Sex, Violence and Bolsheviks

Dirty letters, icepick wielding assassins and a simmering world war all came into play during the turbulent final days of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky.

Bertrand Patenaude, a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, details the soap opera final days and turbulent political life of the revolutionary in his book TROTKSKY: DOWNFALL OF A REVOLUTIONARY.

Patenaude discusses the intrigue involved in Trotsky's final days and the battling ideas that splintered the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.


LISTEN: BERTRAND PATENAUDE - TROTSKY

A Communist Ponzi Scheme

Overreaching military expansion. Sudden bank runs revealing a shaky economic foundation. Rampant cronyism. Sound familiar?

Princeton professor of Contemporary History Stephen Kotkin thinks so. Kotkin has notes all these factors in the not-so-distant history of Easter Germany, Poland and Romania.

On the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Kotkin unpacks the factors that led to what seemed to be an abrupt unraveling of communism in Eastern Europe in the late 80s and early 90s.

LISTEN: STEPHEN KOTKIN - UNCIVIL SOCIETY