And it gets extremely weird by the end. He spends some 70 episodes just between 1905 and 1917, but then the timeline is horribly compressed to the point where 1922 to 1938 are all told in just some 5 episodes.
There are constant grammar mistakes and names keep being swapped around (at multiple points he even says Trotsky wanted to be "Stalin's heir" when he meant Lenin), to the point where I had to keep going back and check to make sure I wasn't going crazy. The best example of this, on the very conclusion, he cites a Bakunin quote as though it was said by Bukharin (link, at 49:45).
In one episode he is very critical of Trotsky's arrogance, but then in the following episodes calls him something like "most important revolutionary after Lenin". I'm not sure if he ever even mentioned the existence of the Fourth International even though he followed Trotsky all the way up to the icepick.
And the whole history after the civil war just boils down to a multiple hour and episode-long of Stalin Bad, without even putting any effort to dispel common myths. Stalin also becomes basically the only character with agency, and things just happen to any other named individual. Not to mention how Stalin was barely mentioned during the entire narrative except being introduced for the Tiflis bank robbery, and hardly ever directly quoted (as is tradition with anti-Stalin historiography).
Foreign policy ceases to exist (except for one off-handed mention of the Chinese civil war to contextualise Trots trotting), Stalin is portrayed as "delusionally paranoid about foreign powers" in the same episode where it's casually mentioned the Nazis took power in Germany.
Gulags and the GPU are mentioned multiple times before they are even formed. He even does a thing where he sneaks in a "Black Book of Communism"-style section where he talks about all the death toll that happened in the period of the revolution, including those of the first and second world wars.
No actual opposition is ever actually mentioned after the end of the civil war, from either inside or outside the Union, and apparently every single problem in the USSR was purely self-inflicted.
Sometimes I think he even forgot that Stalin was Georgian and not Russian to try and pin Russian chauvinism on him too.
Best part was when he actually did a somewhat reasonable explanation of natural and economic causes of the 1931 famine, but then ends with something like "some people call it Holodomor and say it was intentional because Stalin hates Ukrainians, but maybe the whole famine was intentional because Stalin hates everybody, I don't know, I'm no expert."
Not gonna lie, all of this, combined with the sudden decrease in writing quality and getting sponsorships from a literal (digital) bank got my inner "paranoid Stalin" a bit concerned that the script was having to go through a final sponsor pass. Though I think he was just tired and wanted to end it, and trusted his Anglo sources and general social-liberal predisposition too much.
I've recommended this podcast in the past due to being fairly entertaining and accessible, and I still think the first part of this series is pretty good (up to the february 1917 revolution), but the last few episodes really soured the whole thing for me. I'm not particularly well-versed in soviet history, so I wonder how much less obvious nonsense I didn't notice.
Anyways, just had to get that rant out of me there.
That's unfortunate, I quite like Mike Duncan. I haven't listened to his Russian revolution part yet though, I heard he had improved from his much more lib days in the early episodes of the revolutions podcast, though clearly not. I guess it really shows how much people's normally decent ability to research a topic just collapses when it comes to a designated "bad guy" like Stalin. No one actually vets their sources because no one else vets the sources, and no one will call them out on shoddy research like they will with other topics. Western academia has this giant blind spot when it comes to socialism and they act like you're a monster for bringing it up.
I still think some of his other series, specially the Haitian and 1848 ones, are pretty good and would still recommend those. His book on the Roman Social War is also pretty alright. It just really sucks to go through more than a hundred episodes on the Russian one only to end with what seems like some state-sanctioned grade school level conclusion. Western leftists really love revolutions until they're successful.
Yeah, his previous stuff is good, if a bit lib at times, just strange for him to fizzle out at the end like this, especially as you say, with more than a hundred episodes on it. Why even bother to talk about the aftermath at all if he's going to do such shoddy work? Though he might not think it is shoddy, western academia has largely "decided" that Stalin was a cartoon villain who was responsible for everything bad that ever happened in the USSR, so I would imagine all of the western sources he looked at said as much. A shame he didn't look for more unorthodox sources, though I guess he risks alienating his lib audience if he actually researched Stalin. It's all a bunch of bullshit really. People don't challenge the narrative because no one challenges the narrative and no one challenges the narrative because no one challenges the narrative.