Russian revolutionary plate

A History of the World in 100 Objects

BBC

History

4.4 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 18 October 2010

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Neil MacGregor's history of the world as told through things that time has left behind. Throughout this closing week he is examining some of the major social and political movements that have helped shape our contemporary landscape. Today he tells the remarkable story of a Russian plate. It was made in 1901 in the Imperial Porcelain Factory in St Petersburg. Twenty years later it was painted over as a propaganda tool for the new Communist Revolution - decorated in the same factory that had become the State Porcelain Factory and in a city renamed as Petrograd. The director of the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, Mikhail Piotrovsky, and the great historian of modern Russia, Eric Hobsbawn, help piece together this momentous history. Producer: Anthony Denselow

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Thank you for downloading this episode of a history of the world in a hundred objects
0:07.8	from BBC Radio 4. The Internationale, the Great Socialist Hym, written in France in 1871 and adopted by the Bolsheviks in the 1920s as the anthem of the Russian Revolution.
0:37.0	For reason in revolt now thunders run the lines and at last ends the age of cant away with all your
0:45.6	superstitions servile masses arise.
0:51.0	Throughout this series we've had images of many individual rulers from Ramesses the second
0:58.9	and Alexander the Great to the Oba of Benin and King Edward the seventh.
1:03.0	But today in our final week, we have the image of a new kind a ruler,
1:08.0	not an eye but a we, not an individual, but a whole class.
1:14.0	In Soviet Russia we see the power of the people
1:17.5	or rather the dictatorship of the proletariat.
1:21.5	The masses are no longer survive. Our object in this program is a painted China plate that celebrates the revolution and its new ruling class.
1:48.0	Seven decades of communism are about to begin.
1:51.0	This plate is just the start of the journey. In one object you can see the
1:57.1	old regime and the new regime and the change from the one to the other and there are
2:02.0	very few objects in which history is so clearly present before you.
2:08.2	A history of the world in a hundred objects. Russian revolutionary porcelain plate.
2:25.0	Pausl and plate.
2:28.0	Painted in 2021.
2:33.0	This week in our history
2:39.0	this week in our history of the world through things
2:42.0	we're coming right up to the present day and even
2:44.5	looking into the future with the last hundredth object. We begin, though, looking back at
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.