I'm a few days late, but there was a new episode of Revolutions Podcast out this week. 10.92- Long Live the Bolsheviks Death to the Communists [Insert Spider-Man meme here]
Anyway, as always, there's a lot going on in this episode. We get what (I assume) is the very end of the Civil War against the whites, and the beginnings of a new Civil War against the Socialist Revolutionaries and other Left opposition.
I do have to admit, however, that I always get a little bit bored when the narrative switches over to military history. (I'm more interested in the social or ideological aspects.) But at the end of the episode, Mike hinted that next week we'd be back to the ideological divisions within Russia.
Indeed, this episode put the ideological battles back front-and-center, so I got exactly what I wanted.
Interesting to hear that the driving force behind the militarization of the working conditions was not Stalin, but Trotsky. Yet another reminder that Trotsky isn't always the democrat he's sometimes remembered as. (This exact same point, as coincidence would have it, was also made by Vaush this week.)
...and yet, I do find myself sympathizing just the tiniest bit with Trotsky's logic here. There's a huge shortage of necessary things. They need to produce those necessary things as fast as possible. Why not just transition the army into a command economy labor force? (I'm not saying I agree with his decision, but I at least see the logic, and I recognize it was a desperate situation.)
Another interesting point from this week's show: Mike Duncan makes the point repeatedly that as bad as things got under the Reds, nobody ever thought of supporting the Whites. Mike Duncan says this is pretty amazing to consider, and I agree.
Mike Duncan said of the Whites at one point, "They just couldn't bring themselves to play nice." They knew that their harsh attitude was alienating the Russian people, but somehow they just couldn't stop themselves.
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