TV review, Russia 1917: Countdown to Revolution (BBC2): stylishly rendered blend of archive footage and reconstructions

Plus: Our Girl: Nepal Tour (BBC1)

Nicholas Asbury plays a nicely intense Lenin in this reconstruction of the Russian Revolution (Oxford Film and Television)

I suppose that if you were placed in charge of scripting a TV documentary about the Russian Revolution one century on, you’d not start it with some diffident remark such as “you’d never know it had happened, actually”. No; you’d proclaim with all the bare-faced confidence of a Communist theoretician at the Smolny Institute in the glory years of Marxist-Leninism that it was the moment when “the world changed forever”.

So that’s what they did in Russia 1917: Countdown to Revolution. Try as the producers and talking heads might – and a lucidly languid Martin Amis and a still-fervent Tariq Ali certainly did, Russian Communism still feels like a stuffed curiosity rather than a politically relevant creed, still less a threat or inspiration to anyone.

This was a stylishly rendered blend of archive plus ancient and modern reconstructions, with a little more effort put into the dramatisation than is usual in such exercises – Nicholas Asbury playing a nicely intense Lenin, for example. Yet it failed to persuade me that the whole Bolshevik revolution thing was anything less than a gigantic blunder, a fraud perpetrated on a people confused and starving, duped by a bunch of squabbling ruthless gangsters who managed to cling to power as a self-perpetuating oligarchy for the next seven decades or so.

Go to Russia today and there’s plenty of reminders of the past, but that is exactly what it they are – those statues of Lenin where he looks like he’s trying to hail a cab, as Alexei Sayle wryly observed, are no longer the symbols of a living, breathing ideology and of a vanguard party leading the people to a brighter future, one where they would “bury” the West, as once they boasted. The statuary (what survives of it), the red stars on top of the onion domes of the Kremlin, that stirring Russian national anthem and the mummified remains of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin himself are no different to the relics of past tsars, saints, soldiers and artists.

Stalingrad and Leningrad are names that have been, to redeploy Trotsky’s memorable phrase, swept away by history’s broom. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is the last Stalinist state on earth, with Cuba a sort of sunny, rum-infused version of it. That, then, is the sum total of the legacy of 1917 in 2017. It is true that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is fascinated and challenged by the deeds of Lenin and Stain, as this drama documentary observed, but they are, from Putin’s point of view, just red tsars, far bloodier but otherwise not so different in motivation or methods to the Romanovs that ruled the joint from 1613 to 1917.

The story of 1917 is a gripping one on its own terms and needs little justification to be revisited, and, agreed, it certainly helped shape much of the last century if not this one. The makers wisely concentrated on the three famous and fascinating personalities involved – Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin. I did wonder a little about the absence of the likes of Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev, names that came to mind from half-remembered undergraduate essays.

The programme did make a decent enough case for the old argument that history is about powerful figures as much as great economic or social trends, in itself an unspoken refutation of the Marxian dialectic, and it was fascinating to see how determined, foul-mouthed and frenzied Lenin personally became in his quest for power. Had Lenin not been such a nutter then the Bolsheviks might have missed their chance. For 10 hours Lenin harangued and banged on about taking power immediately in an insurrection until the Central Committee came round to his way of thinking – long, tedious meetings designed to browbeat the opposition into obedience being one leftist tradition that has persisted to this day, I’ll concede that.

The argument was also made, more powerfully, that the Bolsheviks came to power on a manifesto of lies – “fake news” as we’d now call it – propagated by the editor of the Communist newspaper of the time – Stalin as journalist. That was then buttressed by the “founding myth” of a great popular uprising in Petrograd, storming the Winter Palace, immortalised in Eisenstein’s brilliant film October made in 1927 – even though the palace wasn’t even locked and was taken over easily a few dozen Bolshevik soldiers. There was no will of the people involved.

Anyway, the Bolsheviks promised freedom and gave their people dictatorship and a vicious secret police state. The winning slogan “Land, Peace, Bread” was also betrayed in the ensuing decades of forced collectivisation, mass political murder (perhaps 20 to 30 million in Stalin’s Great Terror) and the shortages and bread queues that were to characterise life in Soviet Russia until the whole rotten structure collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions a quarter of century ago. It’s all in the dustbin of history now, thank god, but worth remembering how the utopian promises of a populist demagogic socialist politician in a beard and a workers’ cap can so be so seductive and so dangerous. I’ll not labour that point.

Being one of life’s gentlemen, and with an extreme respect for those who try to make a living from their creativity, I don’t really like to pile the vulgar abuse onto any TV drama, but I’m afraid that the universal shortcomings in Our Girl: Nepal Tour compel me to do so.

Where to start? Well, there’s the acting, which makes an old episode of The Bill look like the Royal Shakespeare Company, and was made all the more difficult a challenge by the paucity of the dialogue (sample snatch: “You should have joined the Navy, you big wuss”). At one point army medic Lance Corporal Georgie Lane (Michelle Keegan does her best), dumps her mum and an unfeasibly large slice of carrot cake in a coffee shop after a phone summons from her superior officer, to whom she says: “I’m ready, boss.”

Worst of all is the fact that every single, and I mean every single, one of the squaddies, male and female, are ridiculously good-looking, and resemble a troupe of models on a fashion shoot for a glossy rather than a hard-bitten British army humanitarian relief team. Basically, Our Girl: Nepal Tour is a bit of humanitarian disaster itself, and I feel very sorry for all those caught up in it.