Josh Ireland

But what happens is that Trotsky arrives, and so does Stalin, and the Bolsheviks.

Trotsky has been on the edge of this movement for quite a long time.

About 10 years previously, there's this vicious, vicious dispute over the kind of detail which now seems like impossibly remote and tiny, but it was about what the ideal revolutionary strategy should be, whether it should be a sort of small cadre of elite revolutionaries or a sort of wider...

a wider attempt to engage the population so anyway Lenin and his followers within the party became a group called the Bolsheviks and they supported this idea of a tiny elite Trotsky

wasn't entirely in one party or the next, but he was broadly aligned with the Mensheviks, who were the sort of smaller group.

But eventually, the excitement, the possibility, this suddenly, this thing that, you know, that fate has handed them, they're all able to even...

at least temporarily to put aside these differences because this is the moment this is the thing they've been waiting for and it's not the revolution they expected but it's a revolution it's like there's been a sort of chasm and then they can suddenly see into a different future and so they begin plotting they begin and this is one of Trotsky's other great gifts he's an incredible organiser he knows how to set up a coup

People in Vladivostok weren't saying, I like that Lenin, I think we should give him a chance.

No one knew who these people were.

These were incredibly obscure figures.

They would, I mean, it would be as if, you know, we woke up tomorrow and a Marxist sect had sort of, had stormed into Downing Street and said, we're now in charge.

And it's, now knowing what we know, it's difficult to sort of applaud it because what follows is the death of millions, but it's an incredible feat of all that.

Astonishingly effective.

It's the confidence, but it's because they know this is their one chance.

This is the one moment they will get when everything, there is chaos, when nobody is sure what to do next, when everybody in the country is unhappy, where...

if you are just confident enough if you're bold enough you can it's all up for grabs it's all up for grabs so this is what they do you're listening to Dan Snow's history we'll be back after this break

So this is what they do.

They form a government.

There's a coup.

Trotsky's absolutely essential.