I’ve seen a lot of reference to it lately so I gave it a try, listened to the first ep about the Russian Revolution. He said something about how opposition to socialist utopia was “human nature” which seemed :LIB: but wondering if I should give it another chance. Or is there anything better in the same vein? Also saw Tides of History mentioned
Mike Duncan is a liberal who seethes every time the Communists win by doing something “wrong”.
(I still look forward to the pod every week)
He might do extensive research for each season of the podcast but in this one there is very much a gaping hole that could have been filled by reading Red Petrograd.
He at least did a good job of emphasizing how every non-Bolshevik faction completely fucked up their position in between February and October 1917, thus throwing support to the Bolsheviks. But he pretty firmly turned against the Bolsheviks in his narrative after October in a very Orlando Figes kind of way. Thankfully he is covering how the Whites continue to be so incompetent and reactionary that everyone else has no choice but to support the Bolsheviks as the lesser evil. But a major tell is that he puts a lot of emphasis on the Bolsheviks dissolving the Constituent Assembly, ignoring how if the Constituent Assembly was even remotely relevant to the interests of the masses it would not have been so trivial to dissolve it.
The funny thing is that he acknowledged that the Provisional Government never had much legitimacy to begin with, yet highlights the Bolsheviks dissolving a process of said ProvGov as some sort of implicit crime. Cognitive dissonance aside, really goes to show you where Liberals have their priorities.
Propping up illegitimate governments and siding with reaction? Hmm…