Marc Ferro

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, is remembered as the instigator of the October Revolution of 1917 and, therefore, as one of the men who changed the shape of the world at that time and forever, but perhaps the actual events happened in a way different from that narrated in the history books…

This program uses Lenin’s own words to tell the story of the Bolshevik rise to power: the overthrow of the Tsar and of the Kerensky government, the efforts at world Communist revolutions and the readiness to compromise in order to save the revolution in the Soviet Union, the ascendancy of the struggle against socialism over the struggle against capitalism. Thus the program explains the political background of the establishment of the totalitarian Soviet state and of its economic, social, and cultural policies—the precise institutions and policies that would in our time cause the destruction of what Lenin created by the force of his single-minded personality, his political acuity, his powerful oratory...and the weaknesses of the divided democratic opposition.

This program shows how simple and logical it all was—one step at a time, from the bitter defeat of World War I and the humiliating Treaty of Versailles, the wrangling of the Weimar democracy, the economic crisis... Then the fear of Communism, the threat of violence, and the Nazi promise of law and order was so seductive that the mass of Germans were willing to overlook a little repression here and a little there, until it became a point of honor for Germans to witness brutality without flinching. Forced after the war to look at what they had done, the Germans would not or could not see.