395. Stalin: The Rise of A Tyrant (Part 1)

How did Stalin become one of the most ruthless dictators in World History? What was his childhood like in Georgia? How did he rise from a poet training to be a priest, to the ruler of the Soviet Union? In Episode 1 of this new series, Anita Anand and William Dalrymple explore the early life of Stalin as he grew up in Georgia. Brought to you by Plaud. Empire listeners can use code 'EMPIRE' to get a 10% discount on their first order at this link: https://uk.plaud.ai/empire Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com. Email: [email protected] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Imogen Marriott Editor: Charlie Rodwell Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 2:13Speaker 03

  Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Anan.

• 2:16Speaker 00

  And me, William Derempel.

• 2:18Speaker 03

  We are doing a story about a man who is in the news again, having sort of been disappeared for decades. So in May 2025, a new relief carving of Joseph Stalin went up in a station on the Moscow Metro, and it was an exact replica, one that had been torn down in the 1960s, at a time when the Soviet Union was desperately trying to put Stalin and everything he represented far behind it.

• 2:47Speaker 00

  Now, Anita, you very sweetly sent me a picture of this new relief, and it's bonkers, because it's not in any even remotely contemporary style. It's pure 1920s Soviet kitsch that looks almost balletic with sort of Stalin, who's about three times life size, towering above a group of adoring schoolchildren who appear to be sort of dancers in the bullshoi. And Stalin's standing there with his hand on his chest, rather like sort of certain images of Bertie Worcester standing against a fireplace in the Drones Club. What on earth is going on? And why is Putin indulging Stalin in this way?

• 3:26Speaker 03

  Okay, so I mean, you think it's giving sort of, you know, Bertie Worcester vibes. I think it's just a lot more, you know, fatherland, fatherland, you know, that scene from that cabaret. Because, you know, all the kids are, you know, sort of reaching up as if he's kind of godlike. And it's a really good question. Why is Putin putting him back? Well, because, and you know what, he has said this when speaking to Oliver Stone, the filmmaker in 2017, and he was talking, you know, Stone just asked him straight out, why are you bringing Stalin back and turning him into Grandad Joe, you know, sort of making him the nation's grandfather? And he said to Oliver Stone, excessive demonisation of Stalin is one of the ways of attacking the Soviet Union and Russia.

• 4:09Speaker 03

  So he has sort of conflated in his mind the fact that, you know, we've apologised too much about the past, we have apologised too much about strong men. And we've said this before, Putin has modelled himself and has always said, the people he looks up to are Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and Stalin. You know, these are the sort of the role models of the strong man.

• 4:34Speaker 00

  Who between them are responsible for lakes of bloodshed stretching across the steps. But what's interesting here to me is that it isn't as if Putin denies the death and the horror of which, you know, there is so very much. He just says that Stalin was an effective manager, which is also bollocks, isn't it?

• 4:57Speaker 03

  So that, so well, no, the phrase itself is in Russian history textbooks, an effective manager. And it is, it's the mildest description for a man who, as you say, you know, lakes of blood, ran a famine and a terror that killed on most serious count somewhere between 15 and 30 million people.

• 5:18Speaker 00

  And if you'd like to know more about that, you could listen to our wonderful friend Anne Applebaum in our Russian series from two years ago, drawing on her Pulitzer Prize winning book on the Red Famine.

• 5:33Speaker 03

  Putin's other argument, by the way, is also interesting, particularly, I guess, for an Empire audience, because he said, look, Stalin, Oliver Cromwell, you know, Britain still has statues of Cromwell, despite what Putin called his very ambiguous role in our history. So if Britain can live with Cromwell on a plinth, the logic runs that Russia can live with Stalin on a plinth. So, you know, that is the argument.

• 5:57Speaker 00

  That's a good counter argument, because if you, certainly from an Irish point of view, Cromwell is someone who was, again, responsible for locks of blood across Ireland.

• 6:08Speaker 03

  Shall we start? Because what we're trying to do, as we did with the Mao series that we did, is sort of getting under the bonnet of who this man was, and then what he did. So we're going to start with something a bit strange, because we don't actually know for certain when Stalin was even born, right? There's a parish register of the Assumption Church in Gori that gives the 18th of December 1878 as his birth date. And that date is confirmed on a seminary certificate, and it's on a Tsarist police file, we'll come to that in a minute, and in his own handwriting on a 1920s questionnaire. But Stalin himself, when he came to power, gave another birth date, which was celebrated as, you know, Stalin's birthday, let's have a parade, the 21st of

• 6:53Speaker 03

  December 1879, a year and three days difference. So why did he do it?

• 6:58Speaker 00

  The great Bob Savis has an idea, doesn't he? In his biography, he has this nice little line, falsification came easily to him, which is certainly a theme we'll see running through this entire series.

• 7:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, but he also has another theory, which, you know, you can't prove, but I think he makes a really compelling argument, that changing the date helped him dodge the draft, dodge conscription when he was a young man. So, look, we don't know for sure. There are some things we do know for sure. We know he wasn't born Stalin. He was born Joseph Jugashvili, and he was born in Georgia. So he's a Georgian, and that's very, very different to being a Russian at the time when he was born.

• 7:40Speaker 00

  When I was growing up and studying Stalin for A level, it didn't mean much to me, the fact that he came from Georgia, because it just looked as if, in those days, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, as if it was, you know, part of southern Russia, certainly the southern USSR. But it's worth giving this history. Georgia is in the Caucasus, it's next to Armenia, it's just north of Iran and Turkey, and it's a very long way from Russia. The religion of Georgia is Georgian Orthodox, it's different from Russian Orthodox. And for a Georgian to rise to power

• 8:19Speaker 00

  in Moscow, and someone from a Georgian Orthodox background, is as improbable as in mid 20th century Britain, someone with an Irish Catholic background from Limerick, or, you know, choose your, choose your remote part of Ireland, coming to power in London. It's improbable.

• 8:41Speaker 03

  And Georgia has its own language, it has its own alphabet. So it's very different and distinct. And so for Georgians, when they were, you know, sort of being run from Moscow, it was as if, you know, they'd been colonised and some people didn't like it at all, never, never came to terms with it.

• 8:59Speaker 00

  And perhaps one other thing we should say is that in distant ancient times, Georgia was actually part of the Persian Empire. I mean, you know, that's the, you know, it's looking southwards to Mesopotamia, rather than necessarily northwards to Russia for much of its history. So it's a long, long way from Moscow central.

• 9:21Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, that's, that's sort of the slightly uneven terrain of geopolitics. Let's talk about the uneven terrain of his childhood, because it is miserable, Willie. I mean, it's so awful. So his father, Besarian, known as Besso, was a cobbler. So this is a poor family. And he had his own workshop in Gori in Georgia. And by most accounts, he was a pretty good cobbler, but what he refused to do was, was keep up with the times. So he kept on making sort of old Georgian style footwear, you know, sort of the soft leather, you know, the high boots, the kind of things, you know, the Cossacks would wear very proudly. But the taste changed, you know, what people wanted

• 10:06Speaker 03

  was the European shoes. So instead of actually thinking, you know, maybe I should move with the times, Besso just became really bitter and angry and alcoholic. And his drinking brought with it violence, and the violence was directed mostly at his poor wife, Kiki, Ekaterina, and against the little boy, Joseph. It is a brutal... Horrible way to grow up. I mean, Besso was so sort of angry with his lot that, you know, he was known as Mad Besso. You know, Robert Service, again, in a very excellent biography on Stalin, says, you know, he got into scrapes when his businesses went into decline. You can

• 10:45Speaker 03

  just imagine this man who comes out and punchy and drunk. And there is a story that, you know, Stalin himself tells to his daughter Svetlana, and please keep that name in mind because we're going to do a bonus episode on Stalin's daughter. It is the most bonkers, extraordinary story you can possibly imagine. But he does tell the story to his daughter that, you know, once his father was so drunk and he sort of came across him battering his mother, and he picked up a knife. He hurls this knife at his father. It misses his father. But then his father comes charging towards him. And he goes and runs away to the neighbors and hides for days till his father's

• 11:26Speaker 03

  anger blows out. So that's the kind of, you know, terror that this kid grows up with. It's a horrible, abusive background. And finally, you know, the father, be grateful for small messes, leaves, which doesn't make, you know, a Katerina's life, Keké's life, much better. But it does mean there's less brutality in the home.

• 11:47Speaker 00

  Anita, you sent me a picture of Stalin as a little, what is it, six-year-old, seven-year-old? And he is this sort of, you can see, he's this sort of abused kid. He looks like a little punk from, you know, from some East End picture of young East End gangsters. He's tiny, he's got jug ears sticking out, and he's, and he's jutting his chin forward assertively, as if, you know, yeah, he's sort of prematurely tough. There's no love there. It's a, it's a little boy's having to assert himself in a, in a very violent world.

• 12:25Speaker 03

  I see someone really fragile. You see someone who's a little thug. I just see somebody who just needs a hug. I mean, the, you know, the eyes are sad eyes, but that's, you know, that's the difference between us. But, you know, but you're right about him being quite thuggish, because he does, you know, as a kid, he's small. He's really small, which is why that, you know, Moscow freeze is really funny, where he's sort of three times as big as anybody else, because he was short all his life. He was always, you know, one of the shortest men in the room. The thing is, this is a, this is a kid who goes through quite a lot. So his father then leaves. A Katerina is struggling to bring up this sort of quite wayward kid by the time, you know, Besso has left, who is now having brawls and fights and things like that. Around the age of

• 13:07Speaker 03

  six, he gets smallpox that is so severe that his mother thinks that, you know, little Joseph is going to die. And already two of his older brothers have died in infancy. So there's a real terror and poverty because she can't afford a doctor. So they, instead they call in this local healer, you know, healer, and, you know, not much good from a local healer. But, you know, he survives, but he is left permanently pockmarked. Every official photo you've ever seen of him, Willie, has been retouched.

• 13:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's not something you see much in, in Europe or America these days. But in India, where I live, that you still see in bazaars, people with really, really bad disfigured smallpox marks. It looks like, you know, battlefield with little shell holes in your, in your, in your cheeks and temples. It wasn't the only thing, was it? Because he'd, he'd fallen under a cart or something and broken his, broken his nose, what happened?

• 14:01Speaker 03

  Well, it was, it was worse than that. It is like being hit by a car is the equivalent. So, you know, there was a runaway horse and carriage that slammed straight into him and they, you know, break his arm. His left arm never properly healed and it was always visibly shorter and stiffer for the rest of his life. So, you know, he went through that as well and was trampled to death. But this is a kid that doesn't die, you know, the pox doesn't take him. This father's brutality doesn't take him. This horse and carriage doesn't take him. Going back to this idea of, you know, why he, he might have turned out the way he did, all he knows in his childhood is, is kind of hardship and brutality, except for the love of his mother, who he is utterly

• 14:45Speaker 03

  devoted to. And she has got some really ambitious plans for him. Join us after the break and we'll tell you more.

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• 16:24Speaker 00

  Welcome back. Well, in the first half, we got a very clear picture of Stalin's rough and provincial childhood with a drunken and abusive father. Anita and I disagreed on the little picture of him, which, which in my view shows a little sort of punk with a jutting chin. Anita sees a baby longing to be mothered. But the, the sensitive side is there. And it emerges clearly more, I suppose, towards the end of his teens, when two things happens. One is, he starts to write really quite good poetry. And the second thing, improbably for anyone that knows the latest Stalin, he joins a seminary. He trains for the priesthood. Anita, take us there.

• 17:07Speaker 03

  Well, shall I read you a bit of Stalin poetry? Shall I? Okay. And you judge for yourself. Okay, here we are. This is, this is from his, no. Morning. The pinkish bud has opened, tushing to the pale blue violet, and stirred by a light breeze, the lily of the valley has bent over the grass. Flower, oh my Georgia, let peace reign in my native land, and may you friends make renown our motherland by study. Now, that, that tells you two things. Okay. One, and I'm told that in the original Georgian, this is quite beautiful. But number two, he is a proud Georgian, not a Russian, not a, you know, not this, you know, sort of amorphous

• 17:49Speaker 03

  kind of, you know, identity that perhaps the Tsar would like to have. But he is a Georgian, and like many Georgians, proud of that identity, proud of that difference, that separation that you were talking about, looking used to it, feeling different.

• 18:02Speaker 00

  Can I just put in here the thought that in a previous episode last year, we had Myajaznoff talking about Konrad and Konrad's father at exactly this period in Poland, which is another place that's under Russian control. And Konrad's father is shoved into the main prison in Warsaw for writing poetry, not a million miles from this, about, talking about, you know, the young Poland rising up and, and the importance of the motherland. I mean, this presumably is, is not just patriotic, it's, it's on the verge of, of transgressive, seditious, in Zara's speak.

• 18:45Speaker 03

  I suppose one cover for any kind of sedition is, is again, Kiki, Katerina, his mother, because, you know, she wants him to rise in the ranks. And the best way of doing that, and this will, this will make sense to a good Catholic boy.

• 18:57Speaker 00

  You love a good, ambitious mother, Anita.

• 18:59Speaker 03

  Well, I, you know, I recognize the breed, but she wants him to be a priest, you know, and she is actually very devout. She's Georgian Orthodox. And she wants young Joseph to become a priest. If only he's a clever boy, if only he could become a priest and he could stay out of trouble, he could rise in the ranks, he could have security. And in 1894, young Joseph, Dugashvili, wins this place at the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary. And it is, by all accounts, you know, quite a brutal regime. It is, it is one of those places that is set up to Russify, to make more Russian, some of these sort of savage outposts of the Tsar's empire.

• 19:38Speaker 00

  So, Anita, that surprises me only in that you'd imagine that just as the Greek Orthodox Church was the great crucible that forms Greek Orthodox resistance to the Ottomans, you'd imagine that the Georgian Orthodox Church was also a centre of resistance to Russification. But you're saying the opposite is true.

• 19:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, you, I mean, you could assume that if the Tsar hadn't taken control of every little thing and used these places. So, you know, in name on the door, it's Georgian Orthodox, but the Georgian Orthodox Church and this seminary in particular are under Russian Orthodox control at this time.

• 20:17Speaker 00

  Important distinction. How interesting.

• 20:19Speaker 03

  Very important. Yeah. And glad you asked. So there is this Russifying, you know, that is going on, which, you know, imagine what that does and how that grates against the little boy who wrote the poem about Georgia, my flowering Georgia and all of that kind of thing. In fact, you know, the pupils.

• 20:36Speaker 00

  He's like one of our characters from the LSD revolution.

• 20:39Speaker 03

  Can I just say, I don't write the poetry here. I leave that to others to do. But, but this is a place that does surveil its own pupils. So, I mean, this place, apart from, you know, it being, you know, the Russification of, of this outpost of Georgia, it's also quite a pressured existence, because all the young minds that are in here are being surveilled like crazy. You know, reports are being written back. Are they good? Are they good Tsarist members? Or are they not? Are they, you know, are they talking sedition? And right under their noses, it's at this point that young Joseph is reading books that actually the Tsar and all the people who hold his empire up would have been appalled by. So Marxism gets to him.

• 21:23Speaker 00

  It sounds to me as if the surveillance in the Georgian Orthodox Seminary is not quite good enough.

• 21:28Speaker 03

  It's not great. So he's reading books that are banned. They're on the banned list. What is to be done? You know, it's the big questions of what is to be done about freedom and what is to be done about the individual. There's another interesting one, and I'll tell you why it's interesting. It's just because of the name of the protagonist. It is, it is a Georgian novel, again, just on the banned list, called The Patricide by Alexander Kasbegi. And, and its hero is this mountain outlaw called

• 21:57Speaker 03

  Koba. Now, you know that word, don't you? How do you know that word? Tell me how you know that word.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  I do know that because one of my favourite authors,

• 22:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:06Speaker 00

  Martin Amis wrote a book about Stalin called Koba the Dread, because he took on that as his nom de guerre, didn't he?

• 22:13Speaker 03

  He took it on and it's, it becomes his name in seminary. So, you know, the friends that he's hanging out with, they all talk to him and they'd say, Koba this, Koba come here, Koba, you know, we're late for Martins or whatever it is they were late for. But it does become his name. But then he becomes the thing the name represents. So this is one of those weird things where you get nominative determinism, right? So he takes on the name Koba, the name of this bandit hero of a book.

• 22:43Speaker 00

  Brilliant name for a man at seminary studying for the priesthood.

• 22:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. But guess what happens next? He becomes a bandit. And it is one of the most improbable, implausible stories of him becoming a bandit. So to understand, first of all, you have to understand a little bit about the atmosphere in Georgia. Because, you know, to become a bandit, to steal from the Tsar, as you said, you know, this kind of sedition, that's not, it's not taken lightly. Even you write Polish poetry, you end up like Konrad Stad in a prison. But the anger that's building up in Georgia is because around about the time when he's at the seminary, there are two mountain bandits who were condemned for shooting a policeman over a stray cow.

• 23:27Speaker 03

  Okay, it's a small thing, but they are publicly hanged in the centre of Gori. And that has a huge impact on young Stalin, because he's there to watch. You know, he's been told not to go, but he goes and he watches and it lights this fire in him. So rather than, you know, sort of thinking, okay, the state is all powerful. I can't, we can't do this, we can't rise above this. He decides to kind of meet it head on and become a bandit himself. And it is the, just the most useless attempt at being a bandit.

• 24:02Speaker 00

  Is he still at seminary at this point?

• 24:04Speaker 03

  He's left, he's just left seminary and he hasn't completed the course.

• 24:09Speaker 00

  Has he formally sort of bailed out? Or is he still sort of, you know, in a cask somewhere?

• 24:14Speaker 03

  He just didn't, he didn't come back, no. I mean, he's done with it, he's completely done with it. Well, not only does he leave the seminary, he gets married in 1906. You know, it's sort of around the time that he leaves the seminary. He marries a woman called Ekaterina, known as Kato. And, you know, she's also a very devout Georgian woman. She's a sister of a seminary friends of his. And, you know, there could have been a happily ever after. There, their son is born in 1907, a little boy called Yakov. And just, you know, keep that name in your mind as well, because, you know, these kids' stories are not happy ones and we'll come to them a bit later. But in that same year, 1907, this is when he decides, old Koba, strike Stalin, strike Jugashvili, decides that he's going to do a bank robbery.

• 24:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, even after watching these two people being hanged in the public square, he's going to have a go. So he and a bunch of his friends ambush a bank stagecoach in Erevan Square in Tiflis. And it is almost within sight of the seminary itself. And it is an audacious thing where they're sort of standing on high buildings and they're dropping bombs and they've, you know, others have been positioned on the street and they open fire with guns. And the man who's pulling all the strings is Stalin, alias Koba, the organizer, the financier, you know, the one who leads the attack.

• 25:30Speaker 00

  This is brilliant. The things you learn in seminary in Tbilisi.

• 25:37Speaker 03

  Well, doesn't it, doesn't it mean you think he's not been reading, you know, the Bible very much? But what happens is, it's an utter disaster. They make off with a significant sum, it's a quarter of a million rubles that they carry off in linen bags. But they cannot spend a single ruble of it because the bank had circulated the serial numbers of the largest notes. So, you know, anytime anyone would have paid for anything with any of those notes, they would have been done. And so, you know, it's around this time that he gets his first mugshot. He's sort of like, he's rounded up, but not imprisoned for this. I mean, he kind of gets away with this.

• 26:11Speaker 00

  Now, I happen to know, Anita, that this is one of your favourite pin-ups. So what's happened to the boy with the pop marks and the broken nose? He's now become rather dishy.

• 26:22Speaker 03

  Do you mean the four mugshot, as I like to think of it? You know, Alex Monteselman will completely be with me on this because we've had a discussion of dictators who were hot ones. And he's top of the list. Okay, the young Stalin was a good-looking fella.

• 26:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, and he's got, he's got quite good hair. He's got sort of swept back hair and he's almost wearing something that looks a bit like a sort of cafe. He looks he's on a free Palestine march.

• 26:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So the question I think you could legitimately ask is how can this rather failed bandit become something very important in the Bolshevik movement? And it is really because of a relationship with Lenin. And we should, why don't you tell people a little bit about Lenin? Because he's a very different character to Stalin.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  So Lenin is a different character and a different figure. He comes from a Russian middle-class family. The key event in his childhood is 1887, when his older brother is hanged for trying to kill the Tsar. And this, of course, radicalises the younger brother. He is expelled from university for going on too many protests. He's even exiled into Siberia in the 1890s. So he's really, you know, considered to be one of the kind of leading radicals of this early period. This is nearly 40 years before the Russian Revolution. He's already been exiled to Siberia. And he's already the leader of the radical Bolshevik wing

• 27:54Speaker 00

  of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Now, I'd always assumed that Bolsheviks were strictly part of the kind of Marxist world. But here it seems to be part of a social democrat sort of political party. Explain that to me.

• 28:10Speaker 03

  It is a radical wing of an umbrella organisation that feels it can hold all of these different thoughts together. And it will turn out that they are very wrong about that. And Bolshevism will become one of the prime motivations in Stalin's life as well. Because, you know, he's now a young father, he's a failed bank robber, he's not a priest. But he starts writing about what the Bolsheviks are thinking and what they're doing. And what this land should be. And they all come to the conclusion that actually all of the oppression, all of the wickedness of the Tsar has to end.

• 28:49Speaker 00

  What I'd love to know is how does Lenin's trajectory, radicalised by his brother's hanging, a very senior figure in exile in Switzerland, who's brought back to lead this revolution? How does he come across some provincial bank robber for the Caucasus? What's the, what's the circumstances that bring these two men from very different backgrounds and very different parts of Russia together?

• 29:17Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, the way Stalin will tell it in later years doesn't bear much scrutiny because the way he tells it, you know, they both skipped into the revolution, holding hands. But actually, it was Lenin who became the leader of the Russian Social Democrat Labour Party, which is a precursor to the Communist Party.

• 29:35Speaker 00

  How interesting. It sounds like it's just a sort of soft left sort of SDP or something, but it's actually the Communist Party and its earlier, the caterpillar that became the butterfly.

• 29:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, sort of the Bolshevik wing of that is even more radical. And that's where, you know, Lenin's heart is beating. And that's what makes him hugely attractive to Stalin. So Stalin sort of knows, you know, where the power is because the Bolsheviks form the majority of that party. There are the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. And Mensheviks are much more sort of the intellectuals and the intelligentsia. And the Bolsheviks are much more power, let's get this done and let's get it done quickly. And it doesn't matter what cost it comes to, and it is going to cost rivers of blood. And you've got two very charismatic people on that side. Lenin being the one who is on top and Trotsky being another who's sort of standing on tanks and rallying people to join the cause.

• 30:27Speaker 03

  Okay, so, but where is Stalin in all of this? Right, Stalin is writing articles about the national question. You know, what it is, what is this new place going to be like? And, you know, he comes to the attention of Lenin through that kind of writing. And then Lenin sort of, you know, brings him on to the Bolshevik Central Committee in 1912 and notices this man is pretty, you know, organised, he's an organised thinker. He can, you know, sort of do this kind of actually slightly plodding work of organising, making sure funding is in place, you know, that kind of stuff, the backroom kind of stuff. Now, that is what he is doing in 1917. While, you know, Trotsky and Lenin are out there, sort of, you know,

• 31:10Speaker 03

  rallying people to come, rise up, rise up. He's not really there, you know, he's not a good orator.

• 31:16Speaker 00

  How interesting.

• 31:17Speaker 03

  He is not the man who's on the frontline. And this is going to be a real problem, Willie, because, you know, he would not thank us for talking like this. Indeed, he did not thank Trotsky, who in the next episode that we do will continually point out that the man was a bean counter when everybody was laying down their lives during the Glorious Revolution. And that is going to, that's going to sting him.

• 31:39Speaker 00

  So it's one of those occasions we've come across several times in this podcast where someone who subsequently becomes terribly famous has his past enhanced in retrospect. So we think of Stalin as someone central in the Russian Revolution, but he wasn't at all. He was a backroom, as you said, a bean counter. And the real heroes at this point are Lenin and Trotsky.

• 32:05Speaker 03

  And Trotsky, and very much Lenin and Trotsky. And Stalin is doing, let's face it, the unglamorous work that nobody else wants to do, but it's still important. So he still has a seat at the table. That's all you need to know, he has a seat at the table. So next time on this podcast, Willie, we're going to talk about how someone who was described as a plodding theorist becomes general secretary of the newly-named Communist Party. And what does that actually mean, that title? Is it actually a job of great power and import? Or is it still another title for a job that nobody else wants to do? And what happens with the friendship with Lenin? All of that to come in the next episode. If you want to get the whole series and a special bonus episode

• 32:49Speaker 03

  about Stalin's daughter, Eye Watering, involves falling in love with an Indian, many broken hearts, defection to America, I mean, everything is in this story. You can go ad-free by joining the club at empirepoduk.com. There's empirepoduk.com. Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Anand.

• 33:08Speaker 00

  And goodbye from me, William Durumpel.

• 33:15Speaker 02

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claud.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claud.ai/spotify.

• 33:39Speaker 05

  Where some see heroes and others see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. While others follow the noise, we follow the money. Learn more at Bloomberg.com.

• 33:54Speaker 06

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