Russia's Wars (2023) s01e01 Episode Script
Empire of the Czars
1
Devastating wars,
Pitiless rulers
in pursuit of
power over centuries.
When Russia takes up arms,
the world holds its breath.
The endless expanse of Russia.
In the 16th century,
the Czar's empire
is still young.
After defeating the
Mongol nomads,
it expands further eastwards
beyond the borders of Europe.
Russian Cossacks subdue
the people of Siberia.
By the end of the 17th century, Russia
stretches all the way to the Pacific.
TRANSLATOR: Seen from Europe,
Russia is a rather
insignificant peripheral empire.
Inward looking, with few contacts
with the rest of the continent.
This giant country plays
no significant role in Europe,
but its rise to a great
power is imminent.
If you're looking over
Russian history of warfare,
you're also looking over
the history of warfare,
history of European
warfare, global warfare.
The Kremlin, Moscow.
The center of Russian power.
In 1682, Peter Romanov
has himself crowned Czar.
History will know him
as Peter the Great.
Pictures give him a certain
sort of solid grandeur,
while in fact, he had a twitch.
He had fits.
He was extremely
hyperactive, kinetic, almost.
At two meters tall, he towers
over his contemporaries,
and he rules his
country with an iron fist.
He was probably the most talented
man ever to be Czar or ruler of Russia.
He had those brilliant qualities
that every politician needs.
He had a vision of
what he wanted to do.
He had the acumen,
the ability to actually do it.
And he had the resources
to achieve what he wanted to.
Everything about
him was extraordinary.
Well, he's Peter the Great.
He is considered,
I mean, he was not the first
Russian emperor, but he is considered
'the Russian emperor'.
Putin himself
recently, not even so recently,
compared himself
to Peter the Great.
Czar Peter wants to
modernize his country.
He takes an early interest
in military and naval affairs.
His conflict with the Ottoman
Empire culminates in his first war.
His goal - to take
the fortress of Azov,
east of Crimea, still
strategically significant today.
The campaign to take
the fortress of Azov
is a very important
trial run for Peter.
He's testing himself,
his own strategic
military capabilities
and the options that he
has worked out for himself.
The first attempt to take the
fortress from the landside fails.
So Peter builds a fleet and
blockades Azov from the sea.
It works.
In 1696, the
Ottoman Fortress falls.
It's Peter's first
significant victory.
TRANSLATION: That was the
really new thing under Peter the First:
he saw the Russian Empire as
a maritime power too, that could
and must defend its
interests and frontiers at sea.
Prior to that, it
hadn't had a fleet.
Peter is fascinated by the West, its
culture and its modern technology.
He decides to travel to Western Europe to
seek knowhow that will benefit his empire.
As 'Peter Michailyov',
he finds work in a shipyard in Holland,
to learn all he can about shipbuilding.
He really is the first to cultivate
this fascination for Western Europe,
or Central Europe, and
for European values.
And he's starting a tradition that
extends through the Czarist empire
and the Soviet Union
to contemporary Russia.
If you follow Russian media
today, watch Russian talk shows,
one of the most frequently
repeated lines is: "We are Europe".
That goes without saying.
And that idea goes back to
Peter, and still holds today.
Peter wants to play in the
concert of European powers.
He also wants access
to the open sea.
In the year 1700,
Peter declares war on
the great power of Sweden.
It controls the land between
Russia and the Baltic Sea.
Peter wants to
break that dominance.
In the autumn, Russian
troops march on Narva.
It's the beginning of
the Great Northern War.
But at the end of October, the
ground is already frozen hard,
making it difficult
to dig trenches.
And Russian gunpowder
is substandard.
After a heavy snowfall,
the Swedish army breaks
through the Russian defence line.
It's a painful
defeat for the Czar.
Narva at the beginning of the Northern
war is a disaster for Peter and Russia,
but he reacts in the same way that he has
reacted to everything else in his life so far.
When something doesn't
work, he sits down, thinks it over,
and works out how the
situation can be bent to his will.
He reforms the army.
He reforms its
command structure.
He begins to understand
that superiority in numbers
is becoming less and
less significant, and that
modern military technology
is more and more important.
He does everything he can to
modernize the Russian army.
And to make it bigger,
the Czar raises more
and more recruits.
Bells are taken from the
churches and smelted into cannon,
an early form of
total mobilization.
In the summer of 1701, Peter
launches another offensive.
He conquers large parts of Livonia
and Estonia, loyal allies of Sweden.
This is a scorched
earth campaign.
Russian troops burn
towns and villages,
plunder, storehouses
ravage the fields.
Nothing must be
left to the enemy.
precisely planned strategy to
make it clear to the Swedes and the
population of the
Baltic, the elites,
the Peter possessed the
military power he needed to take
control of the Baltic.
It's a tactic that damages
Russia's reputation.
It's always a strategy
of Russian warfare.
It's not unique to Russia,
and it's easy to paint the Russians
as complete barbarians at this time.
But in fact, all armies were,
pretty chaotically supplied.
But, you know, the Russians
took it to another degree.
I mean, there was a civilized
code of warfare in the West.
Peter the Great never
subscribed to that.
And repeatedly he showed incredible
ruthlessness at crushing opposition.
To gain access to the sea,
Peter captures the
fortress of Nyenshanz,
near the mouth of the River
Neva in the Gulf of Finland.
He burns down the whole complex.
Close by in the middle
of the Neva Delta,
he builds a new fortress
with a church named for
the apostles Peter and Paul.
The Czar christens this place, which
he has chosen for his new capital,
Saint Petersburg.
So in the Northern war,
which will go on till 1721,
Czar Peter won his first
foothold on the Baltic Sea.
But the Swedish king
is not ready to give up.
He launches a counter-offensive with
a well-equipped army, 40,000 strong.
The Russians make tactical
withdrawals and carry out guerrilla
attacks on the
enemy's supply lines.
Wherever the Swedes advance,
they find no food for the army.
Soon, hunger, disease and cold
are decimating the Swedish forces.
Summer 1709 sees
the decisive battle:
over Ukraine's Poltava fortress.
The Swedish army now
has only 22,000 soldiers.
The Russians 42,000.
Peter the Great is victorious.
He's absolutely thrilled.
This immediately becomes
part of the myth of Russia.
He does that very much.
He sets up himself as a
symbol as the great victor.
So Poltava becomes very, very
important in Russian historiography.
And it really is a very important
turning point in the history of
Europe, after all,
because this is
the moment that Russia really
defeats the Swedes in the Baltic.
This is actually the moment that
Russia becomes a great empire.
From now on, Russia is
a European great power,
Saint Petersburg is its
new capital in the West.
And by conquering the Baltic,
it has gained ice
free access to the sea.
The ideal basis for the
further expansion of the empire.
About 50 years later, Russia's
position becomes even stronger.
In 1744, a German princess,
Sophie Frederike of Anhalt-Zerbst,
travels to Saint Petersburg.
She's betrothed to Peter the
third, heir to the Russian throne.
A grandson of Peter the Great.
But first, Sophie
takes a Russian name:
Ekaterina.
The couple have
little in common.
The heir to the throne seems
infantile and has no interest in his bride.
He would rather play
with his tin soldiers.
Their characters,
interests and goals were
completely incompatible.
Part of this was undoubtedly
down to the ability and ambition
of the young Princess.
From the very start, she was
determined to be more than just
some married-in Princess
stuck in a back room.
Soon Catherine
speaks fluent Russian.
She absorbs Russia's traditions
and ways of doing things.
That makes her
popular with the people.
She's educated,
clever and emancipated.
She's got this connection with the
West, with Germany, but with much
of the history of Western
Europe or Central Europe.
And she brings some of those values and ideas
to play in her transformation of Russia.
She understands what
makes the Netherlands great,
what makes France great,
what makes England great,
what makes a great
empire. The Spanish.
She's learned all that stuff and
she says "Okay, I'm going to translate
some of this knowledge
into what I can do for Russia."
Catherine isn't reluctant to get involved
in conspiracy and political murder.
When Peter becomes Czar in 1762,
Catherine plots a risky plan
with her lover, Grigory Orlov.
She gets the Imperial Guard on her
side and disposes Peter, who shortly
thereafter dies in
mysterious circumstances.
Catherine is declared
the new head of state.
And crowns herself Czarina.
The way is now clear to mould
Russia after her own ideas.
She wanted to complete
the work of Peter the Great.
And in fact, every ruler since Peter
the Great wanted to emulate him.
Every Czar, every
general secretary,
every president of Independent
Russia wanted to be Peter the Great,
wants to command in warfare,
and few of them have
the ability to do so.
In Catherine's time,
Russia is an agrarian country.
Around 90% of the
population are peasant farmers.
Serfs on the
estates of aristocrats.
They can be conscripted
to fight for the Czar.
The rulers can raise an
army whenever they want.
Catherine would like
to abolish serfdom,
but she can't get her
way against the nobles.
And a large, powerful army
will help her achieve her aims.
She plans to expand
the empire southwards.
She wants to build a fortress on the
Black Sea as a bastion against the Ottoman.
And of course, Catherine's
looking at the south and saying:
Crimea looks really
quite interesting.
What can we do down there?
The overall aim toward the Black
Sea is to get control over the Black Sea,
starting with Azov, but
then, of course, the Crimea.
And then with luck to be able to
get control over Constantinople,
or at least be able
to control shipping
that goes in and
out of the Black Sea.
This is all to do with
power, to do with trade,
to do with economic success
as well, and of course, to do
with getting more and more territory
which makes your country your
empire even more important.
In context of today of course,
getting Crimea is very important.
Catherine's forces move south.
The Russian Baltic fleet undertakes
the long voyage to the Aegean Sea.
Here, in a battle in 1770, most
of the Ottoman fleet is destroyed.
And finally, in 1783 the Crimea,
the jewel in the
crown - is annexed.
Both for its geostrategic
significance, dominating the Black Sea,
and in the mental map
of the Russian elite,
the Crimea is the
pearl of the Empire.
The elite, and the imperial family too,
start building summer residences there.
New cities are founded
like Odessa and Sevastopol,
as ports for Russia's
Black Sea fleet.
Catherine now holds the gateway to
the Black Sea and the North Caucasus.
Her lover and companion, Marshal
Potemkin, starts a major project of
colonization and Russification
of today's southern Ukraine.
He brings in thousands of settlers
and christens the region "Novorossiya",
"New Russia", in
a prestige project.
They say he faked the progress of
development for the Czarina´s visit.
By constructing settlements that
were no more than painted facades,
so-called Potemkin Villages.
The Potemkin villages existed.
They were there to
give an impression
of the first fruits of the long
term policy of colonization.
Actually, it's a
really modern idea.
If you look ahead to the
20th and 21st centuries.
The idea of spreading fake news to
get people on your side to impress them.
Czarina Catherine died in 1796
without achieving her principal goal.
The complete destruction
of the Ottoman Empire.
But her conquests greatly
expanded the Russian Empire.
And so in her own lifetime, she
became known as Catherine the Great.
The importance of her,
as with Peter the Great,
Vladimir Putin mentioned,
I think twice that
Catherine the Great
is his favorite monarch.
He actually takes
lessons from her.
I mean, Peter the Great is a great
example, but she is, as he put it,
she was probably a better empress
because, as he said, she shed
less blood, but she
took on more territories.
At the start of the 19th century,
Napoleon Bonaparte has Europe in his grip.
France controls great
swathes of the continent.
It has an alliance with Russia.
But there are tensions between Napoleon
and the Russian Czar, Alexander the first.
Napoleon gathers a huge army.
Austria and Prussia are
forced to provide troops.
The Grande Armée
numbers half a million men,
far larger than Russia's forces.
Napoleon's invasion of
Russia was one of those crazy,
maniacal and stupid
moves in history.
You can chalk it up
to really, really dumb.
So he's really got
a treaty with Russia.
It looks as if he
can actually be fine.
But he gets it into his mind
that the Russians are going
to come against France,
come against him.
So let's launch a
pre-emptive strike.
The plan is to mount a high speed campaign followed
by a single decisive battle to win the war.
On June the 24th 1812,
the Grande Armée crosses
Russia's border at the River Memel.
But Russian forces withdraw
into the wide expanses
once again, leaving
behind scorched earth.
Without supplies, Napoleon's
troops begin to starve.
Russian tactics are successful,
more or less without combat.
The Grande Armée is shrinking.
Napoleon's idea was to
advance deep into the Russian
empire all the way
to its heart, Moscow.
To take Moscow.
And he expected that, as in
his other European campaigns,
he would not only be
offered the keys to the city,
Russia's ancient capital,
but also that a peace
offering would follow.
At Borodino, just
150km from Moscow,
the Russians confront
the Grande Armée.
Napoleon wins a victory, but Russia fights
stubbornly with no concern for losses.
The Grande Armée suffers
almost 30,000 dead or wounded.
The Russians lose around 40,000 men in one
of the 19th centuries bloodiest battles.
Borodino was the
most intense butchery,
the most intense massacre
in a battle until the first day of
the Battle of the Somme in 1916.
It was absolutely a brutal stalemate in
which the Russian and French armies
just blew each
other to smithereens
at very close quarters
for a whole day.
Napoleon's forces enter
Moscow with no further fighting.
But the evening of their
arrival, the city is in flames.
Once again, it's the Russians
scorched earth policy, denying the
invaders any means
of supplying themselves.
Napoleon could only look on.
Not only did the governor
of Moscow set fire to the city,
but no delegation came
to meet him to negotiate.
Napoleon decides to withdraw.
But the winter causes enormous losses
in his army through cold and hunger.
The battle for the river Beresina is
the fatal blow for the Grande Armée.
By the end, just 18,000 of the
original 450,000 are still alive.
In the annals of Russian imperial
history, Napoleon's failed campaign
will become known
as the Patriotic War.
It's over.
They've swept the
interloper out of the country.
Hardly anything is
left of the French army.
Survival has
turned into triumph.
And so this is something that gives a
sense of indomitable of the Russians,
the fact that no army
can really defeat them.
That they are secure and safe
within their geographical boundaries.
And look what we
did to Napoleon.
And later, of course,
look what we did to Hitler.
Decades later, Leo Tolstoy publishes
his world famous novel, "War and Peace".
Before the background of the War of
1812, he tells the story of three families,
an epic that both defines and
celebrates the Russian nation.
The novel became a bestseller
frequently adapted for the cinema.
Tolstoy was fascinated
by Russian nationhood.
He was fascinated by the history
and the relationship in history between
great forces, nations, empires,
economies, cultures, and
also the effect that single men,
individuals had on history.
And he's humanizing the
Russian nation through his heroes.
And he's looking back, adding
in a way to the mythology of
Russian resistance,
the people's resistance.
But it's also deliberately, in a way,
canonizing the creation of Russian nationhood.
After the Patriotic War,
Napoleon's power is
shaken throughout Europe.
In 1813, Russia with
Prussia, Austria and Sweden,
march against Napoleon's
newly constituted army.
The Battle of the Nations at Leipzig is one
of the greatest battles in world history.
It marks the end of Napoleon's
domination of Europe.
Along with Prussia and Austria,
Russia is now setting
the tone in Europe.
Since the time of Peter the Great,
Russian Czars expanded their empire at sea.
In the first half of the 19th
century, Sevastopol in the Crimea
becomes the most modern
naval base of its time.
Sebastopol became one of the
incredibly proud, heroic city for Russia.
And that's partly why Sebastopol in
the Crimea is so important today to Putin.
But secondly, it had hugely practical
importance, and it still does today
as well, because
the Crimea controls
the entire Black Sea and in effect,
the approaches to Constantinople,
to Istanbul, in today's Turkey.
As Russia became the
breadbasket of the world of Europe,
growing much of
the grain that was
exported in the 19th
century through Odessa,
then, Crimea and its navy were
the guards, the sentinels of that trade.
There's one last obstacle between the
Russian navy and the world's oceans.
In 1850, the Ottomans still
controlled the bottleneck of the
Bosphorus and the Dardanelles.
Russia's Czar sees the
Bosphorus as the keys to his house.
Nicholas the first
has a list of demands.
He wants a treaty recognizing Russian protection
of the Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire,
about a third of the population.
The Sultan refuses.
The Czar now has an
excuse for military escalation.
TRANSLATOR: The Ottoman Empire
was becoming weaker and weaker.
And in the mid-19th century,
Czar Nicholas the
first saw an opportunity.
He could finally win
control over the Black Sea and
the vital access to the Mediterranean.
In autumn 1853, the Russian Black
Sea fleet attacks the Ottoman Port
of Sinope, setting all
the enemy ships on fire.
3000 Ottoman sailors
perish in a matter of hours.
Just one enemy ship
can flee to Constantinople.
But the battle at Sinope changes
opinions in France and Britain.
For the British,
it was quite clear that Russia must not be
allowed to take control of the Bosphorus.
al a huge interest in keeping
the Dardanelles open, both for nav
forces and also for
British merchant ships,
which played a dominant
role in wheat exports.
For example, out of Odessa.
England and France support the Ottoman
Empire and declare war against Russia.
They seek a long term reduction
of Russian power in the Black Sea.
The plan is to take
and destroy Sevastopol.
The world has never
seen a war like this.
But what's happening is, of course,
you're going into the modern world.
You're going into the world
of the industrial Revolution,
you're going into the
world of modern armaments,
of trains, of all these other new
technological developments of the
telegraph and so
on, which changed
the concept and the
makeup of warfare.
The Crimea becomes the
first European media war.
British reporters
like William H.
Russell send dispatches
direct from the front lines.
And for the first time, there
are photographs of a campaign.
Because of the long exposure times,
military action can't be shown, but
the photos still give a
brand new insight into war.
The public in Britain and France
getting their information from war
reporting, followed
the war with great
interest and a good deal of
patriotism for their own armies.
But they were also
shown the reality of trench
and siege warfare.
The Russians build up Sevastopol
into an apparently impregnable fortress,
an integrated defense system
combining artillery batteries
and trench networks.
Industrialization makes the
Crimean War a conflict of technology
with new and deadly weapons.
The British Lee-Enfield rifle, for
example, has a range of 1000m.
This muzzle-loader is far superior to
Russian muskets with their 200 meter range.
But actually they now
commanded mass armies,
huge armies that were
heavily armed with new
rifles and new artillery.
The siege of Sebastopol is
conducted under appalling conditions.
Cholera and dysentery kill thousands
of soldiers, including senior officers.
But the battle for
the port continues.
The young Leo Tolstoy
volunteers to defend the city.
In his "Sevastopol
Sketches" he writes:
"Above their heads
was the lofty, starry sky,
across which flashed the
fiery streaks of artillery shells".
Tolstoy's Sevastopol sketches
gave Russian readers the first realistic
picture of what went on there.
It was no exaggeratedly patriotic,
romanticizing portrait of Russian
heroism, of soldiers
happy to throw
themselves into battle
and sacrifice themselves.
But rather it
showed the suffering,
the groaning, the
screaming and dying.
The siege of Sebastopol
lasts almost a year.
Finally, after bitter fighting, French
forces breached the defensive ring.
The defeated Russians blow up
their positions and leave the city.
Sevastopol is reduced to rubble.
In Russia, it becomes a
symbol of Russian resistance.
Leo Tolstoy writes:
"As they left Sevastopol,
almost every soldier looked back,
sighing, inexpressible
bitterness in
his heart, and shaking
his fist at the enemy."
Sebastopol was so important.
It was Catherine
and Potemkin's city.
It was the naval base
of the Russian Empire.
And it still has
that prestige today.
Hence, Putin was so keen to
the Crimea for Putin is Sebastopol.
For the time being, the end of the
war halts Russia's plans for expansion.
The Czar is forced to recognize the
independence of the Ottoman Empire.
In the Treaty of Paris at
the end of the Crimean War,
Russia has to accept the
demilitarization of the Black Sea,
so it can no longer
have a Black Sea fleet.
But what was more devastating
for Russia's self-respect
was the humiliation of
being defeated in the Crimea,
their own territory by France
and Britain, and above all,
by the Ottoman Empire,
that they had considered
militarily and culturally inferior.
The Crimean War may have
marked the birth of modern sanitation.
But by the time it was over, an
estimated 70,000 Russian soldiers
and 90,000 British and
French had lost their lives.
Because of the new
technology and high losses,
the Crimean War is
considered the first modern war.
But in the coming decades, the toll of
armed conflicts would dramatically increase.
At the end of the 19th century,
Czar Nicholas the second
ascends to the throne.
Imperialism is
reaching its peak.
Unlike other European great powers,
Russia has no overseas colonies -
but it has Central Asia.
The Czar rules the largest
continuous landmass on earth,
and he wants to
extend his empire.
Especially in the Far East.
TRANSLATOR: And then they start
building the Trans-Siberian Railway
and see that as the
real colonial empire.
Other states, the
British, the French,
the Germans start
taking over Africa.
The Russians, so to speak,
see their Africa in Asia.
The Czar occupies Manchuria
and leases Port Arthur from China.
It is to be the main base
for Russia's Pacific fleet.
Korea, too, has opened
its borders to Russian troops
and is trading with Russia.
Japan views Russian
expansion as a threat.
What Nicolas the
second didn't understand
was that there was a dynamic
new power in the East - Japan.
That with British knowhow,
British naval knowhow
and the latest weaponry
and technology was more than
a match for the Russians.
And that clash was to be
disastrous for the Russians.
In February 1904, the Japanese fleet
attacks Russian ships at Port Arthur
with torpedoes, unleashing
the Russo-Japanese War.
The Japanese attacked
without declaring war.
Setting a precedent that would repeat a
Pearl Harbor in the Second World War.
To that extent, it was a surprise,
but it was clear that war was coming.
Russia had embraced the possibility of a far
Eastern war, and was prepared to risk it.
Japanese forces approached
Port Arthur over land.
For more than 150 days
they besieged the city.
When the Russians realised they
have no chance of breaking out,
The Czar scuttles his
Pacific fleet in the harbour.
Then the diverted Russian Baltic
fleet is tracked down by the Japanese,
and almost entirely destroyed.
This prestige fleet so miserably,
so hopelessly destroyed, sunk!
By the end, all the vessels of two
great fleets lie at the bottom of the sea.
And to add insult to injury,
the Japanese then raise the ships
and integrate them into their own fleet.
That is a humiliation on an
almost unimaginable scale.
The defeat has serious
consequences for Russia.
Broad strata of the population begin to
question the autocratic authority of the Czar.
Internal resistance is growing
with calls for political participation,
civil rights and a
better food supply.
The Czar responds with defiance.
His troops fire
on demonstrators.
When he repressed
the revolutions in 1905,
when he retook Russia
really from the rebels.
He did so with
absolute brutality,
and that made him extremely
unpopular with many people.
He already had a bad
reputation for being a loser.
But now he also added the
reputation for being a butcher.
The Czar's basic failure to
understand is underlined by the fact
that he showed not the
slightest regret or remorse.
Instead, he didn't try to conceal his
anger at the insubordination of these
impudent workers,
who had the temerity
to trouble him over
something like this.
And it is at this point at the latest,
that even his closest advisers at court,
realize how far their ruler
has lost contact with reality.
Resistance is growing,
even in military circles.
In the summer of 1905,
Sailors on the cruiser Potemkin
mutiny in the Black Sea.
Events recreated in the silent
film "Battleship Potemkin."
When the ship arrives in Odessa
in the middle of a general strike,
Czarist troops wreak a bloodbath
among the civilian population.
Subsequently, of course, this
mutiny won special prominence
through Sergei
Eisenstein's masterful film.
A mutiny, the workers march in
January, the peasants' uprisings,
all that together
worked to create the
impression that things
couldn't go on like this.
As the pressure on the streets
grows, the Czar seems to give in.
In his October
manifesto in 1905,
the Czar promises civil rights
and an elected legislative assembly.
The Duma.
We can see what Czar Nicholas thought of the
Duma, by the fact that he never visited it.
But in April 1906,
when it first met,
he summoned the Duma to the
throne room of the Winter Palace.
He addressed them from the throne, and
told them what they could and couldn't do.
The 1905 revolution fails.
Conservative and nationalist circles
around the Czar block real reform.
Nicholas has formed
an alliance with France,
and also an agreement with
Britain, an informal pact known as
the Triple Entente, facing the Triple Alliance
of Germany, Italy and Austria-Hungary.
June 28th 1914, a
fateful day for Europe.
The heir to the Austrian throne,
Franz Ferdinand and his wife are on
an official visit to the
Bosnian capital, Sarajevo.
They are assassinated in their
open car by a young Bosnian Serb.
Austria-Hungary plans its response,
a lightning fast victory over Serbia.
But Russia declares
itself Serbia's protector.
The Czar orders a
general mobilization.
We historians have argued for a
century how to explain the outbreak
of the First World
War, and we still
haven't got an explanation
everyone can agree on.
So it seems to be very complex.
My own conclusion is that all
of the great powers there were,
five of them, could
have prevented the war.
And to a different extent, all of them bear
responsibility for the outbreak of war,
including Russia.
After all, the Russians were
prepared to risk a great war over Serbia.
And the same was true of
the Austrians and the Germans.
And finally also the
French and British.
In the First World War,
Russia fights alongside its allies France
and Britain, against Germany and Austria.
The Czar's army is
the world's largest.
But his troops are badly
trained and poorly equipped,
and the command
structure is outdated.
Nevertheless, in 1914,
the Russians advanced to
Tannenberg in East Prussia.
The Russians mobilize and they
advance much faster than the Germans
expected, and they march
into East Prussia on two fronts.
At first, the Germans panic and
transfer troops from the Western Front.
But then superior German tactics
encircle and destroy one of the two
Russian armies at Tannenberg,
taking more than
90,000 prisoners.
On the eastern front, the Russian
and German empires reach a stalemate.
In the first year of war,
the Russians lose 1.4
million dead and wounded.
The Germans take around
980,000 Russian soldiers prisoner.
In fact, the Czar's army isn't
equipped for this modern war.
For instance, they
have no heavy artillery,
unlike the Germans.
The Russians have some success fighting
the Austrians, but not against the Germans.
In 1915, Czar Nicholas takes over
Supreme command of the armed forces,
and takes himself
to the front line.
That was certainly a bad idea.
His generals advised against it because
Nicholas had no military experience.
Some sovereigns have
been effective war leaders.
But he wasn't one of them.
Then he did let the
generals have their way,
but he had to take the
blame for Russian defeats.
By the beginning of 1917, with the
morale of the troops at rock bottom,
Russia is a tinderbox.
The lack of reform and food shortages
at home are stoking resentment
against the Czar's regime.
There are almost daily mass
protests, hunger marches and strikes.
When police and soldiers begin
to mutiny and join the protesters,
Czar Nicholas follows the advice
of his generals and abdicates.
350 years of absolute
rule have come to an end.
A provisional government puts the
Czar and his retinue under house arrest.
The crisis grows.
In April 1917, Vladimir Ilyich
Lenin returns to Saint Petersburg
from exile in Switzerland.
The leader of the Bolsheviks
urges the takeover of the country by
workers, soldiers and peasants.
And he promised the three things
that the Russians most wanted:
bread, land and peace.
He positions himself openly
against the provisional government.
Now we have chaos,
crisis, complete revolution.
The Czar has been overthrown.
That was unimaginable.
Lenin must privately have admitted
that he could never believe that possible.
And now he has
the chance to act.
The real strategist of
revolution is Leon Trotsky.
In October 1917, he sets
up a military organization,
the Military Revolutionary
Committee, the MRK.
Right across the country,
Bolsheviks seize power violently.
Actually, Leon Trotsky's great
achievement was knowing which bridges
post offices and train stations in
Saint Petersburg had to be occupied,
so that they could surround the
remains of the collapsing provisional
government inside
the Winter Palace
and take it quietly
and without bloodshed.
After the revolution, Lenin and
Trotsky must consolidate their power
over the whole country
as quickly as possible.
And so they end the unpopular
war without consulting their allies.
At Brest-Litovsk, they sign a
separate treaty with the Germans.
With this treaty, Russia
loses everything it has gained
since Peter the Great.
They lose all the non-Russian
parts of the empire.
They're forced back to the
core of purely Russian territory.
And of course, all this is
a terrible defeat for Russia.
Losing their European lands
means losing a very large amount of
industry and a big
part of their population.
ar. they're doing this because
their priority is to win the civil w
But this is a peace they
won't accept in the long run.
In the coming years, Russia's new rulers
will do all they can to reverse these losses.
But first, they have to fight
for power inside the country.
"White" forces - loyal to the Czar,
rise up against the Bolsheviks.
By 1918, Russia is in the
grip of a terrible civil war.
The Bolsheviks have imprisoned
Czar Nicholas and his family in
Yekaterinburg, 2000km
from Saint Petersburg.
They spend their days locked up in
a modest villa under constant guard.
Nicholas had already
been overthrown.
He'd lost power. He
was discredited politically.
But in an autocratic system,
the Czar, the autocrat always
had the potential to return.
He was the sacred monarch.
He was potentially more
significant than he was in actuality.
Lenin understood that Nicholas
the second could be a rallying banner
for the opposition.
The Bolsheviks must at all costs
prevent the Czar falling into the
hands of the white armies.
They're afraid that the whites
could use the Czar as the figurehead
of a counter-revolution.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks decide to
murder the Czar and his entire family.
He wasn't a great Czar,
but because he was killed,
he became a martyr.
I think it was important for world
history in a sense that it showed,
not that we needed
more evidence,
but it showed the brutality
of the new incoming
Soviet state, the state of
dictatorship of proletariat.
More than 350 years of Czarist
rule have come to an end.
In the wake of the Civil War,
a new Russian empire rises.
That will become a global power.
Devastating wars,
Pitiless rulers
in pursuit of
power over centuries.
When Russia takes up arms,
the world holds its breath.
The endless expanse of Russia.
In the 16th century,
the Czar's empire
is still young.
After defeating the
Mongol nomads,
it expands further eastwards
beyond the borders of Europe.
Russian Cossacks subdue
the people of Siberia.
By the end of the 17th century, Russia
stretches all the way to the Pacific.
TRANSLATOR: Seen from Europe,
Russia is a rather
insignificant peripheral empire.
Inward looking, with few contacts
with the rest of the continent.
This giant country plays
no significant role in Europe,
but its rise to a great
power is imminent.
If you're looking over
Russian history of warfare,
you're also looking over
the history of warfare,
history of European
warfare, global warfare.
The Kremlin, Moscow.
The center of Russian power.
In 1682, Peter Romanov
has himself crowned Czar.
History will know him
as Peter the Great.
Pictures give him a certain
sort of solid grandeur,
while in fact, he had a twitch.
He had fits.
He was extremely
hyperactive, kinetic, almost.
At two meters tall, he towers
over his contemporaries,
and he rules his
country with an iron fist.
He was probably the most talented
man ever to be Czar or ruler of Russia.
He had those brilliant qualities
that every politician needs.
He had a vision of
what he wanted to do.
He had the acumen,
the ability to actually do it.
And he had the resources
to achieve what he wanted to.
Everything about
him was extraordinary.
Well, he's Peter the Great.
He is considered,
I mean, he was not the first
Russian emperor, but he is considered
'the Russian emperor'.
Putin himself
recently, not even so recently,
compared himself
to Peter the Great.
Czar Peter wants to
modernize his country.
He takes an early interest
in military and naval affairs.
His conflict with the Ottoman
Empire culminates in his first war.
His goal - to take
the fortress of Azov,
east of Crimea, still
strategically significant today.
The campaign to take
the fortress of Azov
is a very important
trial run for Peter.
He's testing himself,
his own strategic
military capabilities
and the options that he
has worked out for himself.
The first attempt to take the
fortress from the landside fails.
So Peter builds a fleet and
blockades Azov from the sea.
It works.
In 1696, the
Ottoman Fortress falls.
It's Peter's first
significant victory.
TRANSLATION: That was the
really new thing under Peter the First:
he saw the Russian Empire as
a maritime power too, that could
and must defend its
interests and frontiers at sea.
Prior to that, it
hadn't had a fleet.
Peter is fascinated by the West, its
culture and its modern technology.
He decides to travel to Western Europe to
seek knowhow that will benefit his empire.
As 'Peter Michailyov',
he finds work in a shipyard in Holland,
to learn all he can about shipbuilding.
He really is the first to cultivate
this fascination for Western Europe,
or Central Europe, and
for European values.
And he's starting a tradition that
extends through the Czarist empire
and the Soviet Union
to contemporary Russia.
If you follow Russian media
today, watch Russian talk shows,
one of the most frequently
repeated lines is: "We are Europe".
That goes without saying.
And that idea goes back to
Peter, and still holds today.
Peter wants to play in the
concert of European powers.
He also wants access
to the open sea.
In the year 1700,
Peter declares war on
the great power of Sweden.
It controls the land between
Russia and the Baltic Sea.
Peter wants to
break that dominance.
In the autumn, Russian
troops march on Narva.
It's the beginning of
the Great Northern War.
But at the end of October, the
ground is already frozen hard,
making it difficult
to dig trenches.
And Russian gunpowder
is substandard.
After a heavy snowfall,
the Swedish army breaks
through the Russian defence line.
It's a painful
defeat for the Czar.
Narva at the beginning of the Northern
war is a disaster for Peter and Russia,
but he reacts in the same way that he has
reacted to everything else in his life so far.
When something doesn't
work, he sits down, thinks it over,
and works out how the
situation can be bent to his will.
He reforms the army.
He reforms its
command structure.
He begins to understand
that superiority in numbers
is becoming less and
less significant, and that
modern military technology
is more and more important.
He does everything he can to
modernize the Russian army.
And to make it bigger,
the Czar raises more
and more recruits.
Bells are taken from the
churches and smelted into cannon,
an early form of
total mobilization.
In the summer of 1701, Peter
launches another offensive.
He conquers large parts of Livonia
and Estonia, loyal allies of Sweden.
This is a scorched
earth campaign.
Russian troops burn
towns and villages,
plunder, storehouses
ravage the fields.
Nothing must be
left to the enemy.
precisely planned strategy to
make it clear to the Swedes and the
population of the
Baltic, the elites,
the Peter possessed the
military power he needed to take
control of the Baltic.
It's a tactic that damages
Russia's reputation.
It's always a strategy
of Russian warfare.
It's not unique to Russia,
and it's easy to paint the Russians
as complete barbarians at this time.
But in fact, all armies were,
pretty chaotically supplied.
But, you know, the Russians
took it to another degree.
I mean, there was a civilized
code of warfare in the West.
Peter the Great never
subscribed to that.
And repeatedly he showed incredible
ruthlessness at crushing opposition.
To gain access to the sea,
Peter captures the
fortress of Nyenshanz,
near the mouth of the River
Neva in the Gulf of Finland.
He burns down the whole complex.
Close by in the middle
of the Neva Delta,
he builds a new fortress
with a church named for
the apostles Peter and Paul.
The Czar christens this place, which
he has chosen for his new capital,
Saint Petersburg.
So in the Northern war,
which will go on till 1721,
Czar Peter won his first
foothold on the Baltic Sea.
But the Swedish king
is not ready to give up.
He launches a counter-offensive with
a well-equipped army, 40,000 strong.
The Russians make tactical
withdrawals and carry out guerrilla
attacks on the
enemy's supply lines.
Wherever the Swedes advance,
they find no food for the army.
Soon, hunger, disease and cold
are decimating the Swedish forces.
Summer 1709 sees
the decisive battle:
over Ukraine's Poltava fortress.
The Swedish army now
has only 22,000 soldiers.
The Russians 42,000.
Peter the Great is victorious.
He's absolutely thrilled.
This immediately becomes
part of the myth of Russia.
He does that very much.
He sets up himself as a
symbol as the great victor.
So Poltava becomes very, very
important in Russian historiography.
And it really is a very important
turning point in the history of
Europe, after all,
because this is
the moment that Russia really
defeats the Swedes in the Baltic.
This is actually the moment that
Russia becomes a great empire.
From now on, Russia is
a European great power,
Saint Petersburg is its
new capital in the West.
And by conquering the Baltic,
it has gained ice
free access to the sea.
The ideal basis for the
further expansion of the empire.
About 50 years later, Russia's
position becomes even stronger.
In 1744, a German princess,
Sophie Frederike of Anhalt-Zerbst,
travels to Saint Petersburg.
She's betrothed to Peter the
third, heir to the Russian throne.
A grandson of Peter the Great.
But first, Sophie
takes a Russian name:
Ekaterina.
The couple have
little in common.
The heir to the throne seems
infantile and has no interest in his bride.
He would rather play
with his tin soldiers.
Their characters,
interests and goals were
completely incompatible.
Part of this was undoubtedly
down to the ability and ambition
of the young Princess.
From the very start, she was
determined to be more than just
some married-in Princess
stuck in a back room.
Soon Catherine
speaks fluent Russian.
She absorbs Russia's traditions
and ways of doing things.
That makes her
popular with the people.
She's educated,
clever and emancipated.
She's got this connection with the
West, with Germany, but with much
of the history of Western
Europe or Central Europe.
And she brings some of those values and ideas
to play in her transformation of Russia.
She understands what
makes the Netherlands great,
what makes France great,
what makes England great,
what makes a great
empire. The Spanish.
She's learned all that stuff and
she says "Okay, I'm going to translate
some of this knowledge
into what I can do for Russia."
Catherine isn't reluctant to get involved
in conspiracy and political murder.
When Peter becomes Czar in 1762,
Catherine plots a risky plan
with her lover, Grigory Orlov.
She gets the Imperial Guard on her
side and disposes Peter, who shortly
thereafter dies in
mysterious circumstances.
Catherine is declared
the new head of state.
And crowns herself Czarina.
The way is now clear to mould
Russia after her own ideas.
She wanted to complete
the work of Peter the Great.
And in fact, every ruler since Peter
the Great wanted to emulate him.
Every Czar, every
general secretary,
every president of Independent
Russia wanted to be Peter the Great,
wants to command in warfare,
and few of them have
the ability to do so.
In Catherine's time,
Russia is an agrarian country.
Around 90% of the
population are peasant farmers.
Serfs on the
estates of aristocrats.
They can be conscripted
to fight for the Czar.
The rulers can raise an
army whenever they want.
Catherine would like
to abolish serfdom,
but she can't get her
way against the nobles.
And a large, powerful army
will help her achieve her aims.
She plans to expand
the empire southwards.
She wants to build a fortress on the
Black Sea as a bastion against the Ottoman.
And of course, Catherine's
looking at the south and saying:
Crimea looks really
quite interesting.
What can we do down there?
The overall aim toward the Black
Sea is to get control over the Black Sea,
starting with Azov, but
then, of course, the Crimea.
And then with luck to be able to
get control over Constantinople,
or at least be able
to control shipping
that goes in and
out of the Black Sea.
This is all to do with
power, to do with trade,
to do with economic success
as well, and of course, to do
with getting more and more territory
which makes your country your
empire even more important.
In context of today of course,
getting Crimea is very important.
Catherine's forces move south.
The Russian Baltic fleet undertakes
the long voyage to the Aegean Sea.
Here, in a battle in 1770, most
of the Ottoman fleet is destroyed.
And finally, in 1783 the Crimea,
the jewel in the
crown - is annexed.
Both for its geostrategic
significance, dominating the Black Sea,
and in the mental map
of the Russian elite,
the Crimea is the
pearl of the Empire.
The elite, and the imperial family too,
start building summer residences there.
New cities are founded
like Odessa and Sevastopol,
as ports for Russia's
Black Sea fleet.
Catherine now holds the gateway to
the Black Sea and the North Caucasus.
Her lover and companion, Marshal
Potemkin, starts a major project of
colonization and Russification
of today's southern Ukraine.
He brings in thousands of settlers
and christens the region "Novorossiya",
"New Russia", in
a prestige project.
They say he faked the progress of
development for the Czarina´s visit.
By constructing settlements that
were no more than painted facades,
so-called Potemkin Villages.
The Potemkin villages existed.
They were there to
give an impression
of the first fruits of the long
term policy of colonization.
Actually, it's a
really modern idea.
If you look ahead to the
20th and 21st centuries.
The idea of spreading fake news to
get people on your side to impress them.
Czarina Catherine died in 1796
without achieving her principal goal.
The complete destruction
of the Ottoman Empire.
But her conquests greatly
expanded the Russian Empire.
And so in her own lifetime, she
became known as Catherine the Great.
The importance of her,
as with Peter the Great,
Vladimir Putin mentioned,
I think twice that
Catherine the Great
is his favorite monarch.
He actually takes
lessons from her.
I mean, Peter the Great is a great
example, but she is, as he put it,
she was probably a better empress
because, as he said, she shed
less blood, but she
took on more territories.
At the start of the 19th century,
Napoleon Bonaparte has Europe in his grip.
France controls great
swathes of the continent.
It has an alliance with Russia.
But there are tensions between Napoleon
and the Russian Czar, Alexander the first.
Napoleon gathers a huge army.
Austria and Prussia are
forced to provide troops.
The Grande Armée
numbers half a million men,
far larger than Russia's forces.
Napoleon's invasion of
Russia was one of those crazy,
maniacal and stupid
moves in history.
You can chalk it up
to really, really dumb.
So he's really got
a treaty with Russia.
It looks as if he
can actually be fine.
But he gets it into his mind
that the Russians are going
to come against France,
come against him.
So let's launch a
pre-emptive strike.
The plan is to mount a high speed campaign followed
by a single decisive battle to win the war.
On June the 24th 1812,
the Grande Armée crosses
Russia's border at the River Memel.
But Russian forces withdraw
into the wide expanses
once again, leaving
behind scorched earth.
Without supplies, Napoleon's
troops begin to starve.
Russian tactics are successful,
more or less without combat.
The Grande Armée is shrinking.
Napoleon's idea was to
advance deep into the Russian
empire all the way
to its heart, Moscow.
To take Moscow.
And he expected that, as in
his other European campaigns,
he would not only be
offered the keys to the city,
Russia's ancient capital,
but also that a peace
offering would follow.
At Borodino, just
150km from Moscow,
the Russians confront
the Grande Armée.
Napoleon wins a victory, but Russia fights
stubbornly with no concern for losses.
The Grande Armée suffers
almost 30,000 dead or wounded.
The Russians lose around 40,000 men in one
of the 19th centuries bloodiest battles.
Borodino was the
most intense butchery,
the most intense massacre
in a battle until the first day of
the Battle of the Somme in 1916.
It was absolutely a brutal stalemate in
which the Russian and French armies
just blew each
other to smithereens
at very close quarters
for a whole day.
Napoleon's forces enter
Moscow with no further fighting.
But the evening of their
arrival, the city is in flames.
Once again, it's the Russians
scorched earth policy, denying the
invaders any means
of supplying themselves.
Napoleon could only look on.
Not only did the governor
of Moscow set fire to the city,
but no delegation came
to meet him to negotiate.
Napoleon decides to withdraw.
But the winter causes enormous losses
in his army through cold and hunger.
The battle for the river Beresina is
the fatal blow for the Grande Armée.
By the end, just 18,000 of the
original 450,000 are still alive.
In the annals of Russian imperial
history, Napoleon's failed campaign
will become known
as the Patriotic War.
It's over.
They've swept the
interloper out of the country.
Hardly anything is
left of the French army.
Survival has
turned into triumph.
And so this is something that gives a
sense of indomitable of the Russians,
the fact that no army
can really defeat them.
That they are secure and safe
within their geographical boundaries.
And look what we
did to Napoleon.
And later, of course,
look what we did to Hitler.
Decades later, Leo Tolstoy publishes
his world famous novel, "War and Peace".
Before the background of the War of
1812, he tells the story of three families,
an epic that both defines and
celebrates the Russian nation.
The novel became a bestseller
frequently adapted for the cinema.
Tolstoy was fascinated
by Russian nationhood.
He was fascinated by the history
and the relationship in history between
great forces, nations, empires,
economies, cultures, and
also the effect that single men,
individuals had on history.
And he's humanizing the
Russian nation through his heroes.
And he's looking back, adding
in a way to the mythology of
Russian resistance,
the people's resistance.
But it's also deliberately, in a way,
canonizing the creation of Russian nationhood.
After the Patriotic War,
Napoleon's power is
shaken throughout Europe.
In 1813, Russia with
Prussia, Austria and Sweden,
march against Napoleon's
newly constituted army.
The Battle of the Nations at Leipzig is one
of the greatest battles in world history.
It marks the end of Napoleon's
domination of Europe.
Along with Prussia and Austria,
Russia is now setting
the tone in Europe.
Since the time of Peter the Great,
Russian Czars expanded their empire at sea.
In the first half of the 19th
century, Sevastopol in the Crimea
becomes the most modern
naval base of its time.
Sebastopol became one of the
incredibly proud, heroic city for Russia.
And that's partly why Sebastopol in
the Crimea is so important today to Putin.
But secondly, it had hugely practical
importance, and it still does today
as well, because
the Crimea controls
the entire Black Sea and in effect,
the approaches to Constantinople,
to Istanbul, in today's Turkey.
As Russia became the
breadbasket of the world of Europe,
growing much of
the grain that was
exported in the 19th
century through Odessa,
then, Crimea and its navy were
the guards, the sentinels of that trade.
There's one last obstacle between the
Russian navy and the world's oceans.
In 1850, the Ottomans still
controlled the bottleneck of the
Bosphorus and the Dardanelles.
Russia's Czar sees the
Bosphorus as the keys to his house.
Nicholas the first
has a list of demands.
He wants a treaty recognizing Russian protection
of the Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire,
about a third of the population.
The Sultan refuses.
The Czar now has an
excuse for military escalation.
TRANSLATOR: The Ottoman Empire
was becoming weaker and weaker.
And in the mid-19th century,
Czar Nicholas the
first saw an opportunity.
He could finally win
control over the Black Sea and
the vital access to the Mediterranean.
In autumn 1853, the Russian Black
Sea fleet attacks the Ottoman Port
of Sinope, setting all
the enemy ships on fire.
3000 Ottoman sailors
perish in a matter of hours.
Just one enemy ship
can flee to Constantinople.
But the battle at Sinope changes
opinions in France and Britain.
For the British,
it was quite clear that Russia must not be
allowed to take control of the Bosphorus.
al a huge interest in keeping
the Dardanelles open, both for nav
forces and also for
British merchant ships,
which played a dominant
role in wheat exports.
For example, out of Odessa.
England and France support the Ottoman
Empire and declare war against Russia.
They seek a long term reduction
of Russian power in the Black Sea.
The plan is to take
and destroy Sevastopol.
The world has never
seen a war like this.
But what's happening is, of course,
you're going into the modern world.
You're going into the world
of the industrial Revolution,
you're going into the
world of modern armaments,
of trains, of all these other new
technological developments of the
telegraph and so
on, which changed
the concept and the
makeup of warfare.
The Crimea becomes the
first European media war.
British reporters
like William H.
Russell send dispatches
direct from the front lines.
And for the first time, there
are photographs of a campaign.
Because of the long exposure times,
military action can't be shown, but
the photos still give a
brand new insight into war.
The public in Britain and France
getting their information from war
reporting, followed
the war with great
interest and a good deal of
patriotism for their own armies.
But they were also
shown the reality of trench
and siege warfare.
The Russians build up Sevastopol
into an apparently impregnable fortress,
an integrated defense system
combining artillery batteries
and trench networks.
Industrialization makes the
Crimean War a conflict of technology
with new and deadly weapons.
The British Lee-Enfield rifle, for
example, has a range of 1000m.
This muzzle-loader is far superior to
Russian muskets with their 200 meter range.
But actually they now
commanded mass armies,
huge armies that were
heavily armed with new
rifles and new artillery.
The siege of Sebastopol is
conducted under appalling conditions.
Cholera and dysentery kill thousands
of soldiers, including senior officers.
But the battle for
the port continues.
The young Leo Tolstoy
volunteers to defend the city.
In his "Sevastopol
Sketches" he writes:
"Above their heads
was the lofty, starry sky,
across which flashed the
fiery streaks of artillery shells".
Tolstoy's Sevastopol sketches
gave Russian readers the first realistic
picture of what went on there.
It was no exaggeratedly patriotic,
romanticizing portrait of Russian
heroism, of soldiers
happy to throw
themselves into battle
and sacrifice themselves.
But rather it
showed the suffering,
the groaning, the
screaming and dying.
The siege of Sebastopol
lasts almost a year.
Finally, after bitter fighting, French
forces breached the defensive ring.
The defeated Russians blow up
their positions and leave the city.
Sevastopol is reduced to rubble.
In Russia, it becomes a
symbol of Russian resistance.
Leo Tolstoy writes:
"As they left Sevastopol,
almost every soldier looked back,
sighing, inexpressible
bitterness in
his heart, and shaking
his fist at the enemy."
Sebastopol was so important.
It was Catherine
and Potemkin's city.
It was the naval base
of the Russian Empire.
And it still has
that prestige today.
Hence, Putin was so keen to
the Crimea for Putin is Sebastopol.
For the time being, the end of the
war halts Russia's plans for expansion.
The Czar is forced to recognize the
independence of the Ottoman Empire.
In the Treaty of Paris at
the end of the Crimean War,
Russia has to accept the
demilitarization of the Black Sea,
so it can no longer
have a Black Sea fleet.
But what was more devastating
for Russia's self-respect
was the humiliation of
being defeated in the Crimea,
their own territory by France
and Britain, and above all,
by the Ottoman Empire,
that they had considered
militarily and culturally inferior.
The Crimean War may have
marked the birth of modern sanitation.
But by the time it was over, an
estimated 70,000 Russian soldiers
and 90,000 British and
French had lost their lives.
Because of the new
technology and high losses,
the Crimean War is
considered the first modern war.
But in the coming decades, the toll of
armed conflicts would dramatically increase.
At the end of the 19th century,
Czar Nicholas the second
ascends to the throne.
Imperialism is
reaching its peak.
Unlike other European great powers,
Russia has no overseas colonies -
but it has Central Asia.
The Czar rules the largest
continuous landmass on earth,
and he wants to
extend his empire.
Especially in the Far East.
TRANSLATOR: And then they start
building the Trans-Siberian Railway
and see that as the
real colonial empire.
Other states, the
British, the French,
the Germans start
taking over Africa.
The Russians, so to speak,
see their Africa in Asia.
The Czar occupies Manchuria
and leases Port Arthur from China.
It is to be the main base
for Russia's Pacific fleet.
Korea, too, has opened
its borders to Russian troops
and is trading with Russia.
Japan views Russian
expansion as a threat.
What Nicolas the
second didn't understand
was that there was a dynamic
new power in the East - Japan.
That with British knowhow,
British naval knowhow
and the latest weaponry
and technology was more than
a match for the Russians.
And that clash was to be
disastrous for the Russians.
In February 1904, the Japanese fleet
attacks Russian ships at Port Arthur
with torpedoes, unleashing
the Russo-Japanese War.
The Japanese attacked
without declaring war.
Setting a precedent that would repeat a
Pearl Harbor in the Second World War.
To that extent, it was a surprise,
but it was clear that war was coming.
Russia had embraced the possibility of a far
Eastern war, and was prepared to risk it.
Japanese forces approached
Port Arthur over land.
For more than 150 days
they besieged the city.
When the Russians realised they
have no chance of breaking out,
The Czar scuttles his
Pacific fleet in the harbour.
Then the diverted Russian Baltic
fleet is tracked down by the Japanese,
and almost entirely destroyed.
This prestige fleet so miserably,
so hopelessly destroyed, sunk!
By the end, all the vessels of two
great fleets lie at the bottom of the sea.
And to add insult to injury,
the Japanese then raise the ships
and integrate them into their own fleet.
That is a humiliation on an
almost unimaginable scale.
The defeat has serious
consequences for Russia.
Broad strata of the population begin to
question the autocratic authority of the Czar.
Internal resistance is growing
with calls for political participation,
civil rights and a
better food supply.
The Czar responds with defiance.
His troops fire
on demonstrators.
When he repressed
the revolutions in 1905,
when he retook Russia
really from the rebels.
He did so with
absolute brutality,
and that made him extremely
unpopular with many people.
He already had a bad
reputation for being a loser.
But now he also added the
reputation for being a butcher.
The Czar's basic failure to
understand is underlined by the fact
that he showed not the
slightest regret or remorse.
Instead, he didn't try to conceal his
anger at the insubordination of these
impudent workers,
who had the temerity
to trouble him over
something like this.
And it is at this point at the latest,
that even his closest advisers at court,
realize how far their ruler
has lost contact with reality.
Resistance is growing,
even in military circles.
In the summer of 1905,
Sailors on the cruiser Potemkin
mutiny in the Black Sea.
Events recreated in the silent
film "Battleship Potemkin."
When the ship arrives in Odessa
in the middle of a general strike,
Czarist troops wreak a bloodbath
among the civilian population.
Subsequently, of course, this
mutiny won special prominence
through Sergei
Eisenstein's masterful film.
A mutiny, the workers march in
January, the peasants' uprisings,
all that together
worked to create the
impression that things
couldn't go on like this.
As the pressure on the streets
grows, the Czar seems to give in.
In his October
manifesto in 1905,
the Czar promises civil rights
and an elected legislative assembly.
The Duma.
We can see what Czar Nicholas thought of the
Duma, by the fact that he never visited it.
But in April 1906,
when it first met,
he summoned the Duma to the
throne room of the Winter Palace.
He addressed them from the throne, and
told them what they could and couldn't do.
The 1905 revolution fails.
Conservative and nationalist circles
around the Czar block real reform.
Nicholas has formed
an alliance with France,
and also an agreement with
Britain, an informal pact known as
the Triple Entente, facing the Triple Alliance
of Germany, Italy and Austria-Hungary.
June 28th 1914, a
fateful day for Europe.
The heir to the Austrian throne,
Franz Ferdinand and his wife are on
an official visit to the
Bosnian capital, Sarajevo.
They are assassinated in their
open car by a young Bosnian Serb.
Austria-Hungary plans its response,
a lightning fast victory over Serbia.
But Russia declares
itself Serbia's protector.
The Czar orders a
general mobilization.
We historians have argued for a
century how to explain the outbreak
of the First World
War, and we still
haven't got an explanation
everyone can agree on.
So it seems to be very complex.
My own conclusion is that all
of the great powers there were,
five of them, could
have prevented the war.
And to a different extent, all of them bear
responsibility for the outbreak of war,
including Russia.
After all, the Russians were
prepared to risk a great war over Serbia.
And the same was true of
the Austrians and the Germans.
And finally also the
French and British.
In the First World War,
Russia fights alongside its allies France
and Britain, against Germany and Austria.
The Czar's army is
the world's largest.
But his troops are badly
trained and poorly equipped,
and the command
structure is outdated.
Nevertheless, in 1914,
the Russians advanced to
Tannenberg in East Prussia.
The Russians mobilize and they
advance much faster than the Germans
expected, and they march
into East Prussia on two fronts.
At first, the Germans panic and
transfer troops from the Western Front.
But then superior German tactics
encircle and destroy one of the two
Russian armies at Tannenberg,
taking more than
90,000 prisoners.
On the eastern front, the Russian
and German empires reach a stalemate.
In the first year of war,
the Russians lose 1.4
million dead and wounded.
The Germans take around
980,000 Russian soldiers prisoner.
In fact, the Czar's army isn't
equipped for this modern war.
For instance, they
have no heavy artillery,
unlike the Germans.
The Russians have some success fighting
the Austrians, but not against the Germans.
In 1915, Czar Nicholas takes over
Supreme command of the armed forces,
and takes himself
to the front line.
That was certainly a bad idea.
His generals advised against it because
Nicholas had no military experience.
Some sovereigns have
been effective war leaders.
But he wasn't one of them.
Then he did let the
generals have their way,
but he had to take the
blame for Russian defeats.
By the beginning of 1917, with the
morale of the troops at rock bottom,
Russia is a tinderbox.
The lack of reform and food shortages
at home are stoking resentment
against the Czar's regime.
There are almost daily mass
protests, hunger marches and strikes.
When police and soldiers begin
to mutiny and join the protesters,
Czar Nicholas follows the advice
of his generals and abdicates.
350 years of absolute
rule have come to an end.
A provisional government puts the
Czar and his retinue under house arrest.
The crisis grows.
In April 1917, Vladimir Ilyich
Lenin returns to Saint Petersburg
from exile in Switzerland.
The leader of the Bolsheviks
urges the takeover of the country by
workers, soldiers and peasants.
And he promised the three things
that the Russians most wanted:
bread, land and peace.
He positions himself openly
against the provisional government.
Now we have chaos,
crisis, complete revolution.
The Czar has been overthrown.
That was unimaginable.
Lenin must privately have admitted
that he could never believe that possible.
And now he has
the chance to act.
The real strategist of
revolution is Leon Trotsky.
In October 1917, he sets
up a military organization,
the Military Revolutionary
Committee, the MRK.
Right across the country,
Bolsheviks seize power violently.
Actually, Leon Trotsky's great
achievement was knowing which bridges
post offices and train stations in
Saint Petersburg had to be occupied,
so that they could surround the
remains of the collapsing provisional
government inside
the Winter Palace
and take it quietly
and without bloodshed.
After the revolution, Lenin and
Trotsky must consolidate their power
over the whole country
as quickly as possible.
And so they end the unpopular
war without consulting their allies.
At Brest-Litovsk, they sign a
separate treaty with the Germans.
With this treaty, Russia
loses everything it has gained
since Peter the Great.
They lose all the non-Russian
parts of the empire.
They're forced back to the
core of purely Russian territory.
And of course, all this is
a terrible defeat for Russia.
Losing their European lands
means losing a very large amount of
industry and a big
part of their population.
ar. they're doing this because
their priority is to win the civil w
But this is a peace they
won't accept in the long run.
In the coming years, Russia's new rulers
will do all they can to reverse these losses.
But first, they have to fight
for power inside the country.
"White" forces - loyal to the Czar,
rise up against the Bolsheviks.
By 1918, Russia is in the
grip of a terrible civil war.
The Bolsheviks have imprisoned
Czar Nicholas and his family in
Yekaterinburg, 2000km
from Saint Petersburg.
They spend their days locked up in
a modest villa under constant guard.
Nicholas had already
been overthrown.
He'd lost power. He
was discredited politically.
But in an autocratic system,
the Czar, the autocrat always
had the potential to return.
He was the sacred monarch.
He was potentially more
significant than he was in actuality.
Lenin understood that Nicholas
the second could be a rallying banner
for the opposition.
The Bolsheviks must at all costs
prevent the Czar falling into the
hands of the white armies.
They're afraid that the whites
could use the Czar as the figurehead
of a counter-revolution.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks decide to
murder the Czar and his entire family.
He wasn't a great Czar,
but because he was killed,
he became a martyr.
I think it was important for world
history in a sense that it showed,
not that we needed
more evidence,
but it showed the brutality
of the new incoming
Soviet state, the state of
dictatorship of proletariat.
More than 350 years of Czarist
rule have come to an end.
In the wake of the Civil War,
a new Russian empire rises.
That will become a global power.