Dan Snow's History Hit - The Rise of Stalin

Episode Date: July 21, 2021

How did a young boy from Georgia become a merciless politician who shaped the Soviet Empire in his own brutal image? Historian and bestselling author, Simon Sebag Montifiore, is back on the podcast to talk to Dan about the rise of Joseph Stalin, a man who caused the death and suffering of tens of millions under his regime of terror. Find out how Stalin climbed to the top of Soviet politics to emerge as Lenin’s heir, and hear how his extreme insecurity and paranoia shaped the way he ruled. 

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. Today I'm talking to one of the world's most fluent and brilliant historians,

Simon Sebag Montefiore, about a man who is one of history's true monsters. A man who may well be responsible for the death of more of his fellow human beings than anyone who has ever lived. Quite the record. I'm, of course, talking about Joseph Vissarionis Zhugashvili. That's Georgian, so he'll forgive my pronunciation. He's better known to history, of course, as Joseph Vissarionovitch Stalin. Stalin would climb the greasy pole or hack his way up the bloody ladder of Soviet politics to emerge as Lenin's heir in the 1920s. He'd given himself the name, the pseudonym Stalin, when he published an article in 1913 before the First World War.

It's derived from the Russian for steel and sort of translates as man of Steel. And it seems like he probably intended it to mimic Lenin's pseudonym. And he would go on to lay claim to Lenin's legacy as his successor. His fortunes were transformed by the First World War as the Russian Empire came crashing down. And he was able to take the fight to the streets to shape what would replace it. He effectively ruled the Soviet Union that he helped to bring into being from 1927 until he died in 1953. His vicious repression, his destruction of entire classes of people within the Soviet Union, whether it's Ukrainians or land-holding kulak peasants, are infamous, are legendary, leading to the loss of millions of lives. leading to the loss of millions of lives.

His extreme insecurity and paranoia led him to initiate a series of purges that led to torture, exile, misery and murder on a titanic scale. Initially, when the Second World War broke out in 1939, he was, of course, on Hitler's side. They invaded Poland together. But 80 years ago this year, Hitler turned on his erstwhile ally and Stalin became something of a hero in the West, as Winston Churchill and others embraced him as a fellow traveller in the battle against Nazism. Jerusalem is one of the most successful podcast episodes of all time. So it's a huge treat having him back on. But we're mainly going to talk about the rise of Stalin, his background and how he came to dominate the Soviet Union. Over the next few months, you will be hearing more about Stalin's

leadership during the Second World War, decisions he made, and how much the Soviet survival and victory in the war against Germany owed to Stalin or how much of that was achieved in spite of Stalin. It's a fascinating tale. This was filmed. We're going to put this out on History Hit TV eventually when the time comes. We are making a series of films on the rise of dictators. This is going to be one of them. And you can already see we got our Hitler one up there already with some fantastic historians. So if you go to historyhit.tv, historyhit.tv, sign up to the world's best history channel. It's growing at a

terrifying pace. We are commissioning lots of new programs all the time. And you can also listen to all these episodes of the podcast without the ads on them. So you just go to historyhit.tv and listen to the episodes without any interference at all. But in the meantime, folks, here is Simon Subag Montefiore talking about the rise of Stalin. Simon Subag Montefiore talking about the rise of Stalin. Simon, thanks very much for coming on the show. If we're looking at Stalin, your books, and I'm just seeing Stalin's name on these bookshelves, where do we start? Where's the starting point for his rise to supreme power? I mean, Stalin was formed by a series of events. I mean, first of all, he was formed by his education as a priest. He learned

Russian in the seminary. He went there as the top choir boy with the most beautiful falsetto voice in the choir, which is quite a thought, isn't it? And of course, if he hadn't learned Russian, he was a Georgian, a cobbler's son from a small Georgian town, Gory. If he hadn't learned Russian and proper Russian there, he would never have been able to rule the Russian empire. So that's one key moment. I think a second key moment is when he converted to Marxism and became a master of the underground life, the conspiratorial life, as you might think, as a sort of terrorist and revolutionary. You see, most of the Bolsheviks, most of the Social Democrats, they were very good at writing articles. They were all intellectuals and noblemen. Lenin called them the tea drinkers. They were very

good at sitting in cafes and talking about themselves and correcting articles and having terrible feuds about ideology. Stalin could do that too, because he'd had this good education. But he could also have people whacked. He could arrange a strike. He could arrange an assassination. He could set up a protection racket. He was a master of espionage and clandestine activity. So he could do both things. Not many of the top Bolsheviks could do both. And that's why, you know, Lenin always said, you know, when someone said, but he's had people killed, Lenin said, that's exactly the type we need. And this is in Tsarist Russia. This is in Tsarist Russia. He went underground. He had

many, many aliases. He had lots of love affairs and abandoned everybody. He just lived for the cause. He believed with semi-Islamic fanaticism in Bolshevism, in Marxism. And these people, many of them had religious educations and they believed that Marxism was a kind of scientific religion, like an alternative religion. So those are key points. And another key point, I think, is his exile to Siberia, where... He gets caught. He gets caught many times. He escapes eight times from Siberia. But he finds himself in Siberia. I think he's happiest in Siberia,

fishing, living with the indigenous peoples out there. And then the revolution happens. And then from 17 to 1953, he's in power. Two formative things, the relationship with Lenin and the revolution, and then the civil war is another completely formative experience, because that's when the Bolsheviks, they put on leather jackets and boots and pistols, and they basically killed a lot of people. They launched a terror on Russia. And then the Russian revolution became an extremist revolution or more extremist. And in a fight for succession,

then the extremist was always going to win. And Stalin was the most extreme radical of the leadership. So when war is going on, he's fishing in Siberia? Yeah, he's actually fishing in Siberia on his own, hating all the other Bolsheviks, who are all these Russian noblemen, Jewish intellectuals, all the kind of people he hates. And he's happiest going on long shooting trips on his own. Also spending long, long days with these kind of indigenous peoples out in the middle of Siberia. And of course, also sleeping with very young girls and impregnating them. And so he's living this kind of life in isolation.

And it must have seemed like the revolution might never have happened. Where is he when the Winter Palace is stormed? The first revolution's in February and he's still out there. And he immediately leaves and comes back to St Petersburg. Lenin comes back, he meets up with Lenin. And are they close? Yeah, they're sort of weirdly close. I mean, Lenin had sort of taken it upon himself

to sort of educate Stalin in ideology and set him sort of jobs to write about nationalities and appointed him as nationalities expert. And Lenin recognises that in the Bolshevik leadership, there are only about two top effective people, and that's Trotsky and Stalin. And it's quite inconvenient that one's a Jew and one's a Georgian, because this is a Russian revolution. But nonetheless, Lenin appoints them. They are the only two people who, once they've seized power, are allowed to come into his office without any appointment. This tells you all you need to know.

But you asked about the October Revolution. And the October Revolution, by then, Stalin is in charge of Lenin's security. He's an expert at smuggling Lenin in and out of St Petersburg when they're hunting him down. And he's around during the storming of the Winter Palace. Trotsky's actually running it. Stalin has other jobs on that night. But he's one of the top five people planning everything. And as soon as they sort of get power,

like I said, you know, Lenin says, Trotsky and Stalin, they can come into my office at any time. They're my two top sort of hatchet men, henchmen. So you mentioned the sort of five of them that are planning this. The impression you get of the second Russian revolution is that the communists were a tiny, tiny little sect, and yet they managed to take over the Russian empire. So how many of them are there at this point working on the ground together in St. Petersburg? There are hardly any Bolsheviks. I mean, there's something like 10,000 or 20,000 Bolsheviks. No one's quite sure. And the actual group who are actually sort of putting it together are just a few thousand people, really. But the point is that Lenin had created this idea of a vanguard, a tiny group of people that could decide everything and represent

the proletariat. And so this suited these kind of very competent people well, people like Stalin and Trotsky, they could get things done. But you've got to realise that no one thinks of the sort of October Revolution as this kind of mythical thing, storming places and taking over everything. In fact, it was incredibly incompetent. In history. I think, who was it? Was it Napoleon who just said you have to be, yes, he said to win battles, you just have to make less mistakes than the other guy. That's what he said. And it's exactly true. The Russian Revolution proves two things. One is the importance of one man, Lenin, in getting it done, because it wouldn't have happened without Lenin. And so he really changed history at that moment. And the other thing is that they only got it done because they were less

incompetent than anybody else. I mean, power was already a power vacuum. I mean, the storming of the Winter Palace, even though the Winter Palace was only defended by a small group of women and small group of cadets and some teenagers, and the windows were open, the doors were unlocked, they still couldn't storm it. And when they did finally storm it, and Lenin was going crazy, saying, why the hell haven't we done it yet? And they said, we haven't quite got there yet. It's only about a half a mile across town. When they finally stormed it, they all got drunk on the Tsar's amazing Chateau Guillem, or whatever that amazing wine is. And they got so drunk that they passed out in the cellar. And when the fire

brigade arrived to smash the bottles, to stop them drinking it, the fire brigade got down on their knees in the cellars and drank it too. And they got drunk. And yet that was how the Winter Palace actually fell. So it was very different from the Bolshevik fantasy of a sort of heroic storming. But once they were in power, you've got to realise that there was a tiny group of people, as you said, and they had this incredibly ruthless idea of how to take power. It was like, they believed in terror, they'd studied the French Revolution, they loved the French Revolution, they saw themselves as sort of Robespierre characters. And they really believed that a small group of people could change history, improve the world, affect progress, using terror to remould society. And they really believed that and they were willing to do it. Is there a point that you

identify when Stalin sort of abandons any pretense at believing in progress and believing in improving the world and it just settles down to becoming a kind of thuggish, autocratic thief? I don't believe that ever happens, funny enough. Because I think when we were taught history at school, we were always taught that Hitler and Stalin were just madmen. And that's a very unhelpful way to look at them, actually, because if you study Hitler's rights to power, he was a superb people person who kind of won over people,

played them off against each other, won over the industrialists, won over the establishment. And in diplomacy, he was a very smooth diplomat when he wanted to be. Stalin, the same thing. I mean, he systematically organized to win power by charming people, by doing favors for people, by giving people apartments and cars, and the Communist Party, first of all. And once he was in power, he worked very hard with kind of on propaganda to promote himself in certain ways, that the man of great modesty. He persuaded everyone that he was the opposite to Trotsky.

The other alternative was Trotsky. When he was struggling for power, Trotsky was this kind of incredibly handsome, barrel-chested, marvellous sort of face with sort of a plumage of hair, who was always kind of walking around in beautiful sort of finely laundered tunics. And yet Stalin, very low key, you know, also done a lot of amazing things in the revolution, but just never showed off, didn't want to be at the centre stage, it seemed, you know, and who wasn't a very good speaker, he spoke with a strong Georgian accent. You know, he really promoted himself. So he was a brilliant people person. And when you read all the letters in the archives, with him and all the top leadership, there are thousands of these letters because it was just before telephones became totally secure and much more widely used. When

you read all these letters, which he wrote by hand for hours, you can see he's flattering them, he's charming them, he's offering them things, he's persuading them. So that's one part of it. The other thing is he always believed in Marxism. Above everything, it was politics, politics, politics. He believed in Marxism. He believed that his destiny was to be the man who made Marxism successful in the world and the heir to Marx and Lenin. And he totally believed that. He believed there was no separation between himself and A, Marxism, but B, Russia. That was the other part of his kind of persona because he was born a Georgian. It was the only time in world history

that a Georgian could become leader of Russia for various reasons because of the internationalism of Marxism and also just because of the sort of extreme situation that Russia had been destroyed, it was being rebuilt. 30 years later, 20 years later, he wouldn't have become leader. He'd have died as a tramp in Georgia, you know, as would Hitler at any other moment in history. Because all of history is just this kind of moment, isn't it?

This fusion of kind of moment, personality and opportunity. So Stalin, I think he always believed in Marxism. So Lenin's in charge there. Civil War breaks out almost immediately. What's Stalin do during the Civil War? Well, in the Civil War, he's both a huge pain to Lenin because he's constantly refused to take orders from anybody, including Lenin. He's the sort of person that never takes orders from anybody. He has to be master of everything.

But at the same time, he's extremely effective at, if you send him to a town, telling him to stop the rot, take control, find enemies, that sort of thing. He's useful at that. He goes down there, he becomes friends with the army commanders, all great enemies with them, but often friends. He creates his own coterie. He executes enormous numbers of people who may or may not be enemies. So he's actually the perfect person for this war. And it's an incredibly brutal war. I mean, something like 10 million people die in it. And what its real effect is on Russia is that it brutalises the Bolshevik party so that the people who do well, the people who get confidence, people who get power, are these really tough working class commissars. Not particularly the sort of old tea drinking intellectuals.

And so Stalin gathers around himself a kind of coterie of these really tough. And you've seen pictures of them all. They're in tunics. They're in boots up to their knees. They have pistols, you know, the leather jackets, all that sort of thing. Those are the people who now take over Russia. And they are kind of bloodied by this. And they're used to executing huge numbers of people. This becomes very useful later in the 20s when they start to collectivise and they start the terror. Stalin's terror in the 1930s, jumping ahead a little

bit, is literally like a fusion. It's like half civil war and half the strange conspiratorial world that Stalin had existed in before the revolution as an undercover conspirator who trusted no one, where everyone was a traitor, everyone was betraying everyone, everyone was talking to the secret police. You couldn't trust anybody. And those two kind of worlds fused in the terror. To go back to your original, where we started with this, you know, the formation of Stalin,

those are the things that formed him. If you listen to Dan Snow's history, we've got more on the rise of Stalin after this. Hi, I'm Susanna Lipscomb, and in my new podcast, Not Just the Tudors, I'll be talking about everything from Aztecs to witches, Belethgeth to Shakespeare, Mughal India to the Mayflower. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Subscribe to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

Subscribe to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.

What stage does the succession become an issue? Well, very soon, because there's an attempted assassination of Lenin very early on, and Lenin is then quite sort of damaged in his health. And, you know, Stalin has a very good civil war, but Trotsky has a better civil war, because Trotsky is the sort of architect of victory. And it's a fascinating story about Trotsky, because, youky because there's this guy, he's a journalist, you know, and we know about journalists in power in England at the moment. But, you know, he's literally a journalist and public speaker. And he becomes the sort of soldier, organiser of victory, which is such an unlikely story, you know, considering he's a Jewish farmer's son who turned international journalist.

But he learns how to organise not just propaganda, but actual armies and warfare. And he really wins the civil war. And so he's actually kind of got a big claim to the succession. And very quickly, 1922, Lenin starts to have strokes which become worse and worse. And as he does that, he realises that Stalin's too powerful. He's made Stalin the general secretary of the party, which is an invented job. I mean, Lenin's really head of the party, but this is the organiser. And Stalin understands that, you know, controlling politics is all about personnel. So he starts appointing his people, patronage. Russia's always been about patronage, still is, you know. So he starts to

become very powerful. And he's never too proud to go and talk to somebody, to listen to somebody, to invite them over for tea, to make an alliance. Well, on the other hand, you've got this Trotsky, this kind of framboyant Jewish president. Jews are very suspicious people to Russians. There's still a strong strain of anti-Semitism, even in the Bolshevik party, which is supposed to be so anti that sort of thing. So Stalin builds a party and Trotsky just builds his own profile and is too arrogant really to build one. And so when it comes to Lenin's death, Lenin dies knowing that Stalin has got too far ahead and that Trotsky, he tries to sort of bring back Trotsky, it's too late really. And he knows that it's going to be a fight for the succession between those two. Who does Letton want to succeed him?

No one. Because like all great leaders, Mrs Thatcher, Tony Blair, anyone else you care to mention in history, they don't think anyone's good enough to succeed them. And so they want a collective leadership. They want someone who's not going to be as important as they are, who's not going to be as great as they are, because they believe there is no one as great as they are. And so he wants a collective leadership. But instead, it's pretty inevitable he's going to get Stalin. And Stalin gradually defeats in the 20s all of the sort of different groups. And they're all hopeless politics, surprisingly, because they

spent their whole lives kind of arguing about ideology in the Bolshevik movement. They're all absolutely hopeless at standing up to him. And is it kind of palace politics? I mean, instead of outmanoeuvring them in conference rooms and things in Moscow, how does he do that? It's all sorts of different ways. I mean, in some ways, it's like personal, old-fashioned, kind of Tammany Hall machine politics. It's literally like, you're coming to Moscow.

Have you got a nice enough apartment? And then when they arrive in Moscow, he actually turns up and looks at their apartment. Is this good enough? Have you got a fridge? Oftentimes he turns up at their apartment, he talks to their wife, and he says, you don't have a fridge, I'm going to get you a general electric fridge, American fridge. That happens many times. Or have you got the right cars?

Let me get you a Packard. You know, this sort of thing. So he takes great trouble. Some of it's just machine politics. Some of it is real ideological politics. He backs Bukharin at one point against Trotsky, against Zinoviev, against the left. But actually, he's a real leftist. And in the end, he follows leftist policy. He says, this has got to be a real revolution. We've got to collectivise, we've got to industrialise. And some of it is just sort of dirty tricks. You know, it's bugging people's phones. It's tricking people, like getting Trotsky to miss Lenin's

funeral by sort of sending him the telegram too late. Any dirty tricks, he's quite happy to do anything. Partly it's just personality promotion. It's just him. You know, he's now a veteran. He's an old Bolshevik. He supports his friends too. So it's a series of things. So although he never faced an election, he definitely ran for office. He definitely ran for office, even though actually the party was quite a small electorate. But actually, it's increasing all the time. There are sort of a million members pretty quickly because it's the ruling party. Everyone wants to join. So though it's not the whole of the Russian people, it's an increasing number of people. And of course, you know, they have to control the whole population. I mean, there's

all sorts of things going on there. And so at what stage does he emerge as the uncontested ruler of the Soviet Union? Well, in December 1929, he's kind of declared the leader. But really, he's kind of been dominant, really, since before Lenin, since 1922, really, when Lenin got ill. When you look at it, it's kind of less surprising. I mean, for outsiders, it's terribly surprising because, you know, he seems such a dark horse and such an unlikely, you know, they're always more flamboyant people. But actually, they're not particularly talented. You know, everyone always said it's so remarkable that he managed to beat Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin. Actually, these are all kind of what Lenin called tea drinkers.

They're not practical politicians. And as we said earlier, you know, the whole point about Stalin was he could do everything. The whole point about Stalin was he could do everything. He had all the political talents necessary to succeed at that time and place, in that peculiar environment of the Bolshevik leadership. How do you see off Trotsky? Trotsky never really makes a real attempt to really kind of put together a full party, a full opposition. And everyone's jealous of Trotsky.

And Trotsky offends everybody. Well, at that time, Stalin was just sort of Mr. Humble, being very humble and sort of easygoing. And he seemed like a marvellous antidote to this kind of strutting Popinjay. Trotsky was the ultimate strutting Popinjay, talented. And everyone was wildly jealous of him and wanted to stop him. And you remember, he only joined the party in 1917.

He was a Menshevik. So he never really got a huge faction behind him with any depth. And so he was actually very vulnerable. And he just refused to sort of fight too. He really refused to fight. In the end, they just voted him out as war commissar. So I think the struggles with the opposition are kind of exaggerated by the West, where we kind of think, what an outrage that this brute managed to outmanoeuvre all these brilliant intellectuals. But actually, they weren't brilliant. They were kind of tedious, you know, Marxist ideologues. And, you know, he outmanoeuvred them easily. So after he's named in 1929, the Terror, is that about his own grip on power? Or is that about

him organising the Soviet Union the way that he wished it to be organised? Well, it's both. I mean, first of all, he says this is a Marxist revolution. We've got to have a Marxist resolution in the country as well. So he organises collectivisation, which is really a war on the peasantry. And they don't care who dies. They send people from the towns, like armed people who look for grain, try and destroy kind of better off peasants, the kulaks. And they form these huge collective farms, which are actually extremely inefficient. But nonetheless, they do it. And it's a kind of war on the countryside. Peasants who resist, peasants who destroy their own grain and stuff, they just let them starve. 10 million people die. And if anyone else had been in power,

I think the Soviet Union would have broken up. But in 1932, Stalin held it together. And then there was industrialization. And this too is remarkable. You think in World War II, in 1942, you know, when you think of Russia as in complete collapse, actually outproduced Germany completely. So what they did, the costs were unacceptable, the death toll, the terror, everything was horrible, the numbers, 20 million people, something like that. But what they achieved was astonishingly effective. But the terror in the 30s was the sequel to collectivisation because during the pressure of collectivisation, he saw that many of the Bolsheviks didn't have the nerve, didn't quite support him, resented him. And so he decided that he would destroy them systematically. And he

was inspired very much by history, because Ivan the Terrible did exactly that with his nobility. And Stalin felt they'd become a new nobility. So he just launched this terror. And its aim was just to find traitors, find enemies, even if they were potential enemies, which is quite a strange thing. You kill people because they could be an enemy. But they literally said, I think it was Yezhov, who was Stalin's kind of the poison dwarf in charge of the secret police at the height of the terror. He said, it doesn't matter if we kill 10,000 innocent people if we get one enemy. And so they basically did that. And it's the most terrifying story. And is it about Stalin's personality? Definitely. I mean, there would have been mass killings under Trotsky, but it wouldn't have taken the bizarre form that it took. That was a product

of Stalin's personal nature. But did it work? It worked to a certain extent, because its aim was to make sure that if there was a war or another mega crisis, that the Bolshevik leadership would be loyal to Stalin and his leadership. And when it happened in 1941, there was not a whisper. No one resisted, you know. And actually during the war, everyone obeyed Stalin completely. And despite, I think he lost sort of six million men in the first year and a half of the war. I mean, no other leader in history could have survived

such disastrous, catastrophic losses in a war. But no one dared confront Stalin. And so he got away with it and then learnt to be quite an effective commander-in-chief. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union would rather die refusing to retreat against the Wehrmacht than deal with reporting back to Stalin that they disobeyed orders or... Another thing comes into play, of course, and that's Mother Russia and the patriotism. In Russia, there's this strong patriotism. Stalin, this Georgian internationalist, becomes, A, a Marxist, but his other identity is

the leader of Russia. And remember, now he has a Russian name, Stalin, and he's not called Dugashvili anymore. And though he has this strong Georgian accent and he still likes Georgian food and Georgian singing and all those kind of things in his private life, actually, he identifies himself as a Russian because they are the big empire, they're the big people of history in his part of the world. And he becomes a Tsar as well. And he talks a lot about this.

It isn't just a sort of riverless comparison. He constantly talks about what Tsars did. He talks about how the Russian people need a Tsar. He talks about how he's going to be that Tsar. And so he promotes himself in the great succession of successful Russian Tsars, as in sort of Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible, who actually wasn't successful, but who killed a lot of people to get his way. So he really identifies himself as pontiff of Marxism, but also as Russian, Russian leader. That's a very powerful combination. Is rule ever questioned again

after he decimates the Soviet Communist Party, fights his way through the Second World War? Is there ever a point when his rule is threatened? Well, I mean, there's one moment just at the end of June and beginning of July 1941, where, you know, having staked his entire reputation on the fact that Hitler would not invade now, despite overwhelming intelligence that he would do. I mean, that's really the biggest mistake of his life. And again, no other ruler but him would have survived it. And he survived it because he'd killed everybody. But I mean, it was a colossal mistake to be surprised like that by Hitler. I mean, he'd applied a rational approach to Hitler. He'd studied history. And he thought that Hitler was a kind of Bismarck character who would follow sensible rules of statesmen. He didn't realise, this was a huge mistake,

he didn't realise that Hitler was what Hitler called a sleepwalker, the biggest gambler in all of history. And so he was surprised. And after sort of a few days of just growing disasters, when Minsk fell, then Smolensk, he lost his nerve. There's a famous scene where he goes into the military headquarters and he looks at the maps and he says, what's going on here? And no one knows what's going on here. And even General Zhukov bursts into tears and runs out of the room. And Zhukov is like the toughest man that's ever been made. He's virtually hewn out of granite. So for him to actually burst into tears, you can see that things are pretty desperate. And then Stalin just looks at everyone, everyone's silent. And then he just walks out and he drives

back to his dacha, his country house. And then he sits there for a few days. I mean, in one way, he's testing people to see if they rebel. He'll crush them if they do. But I think he also did have a crisis, not quite a breakdown, but just a crisis of sort of needed to gather himself. And then, of course, the leadership go out and say, please come back. And there's that famous moment when they go in there and he's sitting there. And Mikoyan says he looks in his face and he thinks like Stalin's expecting them to arrest him. But instead, they say, will you come back as Supreme Commander in Chief and run the war? And he immediately says yes and comes back. And from then on, he's in total charge all the way to Berlin. And as for Berlin, you know, he looked at Russian history all the time. He always said when Avril Harriman, the US ambassador or envoy, said to him, like, congratulations, General Islamist Stalin, you've taken Berlin. He said yes. But Alexander I took Paris.

I love that. I love that quote. And why didn't they arrest him? Because they were so hollowed out, they were so beaten down and traumatised by the terror that they didn't dare to talk to each other, whisper it to each other. Well, one of the advantages of having a terror is that you kill the strong people, all the tall poppies you cut down. You know, also that when you have a government of very, very weak people, weak and useless people,

the whole point of that is that they don't conspire against you. I feel they have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, the whole point of that is that they don't conspire against you so on that rather depressing note we're going to leave this conversation with simon sebag montefiore right there takes us up to the the Second World War. We'll, of course, have future podcasts on which we talk about Stalin's wartime leadership throughout the rest of this year and into next year to mark the 80th anniversary of some of the most titanic clashes of the Second World War. Simon has obviously written lots of wonderful books,

Young Stalin in particular, Court of the Red Tsar. You can't go wrong with any of those. Thanks for listening, folks. Thanks, folks. You've met the end of another episode. Congratulations. Well done, you. I hope you're not fast asleep.

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Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.