Performing these Uncommon Knowledge interviews over the years, I’ve learned that the interlocutor — that would be me — has only the most tenuous control over the conversation. Christopher Hitchens reduces that control to negligibility. (In last week’s show, Harry Jaffa obliterated it.) For what it’s worth, though, I was attempting to tease out of Hitch and Bob Service comments on my own two conclusions about Trotsky: that, a brilliant orator and writer, Trotsky really was different from Stalin; but that Trotsky remained a monster all the same.

Hitch and Service agreed on the first of those two conclusions — this will become particularly clear in tomorrow’s segment of the program. But whereas Hitch took pains to insist on Trotsky’s “moral moment” — Trotsky’s early denuciation of the Nazis; in re which, see Jonah, below — Bob would have none of it, wincing at the very use of the word “moral” in connection with Lev Davidovitch. If Trotsky, not Stalin, had succeeded Lenin, Bob insisted, more blood would have been shed, not less.

Sometimes, alas, the best lines get delivered after the cameras stop rolling. As we were dabbing off our makeup, Bob Service reached for the galleys of his forthcoming book, Trotsky, and said, “If the ice pick didn’t finish him off, I hope my book does.”