Well, hi, everybody. I'm Bill Whittle. You may remember me from Right Angle. I'm here with Steve Green and Scott Ott, and it's good to be back after missing a couple weeks. I was fortunate in terms of choosing my topic for this week. I usually go to Instapundit and just steal whatever Steve Green, General Pison,

just have him answer his own questions.

But looking at Instapunit earlier today, I saw a post by Steve Green on Instapunit

that basically was titled The Russia That Might Have Been.

And I'd like to talk about that.

The particular article that Steve is referencing, of course, is the Russia that might have been. And I'd like to talk about that. The particular article that Steve is referencing, of course, is the Russia that might have been, had Vladimir Putin not taken office and had not been Vladimir Putin.

But the reason I was gone for the last two weeks was because I was finishing writing and then shooting

an eight-part series on the birth of the Soviet Union called

an Empire of Terror for Daily Wire. And so in the course of the extensive four or five

months of research I did for that, I ran into a couple of cases of the Russia that might

have been. And these are heartbreaking stories, and they're a hundred hundred years old and I thought maybe I'd share them with you guys.

Steve will start in 2000, I'm sorry, we'll start in 1917 and then we'll work away backward from that.

So in 1917 there were actually two Russian revolutions.

In October of 1917, old style calendar, the czar abdicates because of all this term

where the capital was Petrograd, which is now St. Petersburg, the czar abdicates, the entire

imperial government falls apart because it's not just the Tsar leaving, it's the entire idea of the aristocracy and all of that. And a group of people take over what's called the

provisional government. And the leader of the provisional government soon emerged as a man

named Alexander Kerensky. Kerensky was a very theatrical guy, had tremendous personal charisma.

But after the Tsar fell, the provisional government issued a statement in the paper.

This is their first day, essentially.

And the provisional government, with Kerenszky as its leader, basically said this.

In public, in the paper, they said, here are the policies that our provisional government are going to abide by.

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