A new episode of Revolutions Podcast is out: 10.86- The Communist Soviets: All power to the Soviets!*

*The Communist Party

As is quite often the case, there is a lot of different subjects packed into this one episode.  I feel like each of these different subjects could have been a whole episode in its own right, but as always Mike Duncan is doing a balancing act between covering the material and keeping the narrative moving.

For example:

At the beginning of this episode, Mike Duncan briefly mentions that in 1918 and 1919 there were revolutionary movements going on everywhere, not just in Germany.  Examining this could easily have been a whole episode.

And then, there's the formation of the 3rd International, which also could have probably been a full episode on its own.  (The history of the International fascinates me--as I've written before.  Granted, the 3rd International is not quite so interesting, because it very quickly devolved from an idealistic organization to the foreign policy wing of Moscow.  But then again, tracing that devolution would be an interesting subject in its own right.)

Then, we get into the depressing stuff--the massacres and the atrocities carried out by the Red Army and the Communists.  (I'm currently listening to the history of the French Revolution, and I'm struck by the parallels between the two in how the peasant uprisings were treated.)

And then we get into the slow transformation of the Communist Party from an idealistic organization to a corrupt organization.  And this is also depressing, but it's also fascinating.  And it's particularly fascinating because Mike Duncan makes the point that the same thing was happening on both sides of the Civil War--the Whites were just as bad as the Reds.  There are any number of interesting discussions about human nature which could be had here.

I also found it interesting to hear about how the money and supplies from the British actually just encouraged more corruption in the White Army.  It reminded me of any number of similar cases throughout history.  

For example, as I wrote in an addendum to my review of  Sideshow by William Shawcross:

         The US congress did attempt to cut funding to the Lon Nol regime, but as Shawcross details in his book, Nixon and Kissinger found a lot of clever ways around this, and lots of money did flow into the Lon Nol regime during this time period.  Shawcross argues that this money was destructive.  It encouraged corruption in the Lon Nol regime, and it made the Lon Nol regime entirely dependent on the United States for its defense. 

            Furthermore, a fair amount of Lon Nol’s commanders were making accommodations with the Khmer Rouge and selling their weapons to the communists.

            Given this state of affairs, it’s difficult to see how things could have been improved even if more money had been pumped into Lon Nol’s government.

...also I believe the same was true of the South Vietnamese government.  And the U.S. supported governments in Iraq and Afghanistan.  History does indeed repeat itself.  Human nature can sometimes be incredibly predictable.