We are now in the final 3 wrap up episodes, in which Mike Duncan takes us from the death of Lenin to Stalin's consolidation of power in just 3 episodes.
I mentioned last week that I was looking forward to this one--the showdown between Stalin and Trotsky was something I had long been interested in, but didn't really know anything about.
And this episode did not disappoint. Another fascinating episode.
I've got a lot of random thoughts about things in this episode, so I'll just list them below.
* One of the things I remembered from my history classes at college was the professor saying that the Bolsheviks were ardent students of the French Revolution. And this really comes through in this episode, in which Mike Duncan recounts how Trotsky and the others were debating the legacy of the French Revolution.
It's also, as Mike Duncan says, a nice little way to bring his podcast full circle.
(I am, by the way, still working on Mike Duncan's season on the French Revolution. I've gotten side tracked by various things the past couple months, but I will get back to it soon.)
I remember another thing the professor said was that the Bolsheviks were fearful of another Napoleon , and they were all on the who was likely to become the next Napoleon and seize power. However, they thought that Trotsky was likely to be the next Napoleon, and this blinded them to the threat of Stalin.
Mike Duncan never said this in those same exact words, but I don't think it's far off from the story he's been telling.
* Speaking of France... It's interesting that Mike says that Bukharin got himself into so much trouble because of how his words "enrich yourselves" translated into French. I wonder how well the Bolsheviks spoke French? I'm guessing it was pretty common in Russia at that time? After all, War and Peace, which was written within the lifetime of some of the older Bolsheviks, was written half in partly in French, right? And the Russian reading audience at the time presumably could understand it.
* The Chinese Communist Party comes up briefly in this episode, and Mike Duncan makes a joke about how we should all take a big collective sigh that he's not going to be covering the Chinese Revolution.
I do admit to being disappointed myself. (I would have loved to hear his take on the Chinese Revolution.) But I can totally understand why he doesn't want to do it. To cover everything would take him so many episodes. Which is why he joked about being on episode eight hundred something.
Someone mentioned in the comments a couple weeks back that there was another guy doing a podcast dedicated entirely to the Chinese Revolution. So that might be interesting to check out some day.
* I mentioned last week that these episodes were coming out later and later. And this episode came out even later in the week than the one before this. This episode came out even later in the week than the one before it. Although Mike had addressed this on Twitter earlier this week.
Which *is* coming. A few weeks back I got knocked totally sideways on my schedule and episodes are now just coming out when they come out.
— Mike Duncan (@mikeduncan) June 16, 2022
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