396. Stalin: The Bolshevik Revolution (Part 2)

Despite later mythology, Stalin was effectively a nobody during the Russian Revolution of 1917. Unlike Trotsky and Lenin, he was not on the frontline amongst the revolutionaries. How did he reveal his penchant for violence during the Russian Civil War in the following years? And what is the darker story behind his marriage to the young Nadya Alliluyeva? In Episode 2 of this series, Anita Anand and William Dalrymple are joined by Giles Milton, author of The Stalin Affair, to discuss Stalin’s role in the fledgling Soviet Union during the violence that birthed it. 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. Empire listeners can use code 'EMPIRE' to get a 10% discount on their first order at this link: https://uk.plaud.ai/empire Try Attio for free at attio.com/empire Email: [email protected] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Imogen Marriott Editor: Bruno Di Castri Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 2:01Speaker 03

  From the Russian Civil War in 1918 to Lenin's death in 1924, this is the story of how Joseph Stalin went from brutal subordinate to master of the party machine. Now, the Bolsheviks had only just seized power when the country collapsed into a conflict that pitted Russian against Russian. Why did the revolution descend into civil war? And how did Stalin position himself as Lenin's successor, even after Lenin rebuked him and called for his

• 2:43Speaker 03

  removal? Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arndt.

• 2:47Speaker 00

  And me, William Durham.

• 2:49Speaker 03

  Now, last time, we left Stalin in 1917, and he was, do you remember, a rather unimpressive man, the man nobody noticed in the room, a poor orator, a plodding theorist, nobody's idea of the next dictator. And we are, I'm delighted to say, joined by Giles Milton, friend of the show and author of The Stalin Affair, The Impossible Alliance That Won the War, to discuss Stalin's rise in the shadow of Lenin. And Giles, first of all, I just want to know, were we unfair, describing him as sort of like a lackluster bean counter pre-1917?

• 3:23Speaker 04

  No, I think you are absolutely right. He very rarely appeared in public as well, was not known generally in Russia, hated public speaking because he had quite a thick Georgian accent. And so, no, I think he was unremarkable. And who could have predicted the future that is about to unfold for him? And we'll look at why and how that might have come about, and whether it was his force of personality, whether he got lucky, or what it was.

• 3:49Speaker 00

  Giles, just sketch for us the start of the civil war. I'm so full of it at the moment, having just watched Dr. Shivago for the 15th time. So I have a very clear sort of fictional version of it in my head. Give us the facts. What should we be thinking of when we think of the start of the civil war? What caused Russian to turn on Russian in 1918?

• 4:10Speaker 04

  Well, Lenin and his revolutionary Bolsheviks have seized power, the Russian Revolution, and they've seized power in Petrograd, now St Petersburg, in Moscow, and in various towns and cities across the country. But the whole country is by no means with them at all. There are still very, very powerful forces, which we now call White Russians and the White Russian armies, who absolutely detested this revolutionary new regime and were prepared to do absolutely anything they could do to crush it. And on paper, they were very powerful. They had some of the leading generals from the First World War. They had big armies. And crucially, they also had the support of quite a number of

• 4:51Speaker 04

  the Western powers. Many people forget this now, but Britain, France, America, Japan, were all throwing their weight behind the White Russian armies to try and snuff out Lenin, Stalin and his new regime before they got too powerful.

• 5:06Speaker 00

  Giles, just to give a picture of who they are, are they all monarchists and the old establishment? Or are they a whole mixture of other people too, who don't like the look of the Bolsheviks?

• 5:16Speaker 03

  And just adding to that, I mean, can you say, look, one side is more ruffian than the other? One side is intellectual and the other side is anti-intellectual? I mean, is any of that rearing its head in the white-red split?

• 5:27Speaker 04

  I mean, the White Russian generals tended to be aristocratic, of good breeding. They were also reactionary, anti-Semitic generally. Nonetheless, they were supported by the Western governments. And I think notably, and this is going to be extremely important for the future, who sends British troops and munitions into Russia to try and fight the Russian Red Army? None other than Winston Churchill, who in 1919 was Minister of Munitions. And he pushed the government into sending troops and weaponry into Russia to fight the Red Army. And notably, an extraordinary fact, that towards the end of the First World War, the British had developed a new lethal chemical weapon. Winston Churchill

• 6:08Speaker 04

  was a great fan of chemical weapons. He believed they were more humane than the bloodshed of the trenches in the First World War. And so he sent this chemical weapon, which was a very powerful toxic gas, to be used against Trotsky and his Red Army. It didn't work very well in the atmosphere in northern Russia, and in fact, the whole stockpile ended up being dumped in the White Sea. But it gives some idea of the lengths to which Churchill was prepared to go to, to try and destroy this regime. And this will account when we wind forwards to the Second World War, to 1941, where Churchill goes into an alliance with Stalin. It shows just how fraught and difficult it was to construct this alliance, because Churchill had been one of the people back in 1919 who tried to get rid of Stalin,

• 6:53Speaker 04

  Trotsky, Lenin, and the rest of them in the Red Movement.

• 6:56Speaker 03

  The civil war that followed, let's talk about that for a little while now, because the Bolsheviks do emerge victorious. It is at an enormous human cost that they do. I mean, and you have all of this, bedrock is laid for what Russia is going to experience, the Soviet Union is going to experience for decades to come, violence, secrecy, political repression, recrimination, you know, sending people off to gulags, that kind of thing. Now, when it comes to the civil war's great battlefield commanders, was Stalin one of them?

• 7:28Speaker 04

  No, he was not, very much not so. The man in charge of the Red Army was Trotsky. And Trotsky proved his worth. He was a brilliant commander. He was brilliant at picking men to serve under him. Remember, just as you touched upon, to give some idea of the scale of this fight, this covers the whole entirety of Russia. Every single bit of the Russian Empire, as it used to be, is going to be included. So now all the countries we know as the Stans, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Ukraine, these are all dragged into this unbelievably bloody conflict. There's going to be famine, there's going to be disease. But there's also going to be political repression. So you mentioned Stalin. No, he was not one

• 8:11Speaker 04

  of the battlefield commanders, but he was appointed as a political commissar. And his role was to make sure everyone on the red side in the Red Army was politically correct, if you like, is following the revolutionary tenets. And he proved himself exceptionally good and brutal in this role. Anyone who stepped out of line was likely to be tortured and then executed. Peasantry who didn't obey his orders would be summarily executed. Their farms would be burnt, entire villages would be burnt. This was a brutal time for Russians across the old Russian Empire. But it also gives us the first signs of a Stalin

• 8:52Speaker 04

  we haven't necessarily seen before, prepared to use absolute brutality against his own people if it served his own ends.

• 9:02Speaker 03

  And also, you've got now a rivalry that is established. In the last episode, we talked about Trotsky really baiting Stalin, saying, you know, where were you during the revolution? Oh, somewhere, somewhere counting paper clips, you know, that kind of, of taunting. And so these clashes now with, with Trotsky, he's got muscle now to be a real threat to Trotsky, because, you know, he has the power to take out enemies of the ideology.

• 9:26Speaker 04

  He does, but he has a formidable enemy as well, because Trotsky is also politically shrewd, he's powerful, remember, he's leading a victorious Red Army. And so, yeah, well, this, this sets the, the ground really for what is going to be a great battle for supremacy between Trotsky on one hand and Stalin on the other.

• 9:47Speaker 00

  Where does Lenin sit in the, in the rivalry? Does he, does he rate both men? Or does he lean towards one or other?

• 9:55Speaker 04

  Well, I think in these early days, he is, realizes that both men have their uses, and therefore he's going to use them for their respective purposes. I mean, Stalin often gets accused of, of setting up at this period, the architecture of what is going to become the sort of hallmarks of the repressive Soviet regime. So people might be familiar with the Cheka. The Cheka was the, the secret police, which would then become the much more familiar KGB. There would be the forced labour camps, there'd be, you know, the one party state that was set up. And everyone sort of nowadays says, well, this was Stalin who set this up while he was acting as political commissar during the civil war. But this, I think, shows a complete misunderstanding actually of Lenin's role, because it was Lenin who set up the

• 10:39Speaker 04

  architecture, and it was Stalin who then exploited it for his own political, you know, fortunes and future. So the Cheka, of course, is a, a very interesting organisation, because it will become the absolute sort of benchmark of state brutality, listening in on people, arresting them, torturing them and executing them.

• 11:00Speaker 03

  I, I think it's really important what you've just said, because, you know, in, in our retrospective history, it's often said, you know, actually Stalin was the corrupting influence. It was Stalin who brought the terror, it was Stalin who did all of these things. But you're saying the architecture was actually a Lenin bequest. Brutality, though, is associated with Stalin because of his conduct as a civil war commander. Can you give us some of the things he did? And I'm particularly interested in what he did in Zaretsin, which would later take his name.

• 11:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, Zaretsin was one of the big battles that took place in the civil war. This was really Trotsky was, his fingerprints were all over this, partly because he appointed a general called Snazarev, General Snazarev, who was, had been in, serving in the Imperial Tsarist Army. Now, this was something, a hallmark of Trotsky's running of the Red Army, is that he was completely prepared to use army officers and generals who'd fought under the Tsar and proved their worth and proved themselves to be capable commanders. And this threw him into a direct clash with actually both Lenin and Stalin, but particularly Stalin. And this was particularly the case at this Battle of Tsarin, where the commander was

• 12:12Speaker 04

  this imperialist Tsarist general, who Stalin, as political commissar, has arrested with all his junior officers and puts them, imprisons them on a barge in the Volga River. And this is quite extraordinary, you know, he's, he's only a political commissar, and he's arresting a senior general conducting a battle on the battlefront. Why did he do this? Well, the argument is that he wants to dispose of these, this general and these officers. It is said that he's actually, his intention is to sink that boat in the Volga and send them all to a watery grave. He doesn't get to do that, because Trotsky learns of what's happened, is absolutely furious with Stalin, and orders that this general is immediately released.

• 12:55Speaker 04

  And so, if you like, this is round one in the battle between Trotsky and Stalin, and it is a resounding victory for Trotsky. He gets his way.

• 13:03Speaker 00

  What are the instruments at both their hands? Stalin has the Cheka, and Trotsky has the Red Army. What, what are, what are the instruments they can use against each other?

• 13:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, essentially, it's army against the state organ, the Cheka, which is, as I said, ruthless at oppressing its own people. One is master of the army, one is master of the Cheka. And of course, Stalin, very close to Felix Zhrzinski, who founded and, and ran the Cheka at this period. One little thing, which I think is quite interesting, I, I think in episode one, you mentioned Stalin statues being resurrected around Russia, and Putin is rehabilitating Stalin. Well, astonishingly, Felix, Felix Zhrzinski, whose statue was removed when the Soviet Union collapsed, his statue has just been resurrected again in Moscow as well. This is, was a brutal, extremely unpleasant, malevolent political

• 13:57Speaker 04

  schemer, who now has his statue re-erected in the heart of Moscow.

• 14:01Speaker 00

  Just up Putin's street.

• 14:03Speaker 04

  But it, but it is interesting that Putin, Putin is using these, these figures from this period, you know, and resurrecting them.

• 14:09Speaker 03

  Well, not all of them, because Trotsky isn't making a reappearance. And, and actually, what's really interesting at this time with the power struggle between Stalin and Trotsky, is that both of them keep running to daddy, daddy being Lenin. So I mean, there's, there's this wonderful letter from Stalin to Lenin complaining about Trotsky. I'll just, I'll just quote a bit of it. "I ask you in time, while it's still not too late, to remove Trotsky and fix him within a framework, since I'm afraid Trotsky's unhinged commands, if they're repeated, will create dissension between the army and the command staff and will totally destroy the front. I'm not a lover of clamours and scandals, but I feel if we don't immediately produce reins to constrain Trotsky, he'll ruin this whole army of ours." And, and they're both belly aching to Lenin about each other.

• 14:52Speaker 04

  And I have to say here, Stalin has a point. There was a real fear that Trotsky, who thought very highly of himself, he was a very commanding, imperious presence, there was a real fear that with these old Russian generals, who are generally pretty competent, that he'd set himself up as a new Napoleon Bonaparte. You know, that actually, he'd kick out the Bolsheviks, he'd get rid of Stalin and Lenin, and actually would set up his own personal dictatorship. So you could see that when Stalin says this, well, of course Stalin has a huge grudge against Trotsky, but he's not without reason, perhaps.

• 15:26Speaker 00

  Giles, on a, on a human level, I always have the impression that Trotsky would be someone you'd, you'd prefer to have to dinner to, Lenin and Stalin would be poisonous company. Is that right? Or were they all pretty tricky characters that you'd really want to keep out the house if you could?

• 15:41Speaker 04

  Well, here's the thing, I think that's a misreading of these people, actually. I read a great deal of the letters and diaries of the Allied commanders sent to work alongside Stalin during the Second World War.

• 15:53Speaker 00

  Right.

• 15:53Speaker 04

  And they said the one difficulty they had with Stalin is that on the one hand, they knew he was a monstrous tyrant who'd liquidated millions of his own subjects. And yet, when you sat down and had dinner with him, he was garrulous, he was gregarious, he was charming, he told jokes, he was witty. And they all said, they, they simply couldn't square the circle of this monstrous dictator they were sitting opposite, who they were nevertheless sharing jokes with and having toasts with glasses of wine and vodka.

• 16:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, we will see a bit of this when we get to the Yalta, I mean, we did a whole series on the Yalta Conference and how, you know, utterly convinced Roosevelt that he was Uncle Joe, a man you could do business with.

• 16:30Speaker 00

  He charmed him, yeah.

• 16:31Speaker 03

  But we're not, we're not there yet. Let's go back to this sort of love, hate triangle, if I could put it that way, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. Despite Stalin, you know, trying to stab him in the back, Lenin doesn't bin Trotsky, but he doesn't discipline Stalin either. Is that weakness? Or is that actually Machiavellian, that as long as they're fighting each other, they won't remove me? What, what is the thinking here?

• 16:54Speaker 00

  Playing his underlings against each other, yeah.

• 16:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't think it's weakness. None of these people have many weaknesses. I think Lenin is doing this quite deliberately. He's keeping them at each other's throats, because it perfectly serves his purpose, I'm sure.

• 17:07Speaker 00

  Which, which would be to, to stay in power, rather than, or, or just have them competing with each other.

• 17:13Speaker 04

  I think this is to keep, for Lenin to keep himself in power, but also, I think he genuinely mistrusts both Trotsky and Stalin. And so, you know, to have them both at each other's throats is quite a useful way of, of keeping, you know, it's like keeping them in their place. Lenin was extremely politically shrewd at doing this, and I'm sure that's what he's doing here.

• 17:34Speaker 03

  Also, I mean, there is, there are some, I mean, there's not much that's funny in the very bleak doings of Stalin. But one of the things I was quite amused that he did used to do, is when he threw his toys out of the pram, he would always threaten to resign. So, you know, when, when he didn't get his way in Zaretsin, and, you know, wasn't, you know, given the, the go ahead to liquidate Trotsky, he, he just says, all right, I'm going then. And this is a, this is a letter by him, Stalin, saying, "Without this, my work on the southern front will become pointless and unnecessary, which gives me the right, or duly the duty, to move away anywhere, to the devil even, rather than stay on the southern front." So he's a great flounder, which is not anything that I really put together

• 18:18Speaker 03

  with his personality later in life.

• 18:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, he constantly has these sort of hissy fits, you know, and the Politburo sort of reads a letter wearily and says, no, Joseph, stay on, we love you, we all love you. But yeah, it's a peculiar aspect to his personality. It should be said, one thing that is kind of interesting from outside of Russia is of course, the West knew very, very little about Stalin. We mentioned earlier, he never gave public speeches, he was never seen in public, or very little anyway. And so the West was actually determined to try and find out more about this new powerful figure emerging in Russia and what is about to become the Soviet Union. Well, this was to have a profound effect in England, because England during the First World War had founded the Secret Intelligence Service, which was

• 19:05Speaker 04

  going to be wound down in 1918, because they said, well, the war's over, we don't need this thing anymore. The chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, who was a man named Mansfield Cummings, he said, hold on a minute, I've got some fluent Russian speakers who could go into Russia and find out more about this new regime, bring back intelligence on Stalin, on Trotsky, on these people. He sent in a team of spies who were quite brilliant at what they did. And some listeners will surely remember Riley, Ace of Spies, an old TV series about Sidney Riley, who was one of the spies sent in during the Civil War. Another one was Paul Dukes, the only British spy ever to be knighted for espionage. These people were sent in to try and work out who these strange and dangerous new revolutionaries

• 19:50Speaker 04

  were, and what they intended, were they really intent on fermenting world revolution, were they really intent on bringing down the democracies of the West, or were they simply trying to take control of their own country?

• 20:01Speaker 00

  And we have this wonderful story at this period from Bob Services Stalin biography of Stalin's incredible impatience about the boots. Could you, do you know that story?

• 20:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's extraordinary. This is when he's in Tsaritsin. Incidentally, I should, as in sort of parentheses, I should say that Tsaritsin, this moment where Stalin tries to arrest all of Trotsky's most faithful officers, this becomes in the, in the story told by Stalin itself, it becomes one of the great battles in the Civil War, of which he is in the front line of it. And of course, Tsaritsin will later be named the city of Stalingrad. So he really takes control of this story, he dominates the narrative and makes it all about him. But while he's in Tsaritsin, yes, he goes, he wants some more boots made, and he goes to a bootmaker, and he says, I need some more boots, how long will they take? And the bootmaker sort of looks at, oh, gosh, it's going to take me

• 20:57Speaker 04

  about five days to make a nice pair of boots for you. And Stalin is furious, he said, I can't believe you're saying that. My old dear old father could make two pairs of boots in a day, which actually surely has to be completely untrue. His father was a total alcoholic, who probably couldn't make a boot in a month, you know. But it does give an idea that when Stalin, when Stalin wanted something done, he was absolutely determined that everyone should run around and do it for him.

• 21:22Speaker 03

  Now, I tell you, we, we've talked about mad Besso in the last episode, and I frankly, I'm not for him, I am against him. But look, we'll go to the break, and you know, from one sort of disastrous marriage, which is the marriage of Stalin's parents, we're going to look at another disastrous marriage, which is the marriage of Stalin himself. Join us after the break.

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• 23:48Speaker 00

  Welcome back. So Giles, we need to know a little bit more about Stalin's love life at this point. We had his rather disastrous early marriage to Katerina in the last episode. Tell us about his new love, Nadia. And there's quite an age gap, isn't there?

• 24:02Speaker 04

  Yes, his, his new love, Nadejda, as she is, Alelujeva, universally known as Nadia, was much, much younger than Stalin. In fact, they met when she was only about 15 or 16, although she'd known him before that, because Stalin had been a regular visitor to the household. Remember Stalin was on the run for many years, he was in and out of prison camps for being a political troublemaker. And whenever he escaped, which he did quite a number of times actually, or was, was released, he tended to end up at the Alelujeva family. So the daughter of the Alelujeva family, who's called Nadia, absolutely adored Stalin. He was good looking, he was, in her eyes, witty, she laughed at all his jokes.

• 24:43Speaker 00

  And rather exciting, escaping from prison camps and turning up in the middle of the night. So I mean, that's got a certain touch of cloak and dagger about it.

• 24:50Speaker 03

  However, if you look at pictures of them together, you know, in those early days, when he went to go and sort of stuff, they, they don't look right, do they? A much older man, sort of, you know, with this, you know, this is when he's sort of hiding out at the home of her father. It just looks all wrong. Nevertheless, okay, you know, she falls in love.

• 25:07Speaker 04

  It maybe looks all wrong because she's actually only 16 years old. She's a teenager. Okay, maybe that was slightly more acceptable in, in that day and age. But nevertheless, within a couple of years, they're essentially living as a couple, as husband and wife, although there's no record of their marriage at that time. And we, we believe they got married several years later. But they're married, and I think right from the beginning, this is probably going to be, we could see it's going to be a troubled relationship. Because Stalin, it would seem, wanted a rather submissive wife who was going to do the shopping, do the cooking, the washing up, clean the household, and leave it at that. Nadia was much more ambitious, she was very intelligent, and she wants to get involved in this exciting

• 25:48Speaker 04

  revolution that's taking place. She wanted to work in confidential roles, she wanted to work on telegrams, and, and actually, she would end up getting a job working for Lenin in his secretariat. And I think this didn't quite fit with Stalin's vision for this domestic wife doing all the chores at home. And I think this, from the very outset, this caused big problems in, in their relationship.

• 26:14Speaker 03

  It is said that Stalin first noticed her because she was tidy. He liked the way she tidied up around the home. And, you know, that's what really charmed him, whereas, you know, it's all his uniform and boots and all his heroism. For him, it was she could be Mrs. Miggins at home.

• 26:29Speaker 00

  Was she capable of, of talking, talking him down? Could she, could she make him do what she wanted? Or was he very much a dominant older man?

• 26:39Speaker 04

  Well, he was a dominant older man, but she was extremely headstrong, and she spoke her own mind. I'm not sure how that would have gone down in the Stalin household.

• 26:46Speaker 03

  And actually, you know what, and we're going to, we're going to dwell on this a bit more in a future episode, in the episode about Svetlana, the, the daughter that is born of this union, because she tells the tale of a feisty mother and just screaming matches between them. And actually, if there's anyone who can talk him down, there's only one person, and it is Svetlana, the daughter. There is a son, Vasili, who's born in March 1921. And this coincides with a stretch where Stalin is unwell, Giles. Tell us a little bit about what he's, what is ailing him.

• 27:15Speaker 04

  He's terrifically unwell. In fact, he's pretty close to death. He has a, an appendix that bursts, and he's seriously ill, has to have a major, major surgery at around this time. And this could quite easily have killed him. He pulls through. As you say, Svetlana is born in 1926. She's a fascinating character. I'm glad you're going to be talking about her further, because of course, she would flee the Soviet Union and take up residence in America. And she'd write a fascinating book called 20 Letters to a Friend, about life with a monstrous father and an unhinged mother. Really fascinating stuff. But, you know, on the face of it, the Stalin household is, is relatively functional. They have their

• 27:58Speaker 04

  dacha outside Moscow. They would go there on summer evenings, and they'd go and eat their picnic there. All their friends would come around, they'd drink, they'd have fun, they'd have barbecues, what have you. And it seems like quite a normal household, if you just stepped into it, you know, briefly. And, you know, people drop in, Voroshilov, who's going to become a loyal supporter of Stalin, he's often there. Other commissars or men who will become commissars also go there and spend their evenings there. And they also adopt a young lad whose father has been killed in the Civil War, or it was killed in a plane crash, actually, I think. And so, you know, on the face of it, this is quite a convivial, gregarious household in which to grow up in. But as Svetlana

• 28:41Speaker 04

  will reveal many years later, there are all sorts of very troubling, dark undercurrents taking place.

• 28:48Speaker 03

  Again, that, we'll get into that in, in the next episode. But what we do know is that the front looks pretty good, as you say, you know, nice dacha, and I know how much Willie likes a dacha. But, you know, glam young wife, you know, kids, growing family, all of that kind of thing. And then in April 1922, Stalin is appointed general secretary. Now, that carries a great deal of weight today, general secretary of the Communist Party, is, you know, normally coincides with being, you know, the president of, of the country or something very high up. Back then, though, it was very much a functional description, and it was sort of grindy work that he was expected to do.

• 29:27Speaker 04

  Yes. I mean, it was a little bit more than licking stamps and, you know, putting addresses on envelopes, but.

• 29:31Speaker 00

  Stenographer.

• 29:33Speaker 04

  What Stalin realised, I think, and this is a sign of Stalin's absolute shrewdness and malevolence, is that he realised that this gave him complete control over the party if he played his cards right. Because what he could do as general secretary is manoeuvre all his friends and supporters into key positions and get rid of everyone that supported Trotsky and the others. And so, from the day he takes that job, he makes the most of it. He, this is really Stalin, I think he's already got one eye on the future. Lenin's not particularly well at this point, and he's thinking of, you know, who's going to succeed Lenin? Well,

• 30:13Speaker 04

  now, I've got an extremely good opportunity to fill the party with all my supporters and champions, and that's going to leave me in great stead when Lenin finally, you know, shuffles off.

• 30:26Speaker 00

  Now, you mentioned that Lenin is now getting older and we're heading towards a world where Lenin won't be at the helm anymore. What happens to the relationship of those two men at this period?

• 30:38Speaker 03

  Because it starts off quite friendly. I mean, he's the kind of person who opens a bottle of wine every time Stalin comes to visit, but it goes really wrong, doesn't it?

• 30:45Speaker 04

  It really does go wrong. And you're right, they met socially and they get on very well. They'd have, you know, friendly chats in the garden and all that sort of stuff, you know. But the relationship gradually falls apart. And I think part of that is because Lenin sees exactly what Stalin's doing. And he's torn, really, between Stalin and Trotsky. These are the only two real possibilities of leadership, you know, when he's no longer there. And I think he genuinely doesn't know which one he should go for, you know. And the problem is exacerbated, or Stalin exacerbates his own chances, or ruins his own chances, really, when he starts insulting Nadia, which is Lenin's own wife.

• 31:22Speaker 03

  I think this is actually one of the most interesting things, which is how Stalin is pretty tone deaf and doesn't read a room properly. Because Nadia Kupskaya is the love of Lenin's life. He respects her, you know, she's sort of the mother of the party. And he pretty much treats her like crap. Tell us about the actual incident that kind of ruins things and how his failure to apologise destroys that relationship.

• 31:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's incredible apology letter. What happens is that Stalin calls up the Lenin household. Lenin is very, very sick by this point. And he speaks to Nadia. And he accuses her of discussing politics with Lenin as he's on his deathbed. Says this is an unforgivable thing to do, it's completely outrageous, really attacks her. And of course, she goes straight back to her darling Lenin and tells him what's happened. And Lenin is absolutely furious. As you say, he's very, very close to his wife and is appalled and disgusted at what Stalin has done. And he insists that Stalin writes a letter of apology. And the letter is, it's like brilliant, because it's one of those letters where you say sorry by not saying sorry. He sort of says, well, you know, if you think I offended

• 32:31Speaker 04

  her, well, then I suppose I'm sorry, but I don't think I actually did. So there's nothing really to be apologetic about, you know. Fantastic. And of course, this hardly assuages Lenin, who remains completely furious with Stalin.

• 32:42Speaker 03

  So after that spectacular sorry, not sorry, Lenin now has got very little time for Stalin. And he writes actually this in 1923, on the 4th of January, this sort of pen portrait of Stalin, which tells you, you know, what he's thinking. Stalin is too crude. And with this defect, which is wholly bearable inside our media and in relations among ourselves, it becomes intolerable in the post of general secretary. I therefore make a proposal for comrades to think of a way to remove Stalin and in his place, appoint someone else. Now, that's a big deal, because for ages, you know, they've tolerated Stalin, they've kept

• 33:26Speaker 03

  him in position because he balances out Trotsky, but this seems to be the first time he's saying, get rid of him. He was rude to my wife, get rid of him.

• 33:33Speaker 04

  Yes, he was rude to my wife. This is extraordinary. But I think, draw your attention to the very last words you read of the quote there. In his place, appoint someone else. He could have so easily said, in his place, appoint Trotsky, but he doesn't. Because the fact is, by this point, he also mistrust Trotsky. He doesn't know what Trotsky will do if he takes over from Lenin.

• 33:55Speaker 00

  What are his worries, Giles? What does he think Trotsky might do?

• 33:58Speaker 04

  I think he thinks he will betray the revolution, he'll take his own path.

• 34:02Speaker 00

  The too many exarists turning up.

• 34:03Speaker 04

  Too many exarists. And, you know, I think, he's got a reason why he distrusts Trotsky. Trotsky likes his old, his uniforms, he likes, you know, hobnobbing with these rather grand old generals. And so I think Lenin is genuinely worried that this code could go all, could go badly wrong in the aftermath of his death.

• 34:25Speaker 00

  So what happens when that, that letter is delivered? Is it, it is sent, isn't it?

• 34:29Speaker 04

  It is sent, yeah. And Stalin, well, no one acts on it. Because the problem is, by this point, you know, Stalin has been general secretary for a number of years by this point. He's pulled in all his champions and supporters and placed them in positions of power. So he's become kind of too powerful to be removed. And so we're left, as Lenin is sort of choking on his deathbed and about to expire, we're left with two very powerful figures, each of which is very, very keen to become the new, the new leader of the Soviet Union.

• 35:06Speaker 03

  Lenin suffers this stroke, which is catastrophic, it ends his political life. And then 10 days later, that's it for Lenin. And his wife, Nadia Kupskaya, has one of the, you know, most telling lines, I think, in the Stalin story. She says, had Lenin, her husband, not died in 1924, he would be serving time in one of Stalin's prisons. Because she saw the writing on the wall that actually, you know, Stalin had it in for Lenin in his rise to the top. And as you say, unremovable, even though the great leader says, I want him gone as general secretary, he would have put him in a gulag had he, had he not been so ill.

• 35:44Speaker 00

  Do you think that's true, Giles? Would he have done that?

• 35:47Speaker 04

  I think there's every chance he would have done. Because Stalin was actually absolutely remorseless when he was confronting people he thought were not on his side. And I'd like to draw attention to another thing he did that disgusted Nadia, the grieving widow. All she wanted was for Lenin to be buried. She wanted to have a simple burial, you know. And what Stalin decides, oh no, we're not going to have a burial. What we're going to do is embalm him and preserve him forever and put him on display in Moscow. And so, you know, within hours of Lenin dying, they start draining the fluids from his body. I mean, this is a really sort of, you know, nasty process. They take out his organs. Instantly, they lose his heart. His heart was never found again.

• 36:32Speaker 00

  Is this the kind of thing that, that they do in Russia at this point? It sounds more like HDG.

• 36:36Speaker 04

  Do you know what? I think what Stalin was, was looking back to his early life, where he was training to become a priest in the Orthodox Church. The Orthodox Church, of course, venerates relics of saints, particularly bodily remains of saints. And I think Stalin was tapping into this cultural and religious tradition of the Orthodox Church to turn Lenin into a relic. And of course, Stalin would come back to this in the Second World War, where suddenly he allows all the churches to be reopened as he rediscovers holy patriotic Russia to try and bring the country behind him in the fight against Nazi Germany. So I think this was Stalin thinking, this is a good way, this is a good thing to do with Lenin's body.

• 37:18Speaker 03

  Can I give you a really genuinely awful, macabre little morsel to go with your story of embalming and upsetting Kupskaya? Is the fact that they found an institute of the brain, specifically to slice and study Lenin's brain tissue, to hunt for the physical roots of his genius. Isn't, isn't that, I mean, just an extraordinary thing?

• 37:38Speaker 04

  I can add a little bit more grim detail to that, actually. His brain, they thought that Lenin was a, was a genius and they wanted to discover the source of this genius. They sliced his brain into 30,000 wafer thin segments. They used a machine, a bit like, you know, when you get Palmer ham in the, in the shops and everything, they slice it. They did that with Lenin's brain. And then they, they put them between plates of glass. And they brought in a German neurologist called Oscar Voit, whose task was to study Lenin's brain and find out the, the root source of his genius. And he spent years looking at these through, through microscopes. And he wrote a 14 volume account of Lenin's brain. Unfortunately,

• 38:21Speaker 04

  he didn't find anything particularly different about his brain from anyone else's. No signs of this supposed genius.

• 38:27Speaker 03

  Have you, have either of you seen embalmed Lenin?

• 38:30Speaker 04

  Yes, I have.

• 38:30Speaker 03

  I have too. Yeah, it's, it's not lovely, actually, is it?

• 38:34Speaker 04

  It's very weird. You queue up, there's all these guards and all their uniforms standing, you know, very erect and everything. And then you file in, file past this sort of slightly yellowing, parchmenty, slightly mouldy.

• 38:48Speaker 03

  I thought he looked sort of plastic. I thought he had a really shiny dome. And it was, and he looked really very plastic and not human at all. Looked, looked like some sort of mannequin, rather than, you know, an embalmed, once human.

• 39:00Speaker 04

  Well, you clearly saw him on a good day. I caught him on a bad day. You know, he was looking a bit mouldy. There were sort of bits of, specks of black on his forehead when I saw him. So they must have cleaned him up for you. No, it's a very odd thing to go and see. Actually, Boris Yeltsin wanted to get rid of Lenin. He said that, you know, he's done his time. I think we should bury him now. But there was never the sort of political willpower, even in the disintegrating Soviet Union, to put Lenin to bed. And so there he remains. And I can't see Putin getting rid of him either.

• 39:31Speaker 00

  I've got a question, Giles. We're heading now to the moment where Stalin is going to seize power. Is it still an issue that he's from Georgia? Because we established very much in the first episode that in the Tsarist system, if you are from Poland or from Georgia, from the extremities of the empire, you are effectively a second-class citizen. The new Soviet Republic is different and has a different attitude to the nationalities. But nonetheless, this is a man with a very strong Georgian accent. Russian is still very much his second language. Is there any sense that he's an outsider who people are

• 40:12Speaker 00

  suspicious of? Or has he now been so much at the centre of things that he is the establishment?

• 40:17Speaker 04

  I think this is very interesting because when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was set up in 1922, there was a great debate about how power would be shared between all the various republics, you know. And Lenin, his idea was that they should have a sort of equal power base. So they would be run almost along democratic lines, if you like, that they'd each have a say in the running of this great, effectively, an empire. Stalin said, no, Russia should be the dominant partner in all of this. So this is quite unusual and unexpected that Stalin, as you say, a Georgian, says, no, it's Russia first.

• 40:55Speaker 00

  Who was writing patriotic poetry to his great homeland as a young man?

• 41:00Speaker 04

  He was, but nevertheless, I think he saw it was in his interest, certainly politically, to champion Russia in the formation of this new great, great state, if you like. And so, but you're right, he was Georgian through and through. This is one of the reasons why he hated making public speeches, was because he spoke with a very strong Georgian accent. And in fact, perhaps the biggest crisis point of his entire time in power came when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. This is a time, surely you'd expect the leader of the country to make an address to the nation. Stalin didn't do it because he didn't like speaking with his Georgian accent and he made Molotov, his foreign commissar, address the nation.

• 41:40Speaker 00

  Really?

• 41:40Speaker 04

  So, yeah, yeah, very interesting. He was always conscious that he wasn't a full-blooded Russian by any stretch of the imagination.

• 41:47Speaker 03

  Look, we're going to end it here. So, look, just keep in your mind this funeral that wasn't wanted by the widow of Lenin, that Stalin has kind of bulldozed his way through. One little thing that we haven't added to that is that he has a really dirty trick that he plays on Trotsky. He tells him the wrong dates for the funeral. So Trotsky doesn't end up going to the funeral and, you know, is livid about this because he's been shut out of this sort of last respects to the great leader. And we are going to take a closer look at Trotsky in the next episode. How he rose, how he falls out even more spectacularly with Stalin, and how eventually, thousands of miles away, in Mexico, Stalin

• 42:30Speaker 03

  finally gets the last word.

• 42:33Speaker 00

  Now, if you cannot hold yourself back from second and third courses, head to empirepoduk.com using the link in the episode description to join today.

• 42:45Speaker 03

  Till the next time we meet. It's goodbye from me, Anita Arndt.

• 42:49Speaker 00

  And goodbye from me, William Thorimpel.

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