Notes: Episode 46, Communism (Part 2)
As with every show, I’ll list any corrections or clarifications here. If there’s anything I’ve overlooked, please contact me by email or in the comments and I’ll edit the notes to reflect the new information.
3:30 The 1871 Treaty of Versailles was in fact the eighth treaty bearing this name, so definitely not the first. I wouldn’t even go so far as to call it the first big one – some of them were certainly small and in modern context maybe not terribly noteworthy, but the 1783 Treaty of Versailles, for example, ended hostility against Great Britain after France’s aid of the newly declared United States. That’s not a shabby Versailles treaty, as far as Treaties of Versailles go.
21:33 – “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” Karl Marx, “A Contribution To The Critique Of Hegel’s Philosophy Of Right” – not Das Kapital, as I speculated.
25:11 – The Paris Fire Brigade had been nationalized since 1793 as an arm of the army engineers, so it’s not as though it was a private endeavor before the Paris Commune was set up. I had a hard time finding any references to the brigade under the commune’s reign, other than a reference to them saving the Louvre during an attack by the parliamentary forces; I suppose this must mean that they continued to operate under the commune, although I’d be interested to know what the leadership looked like during the two months that the commune existed. I’m sure someone managed to ride this very specific and interesting topic all the way to a history PhD.
45:22 – Simply misspoke. Russia switched to the more common in the west Gregorian calendar after the revolution; the Julian calendar was what they were moving away from.
52:32 – Stalin was put on display between his death in 1953 and 1961, at which point he was removed and entombed in the walls of the Kremlin. So yes, he was displayed, but only for a relatively short time.
1:06:58 – This is correct – the first successful Soviet nuclear weapons test occurred in 1949. Interestingly enough, their plan depended heavily on information acquired through espionage from the United States.
1:10:42 – And I was wrong! The war in Afghanistan the first time around began out of revolt in 1978 and saw CIA intervention as early as 1979. The vast bulk of the action belongs to the 80s, but Ethan was right on the start date for this one.
