yeh, he knew his shit alright

The Russian revolution would be, at first, a capitalist, industrial revolution, to remove the tsarist and feudal aristocracy from power, and to place the bourgeoisie in government. The Bolsheviks ran ahead and made a socialist revolution. They even say that the revolution was financed by big capitalists. The victory of the Bolsheviks generated a reaction from the international bourgeoisie, which sent troops to Russia to fight the Bolsheviks. At the request of Lenin, Trotsky founded the Red Army and traveled throughout Russia by train and secured the survival of the socialist revolution. But the bureaucracy, created to administer the revolution, seized power and put Stalin as ironforehead.

Every discussion he hosts is like this, regardless of topic. The guy is a treasure. You can tell that Hitchens and Service both respect it and the conversation is all the better because of it.

Yeah although he shouldn;'t have been hesitant to call stalin a conservative. Everyone who's educated on the subject knows he was a conservative communist.

@@iancalvert417 conservative communist has to be an oxymoron.

No, he's actually fairly ignorant about the Kronstadt rebellion and takes a conventional unquestioning view, & like many views of his, predetermined by the works of Orwell.

Tripp K I agree with you on Hitchens ignorance on certain and specific topics , however, I would argue that his perspective is being rather largely "Influenced" by Orwell, than Pre-Determined because of the significance of the word

How to you come to that conclusion Tripp and I wouldn't say hitch was unquestioning

Molly Streames The Soviet government was supposed to just "let" a mutiny occur in the middle of the civil war? It's holding a certain country to ridiculous standards he would never assign to another one, and he does this because it's fashionable and conventional.

"and he does this because it's fashionable and conventional." Oh come on. He never cared for what was fashionable.

That tells you how hard our cultures are to understand each other, hence our trade war .

+Theun de groot It was because of the time limit. This discussion could have lasted for more than an hour easily. Nevertheless, it was lovely to see Hitchens being so insecure and dodgy, quite unusual of him. He wasn't so arrogant and bold this time. His desperate but somewhat ineffective attempts to defend Trotsky are also very meaningful. His hypocrisy got really exposed here, especially in that part when he conceded that Trotsky's prose was a "little thuggish". And Hitchens says that about a guy who wrote a book actually titled "In defence of terror", in which he endorsed any brutal and ruthless measures as a means to achieve his political objectives, that is, to seize power and achieve dominance. Was it really that that hard for Hitchens to see how his spiritual father was similar to Hitler in this case? Trotsky was a devious criminal, who was indeed power hungry, and whose hidden devilish agenda was to uproot the good old order, unleash hell and enslave the world. That was the real purpose of the so-called revolution, and that was the purpose of the USSR, most anti-humane and genocidal political systems that ever existed, which Trotsky designed himself and for which he laid ideological foundations. If Hitchens couldn't understand all that it means he was just a naive "useful idiot" which I doubt. If he did, then it leads me to believe that he was just a cynical and dishonest conmen, which is typical for communists, who was additionally fanatically blinded by convictions which he adopted in his youth, and that reveals how irrational and immature he was in fact.

***** When I compared Trotsky to Hitler I did not mean that they were equal in terms of the death toll, or suffering and destruction that they brought about. To make such comparisons is rather futile and pointless anyway. What I meant is that this two had a very similar mindset and personality. They were bold, ruthless, cynical and shared similar contempt for human life, and that expressed itself in their rhetoric and action. They were also great visionaries, very passionate and charismatic figures. In my opinion the similarity is striking. They both played in the same league of totalitarian ideologues and tyrants. If Hitler is indeed so akin to Trotsky and embedded in our culture as an epitome of ultimate evil and a horrific, sinister villain, then what is the matter with Hitchens making his relentless exhortations in favour of the latter, as if he tried to vindicate him. One may get an impression that he would make a saint of Trotsky if he could. But the figures of Trotsky and the like deserve utmost condemnation rather then vindication. I find it absolutely preposterous that Hitchens decided to defend such a lost cause in the name of youthful ideals that he clung to so tenaciously.

+Tomasz Serafin Pish!

+Tomasz Serafin I don't think Hitchens was insecure at all. I believe this is the right tone for an academic discussion and actually gives very smart answers. If you have to talk to dumb theologians there is very little to argue about.

+Tomasz Serafin you are very wrong about Trotsky. You are actually just lying on the kind of misinformation spread by Stalinists communists about Trotsky. I invite you to read his autobiography.

coweatsman The empires had interests in China. Capitalism and free enterprise are not the same thing. There is no such thing as the free market either. It requires regulations.

Everyone who goes to Oxford is an intellectual? Hm...

+Marco Ermini Robert Service, though obviously factual in his claims, strikes me as a real philistine. He doesn't understand both the complexity of Trotskyism as an ideology, nor - and this perhaps aids the latter - does he think it worth any consideration. Trying to understand Trotsky without dealing with, in detail, the left oppositionist movements across the globe he directly inspired, is a complete waste of time to me; which is why I prefer, for it all it's idealism and faults, Deutscher's trilogy of Trotsky, not least for it's sheer literary value - something Service, of course, comes no where near matching.

yonis gure I totally agree. I shall dig out the Deutscher's books out of my bookshelves

Service's Trotsky & Lenin biography is full of fictionalization and misquotes as well as a clear lack of objectivity.

To be generous with your comment, I'd say you have unrealistic expectations regarding the responses of people being interviewed in real time. I'd like to hear how "nuanced" your conversation is on major figures on the spot with limited time to talk. In this video discussion you and Hitchens were forced to hear ugly things about your hero Trotsky, and you can't handle it.

Tripp Read the Black Book of Communism- objectively 200 million people dead.

I can't find any of Kotka's lectures on UKposts.

@@gurgortsac archive.org/details/stephen-kotkin-paradoxes-of-power-audio archive.org/details/stephen-kotkin-waiting-for-hitler-audio

Aditya Kadambi I want this too ... actually I want books written by trotsky

You could try going on Marxists.org; there's a massive archive there with works including Trotsky's "The Revolution Betrayed", and criticisms of Trotsky.

Start with Service (negative view, the paperback, which corrects some glaring errors in the original edition), Deutscher (positive, and a literary masterpiece in its own right), Stalin's Nemesis, and A Revolutionary's Life by Rubenstein, and Geoffrey Swain's bio. And Trotsky's own "The Revolution Betrayed" and "History of the Russian Revolution. With a wider scope Rabonowitch's trilogy on the Russian Revolution is essential, and the Civil War books by Mawdsley, W. Bruce Lincoln and Smele are the go to's on Trotsky's Red Army. A thorough reading of the brief but masterful texts both titled "The Russian Revolution" by Sheila Fitzpatrick and Rex Wade are excellent prerequisites/brief syntheses on the wider picture that combine massive depth in a concise manner that only a great writer and historian can do. (Mawdsley for example, is a great historian, but not a great writer). And in fact, just about everything these two authors did is essential. I'd argue to best understand Trotsky you need to weigh him against Lenin, and for that the biographies of Service and Lars Lih will give you a good intro into where the field is on Lenin at the moment (I don't think these writers like each other very much), and Lenin in Exile, The Practise and Theory of Revolution, Lenin on the Train and Beryl Williams Lenin & Christopher Read's bio are all worth reading. And why not Stalin? The definitive text is the duology by Kotkin, which is quite simply greater than any biography ever written on any of the three, and perhaps of any Soviet figure, ever.

I'm reading Results and Prospects by Trotsky, very fascinating. Reads very in a very contemporary seeming manner.

TV is TV there's not much you can do.

A longer interview with these extremely knowledgeable and eloquent guys would have been nice though.

Im sure it wasn't his idea.

Why do you put the interviewer on a pedestal?

The-Great- LFC You've discredited you're own statement by making an unimaginative, childish and cliche statement "imperialistic fascist" white army. The white army was a mixture of different people with varying motivations, some simply didn't want to be under communism. That doesn't make them all bad or neither fascist or imperialistic. If you also break down the actual meaning of 'imperialistic' and 'fascist' both of those could describe what became of the Soviet Union.