#1149 Sean McMeekin: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism

Hello, everyone. Welcome to a new episode of the Decenter. I'm your host, as always, Ricardo Lopes, and today I'm joined by Dr. Sean McMiken. He is Francis Floornoy Professor of European History and Culture at Bard College, and today we're going to talk about his book. to overthrow the world, the rise and fallen rise of communism. So Doctor McMicking McMickin, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to everyone. Oh thank you for having me, Ricardo. It's great to be here. So what motivated you to write these books?

Well, it's actually easier to answer that question than it might uh ordinarily be, um I can almost date it to a conversation I had several years ago at the height of the Covid lockdowns with uh an English historian friend of mine called Nick Lloyd, who writes a lot on the first world war. Um, he's doing a trilogy at the moment, Western Front, Eastern Front have both come out, and he's gonna do another history of the Middle Eastern Front. And we've worked together at times or spoken together at events over the years, and we were just jaw boning back and forth about The lockdowns and the travel restrictions and the mask mandates and all these other things and how difficult it was to do anything or travel or go anywhere or do research or even see people and we We started musing aloud whether this might have been what it was like under communism, and and he said, Why don't you write a history of communism? And so there it is. No, the the reason the the broader, I suppose, cause uh the the longer term cause, you might say, instead of the proximate cause of my tackling uh the subject.

is that I've been working on aspects of the history of communism on and off for many years. where I actually kind of began my my career as a historian. Um Way back in the nineteen nineties, I grew up against the backdrop of the fall of the Soviet Union, was in the headlines, uh the Berlin Wall, uh the fall of the USSR. Um so from a very early age I was always fascinated by the subject, and it's really where I first kind of cut my teeth is. As a historian doing a lot of research in Moscow in the old communist archives, which always had an interesting fresson to me, the uh the secrets, the buried secrets suddenly laid bare, even if some of those archives unfortunately are closing up again. Um, so I've been working on and off on the subject for years, and it just kind of struck me, I mean, why why not try to do a kind of a a general summing up of what we know also because um and I think that's really the angle of the book.

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