Bukharin and Trotsky Revealed

BolsheviksEconTalk’s Russ Roberts has posted a podcast mini-series on Bolshevik leaders of the 1917 Russian Revolution, having now completed episodes featuring Paul Gregory on Nikolai Bukharin and Robert Service on Leon Trotsky.

Paul Gregory of the University of Houston and a Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about Nikolai Bukharin‘s power struggle with Stalin and Bukharin’s romance with Anna Larina, who was 26 years younger than Bukharin. Based on Gregory’s book, Politics, Murder, and Love in Stalin’s Kremlin, the conversation explores the career and personal life of Bukharin and how his career and personal life intersected. Bukharin was one of the key founders of the Bolshevik Revolution that led to the creation of the Soviet Union. In the late 1920s, he disagreed with Stalin’s policy of collectivization. Stalin ruthlessly pursued him, eventually had him arrested, tried and convicted in the one of the infamous Show Trials, and executed. Anna, his wife, is then sentenced to the Gulag and later exiled. The power and poignancy of the story lies in Bukharin’s refusal to believe that his old friend Stalin is out to kill him. Gregory also discusses Bukharin’s economic policies and whether Stalin or someone like him was inevitable.

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Robert Service of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and the University of Oxford talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the life and death of Leon Trotsky. Based on Service’s biography of Trotsky, the conversation covers Trotsky’s influence on the Russian Revolution, his influence on policy alongside Lenin, his expulsion from Soviet Union in 1928 and his murder in 1940 by Stalin’s order.

Both Gregory and Service have engaging stories to tell about these two founding revolutionaries, that are both intimate and critical. Overall, Roberts is hunting the ghost of Joseph Stalin. Service identifies Stalin as a “gross personality disorder” who shared much with his contemporaries. Although Stalin outwitted the hapless Bukharin and ordered the assassination of Trotsky, Service argues that Trotsky and Stalin, with Lenin, were all blood brothers who debated fine distinctions of political philosophy like medieval academicians. Service punctures the romantic myths surrounding Trotsky, including his background, his support and use of terror,, his Russian chauvinism, and his consistent support for one-party rule. One of the more telling episodes is Trotsky’s support for forcing Russian peasants to abandon private property for collectivization, but with propaganda. Roberts has done a great service exposing the previously undisclosed histories of these key actors and demonstrating the futility of keeping the Bolsheviks in a pantheon of non-totalitarian leftists.


Filed under: Academia, Books, Business/Economy, History, Podcasts, Russia Tagged: bolsheviks, econtalk, joseph stalin, leon trotsky, nikolai bukharin, paul gregory, robert service, russian revolution