Empire: World History - 396. Stalin: The Bolshevik Revolution (Part 2)

Episode Date: September 16, 2026

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

This episode is brought to you by our friend Plaud, the world's number one AI note-taker brand. Now, when it comes to research, we all have our own methods sitting for hours in the archive, reading the secondary works, capturing every detail, grilling top scholars. But often we have to lose material in order to remain engaged when doing an interview. We've all been there sitting there with our notes, missing half the vital bits of conversation. and that no longer need happen ever again. Because now you just put Plaud on your collar and bingo. It records everything you say and transcribes it into sensible action points that you can refer to afterwards.

I only picked up Plaud a few weeks ago and already it's changing the way that I work. With One Press, the device transcribes those real conversations and turns them into clear actions. It also has a brilliant feature called Ask Plaud, which calls up details of hazy, long gone conversations. in seconds. Empire listeners can go to UK.plaud.aI.4-E-E-I-F-E-E-I-Fourd. That's UK. Pl-A-U-D.org-A-I-Fourd and use the promo code Empire to get 10% off any Plaud device. From the Russian Civil War in 1918 to Lenin's death in 1924, this is the story of how Joseph Stalin went from brutal subordinate to master of the party machine. the Bolsheviks had only just seized power when the country collapsed into a conflict that pitted Russian

against Russian. Why did the revolution descend into civil war? And how did Stalin position himself as Lenin's successor? Even after Lenin rebuked him and called for his removal. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnindh. And me, William Durhampool. Now, last time we left Stalin in 1917 and he was, do you remember, a rather unimpressive man, the man nobody noticed in the room, a poor orator, a plodding theorist, nobody's idea of the next dictator. And we are, I'm delighted to say, joined by Giles Milton, friend of the show, an author of the Stalin affair, the Impossible Alliance, that won the war, to discuss Stalin's rise in the shadow of Lenin. And at Giles, I just want to know, were we unfair, you know, describing him as sort of like a lackluster bean counter pre-1917? No, I think you are absolutely right.

He very rarely appeared in public as well, was not known generally in Russia, hated public speaking because he had quite a thick Georgian accent. And so, no, I think he was unremarkable. And who could have predicted the future that is about to unfold for him? And we'll look at why and how that might have come about, and whether it was his force of personality, whether he got lucky or what it was. Charles, just sketch for us the start of the Civil War. I'm so full of it at the moment, having just watched Dr. Chavago for the 15th time. So I have a very clear sort of fictional version of it in my head. Give us the facts. What should we be thinking of when we think of the start of the Civil War? What caused Russian to turn on Russian in 1918? Well, Lenin and his revolutionary Bolsheviks have seized power, the Russian Revolution. And they've seized power in Petrograd, now St. Petersburg, in Moscow. and in various towns and cities across the country,

but the whole country is by no means with them at all. There are still very, very powerful forces, which we now call white Russians and the white Russian armies, who absolutely detested this revolutionary new regime, and we're prepared to do absolutely anything they could do to crush it. And on paper, they were very powerful. They had some of the leading generals from the First World War. They had big armies.

And crucially, they also had the sort of, support of quite a number of the Western powers. Many people forget this now, but Britain, France, America, Japan were all throwing their weight behind the white Russian armies to try and snuff out Lenin, Stalin and his new regime before they got too powerful. Giles, just to give a picture of who they are, are they all monarchists in the old establishment or are they a whole mixture of other people too who don't like the look of the Bolsheviks? And just adding to that, I mean, can you say, look, one side is more ruffian than the other. One side is intellectual, and the other side is anti-intellectual. I mean, is any of that rearing its head in the white-red split? I mean,

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

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

this alliance, because Churchill had been one of the people back in 1919 who tried to get rid of Stalin, Trotsky, Lenin and the rest of them in the red in the red movement. The civil war that followed, let's talk about that for a little while now, because the Bolsheviks do emerge victorious. It is at an enormous human cost that they do. I mean, you know, and you have all of this spedrock is laid for what Russia is going to experience, the Soviet Union is going to experience for decades to come, violence, secrecy, political repression, recrimination, you know, sending people off to gulags, that kind of thing. Now, when it comes to the Civil War's great battlefield commanders, was Stalin one of them? No, he was not, very much not so.

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

And his role was to make sure everyone on the red side in the Red Army was politically correct, if you like, is following the revolutionary tenets. And he proved himself exceptionally good and brutal in this role. Anyone who stepped out of line was likely to be tortured and then executed. Peasantry who didn't obey his orders would be summarily executed. Their farms would be burnt. Entire villages would be burnt. this was a brutal time for Russians across the old Russian Empire.

But it also gives us the first signs of a Stalin we haven't necessarily seen before prepared to use absolute brutality against his own people if it serves his own ends. And also you've got now a rivalry that is established. In the last episode we talked about Trotsky really baiting Stalin, saying, you know, where were you during the revolution? Oh, somewhere counting paper clips. you know, that kind of taunting. And so these clashes now with Trotsky, he's got muscle now to be a real threat to Trotsky

because, you know, he has the power to take out enemies of the ideology. He does, but he has a formidable enemy as well, because Trotsky is also politically shrewd. He's powerful. Remember, he's leading a victorious Red Army. And so, yeah, well, this sets the ground, really, for what is going to be a great battle for supremacy between Trotsky on one hand and Stalin on the other. Where does Lenin sit in the rivalry? Does he rate both men or does he lean towards one or other? Well, I think in these early days, he realizes that both men have their uses,

and therefore he's going to use them for their respective purposes. I mean, Stalin often gets accused of setting up at this period the architecture of what is going to become the sort of hallmarks of the repressive Soviet regime. So people might be familiar with the Chequer. The Czechor was the secret police, which would then become the much more familiar, KGB. There would be the forced labor camps, to be, you know, the one-party state that was set up. And everyone sort of nowadays says, well, this was Stalin who set this up while he was acting as political commissar during the Civil War.

But this, I think, shows a complete misunderstanding, actually, of Lenin's role, because it was Lenin who set up the architecture. and it was Stalin who then exploited it for his own political, you know, fortunes and future. So the Checker, of course, is a very interesting organisation because it will become the absolute sort of benchmark of state brutality, listening in on people, arresting them, torturing them and executing them. I think it's really important what you've just said because, you know, in our retrospective history, it's often said, you know, actually Stalin was the corrupting influence. It was Stalin who brought the terror. It was Stalin who did all of these things. But you're saying the architecture was actually a lead-in bequest.

Brutality, though, is associated with Stalin because of his conduct as a civil war commander. Can you give us some of the things he did? And I'm particularly interested in what he did in Soretzhen, which would later take his name. Yeah, Tsaretsin was one of the big battles that took place in the Civil War. This was really, Trotsky was his fingerprints were all over this, partly because he, appointed a general called Snezarev, General Snezarev, who was, had been

serving in the Imperial Tsarist army. Now, this was something, a hallmark of Trotsky's running of the Red Army, is that he was completely prepared to use army officers and generals who'd fought under the Tsar and proved their worth and prove themselves to be capable commanders.

And this threw him into a direct clash with actually both Lenin and Stalin, but particularly Stalin. And this was particularly the case at this Battle of Tsarin, where the commander was this imperialist, czarist general, who Stalin, as political commissar, has arrested with all his junior officers and puts them, imprisons them on a barge in the Volga River. This is quite extraordinary, you know, he's only a political commissar, and he's arresting a senior general conducting a battle on the battlefront. Why did he do this? Well,

the argument is that he wants to dispose of this general. and his officers, it is said that he's actually, his intention is to sink that boat in the Volga and send them all to a watery grave. He doesn't get to do that because Trotsky learns of what's happened is absolutely furious with Stalin and orders that this general is immediately released. And so if you like, this is round one in the battle between Trotsky and Stalin, and it is a resounding victory for Trotsky. He gets his way. What are the instruments at both their hands? Stalin has the checker and Trotsky And Trotsky has the Red Army?

What are the instruments they can use against each other? Yeah, essentially, it's army against the state organ, the Chequer, which is, as I said, ruthless at oppressing its own people. One is master of the army, one is master of the Chequer. And of course, Stalin very close to Felix Jezinski, who founded and ran the Chequer at this period. One little thing, which I think is quite interesting, I think in episode one, you mentioned Stalin statues being resurrected,

around Russia and Putin is rehabilitating Stalin. Well, astonishingly, Felix Zhizinsky, whose statue was removed when the Soviet Union collapsed, his statue has just been resurrected again in Moscow as well. This was a brutal, extremely unpleasant, malevolent political schema, who now has his statue re-erected in the heart of Moscow. Just up Putin's street. But it is interesting that Putin is using these figures from this period. you know, and resurrecting them?

Well, not all of them, because Trotsky isn't making a reappearance. And actually, what's really interesting at this time with power struggle between Stalin and Trotsky is that both of them keep running to Daddy, Daddy being Lenin. So, I mean, there's this wonderful letter from Stalin to Lenin complaining about Trotsky. I'll just quote a bit of it. I ask you in time, while it's still not too late, to remove Trotsky and fix him within a framework since I'm afraid Trotsky's unhinged commands, if they're repeated, will create dissension between the army and the command staff and will totally destroy the front.

I'm not a lover of clamors and scandals. But I feel if we don't immediately produce rains to constrain Trotsky, he'll ruin this whole army of ours. And they're both belly aching to Lenin about each other. And I have to say here, Stalin has a point. There was a real fear that Trotsky, who thought very highly of himself, he was a very commanding, imperious presence. There was a real fear that with these old Russian generals who are generally pretty competent,

that he'd set himself up as a new Napoleon Bonaparte. You know, that actually he'd kick out the Bolsheviks. He'd get rid of Stalin and Lenin and actually would set up his own personal dictatorship. So you can see that when Stalin says this, well, of course, Stalin has a huge grudge against Trotsky, but he's not without reason, perhaps. Charles, on a human level, I always have the impression that Trotsky would be someone you'd prefer to have to dinner to Lenin and Stalin would be poisonous company. Is that right, or were they all pretty tricky characters

that you'd really want to keep out the house if you could? Well, here's the thing. I think that's a misreading of these people, actually. I read a great deal of the letters and diaries of the Allied commander sent to work alongside Stalin during the Second World War. And they said the one difficulty they had with Stalin is that on the one hand, they knew he was a monstrous tyrant

who'd liquidated millions of his own subjects. And yet, when you say, down and had dinner with him. He was garrulous. He was gregarious. He was charming. He told jokes. He was witty. And they all said they simply couldn't square the circle of this monstrous dictator. They were sitting opposite who they were nevertheless sharing jokes with and having toasted with glasses of wine and vodka. Yeah, I mean, we'll see a bit of this when we get to the Yalta. I mean, we did a whole series on the Yalta conference and how, you know, he utterly convinced Roosevelt so that he was Uncle Joe, a man you could do business with. He charmed him, yeah. But we're not, we're not there yet. Let's go back.

back to this sort of love, hate triangle, if I could put it that way, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. Despite Stalin, you know, trying to stab him in the back, Lenin doesn't bin Trotsky, but he doesn't discipline Stalin either. Is that weakness, or is that actually Machiavelli, and that as long as they're fighting each other, they won't remove me? What is the thinking here? Playing his underlings against each other. Yeah, I don't think it's weakness.

None of these people have many weaknesses. I think Lenin is doing this quite deliberately. he's keeping them at each other's throats because it perfectly serves his purpose, I'm sure. Which would be to stay in power rather than or just have them competing with each other. I think this is for Lenin to keep himself in power, but also I think he genuinely mistrusts both Trotsky and Stalin.

And so, you know, to have them both at each other's throats is quite a useful way of keeping, you know, it's like keeping them in their place. Lenin was extremely politically shrewd at doing this, And I'm sure that's what he's doing here. Also, I mean, there are some, I mean, there's not much that's funny in the very bleak doings of Stalin. But one of the things I was quite amused that he did used to do is when he threw his toys out of the pram, he would always threaten to resign. So, you know, when he didn't get his way in Zaretsin and, you know, wasn't, you know, given the go-ahead to liquidate Trotsky, he just says, all right, I'm going then.

And this is a letter by him, Stalin, saying, without this, my work on the Southern Front will become pointless and unnecessary, which gives me the right or duty the duty to move away anywhere, to the devil even, rather than stay on the Southern Front. So he's a great flouncer, which is not anything that I really put together with his personality later in life. Yeah, he constantly has these sort of hissy fits, you know. And the Politburo sort of reads a letter wearily and says, no, Joseph, stay on. We love you. We all love you. But yeah, it's a peculiar aspect to his personality. It should be said,

one thing that is kind of interesting from outside of Russia is, of course, the West knew very, very little about Stalin. We mentioned earlier he never gave public speeches. He was never seen in public or very little anyway. And so the West was actually determined to try and find out more about this new powerful figure emerging in Russia and what is about to become the Soviet Union. This was to have a profound effect in England, because England, during the First World War, had founded the Secret Intelligence Service, which was going to be wound down in 1918, because they said, well, the war's over, we don't need this thing anymore. The chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, who was a man named Mansfield Coming,

he said, hold on a minute. I've got some fluent Russian speakers who could go into Russia and find out more about this new regime, bring back intelligence on Stalin, on Trotsky, on these people. He sent in a team of spies who, who... were quite brilliant at what they did. And some listeners will surely remember Riley Ace of Spies, an old TV series about Sidney Riley, who was one of the spies sent in during the Civil War. Another one was Paul Dukes, the only British spy ever to be knighted for espionage. These people were sent in to try and work out who these strange and dangerous new revolutionaries

were and what they intended, where they really intent on fermenting world revolution, were they really intent on bringing down the democracies of the West, or were they simply trying to take control of their own country? And we have this wonderful story at this period from Bob's services Stalin biography of Stalin's incredible impatience about the boots. Do you know that story? Yeah, that's extraordinary.

This is when he's in Saritzin. Incidentally, I should, in sort of parentheses, I should say that Staritzin, this moment where Stalin tries to arrest all of Trotsky's most faithful officers. This becomes, in the story told by Stalin itself, it becomes one of the great battles in the Civil War, of which he is in the front line of it. And of course, Saritzin will later be named the city of Stalingrad. So he really takes control of this story. He dominates the narrative and makes it all about him. But while he's in Saritzin,

yes, he goes, he wants some more boots made and he goes to a bootmaker. And he says, I need some more boots. How long will they take? And the bootmaker sort of looks at, oh, gosh, it's going to take me about five days to make a nice pair of boots for you. And Stalin is pure as he said, I can't believe you're saying that. My old, dear old father could make two pairs of boots in a day, which actually surely has to be completely untrue. His father was a total alcoholic who probably couldn't make a boot in a month, you know. But it does give an idea that when Stalin wanted something done, he was absolutely determined that everyone should run around and do it for him.

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

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So, Jals, we need to know a little bit more about Starlin's love life at this point. Yes. We had his rather disastrous early marriage, Eccatharina, in the last episode. Tell us about his new love, Nadia. And there's quite an age gap, isn't there? Yes, his new love, Nadajda, as she is, Allelieuieva, universally known as Nadia, was much, much younger than Stalin. In fact, they met when she was only about 15 or 16, although she'd known him before that,

because Stalin had been a regular visitor to the household. Remember, Stalin was on the run for many years. He was in and out of prison camps for being a political troublemaker. And whenever he escaped, which he did quite a number of times, actually, or was released, he tended to end up the Alleluieva family. So the daughter of the Aleyueva family, who's called Nadia, absolutely adored Stalin. He was good looking, he was, in her eyes, witty. She laughed at all his jokes.

And rather exciting, escaping from prison camps and turning up in the middle of the night. I mean, that's got a certain touch of cloak and dagger about it. However, if you look at pictures of them together, you know, in those early days when he went to go and sort of stuff, they don't look right, do they? A much older man sort of, you know, with this, you know, this is one of hiding out at the home of her father. it just looks all wrong. Nevertheless, okay, you know, she falls in love. It maybe looks all wrong because she's actually only 16 years old. She's a teenager. Okay, maybe that was slightly more acceptable in that day and age. But nevertheless, within a couple of years, they're essentially living as a couple as husband and wife, although there's no record of their marriage at that time.

And we believe they got married several years later. But they're married. And I think right from the beginning, this is probably going to be, we could see it's going to be a troubled relationship. Because Stalin, it would seem, wanted a rather submissive wife who was going to do the shopping, do the cooking, the washing up, clean the household, and leave it at that. Nadia was much more ambitious. She was very intelligent. And she wants to get involved in this exciting revolution that's taking place. She wanted to work in confidential roles. She wanted to work on telegrams. And actually, she would end up getting a job working for Lenin in his secretariat. And I think this didn't quite fit with Stalin's vision for this domestic wife doing all the chores at home. And I think this, from the very outset, this caused big problems in their relationship. It is said that Stalin first noticed her because she was tidy.

He liked the way she tidied up around the home. And, you know, that's what really charmed him, whereas, you know, it's all his uniform boots and all his heroism. For him, it was she could be Mrs. McGins at home. Was she capable of talking him down? Could she make him do what she wanted, or was he very much a dominant older man? Well, he was a dominant older man, but she was extremely headstrong and she spoke her own mind. I'm not sure how that would have gone down in the Stalin household. And actually, you know what?

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

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

about life with a monstrous father and an unhinged mother. Really fascinating stuff. But, you know, on the face of it, the Stalin household is relatively functional. They have their dacha outside Moscow. They would go there on summer evenings and they'd go and eat there, picnic there. All their friends would come around. They'd drink. They'd have fun.

They'd have barbecues, what have you. And it seems like quite a normal household if you just stepped into it, you know, briefly. And, you know, people drop in. Vorosheelov, who's going to become a loyal supporter of Stalin. He's often there. Other commissars or men who will become commissars also go there and spend their evenings there.

And they also adopt a young lad whose father has been killed in the civil war, or it was killed in a praying crash, actually, I think. And so, you know, on the face of it, this is quite a convivial, gregarious household in which to grow up in. But as Spetlana will reveal many years later, there are all sorts of very troubling, dark undercurrents taking place. Again, we'll get into that in the next episode. But what we do know is that the front looks pretty good, as you say, you know, nice dash. and I know how much Willie likes Adashah, but, you know, glam young wife, you know, kids, growing family, all of that kind of thing. And then in April 1922, Stalin is appointed General Secretary. Now, that carries a great deal of weight today, General Secretary of the Communist Party's of, you know, normally coincides of being, you know, the president of the country or something very high up. Back then, though, it was very much a functional description and it was sort of grindy work that he was expected to do. Yes, I mean, it was a little bit more than licking stamps and, you know, putting addresses on envelopes. But, stenographer.

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

Well, now I've got an extremely good opportunity to fill the party with all my supporters and champions. And that's going to leave me in great stead when Lenin finally, you know, shuffles off. You mentioned that Lenin is now getting older and we're heading towards a world where Lenin won't be at the helm anymore. What happens to the relationship of those two men at this period? Because it starts off quite friendly. I mean, he's the kind of person who opens a bottle of wine every time Stalin comes to visit. But it goes really wrong, doesn't it? It really does go wrong.

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

And the problem is exacerbated or Stalin exacerbates his own chances or ruins his own chances, really, when he starts insulting Nadia, which is Lenin's own wife. I think this is actually one of the most interesting things, which is how Stalin is pretty tone deaf and doesn't read a room properly, because Nadia Krupskaya is the love of Lenin's life. He respects her, you know, she's sort of the mother of the party. And he pretty much treats her like crap. Tell us about the actual incident that kind of ruins things and how his failure to apologize destroys that relationship. Yeah, it's an incredible apology letter. What happens is that Stalin cools up the Lenin household. Lenin is very, very

sick by this point. And he speaks to Nadia. And he accuses her of discussing politics with Lenin as he's on his deathbed, says this is an unforgivable thing to do. It's completely outrageous. Really attacks her. And of course, she goes straight back to her darling Lenin and tells him what's happened. And Lenin is absolutely furious. As you say, he's very, very close to his wife and is appalled and disgusted at what Stalin has done. And he insists that Stalin writes a letter of an apology. And the letter is, it's like brilliant because it's one of those letters where you say sorry by not saying sorry. He sort of says, well, you know, if you think I offended her, well, then I suppose I'm sorry, but I don't think I actually did. So there's nothing really to be apologetic about, you know, fantastic.

And of course, this hardly assuages Lenin, who remains completely furious with Stalin. So after that spectacular, sorry not sorry, Lenin now has got very little time for Stalin. and he writes actually this in 1923 on the 4th of January, this sort of pen portrait of Stalin, which tells you what he's thinking. Stalin is too crude. And with this defect, which is wholly bearable inside our media and in relations among ourselves, it becomes intolerable in the post of General Secretary. I therefore make a proposal for comrades to think of a way to remove Stalin

and in his place appoint someone else. Now, that's a big deal because for ages, you know, they've tolerated Stalin, they've kept him in position because he balances out Trotsky, but this seems to be the first time he's saying, get rid of him. He was rude to my wife. Get rid of him. Yes, he was rude to my wife. This is extraordinary. But I think draw your attention to the very last words you read of the quote there. In his place appoint someone else. He could have so easily said in his place appoint Trotsky, but he doesn't. Because the fact is, by this point, he also missed trust Trotsky. He doesn't know what Trotsky will do if he takes over from Lenin.

What are his worries, Giles? What does he think Trotsky might do? I think he thinks he will betray the revolution. He'll take his own path. The too many ex-arists turning up. Too many ex-saris. And, you know, I think he's got a reason why he distrust Trotsky. Trotsky likes his old uniforms. He likes, you know, hobnobbing with these rather grand old generals. And so I think Lenin is genuinely worried that. this could go badly wrong in the aftermath of his death. So what happens when that letter is delivered? It is sent, isn't it?

It is sent, yeah. And Stalin, well, no one acts on it. Because the problem is, by this point, you know, Stalin has been general secretary for a number of years by this point. He's pulled in all his champions and supporters and place him in positions of power. So he's become kind of too powerful to be remembered. removed. And so we're left, as Lenin is sort of choking on his deathbed and about to expire,

we're left with two very powerful figures, each of which is very, very keen to become the new leader of the Soviet Union. Lenin suffers this stroke, which is catastrophic, it ends his political life. And then 10 days later, that's it for Lenin. And his wife, Nadia Krupskaya, has one of the most telling lines, I think, in the Stalin's story. She says, had Lenin, her husband not died in 1924, he would be serving time in one of Stalin's prisons. Because she saw the writing on the wall that actually, you know, Stalin had it in for Lenin and his rise to the top. And as you say, unremovable, even though the great leader says, I want him gone as general secretary, he would have put him in a gulag had he not been so ill. Do you think that's true, Giles?

Would he have done that? I think there's every chance he would have done because Stalin was absolutely remorseless when he was confronting people he thought were not on his side. And I'd like to draw attention to another thing he did that disgusted Nadia, the grieving widow, all she wanted was for Lenin to be buried.

She wanted to have a simple burial, you know, and what Stalin decides, oh no, we're not going to have a burial, what we're going to do is embalm him and preserve him forever and put him on display in Moscow. go. And so, you know, within hours of Lenin dying, they start draining the fluids from his body. I mean, this is a really sort of, you know, nasty process. They take out his organs.

Instead, they lose his heart. His heart was never found again. Is this the kind of thing that they do in Russia at this point? It sounds more like H.D. Do you know what? I think what Stalin was looking back to his early life where he was training to become a priest in the Orthodox Church. The Orthodox Church, of course, venerates relics of saints, particularly bodily remains of saints. And I think Stalin was tapping into this cultural and religious tradition of the Orthodox Church to turn Lenin into a relic. And of course, Stalin would come back to this in the Second World War where suddenly he allows all the churches to be reopened as he rediscovered holy patriotic Russia to try and bring the country behind him

in the fight against Nazi Germany. So I think this was Stalin thinking, this is a good way, this is a good thing to do with Lenin's body. Can I give you a really genuinely awful, macabre, little morsel to go with your story of embalming and upsetting Kripskaya, is the fact that they found an institute of the brain, specifically to slice and study Lenin's brain tissue, to hunt for the physical roots of his genius? Isn't that, I mean, just an extraordinary thing? I can add a little bit more grim detail to that, actually. His brain, they thought that Lenin was a genius and they wanted to discover the source of this genius, they sliced his brain into 30,000 wafer thin segments. They used a machine a bit like, you know, when you get

Parma ham in the shops and everything, they slice it. They did that with Lenin's brain and then they put them between plates of glass. And they brought in a German neurologist called Oscar Voigt, whose task was to study Lenin's brain and find out the root source of his genius. And he spent years looking at these through, you know, through Microsoft. and he wrote a 14-volume account of Lenin's brain. Unfortunately, he didn't find anything particularly different about his brain from anyone else's. No signs of this supposed genius. Have either of you seen embalmed Lenin?

Yes, I have. I have too. Yeah, it's not lovely, actually, is it? It's very weird. You queue up and there's all these guards and all their uniforms standing, you know, very erect and everything. And then you file in, file past this sort of slightly. yellowing, parchmenty, slightly mouldy. I thought he looked sort of plastic.

I thought he had a really shiny dome. And he looked really very plastic and not human at all. Look like some sort of mannequin rather than, you know, an embalmed once human. Well, you clearly saw him on a good day. I caught him on a bad day. You know, he was looking a bit mouldy. There were sort of bits of specks of black on his forehead when I saw him. So they must have cleaned him up for you.

It's a very odd thing to go and see. Actually, Boris Yeltsin wanted to get rid of Lenin. He said that, you know, he's done his time. I think we should bury him now. But there was never the sort of political willpower, even in the disintegrating Soviet Union, to put Lenin to bed. And so there he remains,

and I can't see Putin getting rid of him either. I've got a question, Jars. We're heading now to the moment where Stalin is going to seize power. Is it still an issue that he's from Georgia? because we established very much in the first episode that in the Tsarist system, if you are from Poland or from Georgia, from the extremities of the empire, you are effectively a second-class citizen. The new Soviet Republic is different and has a different attitude to the nationalities. But nonetheless, this is a man with a very strong Georgian accent.

Russian is still very much his second language. Is there any sense that he's an outsider who people are suspicious of? Or has he now been so much at the centre of things that he is the establishment? I think this is very interesting because when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were set up in 1922, there was a great debate about how power would be shared between all the various republics, you know. And Lenin, his idea was that they should have a sort of equal power base. So they would be run almost along democratic lines, if you like,

that they'd each have a say in the running of this great, effectively an empire. Stalin said, no, Russia should be the dominant partner in all of this. So this is quite unusual and unexpected that Stalin, as you say, a Georgian, says, no, it's Russia first. Who was writing patriotic poetry to his great homeland as a young man? He was, but he nevertheless, I think he saw it was in his interest, certainly politically, to champion Russia in the formation of this new great, great state, if you like. But you're right, he was Georgian through and through. This is one of the reasons why he hated making public speeches was because he spoke

with a very strong Georgian accent. And in fact, perhaps the biggest crisis point of his entire time in power came when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. This is a time, surely you'd expect the leader of the country to make an address to the nation. Stalin didn't do it because he didn't like speaking with his Georgian accent and he made Molotov, his foreign commissar, addressed the nation. Really? Yeah, very interesting.

He was always conscious that he wasn't a full-blooded Russian by any stretch of the imagination. Look, we're going to end it here. So look, just keeping your mind this funeral that wasn't wanted by the widow of Lenin, that Stalin has kind of bulldozed his way through. One little thing that we haven't added to that is that he has a really dirty trick that he plays on Trotsky. He tells him the wrong dates for the funeral. So Trotsky doesn't end up going to the funeral and, you know, it's livid about this because he's been shut out of this sort of last respects to the great leader. And we are going to take a closer look at Trotsky in the next episode,

how he rose, how he falls out even more spectacularly with Stalin, and how eventually thousands of miles away in Mexico, Stalin finally gets the last word. And now, if you cannot hold yourself back from second and third courses, head to Empirpoduk.com using the link in the episode description to join today. Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnand. And goodbye from me, William Dhrimple.