My longtime National Review Online podcast Between the Covers is now new and improved–and co-produced with our friends at Ricochet. We’ve renamed it The Bookmonger, and the first episode is now available–a conversation with Stephen Kotkin, author of Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928. We discuss how the son of a shoemaker and a washerwoman could become one of the world’s great tyrants, what would have happened to the 20th century if Stalin had died in Russia’s revolutionary purges, and how an American historian knows how to tell the truth with Soviet sources.
Give it a try: The podcast never has sounded better and we even have a rock-music intro.