New episode of Revolutions Podcast out.  (It actually came out a couple days ago, but I'm playing catch-up).

10.72- The Decision

It's been a long ride with this podcast, but it looks like we are finally on the eve of the October Revolution now.  This episode feels like it's just getting all the pieces finally in place.

A few thoughts:

* Interesting that Kerensky is now just as isolated and clueless as the Romanovs were.  Mike Duncan spent so many episodes portraying the Romanovs as idiots that I assumed they were a special kind of stupid, but maybe it's just something about the job that encourages delusion and myopia.  

* Mike Duncan emphasizes that all historians point to Lenin's decision as one of those moments where one individual man really does change the course of history.  (This, of course, is relevant to my post on this same subject earlier this week.)   At the same time, however, the impression I get from Mike Duncan's narrative is that the Kerensky government was headed for collapse one way or the other.  If the Bolsheviks hadn't have seized power, I get the impression that another socialist group would have. 

* In my review of Karl Marx: His Life and Environment by Isaiah Berlin, I wrote:

One thing Berlin does which I thought was very interesting was that he emphasized the paradoxes in Marx’s legend. For example... how the German and Austrian communists, who followed Marx’s advice about organizing from the bottom up, were eventually overwhelmed by the fascists, where as the Bolsheviks, who committed the most un-Marxist act of a revolutionary coup, was the first (and for a time the only) successful Marxist revolution.

However, from this episode, I learned that the Bolsheviks were on their way to gaining control over the Soviet even before the coup.  So it sounds like they were still on their way to gaining power one way or the other.

* Final note: There's some brief mention about the sailor's revolt in Germany, and how Lenin believed they were on the eve of a European wide-socialist revolution.  Mike Duncan doesn't say anything more about what was happening in Germany at the time, but I hope in later episodes he is able to circle back around and talk about the revolution in Germany that was happening at this same time--because it's interesting, firstly, and secondly because my understanding is that it really did influence Lenin's thinking at the time.