Russia: The Wild East: Series 1
(home) (rss feed)

21-May-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 1 - 25. Revolution!
The signal for the Revolution was given on October 25th by the battleship Avrora, still moored at the St Petersburg quay where she was anchored in 1917. In the concluding programme of the first half of BBC Radio 4's major history of Russia, Martin Sixsmith argues that between the February and October Revolutions of 1917, Russia missed her only chance for real change. He says, '1917 has long been seen as a turning point in Russian history. February put an end to tsarist rule and October inaugurated the era of proletarian socialism. But I believe the real chance for change came in the brief period between the revolutions. The Provisional Government was committed to the introduction of liberal parliamentary democracy, respect for the law and individual civil rights.' But the Provisional Government did not survive, and under Lenin and Communism, the country's 1000 year history of autocracy would continue. Sixsmith quotes the writer Vassily Grossman who says, 'In 1917, the Russian soul had been a slave for a thousand years... the path of freedom lay open, but Russia chose Lenin.' Sixsmith identifies widely differing versions of the events of 1917, untangling the myth and the reality. Eisenstein's iconic film 'October' dramatizes the storming of the Winter Palace, but in fact it was defended by a smattering of teenage cadets. There wasn't much heroism or bloodshed, and it was all over in 24 hours. But it was the beginning of a power struggle between competing revolutionaries, and, in the next part of his history, coming to BBC Radio 4 in the Summer, Martin Sixsmith will describe how the Bolsheviks would consolidate their monopoly on power. They would create a repressive Communist state that would last for over seventy years until it was, in 1991, overturned. Historical Consultant: Professor Geoffrey Hosking Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
 (top)   (home)   (stream)   (stream (direct))   (download)
20-May-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 1 - 24. Lenin's Return
Chaos follows the abdication of the Tsar, and it is into this chaos that Lenin returns from exile. The programme opens with a series of telegrams from the German foreign ministry which reveal that Berlin saw Lenin as a 'secret weapon', a 'dangerous virus' that would foment revolution forcing Russia to withdraw from the war, and so the Germans put him on the legendary sealed train bound for St Petersburg. But Lenin was most certainly not in control. No one was in control. Tsarism had collapsed but the revolutionaries were far from united. The Provisional Government was trying to create Russia's first western style law-governed state: their "liberal idealism was impeccable," muses Martin Sixsmith, "but the middle of a world war with revolutionary chaos on the streets was not the easiest moment to introduce democracy." The opposition was divided between the Mensheviks who wanted to go through a phase of capitalist democracy before true revolution ushered in the nirvana of socialism. The Bolsheviks, at that stage minor players, had more idea of what they wanted to destroy than what they wanted to create. But Lenin seized the moment: "All power to the soviets!" was his dramatic conclusion that has resonated through Russian history. He was already plotting a Bolshevik coup to take control and boldly promised Land, Peace, Bread and Freedom. This gave him the popular support he needed to have a real chance of taking power. But then he ran away. Sixsmith draws on comments by Nikolai Valentinov, a friend of Lenin, which hint at a manic depressive side to Lenin's character to explain it. It puts things on hold, the Bolsheviks go underground, but by October, the pressure for change was unstoppable. Historical Consultant: Professor Geoffrey Hosking Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
 (top)   (home)   (stream)   (stream (direct))   (download)
19-May-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 1 - 23. The Year 1917 Dawns
1917 is the year etched into Russian history. The First World War had caused disillusion amongst the military and the workers. Tsar Nicholas the 2nd believed blindly in his autocratic right to rule, but enemies were all around him, and the eventual victor - Lenin - was biding his time at a safe distance. Shostakovich's Symphony 'The Year 1917' provides the backdrop for this most momentous year in Russian History. The February Revolution of 1917 was, like the earlier peasant revolts of Stenka Razin and Pugachev, a spontaneous uprising against a hated regime. Contrary to the Soviet account of the period, Martin Sixsmith argues "It was unplanned, uncoordinated, and the professional revolutionaries were left trailing in its wake." But, with his kingdom crumbling, Tsar Nicholas the Second is portrayed, through letters to his wife Alexandra, as strangely detached. He barely mentions the revolution that was about to end Tsarism in Russia, as if willing it to go away by concentrating on other, minor inconveniences. Finally the Romanov dynasty, that had begun in the heroic glory of 1613 and celebrated its third centenary with great pomp just four years previously, came to an end in the banality of a provincial railway siding where Nicholas was forced to resign. In the Tauride Palace in Saint Petersburg from where Martin Sixsmith tells the rest of the story, Nicholas's portrait was unceremoniously ripped from the wall of the Duma chamber. Sixsmith walks from the palace's right wing, where the Duma deputies announced they were creating a new government, to the left wing where hundreds of workers, soldiers and peasants were gathering - the two groups jostling to fill the vacuum. The time was crying out for someone to seize the initiative; he was already waiting in the wings. Historical Consultant: Professor Geoffrey Hosking Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
 (top)   (home)   (stream)   (stream (direct))   (download)
18-May-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 1 - 22. The Centre Weakens
Tsar Nicholas 2nd's reign at the beginning of the 20th century had already been marked by the shedding of workers' blood, and political weakness. Revolutionary voices had been raised, and an unstable Europe would break out into the First World War. The seeds of instability had been sown 40 years before, but it would be Nicholas who would reap the disastrous harvest. Martin Sixsmith tells the story of Russia's part in the First World War through Solzhenitsyn's novel August 1914. Solzhenitsyn takes issue with Tolstoy's belief that individuals cannot shape history and argues that there was nothing inevitable about the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Greater determination and better leadership could have made things turn out very differently. Sixsmith comments, "In many respects 1914 was a last opportunity for the tsarist regime to save itself. The war was popular and its cause had united many elements of a divided society. For a brief moment, peasant resentment and workers' demands took second place to the overriding imperative of defending the motherland. But the mood of national unity was soon to be shattered by political shenanigans, tsarist incompetence and further setbacks on the battlefield." By 1917 patience with the Tsar had run out, the strain of the war effort led to food shortages, profiteering and inflation. The hated figure of Rasputin had been assassinated the previous year but it was not enough to save the monarchy. Discontent was turning to revolt. Sixsmith concludes, "The unity of 1914 was long gone; the old myths of loyalty to the tsar could no longer hold society together. Tsarism was rotting from within and the only question was who or what would trigger its collapse." Historical Consultant: Professor Geoffrey Hosking Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
 (top)   (home)   (stream)   (stream (direct))   (download)
17-May-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 1 - 21. Too Little, Too Late
In the final week of the first part of BBC Radio 4's major new series on the History of Russia, the momentum is all towards revolution. After centuries of unbending autocratic government Nicholas II creates an embryonic parliament - an astounding leap forward. Unrest abates and the economy recovers. Martin Sixsmith reflects, "For a brief moment the vision of the Russian empire as a sort of British constitutional monarchy looked enticingly possible. Had it been offered earlier and more willingly - it might just have worked." Instead it is seen as too little too late. Sixsmith stands where the revolutionaries stood and paints this picture: "On the 18th of October 1905, a young Jewish intellectual with a small goatee beard, a thick head of black hair and intense dark eyes rose to address an unruly assembly of striking workers here in the Technological Institute in Saint Petersburg." That man was Lev Bronstein, better known by the pseudonym Leon Trotsky. He and Lenin were agitating for the whole Tsarist system to be swept away. After the assassination of his uncle, Tsar Nicholas retreats from public view for eight years, but remains under the influence of his wife and her faith in the maverick and dissolute holy man, Grigory Rasputin. When the Prime Minister is assassinated at Kiev Opera House, imperial Russia's last attempt at political liberalism comes to an irrevocable end. Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
 (top)   (home)   (stream)   (stream (direct))   (download)
14-May-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 1 - 19. Censorship and Suppression
The assassination of Alexander II in March 1881 resulted in sheer panic amongst the ruling elite - revealed in the private correspondence between Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the right wing conservative adviser of the new tsar, and Alexander III. Within days of ascending the throne, Alexander denounced his father's plans for a quasi-liberal constitution, thus signalling the end of yet another of Russia's brief flirtations with the ideas of liberal democracy and a return to the autocratic rule, which has always been her default position. In an argument which Martin Sixsmith suggests is as relevant today as it was in 1881, Pobedonostsev contends that the vast size of Russia and its many ethnic minorities mean Western style democracy can never work there. Under his influence, censorship was tightened, the secret police reinforced and thousands of suspected revolutionaries packed off to Siberia. Ethnic tensions were met with a campaign of forced Russification which fostered resentment and sowed the seeds of future conflict in regions like Ukraine, the Caucasus, central Asia and the Baltic Provinces. Alexander wanted to unify the country by turning a Russian empire into a Russian nation, with a single nationality, a single language, religion and sovereign authority. He had a pathological fear of political opposition and was quick to declare emergency rule, suspend the law and restrict civil liberties. For a while revolutionary activity was driven underground, and to the countryside. But it never went away and it returned with a conviction that if the people were not ready for revolution it must be brought about and imposed on society by a clique of dedicated professionals. Historical Consultant: Professor Geoffrey Hosking Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
 (top)   (home)   (stream)   (stream (direct))   (download)
14-May-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 1 - 20. The Last Tsar
It is the turn of the century and the days of Imperial Russia are numbered. Nicholas II was crowned in May 1896. Nearly 1400 men, women and children were crushed to death in the crowds at his coronation, which was quickly seen as a bad omen. Within a year, disturbances had broken out in Russian universities and the Socialist Revolutionaries were disrupting government by murdering senior government ministers close to the Tsar. Double agents used their privileged position to mount further assassinations. By the end of 1904, Russia was close to turmoil and a strike at the Putilov Engineering works in St Petersburg spread quickly to other factories. Within a month a hundred thousand workers had downed tools. Dmitry Shostakovich's eleventh symphony - The Year 1905 - portrays the bloody culmination of the strikes on Sunday the 9th of January, when soldiers opened fire on protesters bringing a petition to the Tsar, leaving more than a hundred dead in the snow. And trouble at home was soon to coincide with disaster abroad. Aggressive expansionism in the far-east had brought Russia into conflict with Japan, and the catastrophe of Tsushima in which Russia lost eight battleships and four cruisers, with 4000 men dead and 7000 taken prisoner. That and the uprising in Odessa, immortalised in Eisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin, dealt Tsarism an immortal blow from which it would never recover. Suddenly the mighty tsarist system didn't look so mighty after all. The resulting concessions introduced by the Tsar were seen as an admission of the regime's fragility. As Martin Sixsmith hints, 'It wouldn't take much for the whole edifice to come crashing to the ground.' Historical Consultant: Professor Geoffrey Hosking Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
 (top)   (home)   (stream)   (stream (direct))   (download)
12-May-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 1 - 18. Seeds of Revolution
In 1881 an assassin's bomb, thrown into the carriage carrying Tsar Alexander II, ended his life with an act of extreme violence. Despite Alexander's good intentions of reform, anger over the power of the ruling class had blazed into the open. The punishment for the assassins was unsparing. Following on from the assassination, Martin Sixsmith looks at the origins of the revolutionary movement in Russia - and where it would lead. He begins with Camus' description of the execution of Alexander II's assassins in St Petersburg. The perpetrators belonged to the People's Will Movement, which had declared a merciless, bloody war to the death. Sixsmith looks at the rise of socialism through the writers of the time, such as Chaadayev and Herzen. Their diagnosis of Russia's social and political backwardness crystallized a deep-seated ideological schism. By the 1840s both Westernisers and Orthodox Slavophiles agreed change was needed .... it was just that they had very different ideas of the form it should take, and they missed their chance. In a few turbulent years, the cautious liberals were swept away by a new generation of angry radicals - Men of the Sixties - "much less squeamish and much readier to use violence to impose their views". Nikolai Chernyshevsky's book What Is To Be Done? published in 1864 determined the future of the whole revolutionary movement. The plot glorifies the 'new men', disgusted by tsarist society and selflessly dedicated to socialist ideals. The love affair of the two principal characters climaxes not in bed, but in the founding of a women's cooperative. Its glorification of 'cold blooded practicality and calculating activity' set the tone for the violence of the coming years and Lenin himself regarded it as a pivotal precursor of Bolshevism. Historical Consultant: Professor Geoffrey Hosking Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
 (top)   (home)   (stream)   (stream (direct))   (download)
11-May-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 1 - 17. The Murder of the Tsar
The cultivation of Russia's great lands depended on the labour of millions of serfs, and they had for hundreds of years been at the very bottom of the social ladder. But, under a new Tsar, it seemed, at last, that their lowly place was going to change. On March the 3rd 1861 Alexander II took a step that many tsars before him had considered taking, but had always drawn back from. The Manifesto on the Emancipation of the Serfs did something that had petrified previous rulers: it offered freedom to twenty three million Russians who for centuries had been little more than slaves. The liberation of the peasants was the biggest shake-up in Russian society since the time of Peter the Great. It affected nearly every member of the population, placed the whole economic and social structure on a new footing, and created shock waves that would rumble through the nation for decades. The reform was long overdue. Peasant unrest had been growing since the end of the Napoleonic invasion, turning to violent uprisings during and after the recent military disaster of the Crimean War. The Manifesto is full of pleas for restraint that betray the very real fear of conflict. But as Martin Sixsmith points out, the Emancipation was 'a botched job - too little, too late - it disappointed and angered nearly everyone'. And in 1881 an extremist revolutionary threw a bomb at the Tsar's carriage with fatal results. "Why," asks Sixsmith "did the man who brought emancipation, peace and the possibility of democracy in Russia end up with his legs blown off, his face shattered, bleeding to death?' The question's all the more poignant because in the minutes before he set off on his last, fatal carriage ride Alexander had just put his signature on a document that could have changed Russia forever. Historical Consultant: Professor Geoffrey Hosking Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
 (top)   (home)   (stream)   (stream (direct))   (download)
10-May-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 1 - 16. The Downtrodden Serfs
Over 700 years successive Tsars had extended the grip of Russia on new territory. The Empire needed a huge peasant class to work the land, and out of this need came the underdog of Russian society - 17 million serfs, or, as they were also called, souls. The plight of the serf pricked the conscience of the Russian intelligentsia, and for writers they were a fact of life that in the 19th century became a cause. As pressure for change mounted, this programme traces the role serfdom has played in the history of Russia. As early as Kievan times in the 11th and 12th centuries, slaves were a valuable commodity. In many ways serfdom had been a relatively benign arrangement between landowner and peasant - and despite the many stories of brutality, the music that emerged is surprisingly joyful. "The inherited willingness to pull together in the face of shared problems helped the nation expand into an empire and defend itself against its enemies," argues Martin Sixsmith. "But it also hindered the development of private property, political freedoms and the law-governed institutions that Western Europe was beginning to take for granted." In the 19th century serfdom had developed into the worst form of slavery and by the 1850's abolition was under serious discussion in Russia and America. An emerging Russian intelligentsia expressed their own guilt over the horrors of serfdom. But unpicking centuries of class division would have to wait for the 20th century before it erupted. Historical Consultant: Professor Geoffrey Hosking Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
 (top)   (home)   (stream)   (stream (direct))   (download)
07-May-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 1 - 15. Defeat and Disaffection
The problems of reform in European Russia are mirrored in its hugely expanded, multiethnic, disparate empire. Today these outlying countries provide dangerous flashpoints and this programme begins with Martin Sixsmith's news reports in the 1980's and 90's about the escalating conflicts in the south of the USSR. He then looks back at the seeds sown centuries earlier and argues that their roots can be understood only through the long view of Russian history. Possession of southern territories including the Ukraine and the Crimea accelerated Russia's rise to Great Power status- and contributed to a sense of national pride that helped glue together a fractious empire, but it wasn't without it's costs. Comparing Pushkin's Prisoner of the Caucasus and Lermontov's Hero of our Time, Sixsmith looks at Russia's brutal conquest of the Caucasus. He draws a vivid portrait of General Yermolov who remains today a figure of hatred and revulsion, a symbol of Russian genocide. This memory is a spur to some of the appalling atrocities of recent history that Chechen fighters have inflicted on captured Russian soldiers. Part of the reason Russia was willing to pay such a heavy price for domination of the Caucasus was as a defence of her vulnerable southern frontiers. Here the Persians, Turks and - increasingly - the British were jostling for territory. The decline of the Ottoman Empire provoked the onset of the Great Game, with Russia and Britain facing off in a struggle to fill the power vacuum. The defeat of Russia in the Crimean War marked Russia's decline as the dominant European power, while at home it sparked public dissatisfaction that would be exploited by the emerging forces of revolutionary opposition. Historical Consultant: Professor Geoffrey Hosking Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
 (top)   (home)   (stream)   (stream (direct))   (download)
06-May-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 1 - 14. Decembrist Revolt
A haunting French lament and readings from Tolstoy's War and Peace underpin Martin Sixsmith's storyline as Napoleon's forces are chased from Russia. This, just like World War Two, was a people's war in defence of the motherland - furious, patriotic, and ultimately successful. The war however, bred further desire for radical change: serfs demanded freedom; peasants demanded the land, and the regular soldiers who pursued Napoleon all the way back to Paris, had seen a world their rulers would prefer them not to see. The discontent and the yearning for change would germinate and spread, before flowering in the most dramatic circumstances. After the liberal impulses of his youth, the French invasion and the spread of domestic opposition panicked Alexander I into a dour, slightly paranoid conservatism. The unrest that simmered during his lifetime exploded spectacularly when he died. The Decembrist Revolt over the succession - partly inspired by the American Revolution - demanded a constitutional monarchy and the abolition of serfdom. The uprising seemed to have been a shambolic, if heroic, failure. But it was an ominous warning to the new Tsar, Nicholas I, that all was not well in his empire. He responded by reinstating the old Muscovite tradition of absolute autocracy, strengthened the secret police, cracked down on dissent and introduced draconian measures to suppress political opposition. But, the harsh treatment of those who led the revolt - many were sent to Siberia and the five ring-leaders hanged - rallied public opinion to their cause, and in a country where poets have long been venerated as the conscience of the nation, Alexander Pushkin's sympathetic verses about the Decembrists did much to establish them as iconic standard bearers of the will for freedom. Historical Consultant: Professor Geoffrey Hosking Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
 (top)   (home)   (stream)   (stream (direct))   (download)
05-May-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 1 - 13. Napoleon Marches East
It is the year 1812 and Napoleon's armies are marching eastwards, bringing the message of revolution to Russia. The French Enlightenment and the revolution of 1789 had had supporters and opponents among Russians. But when Napoleon turned his sights on Moscow, the threat to the Motherland spurred them to forget their differences, forget their grievances and unite. Against the backdrop of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture and drawing on Tolstoy's War and Peace to illustrate Russia's deep seated fear of invasion, Martin Sixsmith reveals that the preservation of the nation became the overriding imperative, just as it had been at Kulikóvo Pole in 1380, just as it would be at Stalingrad in 1942. But, before the victory came the bungling. Catherine's successor and unloved son, Paul the First, was murdered in 1801 by a group of disgruntled Guards officers, and his twenty three year old son Alexander was summoned and told it was time for him to 'grow up and start to rule.' The gap between Russia's ruler and the Russian people had grown dangerously wide and Alexander feared revolution if it were not addressed. So his reforms were aimed at engaging the population in the interests of the state, giving them a stake in society, and creating patriotism and civic consciousness in a resentful population. But even then, his advisor Mikhail Speransky wrote about "the dead hand of autocracy" that had stifled every attempt to reform it, and Martin Sixsmith draws pertinent parallels with Russia today. Historical Consultant: Professor Geoffrey Hosking Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
 (top)   (home)   (stream)   (stream (direct))   (download)
04-May-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 1 - 12. Rebellion and Punishment
Catherine's great passion was for Prince Potemkin and he became her closest confidant and supporter. Catherine had flirted with the liberal values of the European Enlightenment, but a popular uprising sent her scuttling back to the harshest forms of autocracy. Alexander Pushkin's classic tale, The Captain's Daughter, captures the apocalyptic atmosphere of the Pugachev Revolt in which hundreds of thousands of peasants, factory workers and serfs turned against their masters. Landowners were massacred and their estates ransacked. It was a foretaste of the revolutionary terror that was about to sweep away the monarchy in France and it gave Catherine nightmares. But, unlike revolutionary America or France where the people were demanding ever more radical changes to society, in Russia the spark for revolt was a reaction against reform, and Catherine the great reformer became the great reactionary, abandoning ideals of liberty, equality and rule of law. Instead of giving power to the people, as Voltaire and Diderot had hoped, Catherine finally endorses the old system of autocracy - uncontrolled authority in the hands of one person, namely herself. Martin Sixsmith argues that this is the nub of Russian history, "that Russia is too big and too unruly ever to be suited to democracy, and that only the iron fist of uncompromising, centralised autocracy can keep such a disparate centripetal empire together and maintain order among her people. It's the same rationale," he says, "enunciated by Rurik and Oleg, by Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great ... that would later be used by the nineteenth century tsars, by the Communist regime in the twentieth century and by Vladimir Putin in the twenty first. Historical Consultant: Professor Geoffrey Hosking Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
 (top)   (home)   (stream)   (stream (direct))   (download)
03-May-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 1 - 11. Catherine, Lover and Reformer
Peter the Great died on the 8th of February 1725. He was 52 years old, had reigned for forty of those years and transformed Russia from a struggling, landlocked state to a major and still expanding empire. But he died without appointing an heir. At the start of week 3 of BBC Radio 4's major new History series, Russia - The Wild East, Martin Sixsmith traces the power struggles after the death of Peter, until another Great leader emerges. While Peter the Great had laid the foundations of Russia as a European power, it was under Catherine the Great that Russia became Europe's most feared superpower. One of the reputations that Catherine acquired was of a woman with a healthy interest in sex, but this shouldn't overshadow her reforming zeal. She modernised the legal system, took ideas from the great Enlightenment thinkers Diderot and Voltaire, and learnt by heart long passages from Montesquieu's iconic manifesto of constitutionalism, on the separation of powers, civil liberties and the rule of law. "It seemed to many," Martin Sixsmith suggests, "that Russia was preparing to boldly go where few others would dare to tread - having been the most backward of the European powers, she now appeared to be leading the way to the enlightened future." But an ingrained fear of vulnerability lay beneath this show of strength, and Catherine followed an aggressive programme of expansion especially to the south. It provided a buffer against enemies on her borders, but sowed the seeds of ethnic tensions that still exist today, and a careful observer would have realised even at this stage that Catherine was setting very clear limits to the extent and nature of the changes she was prepared to allow. Historical Consultant: Professor Geoffrey Hosking Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
 (top)   (home)   (stream)   (stream (direct))   (download)
30-Apr-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 1 - 10. A Window on the West
Peter the Great's major legacy, visible in all its splendour today, is the city of St Petersburg. He wanted to found a new capital city, named after St Peter the Apostle. He chose an inhospitable northern marshy bank of the River Neva, and raised up a formidable showpiece of architecture and city-planning. St Petersburg became a grand statement loaded with symbolic resonance of renewal and adventure. It would inspire future generations, including the greatest of all Russian writers, Alexander Pushkin. His epic poem The Bronze Horseman opens with an elegant love letter to the European face of St Petersburg and her ousting of the old, Asiatic leaning Moscow. From the city's streets Martin Sixsmith describes the "never-ending boulevards and even vaster squares; the surreal White Nights when darkness is banished and the city takes on its magical aura of ethereal beauty." Peter himself talked of a 'great leap from darkness into light' and the city became known as a 'window on Europe' and the defining metaphor of Peter's reign. But, the first clues that Peter's reforms might not be all they seem come in the very way he set about building this place. While the city rose gleaming and splendid, its foundations - laid on gigantic crates of stones sunk by slave labourers into the boggy mire - were literally full of the dead. Just as at the end of Pushkin's The Bronze Horseman, praise for Peter is tinged with horror, Martin Sixsmith asks how European Peter really was in terms of democracy, justice and the rule of law. He knew change was vital because of the tensions in society - the peasant revolts were a symptom of a system straining at the seams - but he wanted to control that change, and certainly didn't want reforms that would weaken the autocratic power he himself wielded. Historical Consultant: Professor Geoffrey Hosking Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
 (top)   (home)   (stream)   (stream (direct))   (download)
29-Apr-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 1 - 9. Peter the Great
A threatening grassroots rebellion, commemorated in Shostakovich's The Execution of Stenka Razin, immediately foreshadows the reign of one of Russia's greatest Tsars, and the architect of its future. Peter the First, later known as The Great, was crowned as a nine year old boy. For a decade and a half he was shamelessly manipulated by relatives and regents in a violent, bloody power struggle. It left him with a burning conviction that Russia must change. Martin Sixsmith describes his relentless energy and fierce determination, which would make him the most influential ruler in Russian history. Only Lenin would come close to him in the impact he had on society and power. Peter the Great was a giant, both physically - he was six foot seven inches tall - and intellectually. He combined intelligence and wit with an unremitting penchant for debauchery. With his band of close associates he formed The All-joking, All-drunken Synod of Fools and Jesters, with extravagant rituals of feasting and drunkenness and savage mockery of the church. But, "beneath it all, like Shakespeare's Prince Hal", Martin Sixsmith insists, "he maintained an unwavering seriousness of intent and acceptance of his destiny." He had inherited urgent problems, but with an eye on the West (he travelled incognito to London, Oxford and Manchester), he reformed the way Russia was governed. He created its first civil service, built a new capital city and brought the Russian calendar into line with the rest of the world. He constructed a modern army and a navy that saved Russia from the very real threat of foreign invasion, and turned a nation in danger of self-destructing into a European great power, with a vast, stable empire able to support her international ambitions. Historical Consultant: Professor Geoffrey Hosking Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
 (top)   (home)   (stream)   (stream (direct))   (download)
28-Apr-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 1 - 8. East into Siberia
By 1613 when the Romanovs came to power, Russia was already a multiethnic empire. It was the wealth of that very empire - the northern forests, the agriculture of the Asian south, the mineral riches of Siberia - that had given Muscovy the strength to survive its recurring crises. It was this relationship between the Russian state and the Russian empire - its original Slavic population and its expanding multi-ethnic one - that became an ever more crucial factor in moulding her future identity In this episode Martin Sixsmith visits the eastern fringe of the Ural Mountains to tell the story of Siberia - its staggering vastness that has spawned legends of space, and emptiness and freedom. He uses the dashing Cossack Yermak - whose memory endures in Russian folk poetry and popular ballads - to show how Siberia became a vital part of Russia's growing empire transforming Muscovy from a state on the brink to a nation of unequalled riches. But the other, darker side to Siberia is also evoked in the poems of Yevgeny Yevtushenko and in Shostakovich's Opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk with its poignant evocation of the convict road that so many Russians - including Dostoevsky, Lenin, Stalin, Mandelstam and Solzhenitsyn, would tread over the next four centuries. He also tells the story of the Old Believers who broke away from the Orthodox Church and whose heirs still gather today. They opposed the hijacking of religious belief by a centralised state-sponsored hierarchy and were part of a daunting set of problems that the new tsar, Peter the Great, had to tackle and tackle fast. Historical Consultant: Professor Geoffrey Hosking Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
 (top)   (home)   (stream)   (stream (direct))   (download)
27-Apr-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 1 - 7. Enter the Romanovs
Pushkin's play and Mussorgsky's Opera Boris Godunov tell the story of Russia's Time of Troubles, which resulted from an absence of legitimate power. After the death of Ivan the Terrible, who left no succession, the throne had been fought over and authority undermined. For 20 years at the start of the 17thc, famine, revolt, economic devastation and foreign invasions came close to destroying the Russian state forever. From the foot of the statue in Moscow placed in their memory, Martin Sixsmith tells the story of the 2 men who saved Moscow from the predatory Poles. They were MÃ-nin and Pozharsky - one of them a Russian prince, the other a merchant. They raised a militia and saw off the invaders, allowing a new dynasty, the Romanov family, to fill the power vacuum. They would rule until overthrown by the Bolsheviks 300 years later. Glinka's patriotic National Anthem, written two centuries later, celebrates the rise of this new autocratic dynasty. The Romanovs, as Martin Sixsmith points out, could have created a new style of governance in Russia. "The nobility might have seized the moment to insist on a role in running the country, similar to the one enjoyed by the English barons since the time of Magna Carta. But they didn't. Instead, the talk was of the need for an absolute ruler, unshackled by restrictions on his authority, and invested with the monolithic power necessary to safeguard national security." One more opportunity to temper the autocracy that would dog Russia for centuries had slipped by with nothing changed. The need for unity and security was paramount. Historical Consultant: Professor Geoffrey Hosking Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
 (top)   (home)   (stream)   (stream (direct))   (download)
26-Apr-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 1 - 6. Ivan the Terrible
The major new history of Russia series began last week in the 9th century with a collection of warring tribes. It looked at the events that laid the foundations of the Russian nation, the adoption of Christianity and the lasting influence of the Mongol invasion. This week Martin Sixsmith discovers the emerging forces that will make her the largest and longest-lived territorial empire in modern history. He begins with Ivan the Terrible who centralises power in the Tsar, enslaving peasants and nobles alike. Martin Sixsmith paints a vivid portrait of one of Russia's most familiar Tsars, and uses Eisenstein's film Ivan The Terrible to explore the tenets of absolute autocracy that have characterised Russian rule ever since. This 'iron fist' which created a major obstacle to reform, and separated Russia ever further from Western Europe. He cites Ivan's correspondence with Elizabeth I, who by the 1550s was Russia's sole foreign ally. 'Ivan's letters', he says, "sound almost like love letters." Ivan the Terrible is remembered as a wild-eyed, slightly deranged figure. But his legacy also had its positive side. Under his leadership, Russia expanded for the first time beyond the lands occupied by orthodox, ethnic Russians. It conquered the Tartar khanate of Kazan, laying the foundations for the greatest contiguous empire on earth. Astoundingly, Russia would grow by 50 square miles a day for the next three centuries, until by 1914 it occupied eight and a half million square miles - a multiethnic, multilingual state spanning more than one seventh of the globe. Today, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia still spans eleven time zones and is home to a hundred nationalities and a hundred and fifty languages. Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.
 (top)   (home)   (stream)   (stream (direct))   (download)
23-Apr-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 1 - 5. Moscow - The New Capital
In 1453, the Fall of Constantinople and destruction of the Christian Byzantine Empire by the Turks left Russia the sole remaining leader of the Orthodox faith. Directly exposed to the expanding empire of Islam it was a time of immense fear but also of opportunity, and Moscow used the crisis to further its claim to religious and political supremacy. A mystical prophetic text, known as The Legend of the White Cowl, began to circulate, claiming to consecrate Moscow as the Third Rome, the true guardian of God's rule and causing great excitement among the population. Martin Sixsmith suggests the prophecy was in fact a forgery created for political purposes. Moscow had begun to emerge a century earlier under the canny Ivan Kalita or Ivan Moneybags, whose wheeling and dealing carved out a rich and powerful place for his city and himself. He persuaded the Mongols to name him Grand Prince and pre-eminent ruler of the Russian lands. The word 'Tsar' was created by his heirs, derived from 'Caesar', and 'Sovereign of all the Russias.' But the departure of the Mongols had left a power vacuum, and there were three contenders vying to fill it: Lithuania, Poland and the northern city of Novgorod, which had avoided direct Mongol occupation, and preserved the old quasi-democratic values of Kievan Rus. Moscow needed to deal with each of them, and it did so slowly, creating a fragile national unity under Ivan III's unbending autocracy. It gave him the strength he needed to embark on an unparalleled campaign of territorial expansion, initiating the relentless empire building that would continue unabated to the twentieth century. Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke production for BBC Radio 4.
 (top)   (home)   (stream)   (stream (direct))   (download)
22-Apr-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 1 - 4. The Mongol Yoke
In 1240, the Mongols arrived at the capital of the Russian lands, the great city of Kiev. After a week-long bombardment that breached the city walls, the Mongols poured in, wreaking death and destruction. It was to change the course of Russian History. Isolated from Europe, Russia missed out on the Renaissance, and Martin Sixsmith argues, "She would never fully catch up with its intellectual, cultural and social values. Instead, a profound admiration for the Mongol model of an autocratic, militarised state began to enter the Russian psyche.This legacy was so deeply assimilated that its influence has marked the way the country is governed right down to the present day." The widely accepted view is that the Mongol period was a national catastrophe and the absolutist state model it implanted in Russia was her great misfortune. But drawing on the writings of the great historian Nikolay Karamzin, Sixsmith suggests the political unity it created among the Russian lands outweighed all the negative effects. He visits Kulikovo Pole, where the Russians marked their the first military victory against the Mongols. In national folk memory this is the place to which Russians came disunited and left as a nation. Alexander Blok, the great Symbolist poet writing 500 years later, sees it as the starting gun for a millennial clash of opposing religions and values that would define Russia's historical identity. The country united around what soon become a national religious myth -the belief that Rus had been chosen by God for a historic mission - and a consciousness of being a unified nation in opposition to external enemies. And, as we'll see, the leader of that newborn Russia would no longer be Kiev, but Moscow. Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke production for BBC Radio 4.
 (top)   (home)   (stream)   (stream (direct))   (download)
22-Apr-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 1 - 3. Prince Igor and the Polovtsians
Russia with its long and vulnerable borders would be a continual prey to aggressive forces. Rivalry and disunity within conspired to undermine any proper defence. In this episode Martin Sixsmith cites one of Russia's most treasured myths, the lyric poem 'The Lay of Prince Igor', which describes the hopeless courage of Prince Igor as he sets off in 1185 with a small band of men to defeat the Polovtsians. As Martin says, 'Every Russian schoolchild knows its strange, disturbing images and its rhythmic, muscular verse. It was a mainstay of the Russian oral tradition, intended to be memorised and recited as patriotic propaganda. But far from being a celebration of victory, the Song of Igor is a dire warning of the perils of national disunity.' The composer Borodin would further its fame with his opera 'Prince Igor' which contain the famous Polovtsian Dances. The music retold the legend, and throughout Russian cultural history artists in the fields of music, art and literature would continually revisit their nation's rich heritage. In Soviet times these stories often acted as propaganda for the Communist State, and Martin Sixsmith in this episode cites the 1938 film 'Alexander Nevsky' by director Sergei Eisenstein, recounting the defeat of the Teutonic knights in 1242, which was used by Stalin to this end. Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke production for BBC Radio 4.
 (top)   (home)   (stream)   (stream (direct))   (download)
22-Apr-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 1 - 2. A Church for the State
Russia in its earliest history was a disorderly group of tribes which followed pagan religions. As Rurik's descendant Vladimir took control in the 10th century AD, two priorities emerged, the choice of a religion that would bind the state together and the choice of an alphabet that would cement the religion in place and become a common language for the people. As Martin Sixsmith relates, 'Russians have been Orthodox Christians for so many centuries that we tend to take it for granted. But Russia came close to adopting another religion - Islam. If Russia had chosen Islam, history could have been very different - not only for Russia, but for all of us in Western Europe too.' It was said that Russia only rejected Islam because of its ban on alcohol, which was a step too far for the thirsty Russians. And, as for the language, the Russians owe that to two missionary Saints, Cyril and Methodius. They based their alphabet partly on Ancient Greek, and created a unifying language for Church and State, one which allowed the people access to the Bible and thus to the message of Christianity. By the 10th century Russia had established a new capital in Kiev, now the capital of Ukraine, and from there sent traders and envoys west into Europe and east into Asia. It was a period when the nation found a stability, but Vladimir had 12 sons, and a fratricidal war would inevitably follow. Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke production for BBC Radio 4.
 (top)   (home)   (stream)   (stream (direct))   (download)
22-Apr-2011
Russia: The Wild East: Series 1 - 1. Rurik, founder of Rus
A major new history series begins this week which traces the development of Russia over a period of 1,000 years. The first five weeks take the listener from the beginning of the Russian state in 862 A.D. up to the cataclysmic revolution of 1917. Martin Sixsmith, who writes and presents the series, was the BBC's Moscow Correspondent in 1991. The series begins with a vivid recording of his report on the events that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. As he says: 'I remember with absolute clarity my conviction that the dissolution of the Communist Party after seventy years in power, meant the monster of autocracy was dead in Russia, that centuries of repression would be thrown off and replaced with freedom and democracy. But I was wrong. The country is stable and relatively prosperous now, but democracy and freedom again take second place to the demands of the state: the spectre of autocracy is again haunting Russia. Back in 1991, in the grip of Moscow's euphoria, I'd forgotten the lesson of history - that in Russia things change ... only to remain the same. Attempts at reform, followed by a return to autocracy, had happened so often in Russia's past that it was very unlikely things would be different this time. ' In this first programme, Martin travels to the northern city of Novgorod. It was there that, ancient history has it, the warring Slav tribes invited Rurik to come and bring order. He was the first iron fist, and he gave Rus-sia its name. But, as Martin Sixsmith points out, already by the late ninth century, two key leitmotifs of Russian history are beginning to emerge - the tendency towards autocracy, and the urge for aggression and expansion. Today Russia spans eleven time zones and is home to a hundred nationalities and a hundred and fifty languages. Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown A Ladbroke production for BBC Radio 4.
 (top)   (home)   (stream)   (stream (direct))   (download) \