220: Red Dawn: Americans and the Bolshevik Revolution

BackStory

History, Education

4.7 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 10 November 2017

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

One hundred years ago, Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik Party seized power in a revolution that would change the world. They would establish the world’s first Marxist state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, a few years later. As the 20th century wore on, the USSR became the United States’s chief military and ideological foe. On this episode of BackStory, Brian, Joanne, and Nathan explore how that distant revolution had an immediate impact in the United States.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National
0:04.6	Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, the Joseph and
0:08.3	Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis foundations.
0:16.1	From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is backstory.
0:24.9	Welcome to backstory, the show that explains the history behind the headlines.
0:29.0	I'm Nathan Connelly.
0:30.3	I'm Joanne Freeman.
0:31.7	And I'm Brian Ballot.
0:32.7	We're going to start today's show with a reporter named John Reed who went to
0:37.4	Russia in September 1917.
0:39.6	The Harvard-educated Reed was young, but he'd already made a name for himself as a
0:45.0	daring foreign correspondent.
0:46.9	He rode along with revolutionary general Pancho Vía in Mexico in 1913.
0:52.6	And before going to Russia, Reed was a reporter on the eastern front of the
0:58.0	first world war, which was still raging.
1:01.6	This is historian Ben Wissenhunt.
1:04.1	And so he was somebody who was, I think, officially a journalist, but even in those
1:08.6	adventures, he becomes somewhat of our participant.
1:12.1	Wissenhunt says Reed arrived in the Russian capital of Petrograd today,
1:16.0	St. Petersburg, at a historic moment.
1:20.2	The mood is very tense.
1:21.4	The mood is very unsettled.
	...

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