Vejas Liulevicius: evaluation

Transcript context

…Even he was surprised how effective and how fast the revolution happened? He was, although I think that he would’ve agreed that what was necessary was a cataclysm on the scale of the First World War to make this happen. The First World War shatters so many of the certainties of the 19th century that we talked about as a dynamic period with argument between ideologies. It scrambles all sorts of earlier debates. It renegotiates the status of the individual versus an all-powerful state and the claims of the state. Because to win, or even just to survive in World War I, you need to centralize, centralize, centralize, and to put everything onto an authoritarian wartime footing in country after country. So Lenin earlier had already articulated the possibility that this might happen by talking about how the entire globe already was connected. And there’s a chain of capitalist development that is connecting different countries so that the weakest link in the chain, if it breaks, if it pops open, it might actually inaugurate much bigger processes and start a chain reaction. That’s what he intended to do and has the chance to do in the course of 1917. Incidentally, just to get a sense of the sheer chaos and the human, on an individual human level, what the absence of established authority meant. There’s few works of literature that is powerful as Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago for giving the whole sweep of contending forces in a power vacuum. It’s an amazing testimony to that time and place. You said that Bolsheviks saw violence and terror as necessary. Can you just speak to this aspect of their… Because they took power, so this was a part of the way they saw the world.…

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