Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Basil Zaharoff: The Man Who Sold World War One

Episode Date: February 20, 2020

Robert is joined again by Teresa Lee to continue discussing Basil Zaharoff. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hi, Robert. Sophie, this is behind the bastards. Easily our worst opening. Definitely our worst opening because of Sophie. Our worst opening was Hitler from like two weeks ago. That might have been our best. Oh my God. Well, for the five people who haven't stopped listening to this episode because of its terrible Sophie-chosen opening, this is behind the bastards. Podcast where we talk about the worst people in history. This is part two of our series on Basil Zaharoff.

And Teresa, how are you doing in this part two? How are you feeling? You know, I'm feeling a little scared about, you know, the inevitable death of all these people in the story. But, you know, I'm a brave girl, so I think I can finish listening to this story. Probably won't be able to go to sleep, but it's a good thing it's the middle of the day. I feel like there's some lessons that we can all learn in our own careers from the career of Basil Zaharoff. Like, maybe if you're trying to sell a movie, you should first sell submarines to Turkey and Greece and Russia and spark a naval arms race. I should first sell movies to different countries and then sell one to one country, then say, do you want two of my movies? I don't know if that would work the same way.

Yeah. I mean, I think, I don't know. Well, you're saying I should scan a rich, older woman out of her money. Yes, absolutely. I've said that for years. And everything will be good. I did dye my hair blonde, so I'm halfway to Russian prints. Do Russians have blonde hair? Yes, I think they do. Very close. Oh yeah, all of them. Every single Russian. No, that was one of the first things I ever said to you when we met was you should pretend to be a Russian prince and marry a rich woman and steal her money and then flee the continent. Yes, I remember that. That's not a lie at all.

Robert, I only see your, like, mouth because your top of your face is cut off. Wait. Not that it matters, but I was just looking at your mustache. Move the screen back. Thank you. It's a mustache. So before we get back into Basil Zaharoff's career, I want to talk a little bit about the way this man presented himself to the world. He wore fine suits at all times and he was known for having a striking mustache.

He spoke rarely in public and confined himself mostly to shadowy back rooms and salons of the great and good. He preferred to speak in a whisper and, like, talk to mainly powerful people and never really, like, he was never a guy who was, like, out in public. Like, there's no, like, big addresses of this guy. He didn't have, like, a very public life. One writer at the time, Osbert Sitwell, described him as evil and imposing, noting his, quote, beaky face, hooded eye, wrinkled neck, the impression of physical power and the capacity to wait. He was an outlook merely a super croupier. And once I heard him introducing himself to a millionaire friend of mine with a startling phrase, I am Sir Basil Zaharoff. I have 16 millions. Just 16 millions?

This is how rich I am. A million dollars? Some? People who want to be dead? Yeah. To his friends, he went by Zed Zed. To the management at Vickers. Wait, wait, wait.

He said, okay. Yeah, it was his nickname. What's your nickname for this guy? Is that who the DJ Zed is named after? Yes. Do you know who that is? Yes, that is exactly the story. Oh my gosh.

Yeah, it's just like, I know who all of the musicians my fans and guests talk about are. Zed, who formerly dated Selena Gomez. Very briefly, but we remember. Yes, I know who all these people are. You're very convincing, Robert. Thank you. To most other people, yeah. So the management at Vickers called him our general representative abroad.

And to most other people in the arms industry who we competed with, he was called the Armaments King. And it was in this last role that he would leave his most enduring mark on the modern world. Finance is boring, so we often ignore matters of debt when we tell the stories of the great wars of the past. But the fact that the Russian Tsar spent the early years of the 20th century signing loan after loan with the French government to pay for his military buildup, went on to be one of the most consequential decisions of the 20th century. So like, Russia's got to like buy $620 million, which is like an enormous amount of money back in those days, rebuilding its military, and they just don't have the cash on hand. And the money comes primarily from France.

And the money comes primarily from France because, like, France is Russia's military ally in this period, and they're kind of trusting that Russia will help them fight Germany if they have to have a war with Germany. Yeah, the fact that Russia accrues hundreds of millions of dollars in debt to France would prove really key to the start of the First World War. And we can thank Basil Zaharov for that. There were a number of arms manufacturers trying to get the Tsar to give them his business, including Krupp, the German firm. But Basil had spent half his life pretending to be a Russian prince, and oddly enough, this actually prepared him really well for the job of selling guns to Russia. He spoke perfect Russian.

He was a member of the Orthodox Church, and he'd spent a lot of time in Russia, and it didn't hurt that his dad had Russified the family's last name. So at this point in time, France and Germany were kind of, like, fighting over Russia's friendship, because, like, Germany had been Russia's ally before, and, like, they all wanted Russia on their side, because Russia is, like, a sixth of the world's land mass, so whoever gets the Russian Empire to back them has a really big advantage in any kind of war in Europe. So while there were a lot of factors that weighed into Russia choosing to stay with France, the fact that the country was deeply in debt to the French Republic did not hurt.

And Zaharov's firms wound up winning the lion's share of the czarist business, and Shriny Basil is the most successful arms dealer on the planet. But the people of France didn't just decide to loan Russia all of that money, because, like, they liked Russians or anything. Yeah, Zaharov convinced them to do it. He owned newspapers in Paris, including one called Excelsior, which he ordered to send out a steady stream of propaganda supporting the cause of loaning more money to Russia. And he had a lot of, like, this wasn't super easy to do,

because, like, about a century before, a little less, France had fought a big bloody war with Russia that had, like, killed the shitload of their young men. So there was, like, some bad blood there. So he had to, like, put out a bunch of propaganda to convince them, like, no, it's actually a good idea to give all of your money to Russia to buy a ton of guns. So Basil found himself in the position of simultaneously trying to convince the French government to risk lots of money backing Russian rearmament, while also doing everything he could to stop French munitions makers

from selling any of their weapons to Russia. So, like, you've got to convince France to give Russia all this money to buy guns, but you also have to convince Russia not to buy any French guns, because, like, you want to sell them your guns. Right, he wants to sell them. Oh, wow. Yeah. So it's kind of a hard hat trick to pull as a gun salesman. But Zaharov pulls it off. Yeah, so he succeeds in, like, making sure that Vickers,

a firm founded by an American and, like, a bunch of British people and run by a Greek pretending to be a Russian, sold arms to the Russian Empire rather than the country who was actually loaning them the money to buy guns. His main competitor for Russia's business was a French firm called Schneider Crusoe. Its head, the eponymous Schneider, wound up dueling Basil for the right to take all of Russia's money. He had his own newspapers and he planted a story in them that Russia was about to sign a deal with Krupp

to let them build factories inside Russia. This was really scary to the people of France, because all of the gun plans that Russia had gotten were French. So if Krupp started building Russian arms factories, producing French guns, that would effectively mean that Germany was gaining access to all of France's military secrets. None of that was true. It was just a bunch of lies that Schneider put out in newspapers. But it scared French people enough that a lot of them demanded their government loan Russia $25 million to rebuild its railways in exchange for letting Schneider Crusoe build arms factories in Russia.

So all this kind of sketchy dealing is going on with, like, all the different companies in the arms trade. And we really don't know much about what Zaharov did or said exactly to Russia, but we know that Vickers is one of the vast majority of the different arms contracts that went to Russia. So, like, even with all this fuckery from Schneider Crusoe, most of the empire's new guns are provided by Vickers through Zaharov. Now, machine guns and rifles and artillery pieces weren't the only thing that modern armies needed at this point. The 20th century saw the advent of air travel and air war as things. And Basil Zaharov knew straight away that he wanted to sell planes, too.

His first step was to use a small chunk of his fortune to endow a chair of aviation at the Sorbonne. This presumably would give him a highly placed flunky when the French government decided to start buying planes. Unfortunately for Basil, this move attracted controversy. And I'm going to quote an article by John T. Flynn, written by the Mies Daily, which is a libertarian think tank publication. So these guys actually really like Zaharov. Quote, Zaharov, for all his pains to elude this spotlight, found that revealing beam playing upon him at intervals and to his discomforture.

Who is this Mr. Zaharov? What is he? To what country does he owe allegiance? He was born in Turkey. He is a Greek. He is a French citizen. He is an English businessman. But what country does he serve? And what sort of game is he playing in France? These were not pleasant questions for one who indeed had what Mr. Roosevelt calls a passion for anonymity.

So he starts to like get like the fact that he's endowing chairs at universities and stuff and like owning newspapers in France gets people really suspicious about his intentions. And so he has to quiet those intentions by like buying. Basically he buys a convalescent home for old French soldiers and donates to a bunch of French causes and becomes like a philanthropist so that people don't think that there's something shady about all the guns he's trying to get other countries to buy. Wait, so he was more anonymous before, but now he's putting his name on all these like buildings and stuff?

Yeah, he has to in order to like because there's a lot of like Rockefeller type of thing. Yeah, yeah, he does it to bribe France into liking him. Gotcha. So that's cool. Yeah, it's cool. Yeah, it's fine. It's what you do. I mean, it's kind of what Rockefeller did. Like that's what it is to like be a philanthropist is you're usually trying to stop people from thinking too much about how you made all the money that you can donate.

Yeah, it just becomes a you just want a building that tourists go take an elevator up to and look around. That's when you know you've made it when your name is on a building like that. Yeah, or all of the wonderful public parks provided by the Raytheon Corporation. So this sort of palm greasing accompanied bezels plotting in nations around the world. Vickers plants soon cropped up in Canada, Italy, Africa, Greece, Turkey, Russia, New Zealand, Ireland and Holland. They made machine guns and cannons and ships but also brand new war planes. Some of the ones that were like just being bought up by European powers. When sales would slump, Zaharoff would use his press organs to pump more stories into the media about say, France's rivals arming.

So he notices sales are slumping, then he'll try to drum up fear that there's a war in Europe happening. Or that's about to happen. So like people will start demanding that their country buy more guns. Now, since Vickers was ostensibly a British company, the British government was happy to help Zaharoff by using their own soft power to bribe and cajole foreign nations into buying British guns. Sometimes the agreement to allow Vickers came with direct military aid from the British Empire. The Royal Navy itself was for sale, provided that the company buying guns from Vickers sent enough money back to the English economy to make it worthwhile. So he gets to use the British military as if you buy enough guns from us, we'll send in our boats to help you do shit.

Because yeah, it's a bunch of money for England. So frustratingly, there's very little specific information on individual acts of bribery that Zaharoff may or may not have carried out because he burnt all of his records when he was an old man. And the British government isn't about to correct the record. But there were folks at the time who paid attention to what Basel and his fellow arms dealers were doing to Europe and the rest of the world. And some of them had the courage to speak up, and I'm going to quote now from Basel's biography, Man of Arms Again. On March 18, 1914, on the very brink of the coming disaster, Philip Snowden, disease-wracked, crippled socialist labor leader, rose in commons to make a speech.

When he had done, he had rocked the British Empire with his disclosures. For two years, a young Quaker socialist named Walton Newbold had been tracing with infinite pains the torturous trail of the international arms makers. And Philip Snowden had in his possession the fruits of that long quest when he rose to speak. One by one, he pointed out cabinet ministers, members of the house, and named high-ranking officials in army and navy circles, persons of royal position, who were large holders and shares of Vickers and Armstrong, and John Brown and Beardmore, shipbuilders. The profits of Vickers and Armstrong had been enormous, and those powerful persons in the state and church and the nobility had bought into them to share in the profits. Vickers had among its director two dukes, two marqueses, two family members of 50 earls, 15 baronettes and five knights, 21 naval officers, two naval government architects, and many journalists.

Armstrong had even more, 60 earls or their wives, 15 baronettes and 20 knights, 20 military or naval architects and officers, while there were 13 members of the House of Commons on the directorates of Vickers, Armstrong, or John Brown. It would be impossible, said Snowden, to throw a handful of pebbles anywhere upon the opposition benches without hitting members interested in these arms firms. Ministers, officers, technical experts moved out of the government, out of the navy, the army, the war office, the admiralty, into the employ of the munitions manufacturers. Snowden quoted Lord Welby, head of the civil service, who only a few weeks before had denounced the arms conspirators. We are in the hands of an organization of crooks, said Lord Welby. They are politicians, generals, manufacturers of armaments and journalists. All of them are anxious for unlimited expenditure and go on inventing scares to terrify the public and terrify the ministers of the crown.

So, part of how Zaharov, and not just him, these other arms companies, get away with what they're doing. They'll hire these members of the nobility, members of the government, or convince them to buy stocks that these people profit too. And that's why he can convince the British government to send the Royal Navy into companies that buy from his firm, is because these guys have a vested interest too. And so, they're basically spending public money to make themselves money by drumming up more arms sales. So, that's cool. Dang. That's like... Wait, who's...

Is this informant? Like, was he... How did he know all this? Like, is he just a guy who was like... He was a... Yeah. Part of this? Yeah, it was this Quaker...

Yeah, this Quaker, like, socialist activist who just, like, slowly would start tracing, like, basically, like, starting with, like, stock sales and stuff. Like, who's buying up interest in all these firms and found out like... And his last name was Snowden? No relation to Edward Snowden? No, no. Snowden's the... Snowden is a socialist labor leader who, like, makes a speech using this guy, the stuff that this other guy found. But yeah, it is weird that, like, yeah, it is another Snowden.

So, yeah. From 1877 to 1914, a cadre of arms dealers spearheaded by Basil Zaharoff, who was the most successful of them, bribed a succession of admirals, generals, high-ranking politicians, and nobility from all of the great powers of Europe. Krupp employed hundreds of people who received salaries without doing any actual work, provided they were willing to put in a good word to their government ministries when Krupp needed it. One German armament maker at the time admitted, for some families, Krupp factories are a great sinecure where nephews and poor relations of officials whose influence in war is great find themselves jobs. In 1913, the year before Snowden made that speech,

Dr. Karl Liebnacht, a socialist leader in Germany's Reichstag, gave a similar speech on coiling massive corruption within the German Ministry of War. It resulted in the trial and conviction of several ministry officials who were found to be agents of Krupp. In Japan, another scandal was involved with the German arms firm Siemens Schuchert, who was found to have paid out more than half a million modern dollars in bribes to Japanese officials to guarantee them the contract to build a massive battleship. And these give us an idea of the kind of stuff Basil himself would have engaged in. But in general, we only catch glimpses of him during this period, as Smithsonian magazine summarizes, quote, he appears sporadically in the Vickers papers now at Cambridge University Library and increasingly in the British Foreign Office archives. These sources allow us to trace ZZ's increasing wealth and status.

Between 1902 and 1905, he was paid 195,000 pounds on commissions worth 25 million dollars today. And by 1914, he was active not only in Istanbul and Athens, but in St. Petersburg, Buenos Aires, and Assumption. He owned several banks, lived in a French chateau, and was romancing the Duchess of Villafranca, a Spanish noblewoman who would become his third wife. So yeah, this is part of what's frustrating about writing about this guy. We don't know specifically what he did. We know that because the people who were bribing public officials that we know about in this time were the ones who weren't as good as Zaharov. Because they got caught.

Yeah, because they got caught. But what happens in Europe, and this is something we don't talk about much when we talk about World War I, but a big part of why that war happened is that the leadership of every country involved had personal financial stakes in the mass sale of weapons and armaments, which also led to them buying more guns and scaring each other with all the guns they were buying, which led them to get angrier at each other, which increased the belligerence between the nations. And it was all basically to sell a shitload of guns to profit like these arms manufacturers and the people that they bribed in government. So you're saying it's like a powder keg? I went to middle school, I remember.

The little diagram you could draw, you know, it's like, World War I is a powder keg. Oh my God, I was with them forever. But it's a powder keg that I think it's usually put that a huge part of it was like... Right, they didn't uncover all the sinister underneath. I mean, some of it was known at the time, particularly a lot of socialist politicians at the time were like, the arms industry owns all of our governments and are clearly lurching us towards a horrible war, somebody should do something about this. But nobody did anything about it. So that's, I mean, that doesn't sound like anything familiar, like the world lurching towards clear disaster.

Oh yeah, I can't think of what that reminds me of something, but I can't put a finger on it. Yeah, thankfully it never happened again. Just a general sense of dread. What does that remind me of something going on today? No, I can't think of it. You know what'll assuage your general sense of dread, Teresa? What? Products and services.

Because if I know something that has nothing at all to do with corrupt arms companies buying politicians and using them to bring the world closer and closer to disaster, it's beautiful, beautiful sweet lady capitalism. So let's calm our souls with a little bit more of that. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. The FBI sometimes gets to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of goods. He's a shark, and not in the good and bad-ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So, we don't know exactly what Zaharoff did in most cases, but there are bits and pieces of evidence here.

And the documentary evidence that survives suggests that the chief value he brought to Vickers was his instinctive understanding of when and to whom he should offer bribes. So, he was one of the guys who was basically getting members of parliament, getting all these royal people to get involved with Vickers and make themselves have a financial interest in the success of his company. He wrote gleeful memos that told of doing the needful and administering doses of Vickers to various prominent people in England. Foreign office records showed that in 1912, Zaharoff was instrumental in passing 100,000 rubles to officers in Russia's Ministry of the Marine in order to divert government contracts to a local shipbuilding group in which Vickers had an interest. At the same time, for reasons that remain obscure but can be guessed at, Vickers also won a contract to supply light machine guns to the Russian army, despite the fact that its bid was 50% more expensive than one submitted by a local Russian company. There is reason to suppose that in the latter's case, Zaharoff's charm and easy way with women was at least as helpful as his money. One historian, William Fuller, suggests that he made particularly effective use of his association with the ballerina Kyshinskaya, who after losing her place as a mistress took up with Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, inspector general of the Russian artillery. So, some of like, he succeeds in basically like getting Russia to buy a bunch of guns from him for way more money than a local Russian firm wants to sell them for.

Because he was dating a ballerina? Yeah, he's dating a ballerina who's also fucking the Grand Duke of Russia. Good for her. Which is, you know, yeah. Poken again. More poking than that. It's like this arm's race is like a delicate ballet. Exactly.

So the individual acts Basel took during this period are less important than the impact of strategies and tactics had on the broader climate in Europe. World War I was most directly a product of the armament schedules of the various nations of Europe. So like once, like Germany realized that like, okay, there was a conflict, you know, happening over between Austria and Serbia, and it's going to pull in Russia and it's going to pull in France. They knew that they had like only a certain amount of time to mobilize their troops and get their army ready and everyone else in Europe knew that too. So it was this kind of thing that like, once everyone starts mobilizing for war, you really have to continue because any delay can mean you lose the war because you don't have your reserves and shit ready in time. And the system Zaharov developed had ensured that each of these great powers had obsessively scheduled updates for their weaponry, their ships, their cannons and their aircraft. And the varying levels to which all of these different militaries were updated played a huge role in the war calculus that drove the decision making in August 1914. So like, basically, he's got like all of these different countries are being convinced to update their weapons and buy new fancier guns and new fancier planes and stuff and new fancier cannons at different times.

And all of the other powers know this. So like Germany in 1914 is in this position where they realize like they have the most advanced army in Europe by their calculus. But Russia is re-arming because Zaharov has got them to buy a bunch of guns and France is re-arming. And so they're like, if we don't get involved like fight a war right now with both of these countries in another five or six years, they'll have bought new guns and their guns will be better than ours. And then we won't have a chance of winning this war. So like because of this kind of armament schedule that Zaharov helps to create, if you look at like the internal documents like German officers like von Moltke who's in charge of their military at the time are writing each other during the July crisis, they call it a preventative war and the thing they're trying to prevent is Germany losing a fight against France and Russia. Because like Russia's buying all these guns from Vickers and they're like soon they're going to actually be able to beat us if we don't fight them right now. I feel like that's like when I break up with someone because I don't want them to break up with me later.

So I'm like, I'll do it now even though things are good. But like later I'll be sad if you break up with me. Yeah. And I think we all remember that breakup you had that led to thousands of French and yeah, exactly. Yeah. So yeah. So that's cool, right? Basically like von Moltke and the German general staff thought that 1914 was like the last year they could beat both France and Russia in a war. The Saxon military attaché in Berlin in July 1914 noted this about the German commander quote, I had the impression that the general staff would be pleased if war were to come about now conditions and prospects would never be better for us. Victor Nauman, a journalist writing in Germany at the time noted the same thing.

There is considerable uneasiness in Berlin over Russian armaments and the test mobilization of considerable Russian forces, not only in army and Navy circles, but also in the foreign ministry. The idea of preventative war is regarded with less disapproval than a year ago. So there's like a really direct line between the fact that Zaharov convinces like sells so many guns to Russia gets France to loan them all this money and the fact that World War One starts like it convinces the Germans that they have to fight right now. That wording to like less disapproval is also like a lot of propaganda because it's spinning like there's disapproval, but it's less disapproval instead of just being like they approve. No, it's just slightly less disapproval.

Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. So, yeah, well, Europe lurched from crisis to crisis in the final years and months leading up to World War One. Basel continued to blissfully sell arms all around the world. Prior to World War One, when war broke out between Greece, Turkey and some of the Ottoman Empire's rebellious European possessions, this was in 1912, Basel took the extraordinary step of funding the Greek war effort to the tune of two and a half million Franks in order to ensure a Greek victory. It's not clear if there was like a financial motivation to this as well or if he was like just patriotic, but the Ottoman Empire's embarrassing defeat helped push them closer to Germany and contributed to the ratcheting up of global tensions. Now, stoking global war was not the only thing Basel got up to during this period.

In 1889, during a tour around Europe, he met Maria del Pilar, Antonia, Angela, Patosinio, Simona, Di Muguerro. The Duchess of Villafarga, he meets the Spanish noblewoman with so many fucking names. And Basel strikes up a romantic relationship with her that allowed him to sell millions of dollars in guns to the Spanish army as well. Now, this was not purely a mercenary endeavor, though. Zaharov seems to have legitimately fallen in love with the Duchess and he begged her to divorce her husband, arguing that since her husband was dying and suffering from dementia, like, would it really matter if they got divorced? But the Duchess was Catholic and she was not willing to get divorced, although she was willing to cheat on her husband. So, I guess do the moral math there.

These are different in Europe, okay? It's much looser than out there. Yeah, I can't divorce my husband because it'll make God angry, but we can fuck for 30 years. So, Basel and the Duchess were together for decades and everyone kind of knew it, but just like agreed not to talk about it, because I guess that's just how you did things back then. Her husband was declared insane and locked up in a mental asylum. He survived 35 years, which none of them expected, and really frustrated Basel, because he and his mistress had to like hide their relationship at least a little bit for most of this period. But to Basel's credit, he seems to have actually loved this woman and the two were together for the rest of their lives.

So, that's cool. She's like the Sunni to his Woody Allen. Yeah, yeah, he doesn't steal from her, so that's nice. Yeah. So, yeah, Basel, yeah, I mean, he's a big part of why World War I starts, and kind of the impact of his like the shit that he pulls prior to the war, like the fact that Russia winds up in like tremendous debt to France, winds up having an impact beyond just the First World War.

So, like, Russia by the time, like, you know, World War I, 1917, like there's a big revolution in Russia and the Tsars very soon out of power. And one of the reasons that this happens is because of all of the debt that Russia owed to France. Like, that was one of the big talking points of the Bolsheviks and the socialists when they like overthrew the government is like the Tsar had mortgaged their company to France to buy better guns, and that had forced them to get involved in this war that had killed hundreds and thousands of their young men. And you can kind of trace a lot of that to Zaharov.

So, like, as far back as 1905, the Bolshevik councils had demanded repudiation of all of Russia's foreign debts, and this demand formed a centerpiece for the strikes in St. Petersburg that happened in 1905. And those strikes spread around the empire along with the demand for debt repudiation, and they were crushed brutally by the Russian government, which was again one of the major causes, you know, one of the things that helped inspire the Russian Revolution. So on December 3rd, 1905, Tsarist authorities arrested the entire Soviet leadership for publishing a manifesto urging debt repudiation.

The revolution that sparked off in 1917 was based on a lot of grievances and crimes by the Tsarist regime, but the fact that the future of the Russian people had basically been like, sold to France for pointless guns for a stupid war was a big part of them. And it also played a role in the fact that, like, the most extreme faction wound up winning the Civil War. The Tsar initially, like, gave up power to a moderate socialist movement led by a guy named Kerensky, and this provisional government was crippled by the fact that it both had to carry on World War I, and it had to pledge to repay the debts contracted by the Tsarist regime. So because Kerensky had to agree that Russia was going to keep paying off its debts to France,

like, that's a big part of why there's a revolution against him in October of 1917, which leads to the takeover of the Bolsheviks, who in 1918 repudiated all Russian debt to its foreign creditors. Now, the fact that the Bolsheviks in charge had decided they're just not going to pay France back pisses off a lot of people, particularly France. And this contributes to the French decision to blockade Russia and back up the white Russian forces. This prolongs the Russian Civil War, killing more Russians than World War I actually did. And it also ensures that the Bolsheviks who emerged victorious from the war were, like, even more pissed at these Western countries, because they were like,

well, you guys extended this horribly brutal war, and, like, just so we'd pay you back for these guns that, like, you conned us into buying in the first place. Isn't that how, like, doesn't the America owe China a bunch of money? Not necessarily with your weapons, but aren't we kind of digging ourselves into a hole like that, too? I mean, we owe more money to our own people. Like, it's, I guess it, I think it's like... But we have a... It's different. Deficit.

We sure do. Deficit. They lent us a bunch of money. I remember, like, loading this in high school, and it's so much that we're never going to pay them back. And I think it's kind of understood that, at some point, it'll just be fair, or we're just going to have to do what they say, because it's so much that we can't pay back. Word. Yeah, I think it's a bit different now, because, like, money's not real now. Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It was, like, back then, everything's, like, backed up by gold or silver. Well, it's really me when I pay rent, but, you know, it's not real to my country, I guess. No, it, like, it isn't really real. Like, you'll notice nobody even fucking talks about the deficit anymore. Yeah, sure. Like, it used to be, like, our national debt was this big deal, and now we just pretend it's not a thing. And now we're, like, just kidding. Yeah, it's like if you go to the hospital and wind up owing $10 million in medical debt, and it's just, like, well, I'm never paying this.

Like, I work at the Sparrow, like, what do you, what do you want? But, like, back then, like, all of the, the, all of these, like, currencies are back, are, like, based on gold and silver and stuff. So, like, there is, like, an expectation of real repayment. True. And, like, it's, you know, a horrible burden to the Russian peasantry, because, like, the rich people of Russia aren't going to pay all of that money. Like, they're the ones who made these deals so that they could get more money

because these arms companies are bribing them. So, like, yeah, Basil, like, when you try to trace out, like, the impact of this guy, like, it's a bunch of stuff, he helps lead the world into World War II, which, like, 20 million people die in. But he also plays a significant role in helping to inspire at least parts of the Russian Civil War and helping to inspire, like, like, the debts that Russia owes lead to, like, protests and stuff that are cracked down on brutally by the Tsar, which is one contributing factor to the Civil War.

And then once the Civil War happens, they help to ensure that the most extreme people get into power and then help also ensure that, like, the European powers, Russia owes money to back up the other side in the Civil War, which kills hundreds of thousands of people. And, like, Basil had a huge impact on that, but he also got to completely ignore it, because he's just a rich guy living in Europe. He already made his fucking money, he doesn't give a shit. Like, he made his, he made, he got his cut of the deal already. He doesn't lose anything because Russia's not paying back his debts.

Like, he's fucking fine. And he was fine with World War I. He made a fuckload of money in World War I. And he basically got to not really work all that hard during the war, because you don't have to work hard to sell guns to countries in the middle of the biggest war in history. It's really easy to sell guns then. So what you're saying is he almost wanted a war? Yeah.

And in fact, once the war was going, it was very much in his interest to prolong the bloodletting and, yeah, make the war happen even longer. So at the start of hostilities, the Imperial German Army had captured a place called the Brie Basin, and they routed two French armies to do it for good reason. Brie included massive quantities of iron ore, and Germany didn't have a whole lot of iron in its own borders. So Brie became a linchpin of the German war effort. Without the iron there, they would not have been able to fight World War I more than about six months.

So they capture all of this iron ore and these blast furnaces and stuff, but all of it's within the range of French artillery. So what would you think if you're France? Oh, Germany's got this place that they cannot fight the war if they can't get iron out of it, and we can blow it all up. You'd think they'd blow it all up, right? Seems like kind of a no-brainer from a military point of view. They don't shell it at all during the war,

and the reason they don't shell it at all is Basil Zaharoff, because Basil's like, well, this is a bunch of money. Like, once the war is over, I could make a lot of money from the iron foundries here. Like, I don't want you guys blowing that stuff up. So he basically finds himself in this position of having to convince France not to do the thing that could allow them to win the war in six months. And when we come back, we're going to talk about how he did that. But first, if you need to win a war against Germany in six months,

the only way to do it is with the products and services that support this podcast. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of goods. He's a shark, and not on the good-bad-ass way.

He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space.

313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus, it's all made up?

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. So, yeah. Basil Zaharoff. Basil is trying to find himself in this position of needing to convince French not to blow up this place that would allow them to win the war and make Germany's effort basically impossible.

And the way he does this is through a friendship he has with a guy named Robert Pinot, who's one of the leaders of the French government's armaments efforts. He's one of the people responsible for arming the French military during this war. Pinot warns him that French generals were agitating to bomb Brie. Because they're like, we want to win this war because we're generals and this is the easiest way to do it. And yeah, Basil basically, I'm going to read a quote from the book Man of Arms that describes what he did next.

At Pinot's request, Zaharoff took informal soundings from the German industrialists in Thionville, while at the same time putting up an alternative blockade plan to French headquarters. This was that the installations at Brie should be left intact, but that attack should be launched and set on the railways. General, uh, military immediately and violently contested this option. The preference may have reflected the special interests of the committee. The ultimate decision, however, lay with the ministers individually and the cabinet collectively after taking into consideration the advice of their military advisors and service chiefs.

They neither pressed it nor resigned in disagreement. The same French source put another gloss on this affair. Towards the end of 1916, Lloyd George sought Zaharoff's advice on the chance of securing a token withdrawal of troops on both sides of the front on New Year's Day. An appeal which Zaharoff, with his customary agility, distorted into a mutual agreement between the allies and the central powers to respect each other's arms factories. Lloyd George, according to this version, finally concurred with Zaharoff's viewpoint

and agreed it would be senseless to destroy industrial plants and to end the war with derelict factories and mass unemployment. So, yeah, um, so it's like, yeah, so he not only like basically like tries to push this plan to have France like send thousands of young men to their deaths trying to attack German railways instead of just shelling these iron foundries. But like later in the war, in like 1916, when he's like asked to try and secure like a withdrawal from both sides on New Year's Day to give like the soldiers, like to ratchet down tensions and give the soldiers a break,

he's like, no, no, no, no, no, they should keep shooting at each other. But like what we should really do is make an international agreement to not destroy any arms factories, because I know, yeah. That's so crazy. Yeah, he's a real piece of shit. Um, so yeah, while millions of young men were like dashing themselves to death against machine gun nests and artillery emplacements, Basil Zaharoff dedicated himself to protecting what really mattered,

the industrial facilities that made those weapons. He was deeply trusted by men at the heights of power on the Allied side and he acted as a go-between for King George V, Lloyd George, who was like the guy in charge of England, and the French Prime Minister, Clemenceau. The Earl of Derby, the British ambassador to France, wrote that there is no man living in whom more people can fight in than him. And while it's impossible to say exactly what impact his personal influence had on the war, Lord Derby was convinced that Basil Zaharoff had a vested interest in making the war go on as long as possible.

In June of 1917, yeah, yeah. In June of 1917, he wrote in his journal, Zaharoff is all for continuing the war to the end. So like, we don't know exactly what he did, and this is part of the frustrating thing. It's like, hard to say like, he said to the king, you know, do this or that, because like, nobody keeps track of these conversations between these world leaders and their friend. But we know he really wants the war to go on long and he's a voice in all these people's ears. Um, yeah.

So, he did make one attempt to secure peace in 1917. Kind of. He was sent by Lloyd George to try and bring Greece into the war on the Allied side and to try to convince the Ottoman Empire to defect from Germany. He was given 10 million pounds worth of solid gold to try to bribe this into being. But unfortunately for Basil, he only made it as far as Switzerland. I'm going to quote from Smithsonian Magazine now. His reputation preceded him, intercepted at the border, he was humiliatingly strip-searched

and left standing in sub-zero temperatures for more than an hour by the border police. In the end, his intrigues came to nothing, but that did not stop him writing to the British government to demand chocolate for Zed Zed. His coy reference to the major honor he craved. So let's say he's asking for like an award. He's like, I would like Zed Zed would like some chocolate. Yeah. So this really discussed King George V, who like at this point is at least enough of a human being

to be like millions of young men have died and like look at the kind of shit you're saying. But he grudgingly recommends Zed Zed for a grand night cross, which finally enabled Zaharoff to style himself Sir Basil for the first time in his life with some sort of justification. So he does get to be kind of nosy. He's just like a little child whining like, I want a prize. You didn't say good job to me after I failed at that thing you wanted me to do. Yeah.

Yeah. I want a prize for like failing to secure peace. I want to participate in the war and helping to start it. Yeah. So obviously World War I ends in 1918. And this is good news for human beings, but bad news for weapons companies because you're going to buy a lot fewer guns after this war. And when the fighting ended, the arms industry contracted massively.

Basil, though, was still very wealthy and influential. And he bought his way into being part owner of Monte Carlo, the famous resort and casino. However, his chief interest continued to be in the movement and destination nations. From 1920 to 1922, Basil got deeply involved in the Greco-Turkish war over Smyrna. And this is, we talk about this a little bit in the Savitri Devi episode. But basically like Greece in a treaty in the Treaty of Versailles is given this like chunk of land on the Turkish coast. And they have to send in troops to actually take it and Turkey fights back. And eventually the allies like abandoned Greece and Greece like loses the war and there's a horrible genocide.

And there are rumors that Basil himself entirely funded the Greek war effort. Their attempt to invade Turkey. There's no hard evidence of this, but it's one of the stories everyone will say is that like he funded this war that Greece fights against Turkey. We just really don't know. The war was a disaster for Greece, though. And it was a disaster for Zaharoff's political backers like Lloyd George. So Zaharoff was a major part of the reason that like they got this land in the Treaty of Versailles and he was like pushing the English and whatnot to back Greece in this war.

But it ends badly for Greece. It's really bad for all of the people that give Zaharoff his influence. And it's bad for his influence, too, because he's made a big fuck up. In the mid-1920s, Vickers began to encounter increasing financial difficulties. In a Europe exhausted by war, nations just weren't buying guns at the same apocalyptic level they once had. Krupp had been killed by Allied demands that they destroy all of their arms producing equipment. But the death of Vickers' greatest competitor did not help the company out. They were forced to massively reorganize and cut costs just to stay in business. Their stock price dropped by two-thirds.

And since Basel was the largest stockholder in Vickers, this severely impacted his net worth. And he was slowly shuffled out of any position of power within the company by 1925. In 1927, the managers of the reorganized firm presented Basel with an award for his 50 years of service with the company. It was a balm designed to hide the fact that they'd removed him from any position of influence. On September 22nd... Have this fucking award. You like awards. Do some chocolate for Zed Zed. So, on September 22nd, 1924, Basel Zaharoff had married his duchess after nearly 40 years together because her husband died in that Assain asylum.

But she didn't outlive him for very long. 18 months later, she died. And this basically spelled the end for Basel. Yeah, he was never the same after his wife died. He does seem to have loved this woman. And in 1927, he burns all of his papers and notebooks, and all of the evidence of his long and bloody career as the most successful arms dealer in world history goes up in smoke. The King of Armaments survived until 1936, but over the next decade, he grew sicker and less mobile, eventually being wheeled around by servants as he did his rounds at Monte Carlo. He died sick and marginalized, with his vast fortune much depleted.

There's no way to know how much money he was really worth, and his liquid known assets of death were only around a million modern dollars. Only a billion dollars. What a fucking loser. A million, a million. A million with a million. Oh, a million. Well, I mean, like, wow, that's just, what a fucking loser. I mean, who doesn't have a million dollars, right? Am I right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, do you don't feel sorry for this guy that he only dies with a million dollars? Robert, all I hear is this is a romcom that ended in a very happy marriage, and you said he loved her, so, you know, that's all I need to hear. Most romcoms, people fuck up, and it doesn't matter how they fuck up, as long as there's a kiss at the end, so that's what I heard. I mean, if there's one thing I've learned from modern politics, it's that just because somebody starts a couple of wars and gets a couple of million people killed,

doesn't mean you shouldn't root for them to be, have friends and live a happy life, you know? So what if Basil's at her off, like, got all those people killed? Like, don't you want him to, I don't know, take up painting and make neat paintings of, like, world leaders or something? Like, isn't that, shouldn't we forgive people like this? Yeah, for the record, because I feel like people don't know me as well as they know you. I 100% do not think that, but, you know, but I do think this guy is bad, and I think he's burning in hell, if you believe in hell.

But if you don't, then he's just, he's just dust. Then he completely won, yeah. If you don't believe in hell, like, then he got away scot-free, basically, with millions and millions contributing to millions of deaths. So, on that happy note, you know who won't contribute to millions of deaths? Are you gonna say me? Teresa Lee. Yeah, exactly.

Time to plug. Oh, wow. Okay, well, I promise to not strip you of millions. I promise I'll never have a million dollars. That's a promise I can keep. You can follow me at LarisaT, L-E-R-E-S-A-T-E-E on Instagram and Twitter. Yay. And my call to all of you is to prove Teresa wrong and give her a million dollars.

Yeah. And then she will sell armaments and spark the next great world war. I feel confident of that. Okay, if you give me a million dollars, I will do my best to sell, start a war. Yeah. So, we are back, or we're done. We're not back. We're about to go away.

What he means is he's doing a live show with Billy Wayne Davis in Los Angeles on March 8th at Dynasty Typewriter by tickets, if you haven't already. He also means that he is I write okay on Twitter. You should follow him. And you should follow our podcast at Basserspot on Twitter and Instagram. Did I forget anything? Did I forget anything, Robert? Oh, we have a T-Public.

Yes. What else? Yes. By Raytheon's fine missiles filled with knives. Yeah. The only missiles filled with knives. Anything else? Oh, you still should.

Nope. Great. Episode's over. Podcast. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of goods.

But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space?

Well, I ought to know. Because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.