Tuesday, July 05, 2022

And the last episode of Revolutions Podcast is now out. 10.103- The Final Chapter: See you on the other side.

...sorry, not technically the last last episode.  Just the last narrative episode (as Mike Duncan explains in the episode).  
This episode (although you wouldn't know it from the title), covers Stalin's great purges.
As Mike Duncan tweeted last week: 

...and indeed, the material is fascinatingly macabre. All the old Bolsheviks, all the old crew who we've been following for the past couple years now on Revolutions Podcast, all get killed off by Stalin.  This truly is the end of the Bolshevik era, so it's a fitting end to the Russian Revolution series.
My only complaint is that the episode slips into a little too much philosophizing when I wanted more narrative.  I mean, we all know that Stalin purged all the Bolsheviks.  (That's high school history stuff.)  So I'm listening to this podcast because I want the details. Who said what at the trials?  Where are the speeches? etc
Trotsky's story is also glossed over.  I guess Mike Duncan was figuring his audience already knew the whole story about  the ice pick in Mexico, so he wouldn't have to retell it.  But I wanted to hear it retold.  (That's what we're all here for, isn't it?)
The problem with this episode is that it is trying to do 2 things at once: cover the great purges, but also wrap up and reflect on the Russian Revolution as a whole.  Thus we get a lot of maudlin reflections, when I wanted more narrative details. IMHO, it would have been better to have one episode focused solely on the just the narrative of the great purges without also having the burden of concluding the series.
But, that's not to say I didn't enjoy this episode.  I mean, sure I would have liked more narrative, but I still found the episode a great listening experience.

Other Notes:
* Strange to think that during this whole period, Stalin still had his supporters internationally.  (see, for example, HERE).  I mean, I understand that the Communist ideology still had international appeal during this period, but how come the whole international Communist movement didn't go over to Trotsky's side during the period of the show trials?  As Mike Duncan points out in this episode, the conspiracies that the old Bolsheviks were accused of and convicted of are literally unbelievable. No sane person could have believed that the old Bolsheviks had conspired to assassinate Lenin and Stalin and to partition the USSR.  

* There is still- some problems with mixing up the names.  Or at least, there was one incident this time.  Mike Duncan at one point says that Trotsky was Stalin's true heir, when I'm sure he meant to say Lenin's true heir.

* Speaking of Lenin... one of the things I wish would have gotten covered in this episode is that, according to Wikipedia, Stalin was probably behind the poisoning of Krupskaya (Lenin's widow) in 1939.

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Mike says he's going to take a few months off, and then come back with a series of final reflective episodes to wrap up the Revolutions Podcast.  But as for me, I think I'm going to stop here with my episode-by-episode reviews.

 My original intent was never to review this series on an episode-by-episode basis, but rather to do video reviews of each season, and then to do one written review of the whole series (as I explained HERE). So I'm still catching up on the back episodes.  (Currently I'm doing the French Revolution). 
But, while I catch up on the back episodes, I've also been keeping my eye on the current episodes.  Mike Duncan was doing so much interesting stuff with the Russian Revolution that I couldn't not check in every week to see where the story was going--I got pulled in with the initial episodes on Marx and Bakunin, and I've been listening ever since.   

When I started up the Weekly Reading Vlogs back in March of 2021, I initially started out simply noting which podcast episodes I was listening to each week.  But after a while I found it hard to resist the urge to add comments.  From about episode 10.50, the podcast started to get amazingly good.  I mean, it was always good, but from episode 10.50 we started getting into all the really fascinating stuff: Rasputin, World War I, the collapse of the Second International, the death of Rasputin, the February Revolution,  the Tsar's abdication etc.--it was all pure gold in terms of story telling.  So, for example, on episode 10.60, I added the comment to my Weekly Reading Vlog: "Mike Duncan's Revolution Podcast is really hitting peak form.  Such excellent storytelling!"
In addition to the podcast hitting peak form, this was also during the Corona Virus lockdown in Vietnam, when I started to get lonely in my apartment and I started to crave more interaction with the outside world, and got the urge to just tweet out or blog about everything I was reading or listening to.  And so from episode 10.63- Abdication, I started doing little blog posts every time an episode of Revolutions Podcast came out. 
 And then once a precedent of publishing weekly reviews has been established, then I felt like I had to keep it up, even after the lockdown ended.
But now that the narrative is done, I think I will also end my episode-by-episode reviews.  I'm going to go back and continue to catch up on the back episodes now.  (I'm still stuck on the French Revolution.)

For the record, here are all my mini-reviews from episode 10.63 to the present:
* 10.103- The Final Chapter: See you on the other side. (Current post)

So, from now on I'm going to turn my full attention to the back episodes.  I'm going to continue my original plan--I'll listen to each season 3 times over, and then do a video review for each season.  This will mean, when I work my way up to it, revisiting the Russian Revolution as part of my video project.  I look forward to revisiting it.
I then plan on listening to the whole series straight through start to finish 2 more times (something I'm also looking forward to), and then doing the written review.
So, I'll be back, someday, with more thoughts on these episodes.  Until then...

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Mike Duncan on Twitter from this week:





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