400. Stalin: A Poisonous Legacy (Part 6)

Fiona Hill is the leading authority on Russia and has been in the room with Putin and Trump. She joins Anita Anand and William Dalrymple to discuss how Stalin’s violent legacies have impacted Putin's approach to authority, and why he is reappropriating Stalin’s memory in Russia today. What are the links between Stalin’s purges and the poisonings of Putin’s enemies in recent decades? How has Putin charmed Trump? And how does the memory of World War II affect both sides of the war in Ukraine today? 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 Try Attio for free at attio.com/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: Oli Ortega 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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• 2:13Speaker 00

  Code device.

• 2:14Speaker 03

  Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Anand.

• 2:30Speaker 00

  And me, William Derumple.

• 2:32Speaker 03

  We've watched a bullied, pockmarked boy become a bank robber, then a bureaucrat, then the master of a sixth of the earth. We've counted the dead in the terror and the famine and the war in the millions. And we have asked all the way through this a question that is not really about the past at all, but about the present. Why is a man in the Kremlin, 70 years after Stalin died, so determined to put him back on the plinth? This isn't just a series about a dead dictator. It's about a country that really can't decide whether the man of steel is a monster or a founding father. In May 2025, a carving of Stalin went back up in the Moscow metro station. It's a replica of one of his successors

• 3:16Speaker 03

  had torn down years ago. And that image is where we began the whole series. Today, we're really trying to understand the man who wanted to put it back up and how far he is actually modeling himself on the man of steel.

• 3:29Speaker 00

  And to do that, we've got you someone who's actually sat in the room with Vladimir Putin, read him for a living, and thought as hard as anyone about what actually drives him.

• 3:40Speaker 03

  Our guest is Fiona Hill. She grew up the daughter of a coal miner in County Durham. She learned Russian. She turned herself into one of the sharpest readers of the Kremlin in the world. She was a national intelligence officer on Russia, then the most senior Russia advisor on the American National Security Council. And she wrote with Clifford Gaddy the book many people reach for first when they want to understand this president. It's called Mr. Putin Operative in the Kremlin. Fiona, welcome to Empire. In your long list of accolades, I forgot to mention, you are now also Chancellor at Durham. So you get to wear a fancy hat and do fancy things.

• 4:16Speaker 04

  I do indeed. No, thank you so much for having me here. It's great to be here with you.

• 4:20Speaker 03

  First of all, I mean, are we making too much of this? And when you read the Kremlin, do you see that there is this resurgence of Stalin?

• 4:28Speaker 04

  I do. And you're not reading too much into it. I mean, what is interesting about this is that Putin has tried on the garb and the image of many other Russian, Soviet, you know, imperial leaders for size. And I guess Stalin is the latest, the latest of the emperor's new clothes. If we look back to earlier periods, he's gone through Tsarist ministers, like Stolypin, who at one point was a prime minister of the Russian Empire under Tsar Nicholas II. So before the Russian Revolution, he was the great reformer. This was in an early phase of Putin's presidency. Stolypin, rather unfortunately, met his demise

• 5:12Speaker 04

  with an assassination in the Kiev Opera House just before the revolution. So, you know, you can imagine that his end was not really the one that Putin was wanting to associate with himself with. But at various points, he's extolled the virtues of the greats, Catherine the Great, Peter the Great, Alexander the Great, who was again another reformer who emancipated the serfs. And I think it's very interesting, very telling, that he's gone back to Stalin, who wasn't somebody who was in that original pantheon, as he has become more and more embroiled in the war in Ukraine. Because of course Stalin's association for many people, and obviously in this case for Putin, is with victory. He was the winner in World War II, the Great Fatherland War, which Putin has tried to make

• 5:57Speaker 04

  linkages with in terms of the war in Ukraine.

• 6:00Speaker 03

  The thing is, though, the thing I find weird about all of this is that there is not a family that hasn't been touched either by the famine, the terror, the gulags. How is this sort of national amnesia working where people find it okay? Or are you getting the idea that actually people are chafing under these big statues and, you know, this sort of resurgence of Stalin's name?

• 6:22Speaker 04

  Look, I think every society suffers from historical amnesia. And Putin, at one point in one of the many meetings that I was present in where he was speaking, was asked a question by a British journalist about Lenin, for example, why Lenin had never been removed from the mausoleum on Red Square. And Putin immediately shot back and said to this British journalist, well, hang on, you're from the United Kingdom, aren't you? What about Cromwell, Oliver Cromwell? Oliver Cromwell's statue is still outside of the Houses of Parliament, said Putin.

• 6:54Speaker 00

  It's quite a sharp response.

• 6:55Speaker 04

  It was a very sharp response. And I was like, gosh, that's kind of clever. Did he kind of, you know, do this, a little bit of research on this in advance? And he said, who was the worst butcher, Lenin or Cromwell? That's a good question. And actually, you know, it'd probably be hard to respond to that, wouldn't it?

• 7:08Speaker 00

  Half the Irish, they might come with a surprising answer, yeah.

• 7:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. And I think that Stalin for Putin falls into that category. He's part of useful history, a very useful history. A lot of people have forgotten, or maybe sometimes didn't know, given their age. I mean, Putin's already been in power for 25 years. And the people who have memories of Stalin, going back to the 1940s and 1950s, are either very old or they're all dead. And, you know, their stories have not necessarily been passed down in recent time. So I think that Putin can use Stalin as an iconic figure and is more confident that he can reshape the narrative about Stalin, or the image of Stalin that he's trying to use, just as Oliver Cromwell, as he rightly said, still stands

• 7:53Speaker 04

  outside of the Houses of Parliament, seen as the father of Parliament, rather than the butcher of, you know, where do we begin? Ireland, Scotland, you know, lots of England, and the person who decapitated a king.

• 8:03Speaker 00

  What do you think also about this remark that he says that the excessive demonization of Stalin is one of the means of attacking the Soviet Union and Russia? Do you think that's a genuinely felt feeling from him?

• 8:15Speaker 04

  No, that's a sentiment that he's expressing as a justification, you know, for what he's actually doing. I mean, it's a classic going right back at your accuser, just like this amazing exchange that he'd had with this British journalist, and basically putting on to everybody else, well, look, you would of course criticize Stalin, because he's a symbol of the greatness of the Soviet Union in the peak of its power, or at least the peak of its perceived power in being one of the victors of World War II, which of course established the United States as a global power. And he's using that, as I said, just very astutely, one might say, but also pretty cynically, as a way of pushing back

• 8:57Speaker 04

  anybody who might be protesting about Stalin's restoration.

• 9:01Speaker 03

  There's pushing back, and then there's also reprogramming. I was really interested in this rewriting of the one compulsory history textbook that every child in Russia has to read. This is August 2023. And it was written by Putin's close ally, Vladimir Medinsky. Now, among the things that it says is, you know, the terror is pretty much a footnote. Stalin describes, we did this in the first episode in the series, a pragmatic manager. Now, you know, what do you make of sort of reprogramming history in the minds of young people? And what do you see as the effect that's having in the last three years?

• 9:40Speaker 04

  Well, look, this is something that so many states indulge in. I mean, I'm sitting talking to you in Washington DC, where, you know, we've just gone through a bizarre celebration in terms of some of the things that happened here in Washington itself, in the Capitol, the 250th anniversary of the United States and of the Declaration of Independence. And there was a lot of reprogramming going on, including a fight on the White House lawn of a really bizarre version of a state fair, and all kinds of reprogramming, repositioning of previous United States presidents who wouldn't have been seen in the same light as they are now from the vantage point of the president, President Trump. This is all

• 10:24Speaker 04

  useful history, and it's what you make use of it. And as I've said already, Putin has reprogrammed Peter Stolypin. He's reprogrammed Catherine the Great. He's reprogrammed Peter the Great. And Stalin, there's just a lot to reprogram, obviously, given the extent of the crimes of Stalin that, you know, we learned in 1956 and onwards after Khrushchev's famous secret speech. But it's also that he's refitted and reprogrammed from a time of, for a time of war. Because the whole idea of Putin is that Russia is facing down, just as the Soviet Union was facing down, the entirety of NATO, Western forces, once again,

• 11:09Speaker 04

  like Napoleon or like Nazi Germany before them, trying to bring Russia, the Soviet Union, the Russian Empire, down to its knees. So I think this is just a classic trope. It's the kind of thing that we see in history over and over again. If you look actually Russian imperial history, you know, as you've talked about many times in various episodes, or the episodes in other empires. This is the kind of thing that we often see when a system is somewhat in trouble or is wanting to convey something different to its citizenry. Under the Tsars and Nicholas II, for example, they did something similar. They went back into the grab bag of former imperial Russian history and tried to give themselves a kind of fresh look,

• 11:51Speaker 04

  knowing that they were in big trouble in the run up to the revolution. It's not just Stalin that Putin has taken on board. It's also the Russian Orthodox Church. And Stalin, the Russian Orthodox Church, went exactly on particularly friendly terms, given Stalin's background.

• 12:08Speaker 00

  I love those pictures of Putin diving into icy water with Archbishop sort of reviving him as he comes up. He's fully into all that sort of thing.

• 12:17Speaker 04

  He certainly is. It's just whatever is a good symbol of the state that he can use and something that exudes and transmits a sense of power. And when Putin was asked about the Orthodox Church, for example, he complained that the Bolsheviks had got rid of it because he said it was a very useful source of power for strengthening the state. So that's how he sees Stalin. And Stalin created a whole secular religion or religious cult in effect around himself. And Putin is using that same religious cult or quasi-religious cult for himself.

• 12:49Speaker 00

  And the same is true, sort of in reverse, isn't it? That people who are memorializing his victims, indeed this Human Rights Organization Memorial specifically, gets closed down as regarded as anti-national, somehow detracting from the state.

• 13:06Speaker 04

  I mean, that's exactly the case, that, you know, yesterday's victims become today's threats to the system. The very people that you were trying to link arms with in the past, because that was part of the policy of that present, is now no longer useful for you. I mean, for people like Yeltsin before him, for Gorbachev, and actually initially for Putin himself, who was actually even seen in the company of the head of Memorial, Ludwig Sevner at various points. It was useful, you know, to commemorate and, you know, try to embrace the victims. And he himself, I mean, his own family, you know, their run-ins with Stalin. One of his grandparents, grandfathers was a cook for Stalin and probably didn't have,

• 13:52Speaker 04

  you know, the best experience in that context either. And he wasn't, you know, really a great fan of the Communist Party. And there's no kind of early evidence that, you know, he was particularly pro-Stalin, but this is what he needs for this moment.

• 14:05Speaker 03

  The thing is, it's so strange. It's a really odd tightrope he has to walk because, you know, as I said earlier, you know, there are a lot of people who were touched by this, you know. They may have been cooks for Stalin, or they may have been in a gulag thanks to Stalin, or they may have starved to death because of Stalin. And you do have Putin at times, sort of standing in front of, you know, the memorial in Moscow to the victims of the repressions, you know, the Wall of Grief, there is this large edifice. And he did say there can be no justification for these crimes. So it is, I mean, is this double thing? Is this sort of Orwellian, you know, all things to all people? Or, I mean, I didn't know how to interpret that, along with the hands off Stalin, you hypocrites, you've got Cromwell.

• 14:48Speaker 04

  I think for Putin, all of these things are possible. He's the ultimate synthesist or synthesizer of Russian history, Soviet history, Soviet power. He himself tries to embody that kind of spirit of the Russian and Soviet states that have preceded him, what's and all. He basically says that. I mean, it's very much in the spirit of Dostoevsky. I'm going to think about the Brothers Karamazov, the whole discussions that you can't have light without dark, you can't have light and shadow without each other. For Putin, he says, look, the great glories of Russia, they came with a cost. Some of those costs were unacceptable, but they had to be accepted.

• 15:29Speaker 04

  You know, if you take Stalin as the great wartime leader that it was, then you, you know, you have to just also

• 15:34Speaker 00

  Take the terror with it.

• 15:35Speaker 04

  the terrible things happened. Yeah, you can't have one without the other. You can't have the light without the dark. Now, all of us would say, come on a second, hang on. I mean, so this is outrageous. I mean, you yourself have spoken out against all of these millions of casualties. His own parents went through the siege of Leningrad and lost a child. And his, every family, as you said, Anita, was touched by Stalin one way or another, and not in a good way. Absolutely. I mean, even the people who were closest to him suffered immensely. But look, we've also got a president in Putin in the here and now, who in trying to re-expand the Russian Empire, do the same things that Stalin did. You know, as a result of World War Two, take back territory that had been lost by the Russian Empire

• 16:18Speaker 04

  at the end of World War One and extending out the extent of Soviet and Russian influence further than it has ever been in history. For Putin's trying to do the same, we're already at two million or more casualties in the war in Ukraine. I mean, that's not in all in terms of deaths, but certainly in terms of the people who have suffered greatly and been grievously injured. We've seen a president who hasn't really flinched at all or blinked with more than a thousand people a day dying on the battlefield. This is Russians. Or being seriously injured on the battlefield for incremental territorial gains. So, I mean, I guess one would say to Putin, if he was the journalist, well, you know, kind of, okay, you know, what about you and Stalin and Lenin and Cromwell and, you know, all the rest of it?

• 17:02Speaker 04

  He's, you know, who is worse at the same time that they clock the country with glory?

• 17:08Speaker 00

  In your book, Fiona, you take Putin apart into several different men wearing the same suit. You talk about the statist, the history man, the survivalist, the outsider, the free marketer. All these things that are apparently contradictory, but which are this complex man. And the one which we're going to pause on now is the one that you gave, in a sense, the book titled to, the case officer. Because before he was any of the rest of it, Putin was KGB. I remember once having a conversation with Viktor Orban, and I said, what was your impression of Putin? And his answer was, immediate, he's KGB, he's absolutely full KGB.

• 17:53Speaker 00

  And if you understand that, you can understand Putin, he said. And that's where the line back to Stalin is not a metaphor, it's an institution. Lenin builds the Cheka in 1917, Stalin turns it into the machinery of the terror, it becomes the KGB. And when the Soviet Union falls, of course, it does not die, even though it becomes the FSB. It changes its name, but the institution remains much the same. And that was the service that Putin ran before he ran the country. And in many ways, it's the most durable institution in modern Russia, the secret police. And the president came up through it. Do you think it's what defines him above all?

• 18:28Speaker 04

  I think it does define him, but not above all, because all of these are the facets of his personality, which Cliff Gaddy, my co-author, and I really try to get at in terms of, you know, figuring out what drives him, are really aggregated perhaps in that role. He's got all of these other elements in the way that he thinks. And he doesn't just think like a case officer of the operative in the Kremlin, which was the subtitle of the book after Mr. Putin, which is, you know, how he recruits people, how he manipulates people, how he gets people to do things that, you know, they really don't want to do, how he turns in people, maybe unwittingly or wittingly, into assets in service of him and his interests and the Russian state. But he also kind of thinks about the Russian state in a very different way. There is that element of him, he's not like Trump, for example, or, you know, the Sun King,

• 19:12Speaker 04

  or, you know, some of the leaders where they say the state is me. He sees himself as a servant of the state. He is very much rooted in an understanding of Russian imperial and Soviet history. And, you know, he frames himself in those, you know, stories as well. So it's not just, you know, he's trying to think about just narrow manipulation of people. He has this kind of sense of what Russia is and what he should be in that context.

• 19:38Speaker 03

  To understand what drives Putin, we need to go back to the fall of the Berlin Wall, I think, as well. Because, you know, we've mentioned this already, Putin was a mid-ranking KGB officer, posted to Dresden first, then in Communist East Germany. In fact, I have spoken to a journalist. When he was very junior Putin, he used to do raids on cinemas, where people were watching movies in the middle of the day when they should have been out working. And, you know, he was one of the people he remembers really acutely, sort of a very young Putin, turfing him out and, you know, threatening to arrest people because they weren't working, they were watching a movie. He then lives through the wall coming down, the crowds coming out, you know, mobs gathering outside his own building where he was, albeit a mid-level king.

• 20:20Speaker 03

  And at that time, he tells the story of, you know, ringing a local Soviet military unit for protection and being told in effect that Moscow wasn't saying anything, and that nobody could act without orders. There were no orders coming in. The men with the guns had simply stopped answering. And he watched in that state of being powerless, which I think you can probably read a lot into the way he is now, with that state of panic, would we say, or just, you know, disgust that everything has collapsed in minutes?

• 20:50Speaker 04

  I think he was shocked by that because he had joined the institution of the KGB and the Foreign Service part of that intelligence service, thinking that this was really, as, you know, well, you suggested, the apex of the whole system. He wanted to, if he was really going to be part of everything, be in the institution that really mattered, that in his view, kept everything together and oversaw everything. And then the fact that all that just seemed to just sort of disappear, like water into sand. I think he just couldn't quite believe it. And it gave him a shock. And as you said, I mean, in a lot of the autobiographical material, where he talks to journalists in interviews, he says that whole idea that Moscow was silent,

• 21:33Speaker 04

  that Moscow suddenly had lost all of its power and that it had seeded the stage, just gone off and disappeared, was perhaps the most astounding thing that he had ever experienced up until that point in his life. And I think it does shape that whole idea of a restoration, of putting things back again. And, you know, when you see him in those very early stages of being, you know, he's the prime minister for a while, he's the acting president, then he's the full-on president. His whole view is putting the state back, strengthening the state again and putting at its service all the institutions that he possibly can, which would include the FSB, the successor to the KGB.

• 22:15Speaker 04

  The Orthodox Church, you know, anything else that he thinks would become a pillar, a fundament for a new foundation for a Russian state. And that's, you know, when he also starts reviving dead Tsars and Tsarinas, kind of the people who had presided over the Russian Empire when it was a major player in European affairs.

• 22:36Speaker 03

  We're going to take a break now, Fiona, but after the break, we can talk about some really very obvious parallels between Putin and Stalin. Those parallels run along the line of assassinations.

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• 24:20Speaker 00

  Welcome back. We had earlier in this series, a wonderful episode on the murder of Trotsky, the idea that Stalin hunts him down wherever he goes, even as far away as Mexico, that the ice pick finally gets him in the back of the head. This idea that the state will get you if you step out of line. There's quite a line of corpses that, you know, have followed Trotsky since Putin came into into power.

• 24:52Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, I mean, you can look at the roll call. So let's remind ourselves, 2006, there was Alexander Litvinenko, a former officer who had turned on the FSB and he dies in London after his tea is laced with radioactive polonium. And then you have a British public inquiry that concludes.

• 25:08Speaker 00

  Quite imaginative ends, these, aren't they?

• 25:10Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, they're just ghastly and they have collateral damage, you know, and and it's a British public inquiry that concludes the killing was probably approved by Putin. The European Court of Human Rights later found Russia to be responsible. That is the same year. We remember that. That's the same year that the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who exposed the war in Chechnya is shot dead in the lift of her building and on Putin's birthday, coincidentally. And then in 2015, you've got the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who's who's shot four times in the back on a bridge in the shadow of the Kremlin. In 2018, you've got the Novichok case, which is used on the Skripals in Salisbury, where an Englishwoman, Dawn Sturgess, dies. And then you, of course, you have the most famous

• 25:55Speaker 03

  of all, you have Alexei Navalny, Putin's bravest domestic opponent. What remind us what happened to him?

• 26:01Speaker 00

  He gets Novichok in his tea as he's about to board a plane and they and he actually survives that astonishingly through through the plane landing and him ending up very quickly in the hospital. Nonetheless, he goes home and he dies in an Arctic penal colony in February 2024, a month before an election that Putin was obviously always going to win. Now, the Kremlin denies every one of these corpses and denies got anything to do with it. But Putin has never been shy about the principle behind them. Traitors will kick the bucket, believe me. Those 30 pieces of silver they were given, they will choke on them. And he's it's almost as if he's proud of these murders.

• 26:40Speaker 03

  Is this Fiona, sort of Stalin playbook, you know, the man who will go to the end of the earth with an ice pick? This is the kind of modeling that's taking place now? And have we had it before with with others? You know, the other presidents who went before Putin, did they indulge in the same thing, but we just weren't looking or we weren't aware? Or it's just very new?

• 26:59Speaker 04

  Well, it's as old as time. You know, let's maybe go back to antiquity and see plenty of examples of this. But in more contemporary, modern Russia.

• 27:08Speaker 00

  Hannibal fleeing from the Romans and being caught in the Dead Sea. Yeah.

• 27:13Speaker 04

  I mean, so many, I mean, you talk about these kinds of episodes on in a regular basis. And I'm sure you could come up with a billion examples, you know, if you really kind of put your mind to it. And you know, we haven't even exhausted all of the examples. I mean, in Russia, shocking number of people falling out of windows, some of them in hospital and, you know, on kind of strange visits.

• 27:34Speaker 00

  Some of them in India on holiday.

• 27:35Speaker 04

  Some of them in India as well. I mean, lots of people coming to bad ends across Europe and places like Spain, you know, for example, and, you know, kind of elsewhere. In the United States, there've been some other kind of cases that have raised a lot of question marks. And of course, then there's Evgeny Prigozhin, you know, at one point, Putin's head of Putin's catering business, who goes into much less savoury work and is the head of the Wagner paramilitary group in charge of bot factories in St Petersburg and all kinds of manner of errands for Putin, who then engages in an insurgency during a really bleak period in the war on Ukraine, in which he gets into a big fight with the Ministry of Defence and starts a march on Moscow ostensibly to get Putin's attention.

• 28:18Speaker 04

  But it looks, you know, remarkably like a mark on March on Moscow. There's a precursor to a coup. All is forgiven for a while. And then suddenly Prigozhin comes out of the biggest window in the sky when something terrible happens to his plane with all of his friends on it at a time when he's been lulled into obviously a false of sense of security. And that's that.

• 28:34Speaker 00

  Were you surprised that he went, he went back at all? I mean, because it seemed that he was, he was destined to fall out of the sky the minute he he went back to Russia?

• 28:44Speaker 04

  Well, he must have been. And this is, you know, what's interesting about Putin is Putin does have incredible powers of persuasion. And, you know, something which goes back to what you were talking about earlier, Willie, about, you know, one of the defining moments of his knowing how to work with people as the case officer, as the operative. And he obviously persuades Prigozhin, you know, after probably yelling at him a bit, that, you know, all is fine, all is sort of forgiven, you know, in love and war. And Prigozhin obviously believes that, or there was just no way that he would have got on along with his closest associates onto this plane. So, you know, Putin also makes it very clear that he will wait to the moment of his choosing to take someone else when they least expect it. And I'll be honest, you know, as somebody who's watching Putin, and I don't really

• 29:26Speaker 04

  like to say this, I was almost in a weird way relieved when this happened because I thought my whole analysis of Putin was completely wrong. It was one of those, you know, pattern breaking events. And I thought, my goodness, he's not going to take Prigozhin out. This must tell us something else about, you know, the system. But then, sure enough, you know, he's he's taken out of the picture.

• 29:44Speaker 00

  No one was surprised.

• 29:45Speaker 04

  Yeah. So nobody was surprised. But I guess Mr. Prigozhin in the moment was surprised because for Putin, this is what he does. And as you said, he has to make it part of the system that just like Stalin, there's no way you can go without him getting at you. And of course, I mean, the initial efforts to kill Trotsky were to try to shoot him. But the ice pick, you know, probably then just starts to kind of elevate then, you know, these really kind of nasty methods. I mean, Putin has also had Chechen war leaders taken out literally in the toilets, or at least in the field toilets with, you know, kind of a precursor, what would now be a drone attack, no doubt. Just all of these kinds of a poisoning as well of one of the Chechen leaders through a letter, you know, kind

• 30:29Speaker 04

  of almost, yeah, going back to sort of the medieval era.

• 30:32Speaker 00

  He likes a bit of poison, doesn't he? He's fun. He's fond of a nice chemical end.

• 30:37Speaker 04

  Exactly. It's meant to be gruesome. That's the whole point of it.

• 30:40Speaker 03

  Isn't that that phrase, pour encourager des autres? I want, I want everybody else to be afraid to see what could happen. Can we talk about the relationship, you know, with Georgia? Because, you know, we banged on a lot about Georgia and Stalin and Gori is still to this day so proud of Stalin. It's got this huge Stalin museum, great bronze Stalins, you know, have come back up. But in August 2008, Putin, who is, you know, the great rehabilitator of Stalin, went to war on Stalin's own homeland. Can you just talk us through what happened there? And because if you do, this one of those episodes that I think people forget in all the other noise that goes on.

• 31:18Speaker 04

  Technically, at that point. Dmitry Medvedev, who people will now go, who? Talking about historical amnesia, was the president of Russia. So Dmitry Medvedev is still out there, you know, as a kind of, almost a cartoon figure of a sort of an attack dog for the Russian state, threatening to bomb and annihilate everybody in nuclear war. But he had been, prior to all of this, the prime minister to Putin's president, to kind of rob into Putin's Batman, which had actually been encapsulated in one of these reports that ambassadors, you know, send back home, for example. And Medvedev had been selected to kind of take charge and take care of the country

• 32:02Speaker 04

  when Putin switched into the role of prime minister to take a kind of a lesser role and not rupture the continuity or the rules and regulations of the presidency. Now, of course, Putin was always sitting alongside Medvedev in a kind of learner driver's, you know, seat in a car, grabbing the steering wheel at different points. So, you know, we can assume that Putin, you know, had a role in all of this. But the war in Georgia comes against the backdrop of the Olympics, in the Summer Olympics in Beijing. We have a kind of a weird split screen as we get later, you know, with all the things

• 32:41Speaker 04

  that happen in Ukraine and as well, of the opening ceremonies, George Bush there, Putin being there, George Bush being at the time the president of the United States. And this incursion into Georgia, because Mikhail Sarkashvili, the then president of Georgia, had sparked off a conflict between Georgia and South Ossetia, one of the breakaway republics of Georgia. So, you know, it's all kind of around Stalin's birthplace, Gori. Stalin's hometown was actually bombed by the Russian air force in the middle of all this. It's all, you know, pretty complicated who started what. But it was clearly that the Georgians and Sarkashvili had been lured into, you know,

• 33:24Speaker 04

  basically a conflict that suited the interests of many people in Russia. Although it's not entirely clear, you know, quite, you know, whether this was going according to plan at the time. I was in the US government, we had a lot of questions about what happened. But basically, it was a lesson again to all of the neighboring states who thought that they could, you know, do their own thing, intervene in affairs at the times of their own choosing. It was a big, strong message from Moscow that Russia was still the boss and that they were not really independent states and there could be an intervention at any moment.

• 33:57Speaker 03

  You just mentioned about, you know, you being in the United States and, you know, your very famous testimony, which went viral about this seeming blindness to what, you know, Putin's influence was on American policy. We did a series on Yalta and we had, and again, we're doing this series on Stalin, so just bringing it back to him. Stalin managed to charm FDR Roosevelt in Yalta to the point where, you know, he really believed everything that Stalin told him. He really believed in this Uncle Joe, Grandpa Joe kind of image that Stalin was presenting to the extent where he often shut out Churchill from very important meetings, which would prove to be catastrophic somewhere down the line.

• 34:39Speaker 03

  How has this charm offensive between Putin and the United States developed? Is it, I mean, people talk about Trump being under the Putin spell, but I mean, has this sort of been dribbling in for quite some time, that people in America have thought, you know what, not Grandpa Putin, but Uncle Vlad? When did it start?

• 35:00Speaker 04

  Well, it starts really with George W. Bush, the very first meeting that he had with Putin in Slovenia. Putin's obviously done his homework on George Bush and he knows that Bush's religion is very important to him. Bush is a born-again Christian, it helped him get over all kinds of personal problems, including alcoholism, for example. And Putin tells Bush a story. He purports to have been baptized by his mother and his grandmother secretly, and that they gave him a cross to wear around his neck. And he tells Bush the story about a fire in his dacha, in his country home, in which the only thing that survives the fire is this cross.

• 35:43Speaker 04

  And he pulls the cross out of his shirt to show Bush. And then, you know, after all of this, having charmed Bush and, you know, used religion to bring them together, because that's what you do if you're a case officer, you look for something you have in common that you can build upon. He basically persuades Bush that, you know, the two of them can do business. And at this point, of course, everybody's hoping that, you know, we're away from the Cold War standoff. You know, we have a whole series of things where Bush and actually his father, you know, they've all, you know, tried to really improve that relationship with Russia. Putin, of course, goes to visit Canabag Port, the Bush family compound. You know, there's some sort of genuine kind of sense that they might be able to work together there. But basically, Bush says that he got the measure of Putin when he looked into his

• 36:28Speaker 04

  eyes. Now, a lot of Bush's entourage are kind of rubbing their heads and shaking them in disbelief. And Colin Powell and a few other people are asked later, what did you think, you know, about looking into Putin's eyes? What did you see? And Colin Powell famously says, KGB, KGB, KGB. And much later, when I was actually somebody as a national intelligence officer in the National Intelligence Council, to do some deep dives and briefings for Bush, that actually took me to one side and said, look, look, I just wanted to explain this whole thing, you know, about Vladimir Putin. You know, I just wanted to, you know, convey that kind of idea, like Margaret Thatcher had done, you know, during the Cold War, that he was a man I could do business with. I wasn't that naive, you know, it's kind of a, you know, it didn't really get me completely. Because it's obviously rankled that in that moment, he'd been sort of seduced by that

• 37:13Speaker 04

  whole idea of a very pragmatic man who was actually somebody he could work with in putting the US and Russian relationship on a different footing. So, you know, this has been a pattern that we can go back to the early days of Putin. I mean, he's been with us for a very long time now, 25, 26, you know, he's probably chasing Stalin's longevity in office now, if he can get towards 30 years, which, you know, at this point, looks like he might, but who knows, right? I mean, it's basically, it's a pattern that he uses over and over again. It's the seduction, it's the charm, it's the trying to persuade people that you think just like them.

• 37:51Speaker 00

  What is the seduction he's used on Trump? And do you think, are you still in the camp that believes that there is a compromat? Or do you think that Trump has just fallen in love with him?

• 38:01Speaker 04

  I think Trump has fallen in love with him, with the idea of him, because he's a big, powerful person, he's iconic, he's a badass, you know, in that kind of American sense, he has unbridled power. And it's also that Putin always looks at people's vulnerabilities and what he can use to manipulate them. And it doesn't have to be compromising information. In the case of Trump, there's so much compromat on him. I mean, this is a man who's had how many lawsuits? He's already been, you know, forced to make payments to all kinds of people. You know, all of his dirty laundry is out there. If there's any more, it'll just get lost in, you know, the wash, so to speak. But what Putin understands about Trump is that Trump responds extremely well to flattery.

• 38:42Speaker 04

  And look, we have Mark Rutte of NATO going over the top in terms of his prayers for Trump, yes, calling him daddy. Putin doesn't go that far.

• 38:52Speaker 03

  Well, what did you make of that? What did you make of that?

• 38:54Speaker 04

  Well, I just thought that, well, I cringed, like a lot of people did. But it's just exactly what Rutte, like Putin, has ascertained is necessary to do, I mean, to basically kiss Trump's ass, you know, let's put it that way, in the pursuit of your own goals. Now, Putin has other goals and Mark Rutte does, obviously, quite in contradiction to Mark Rutte's goals, which is to keep the United States and Trump firmly in NATO, which Putin doesn't want, he wants the exact opposite. But Putin wants Trump to do all kinds of things for him. He thought he was literally his trump card for getting Ukraine on a platter, the head of Volodymyr Zelensky, for example, so excited by, you know, what happened in the infamous meeting in the White House, for example.

• 39:37Speaker 00

  He must have been thrilled.

• 39:39Speaker 04

  Oh, he was absolutely thrilled when Trump and J.D. Vance just attacked Zelensky. This was just better than he could possibly have imagined. But what he does is, I mean, he, yes, he cajols, he flatters and he persuades Trump. And often, Trump doesn't need a lot of persuading, because, you know, he thinks in some respects in quite similar terms to Putin. And it's about money as well, because, I mean, when you look at, you know, what's on offer all the time, both from Trump to the Russians or to everybody else in the Persian Gulf or with Iran or North Korea, it's all about offering people a kind of an amazing, you know, future where everybody has a condo and, of course, you know, somebody in their entourage and family makes money out of it. And Putin does the same.

• 40:20Speaker 04

  I mean, that's also a part of the whole shtick of being a KGB operative when he was in the KGB, which is offering people money, cash, women, you know, you name it.

• 40:30Speaker 00

  I've got a question before we, we've got to go to Ukraine, but before we get there, one last question. My friend Anne Applebaum has this theory that Lindsey Graham and the religious right have pulled America much closer to Putin because they see it as a Christian country, unsullied by liberalism. Do you think that again is a, is the result of a Putin love, love bombing of the Christian right in, in the US? Is, is that another Putin play? Or have they come of their own volition?

• 41:00Speaker 04

  I think Lindsey Graham should probably be separated out from this because actually in the wake of his recent untimely death, there's actually a move to put more sanctions on Russia in his name through Congress and the Senate at this moment. Because Lindsey Graham, you know, for all the other things that he did in support of Trump, was actually pretty stalwart and steadfast in his support for Ukraine, you know, throughout the war. And he was, you know, a kind of classic Russian hawk in the Republican Party before, you know, basically joining forces with Trump for domestic and all kinds of other reasons. But in terms of the religious right, evangelical, you know, Christians, all kinds of groups of people, it does actually fall well into, truly into that, this purview. In fact, what's

• 41:43Speaker 04

  been extraordinarily interesting in a relatively recent period, in July of this year of 2026 is that Laura Luma, one of the influencers in the kind of the MAGA, the Make America Great Again entourage of Trump, took a trip to Kiev and suddenly started to see a kind of a different form of religion here. She visited the Cathedral of the Domitian, which had been badly damaged by, you know, Russian drone attack on Kiev, and suddenly started to say, well, hang on again, you know, Ukraine is actually a Christian country. And in fact, this has been at the core of Putin wanting to retake back Ukraine and Kiev as the very

• 42:24Speaker 04

  heart of Kyivan Russian history, Kyivan Rus as the progenitor of the Russian Empire, of the first Christian core of the large imperial, imperial Russia. And she starts to say, how can Putin, who I previously thought was, you know, basically the savior and the guarantor of all kind of Christianity, just in the line that you've kind of laid out there, call himself a Christian and a Christian leader when he's presiding over this slaughter of other Christians in Ukraine and also the damaging of this amazing church? So, you know, it's, it's, it's very interesting. He's absolutely using the power of the church, the Russian Orthodox Church domestically, and using it abroad to kind of bring in everyone

• 43:07Speaker 04

  else as the kind of protector and the guarantor of conservative values.

• 43:12Speaker 03

  I noticed something, and this is sort of to do with Ukraine and to do with everything that you've just, just talked about. But the Victory Day marches on the 9th of May, that there's a new bumper sticker around Russia, a new slogan, which is "We Can Repeat", and that refers to Stalingrad, that you know what, attrition, we're good at it, we will win. And that, and that it's applied to what's going on with Ukraine. What is going to happen with Ukraine? Now, when we look back on this in 10, 20 years, how is this all going to play out, Fiona?

• 43:43Speaker 04

  Well, the Ukrainians are good at attrition too. So, part of the, you know, repurposing of this whole narrative about Stalin and about World War II, is you kind of forget that there was not just, you know, kind of Russian Empire in the past that had other parts of it, but also during the Soviet Union, places like Ukraine were part of the Soviet Union. And there's always this attempt to go and make Khrushchev as a kind of symbol of a Ukrainian, you know, background, the person who gives Crimea to Ukraine, et cetera, et cetera, which, you know, is also more complicated than it looks at the surface. And yes, Khrushchev had worked in Ukraine, had been a miner at, you know, kind of one point, you know, for example, but he wasn't a Ukrainian per se. But there were many Ukrainians

• 44:26Speaker 04

  who served in the Soviet military and who were there at Stalingrad. And as we know from all the work that Timothy Snyder has done on Bloodlands, you know, for example, and Anthony Bevo, and, you know, his work on World War II and the Soviet Union, some pretty awful things happened in what is now the modern territory of Ukraine. And those were, you know, very much the scene of, you know, particularly heated battles. And there are all kinds of cities that emerge out of World War II as hero cities. And it's not just Stalingrad, later Volgograd, it's Crimea, it's Sevastopol on, you know, the Crimean Peninsula, it's cities like Kiev, it's cities like Odessa that are in Ukraine as well because

• 45:10Speaker 04

  they're also besieged and, you know, taken over by Nazi Germany. And the Ukrainians go through, you know, not just World War II, but prior to that, they've gone through the Holodomor, the Great Famine that Stalin inflicted on them. So you can see where I'm heading here, that, you know, you've already got this kind of whole history of where Ukrainians have suffered as well. So basically, we've got competitive war of attrition going on here, where Ukrainians, despite the fact that they're much smaller in terms of population and size and resources, imagining, managing to bog Russia down. Because Putin has forgotten that they were part of that same mentality of we're going to survive this as well.

• 45:52Speaker 00

  I've read several Russian experts over the last month who's saying that there is now every reason to think that the boot is on the Ukrainian foot, that the drone attacks on Crimea and so on have given it a whole new edge. Do you think Ukraine could bring Putin down now?

• 46:08Speaker 04

  Well, I think in combination with lots of other things, it's entirely possible that at least it constrains his options. You know, he gets blocked from going any further. The Ukrainian strategy, you know, right now is to take out logistics and supply lines, which we've seen with these long-range strikes into Russian territory on petrochemical plants, for example. And, I mean, even taking out supermarkets like Wildberries in terms of, you know, their big, you know, wholesale storages. I mean, it's as best like the Romans sacking the granaries of, you know, every country and, you know, place that they came across. So, I mean, again, this is a kind of bit of going back to antiquity. And, you

• 46:49Speaker 04

  know, the Ukrainians, you know, have also managed to bog the Russians down on the battlefield. They've used drones rather than, and robots to really drain the Russians, you know, to bleed them, which is, you know, an awful thing to be thinking about. But that's their strategy, block them, bleed them, take out all of their supply lines. Now, Russia obviously has an enormous amount of resources. One of the parts of the book that Cliff Gaddy and I really focused on, The Survivalist, was about Russia building up the stockpiles, preparing for just this very kind of eventuality. So it's really going to also take a shift in thinking in Russia itself, of those people around Putin. And, you know, you can see some signs for that. But I think Putin thinks he's still got, you know, quite a bit that

• 47:34Speaker 04

  he can lean into, more that he can draw down on. But look, I think we'll have to see because as we all know, there are always exogenous shocks in the system. I think that the US attack with Israel on Iran is a major exogenous shock that hasn't actually been all that good, you know, for Russia, for example, because it, you know, puts something else in the calculus that you really can't control. So I would just say we have to watch this space. But, you know, there could well be that just as you get in a war of attrition, both sides exhaust themselves to a point where, you know, there has to be, and that's what a lot of people are hoping for who want to end the war, of course, that there has to be some kind of, it's obviously not going to be a reconciliation, but some kind of compromise reached.

• 48:15Speaker 03

  Fiona, it is always so fabulous to talk to you. Thank you so much, Fiona Hill there. We've walked a, walked a long road, Fiona and Giles and Anthony Beaver. It's been really good having these guides in this series on Stalin. Thank you very much for listening to us. Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Anand.

• 48:36Speaker 00

  And goodbye from me, William Dalrymple. The Rumpel.

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