A fascinating description of both the domestic and international politicking in this week's episode.
Like I said last week, I had only known about Brest Litovsk in very vague terms. Learning about exactly how that peace negotiation went down--with all the backs and forths--was really interesting.
(I also mentioned last week that I didn't understand how Germany could afford to play hardball at the negotiations at this point in the war, but this episode helps to make Germany's situation clearer.)
And then the story of how the Bolsheviks are manipulating things domestically is equally fascinating. (Lenin is a master manipulator. I definitely get the impression that without Lenin's political cunning, the Bolshevik's wouldn't have lasted.)
Other notes:
* Interesting that Russia's relationship with Ukraine is currently back in the news, since that is one of the topic's of this week's episodes.
* At one point, Mike Duncan mentions that the left Bolsheviks wanted to wage a revolutionary war, and Mike Duncan compares this to the Jacobins in 1792. I'm going to have to go back and listen to the French Revolution episodes again (I'm working my way up to them currently) But I thought the revolutionary war was the project of the Girondists, not the Jacobins. (Remember Robespierre's famous quote about how no one loves armed missionaries.) But I wonder if I'm getting things mixed up. Maybe once the war was already under way, then the Jacobins were responsible for the levee en masse? Like I said, I'm going to have to re-listen to those episodes.
* As with the previous - three - episodes, this episode shows the tension between the idealism of many of the Bolshevik's reforms, but also their growing authoritarianism. (No doubt this will be a theme of every episode from here on out. I should probably stop mentioning it in my weekly reviews as if it was something novel.) Mike Duncan notes the decree that anyone hindering the war effort would be shot on the spot, and says that this is the roots of the coming Red Terror. Certainly to modern ears, these kinds of declarations have a chilling effect. And yet, I wonder how common it was at the time? Wasn't it commonplace in wars of this period that looters or deserters would be shot on the spot? That's definitely the impression I got from books like this. (And I'm currently listening to Mike Duncan's season on the American Revolution, where I think he says something about George Washington shooting looters in his army.)
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