it was very easy for Lenin and the Bolsheviks to sabotage the creation of the constituent assembly. And then in January 1918, they were able to basically allow the deputies in and then they had them all chased out by construct sailors soon after midnight. So it existed for a matter of hours only. Thank you very much. Okay, the lady in pink, just there. Okay, thank you. You're welcome. No, just here, there you go. Lovely, thank you. Hello, thank you for being here this afternoon. Sort of an offshoot of Penelope's question. You mentioned in the context of the revolution the institutions that people thought they could absolutely not do without that suddenly, well, changed. What are the modern institutions that are at risk and what can they do to salvage themselves? Governmental, perhaps monarchy, perhaps even press. Well, so here in this country, you mean? I would say UK, but if there's anything outstanding globally as well. Okay, okay. What can they do to, well, I mean, I think your essential point is absolutely right about the whole question of institutions. I was very struck by the fact that David Frum, one of the sort of political commentators in America, when the Queen died, he pointed it out very clearly, I think, what a paradox it was that the Americans had created a constitution using the best brains that have ever been assembled in a single room back in 1776. And yet they had failed to prevent, basically, what was going to be an elective dictatorship. Well, he said that in here in Britain, you know, you have a chaotic, totally unpredictable system, which depends on hereditary. And yet there is no real threat or has been no real threat of a military coup or an overthrow of the system. I think the point here is very much that if you have a republic, and I think this is something which will be interesting to discuss, say, with Australians, who of course want to have their head of state, but they just don't know what to choose, the vital quest thing is, don't have a politician as head of state, because that is what's so dangerous. And this is, in a way, the unintended brilliance or defensive nature of the British regime. If you give the symbols of pomp and panoply of all that sort of stuff, and in a way also command of the armed forces to the head of the state, but allow them no political power whatsoever, it is much more democratic in the sense it's much less likely to create or to provide that sort of pre-revolutionary situation, which you might get otherwise. As soon as you start having a politician up there who can move from being, say, prime minister to president, if you take, say, America and Trump, I mean, let's face it, it is still a very scary possibility. Or even in France, I mean, the Fifth Republic's constitution gives far too much power to the president, but that is a problem when you have the president as the commander-in-chief and also as the political leader. And this is why institutions are so important because unless you can defend things like the Supreme Court, as we're seeing battles in Poland, we're seeing a certain, should we say pressure, even in this country, of resentment of the present government against what they think is the excessive power of judges. And certainly we're seeing it in the United States. Institutions are vital if you are going to defend democracy. Without them, then, I think you're extremely vulnerable. And I think when it comes to my own profession, the press, we are in a very, very difficult situation now given social media and how that can undermine us as an institution because of all kinds of nefarious and frankly incredible actors who can bash out stuff on a keyboard. Yes. I'm going to go to a question here and then we'll go to the lady in yellow there. And then I want someone on the left, on the left, on the red side. That's the white side of the red side. The greens. I'm sorry, we don't want to start having a civil war and bring you to the library. The summer civil war. I'm going to go with, I'm going to go with bandit queen. Bandit, bandit queen. Bandit queen. How can we ever hope to teach Russia about the terrible long-term effects of conflict and warfare, especially the psychological effects on survivors of war on both civilians and soldiers alike? Well, a very good point. I mean, already we're getting reports from Russia, as you know, and if you will, of the psychologically damaged. I mean, many of them are actually deliberately recruited, particularly of pre-Goshians, Vagla a lot, because they were psychologically damaged in the first place. And they were returning home. And I mean, there are many towns where people are literally terrorized and afraid to go out on the streets. And they know that these guys have got nothing to lose because even if they were arrested, they'd immediately be released by, you know, their former bosses. So, yes, the psychological consequences of this war, and of course, for Ukrainians as well. I mean, when one sees the results of many of the atrocities where they've joined a whole lot of others, you know, no society can survive untouched by that sort of horror. Yeah, okay. So, yes. Hi. Fine. You mentioned about the fact that, you know, there were so many repercussions of this kind of origin story of conflict between the left and the right in the revolution and going on to the Spanish Civil War and onwards. Do you feel like there's anything that we can actually learn or benefit from now when we have such an incredibly heightened state of conflict between kind of different positions across, you know, in the UK and the US, but really across the world? Well, when it comes to something as extreme as the Civil War, that is well beyond what we're seeing. The question, will we see that sort of conflict developing particularly in the United States? I mean, there have been numerous articles about the way that some of the extreme right want to set up their own communities, even states within the United States. I mean, that actually has more echoes of the 1860s than of anything recently. I think the only lessons we can learn are the dangers. And what we have seen, and it goes back slightly to what I was saying in my answer to Clive, when you get this vicious circle of rhetoric, it's almost impossible to stop. And this is really what created this terrifying split in the 20th century, which basically still to a certain degree dominates our lives today. I mean, that split between left and right, red and white, communist and fascist and so forth has slightly changed axis because it's now much more between authoritarianism and democracy. But it still comes from the same stem all the way through. What can you do to stop it? Well, I mean, I remember arguments with sort of Spanish historians or friends. They were saying, oh, but Anthony, you exaggerate or whatever. Words don't kill. Well, actually, words do kill. I mean, there we had in 1935 and 1936, Largo Caballero, who later became the leader of the socialist party in the Spanish, who was talking about, he was very proud of being suddenly being called the Spanish Lenin. And he was talking about the complete annihilation of the bourgeoisie in Spain. Well, I mean, it's not surprising then that a large part of the bourgeoisie then go to support Franco because they become terrorized. At the same time, the left is terrified because they see the horrors perpetrated by Franco and his legionnaires and Moroccan rigurares in 34 in the Asturias and the appalling torture and all the rest that was carried out afterwards. So when you get to this sort of circle of fear, it's very, very hard to stop. And I didn't think we can learn a lesson which will teach us on really how to stop it unless you can somehow stop it earlier on. I mean, my solution will be ban social media, but I mean, I know that I can imagine how popular I would be if I came out with that. Are you on Instagram? I'm on Instagram, yes, but... You're on Instagram? Any of... I've only just joined myself. Seriously? I do one or two silly little photographs which might amuse people, but no more than that, I can assure you. Right, I want a question on the left. Gentlemen down here. And then we've got one more up on the right and I think that's going to be hard. And then that's it. That's ours. Right. How inevitable do you think the Bolshevik rise to power was? Because, of course, during the July days, which wasn't necessarily led by the Bolsheviks, but was very heavily influenced and linked to the Bolsheviks, they lost a lot of power. Then, of course, in the Commonwealth of Fair, they gained a lot of support as well. Do you think it was necessarily the blundering by the provisional government that led to their rise, not necessarily just the state in Russia? Well, in a curious paradoxical way, I think it helped them because it meant they were still underestimated. You know, the fact, Karensky was unbelievably arrogant and unimaginative because he kept, even right up to the very, very end, he was telling the British Embassy, oh, for goodness sake, don't worry, I mean, the Bolsheviks are no threat whatsoever. And this was only a few days before, only a few days before, really, the, what I would call the October coup d'etat. And by then, they'd already infiltrated the security services, the communications, the telephone exchanges and all the rest of it. But the July days, yes, they were a disaster, but the very fact that Lenin had to go underground and that they all had to hide and Trotsky was locked up. But that actually was not really a disadvantage. I mean, it was simply, again, re-emphasizing the prejudices against them by fellow socialists, by the other socialist parties, as well as, of course, by the right, thinking that they didn't actually pose a real threat. So, you know, one can certainly see it in both ways. And then we got one... One more question? That's one more, we had one more up there, which is very... One up there? Oh, there's a lady there with her hand, put your hand, put your hand, yeah, give it some action. Yeah, there we go. There we go. If you could get the microphone now to her. Thank you very much indeed. Lovely. Thank you. How do you think that Lenin and the Communist Party were able to so effectively suppress rebellion against grain requisitioning and the Kronstadt sailors? Was it all down to military force? I think when it comes to the Kronstadt revolt, I think that one can only say sheer brutality and total ruthlessness. And, of course, when it came to the other revotes of 1921, Tambov, Western Siberia, and all the others, we've got no idea really about the numbers who were killed and all the rest of it. When I was in Helsinki, and I mean, actually, it was any... Just as I was leaving, I heard that many of the people involved in the Kronstadt revolt, their grandchildren are still living in Helsinki. They escaped over the ice. Some of them barefoot running across the ice to get away. But Trotsky and saying that he was going to shoot them down like partridges. And then when we came to Tambov and all the rest of it, I mean, I think they were actually using poisonous gas against some of the revolting peasants and the sort of revolts during 1921. So, you know, if you have got and you have taken power at the end of a civil war like that, you still have the troops in place and you still have the armaments. I suppose, you know, an expert in military power would say, well, you've got to use them. But my God, they were used in a, as I say, in an utterly, utterly brutal way. I was appalling some of the accounts. I mean, I'm afraid by the end it was right at the end of my book, but I mean, I bring it in. But I mean, there have been many, have been other books really describing that particular period. And it was, as I say, deeply shocking. Well, on that cheery note. I know, I'm afraid. We shall bring this to an end. So, thank you, buddy. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much for that. That was really, really intriguing. And hopefully, we all learned something. And Vladimir, if you're watching, I hope you learned something too, as well. So I think Santa is going to be doing some book signings outside. There are books outside available. So feel free to have a look. If anyone who was watching online, thank you for joining. And hopefully, we'll see you all soon. Thank you very much.