Empire: World History - 72. The Russian Empire and the Great Game

Episode Date: August 15, 2023

The story of the Russian Empire spans centuries and continents. It is one of tsars and revolutionaries. Sex and power. Invasions and conquests. In the new season, William and Anita will explore the roots, deeds, and legacy of one the largest empires to ever exist. From the first Russian invasion of Ukraine, to the birth of Asian nationalism, with the original retreat from Kabul in between; this will leave you stunned. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/empirepod. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport + Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mparpoduk.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Durimple. It's exciting day there, isn't it? It is exciting. It is exciting.

It's like a new day at school, isn't it? New term. New term. That's right. And outside, it's a whole new season. When we last talked, it was meant to be summer. Now we've got definitely autumn blowing in. I'm in Scotland looking outside the window.

Yes. Can I just remind you, your window is actually the Darth Vader of podcast. Because if you continue to look out your window, what it does is it means, William. I know you're new to this podcast thing. We've only done 100 million episodes. But when you do look out of your window, William, it's your ear that talks to the microphone. Yes, I've got a very beautiful view today, is what I was trying to say. And looking out on the right, putting my ear to the microphone, ignoring all that's happened before.

It's definitely autumn. It's gone. The summer is no more. Well, let's see. Fingers crossed. Fingers crossed, it brightens up. Look, I know you've been literally exploding to give away the big secret. I've been trying on several occasions to give away our secret.

I mean, I literally had to drop a wardrobe on you to see. stop you from doing this on a number of occasions. It's twice that. But shall we? What is the new series of Empire about? So what we thought we'd do? And actually this was Anita's brilliant idea that came in the summer. As the politics hotted up in that part of the world, we thought it was time to turn

our attention to Russia. And the Russian Empire. Well, I mean, it's all that's been in the news of late. And rumour has it, you've got another job somewhere doing. In another parish. I do a little broadcasting on the side, ladies and gentlemen. But it has, you know, the news agenda has been dominated by Russia, by what's going on in Ukraine. So it seemed to us really quite sensible to have a look and try and make sense of why this is happening and where this all stems from.

we know that you like this because when we did things on the Middle East and the Sykes-Pico line and the Baltha Declaration, we had just, we were inundated with people saying, ah, that's what that was all about. Okay, right, we get that. So in this series, what we're hoping to do is give you an idea of what goes on behind the mindset, perhaps, of the Kremlin today and how it reaches back into a past that. I was going to say it's from Russia with love, but it isn't. It's Russia with love, guts, gore, blood. You know, if you were into the gouging and a stabbing and exploding of the Coen-Nor series, fasten your seatbelts, ladies and gentlemen. That was a trip to Disney World in many respects compared to what we've got for you in the next few weeks. What I think is interesting about the Russian Empire is because it's contiguous with Russia in the way that, say, the British Empire was not, or the French Empire was not. it's very easy to forget for much of Russian history that it is an empire at all, but it was, in fact, one of the great empires of history. And between the 17th century and the 20th, if you count the advances made by the Russian Empire, you end up on average with 55 square miles per day being added to it. And that's 20,000 square miles a year. And by the,

the late 19th century, they ruled one sixth of the Earth's surface and was still expanding when the Russian Revolution took place. So what we're going to do is we're going to reach right back into time. Hopefully, I mean, you'll get an idea of why it is that expansionism seems to be wound around the DNA of the present incumbent of the Kremlin, because this is a history, as Williams just pointed out, of expansion and difficult expansion. So how did this tiny place, you know, in the mists of time in a small place, which seem to be on its uppers, suddenly grow to become a global power, then cease to be a global power, then become a global power, then cease to be a global power. And arguably is one of the major threats to global security today in this day and age.

And we're going to start that story with some really incredible. characters. You will have heard, and particularly if you watch dramas on the streaming services, shall I say, the names Catherine, Peter, the Great, not so good. I mean, these names are not going to be unfamiliar to you, but who were they really? Who were they in reality, in history? And also, I mean, if you've been through schooling, as I have, you may have flirted at some point or another with the Romanovs, the Russian family that embodies that first, growing Russian Empire. So we're going to talk about them as well and perhaps blast through some of the myths. I mean, I'm just saying Anastasia, putting her out there. We'll try and deal with the

reality of some of them mythologizing about the start of this empire. And I think there's, in a sense, two halves to this story. There's the westwards and northwards thrust through the Ukraine to the Baltic, obviously something that has enormous resonance today with what's going on in the Ukraine. And so many of the cities which are being fought over at the moment on the front line are actually founded at the time of Catherine the Great cities like Odessa, our Potemkin foundations. But then we're also going to have a look at the eastwards expansion and the expansion southwards, which starts really with Peter the Great and continues right on through the the 18th century, right up to the early years of the 20th century. And that's an extraordinary story, too.

You've got the medieval Muscovy kingdom expanding first to the vulgar, that it reaches the Caspian by 1556, the capture of Astrakhan, then it expands beyond the Urals and starts taking over the Muslim Khanates to its south, Shibir, and so on. And just when the other empires are beginning to sort of slow down, their conquests by the time the British have already conquered all of India, you suddenly get this extraordinary second thrust south of the, what they call the Orenberg Line. And by the early 20th century, the Russians have moved 1,800 miles further south, adding 1.5 million square miles and 6 million new subjects to their empire. The Oxus is now the boundary, including all the basins of Central Asia's other great river.

and they're beginning to take over these famous Central Asian carnates, Tashkent, Bukhara, Samarkand, all these fantastic names. Yeah, it's Vinite Bajal, sir. I have a question. I have no problem with your Samarkand and your Tashkent, but you did one of those, how can I put it, but sort of the posh boy pronunciation that I don't, I never, and are you right? Is it the Urales or is it the Urales?

I say Urales? You said Urales. pronunciation. Is it Romanov, as you said, or is it Romanov? I think it's Romanov. I'm tempted to call the whole thing off. Yes, okay. Well, we'll agree the pronunciations of these things. But you get the idea. You're the BBC girl, Anita. You're the BBC girl. You get to have the pronunciation. In another life, that is correct. But look, we're going to walk you through that. I'll gallop you through, gallop you through on a galloping horde of horses through that early history. But the thing that, you know, I'm very excited that we're also going to be talking about

is the history of the great game. So we'll talk about the formation, the foundation, the idea, the notion of a Russian empire, and then how it starts to meddle in world affairs. And there is no better example, no more dramatic example of this, than the great game, which is a real, I mean, that's a huge part of your life, isn't it, William? I mean, the great game referred, just to explain it, if the, if the, if the, term is not familiar, to this rivalry between the imperial Russian Empire heading south at this extraordinary rate of however many hundreds of miles a year, and the British heading north

and westwards up from Bengal, and meeting in places like the Pamirs, the Himalayas, in the Afghan foothills, and so on. But it is a very problematic term. It's a term which dates from the kind of Kipling era Raj. And it gives the impression of a sort of jolly boy's own adventure in the Himalayas, whereby a bunch of posh Russian officers are facing off against a bunch of posh English officers. And it's all a terrific wheeze. Of course, if you are a member of the one of the Khanates in Tashkent or Samarkand or Bukhara and the British are coming from one side

and the Russians are coming from the other and both have got Gatling guns. Then this idea is very far from a game. And Kipling saw this as a sort of an area of boy's own daring do where Brits in disguise would go up into the Himalayas and often send ahead of them people called the Pundits who were highly trained Indians in disguise with, for example, sort of measuring tape in their prayer wheels

or measuring staffs disguised as pilgrim staves and that these guys would be making maps, working out the depths of rivers. One of the classic great game stories, which I'm going to really enjoy telling, is one that features very strongly in my book, Return of a King. And that's the moment that the British want to map the Indus.

And the problem here. It's such a fabulous story. It's such a good story. It's a great story. It's a great story. This is like the very beginning of the great game, is that there are, you know, warring tribes on either side. And Ranjit Singh, the Sikh ruler who controls Lahore very sensibly, is not going to allow

any British people measuring the industry. And certainly not sending, you know, cartographic teams to work out what are the best passes to invade Central Asia with or the best ways to go up the river. So they come to a sort of, you know, 19. century equivalent of sort of James Bond's M comes up with a 19th century wees to get the measuring men and the cartographers up the indus. They hear that Ranjit Singh's great passion in life is horses. He has an enormous stable full of the fastest, the swiftest, the tallest horses in all of India. And they have the idea that in order to get a boat up the indus and in the boat a series of

cartographers from the Royal Geographical Society measuring flow and depth and busy taking readings on the banks, then what they're going to do is that they're going to send a party of English dray horses, enormous cart horses, who are these towering beasts, seven foot tall, on a raft up the indus. And he will give permission to this because he wants the horses to reach him in mint condition. On top of this, they're going to send a coach, which is a decommissioned coach that had previously belonged to the Lord Mayor of London. And inside the coach, they're going to put the geographers with their Theodolites and so on, and hidden under the coach, there will be other people measuring the depth of this. And so this... A Trojan horse situation. It's not a Trojan

thing's hidden on a horse. It's an incredibly improbable story, but it actually happened. Actually, it reminds me of another, I mean, we're diverting as we do on this. And I'm going to come back to the roadmap. As our producer, one of our producers, put it, give him the sizzle, not the sausage today, which I think is one of the most vile sayings I've ever come across, but I promised I would use it just because you all should know how people talk. But when it comes to horses in Ranjit Singh, just another story that comes to mind is something I wrote about,

which is the British were trying to woo him at one point and sent very fine thoroughbreds across the water as a gift, but the ship sank and they all drowned. So we'll maybe talk about that as well in a bit. But just as an outline of this series, we're going to take you back to the very beginnings of the Great Game. We're going to talk about people like Napoleon and Alexander II. This stretches all the way back to them and their plans to conquer India.

As I said, you know, Peter the Great is going to figure, Catherine the Great, all the Greats. We'll have all the Greats on this podcast series. And also, you know, Afghanistan will figure in this. So much of what Afghanistan is today, we will go back into the history of that place and how a great deal of international meddling has made it the place that it is today. We'll talk about the East India Company missions that William has just been touching on, those early attempts to set a foothold in what is an enormously strategic part of the world.

You've got these extraordinary characters like the mysterious Captain Vickovich, one of my favorite characters, who is the Russian spymaster, but except it turns out he's not Russian at all. He, in fact, is a Lithuanian who stood against the Russians. He sent it to a punishment posting south of the Ural's, and it's only his skill in Central Asian languages that allows him to be recruited as a kind of spy for his enemies, the Russians. And there's a great rivalry with Alexander Burns, who's the British man. And this is very much the kind of prime great-graim territory, the two meet in Kabul for Christmas lunch. Yeah, and, you know, we'll have uprising, sieges, defeats, the retreat from Kabul.

I mean, this is a history book which is soaked through with blood. And we're also going to touch on the Crimea, which is such an enormous part of British history. It's probably the stuff that you were taught at school. And it's just completely relevant to what is going on in modern politics today. And we will have, again, your home territory, the second Afghan war, which is just such an important part of the formation of Asia. And that's important from a different point of view, because that's where the Durand line, which is the line separating now Afghanistan and Pakistan is formed. And that, of course, is the line which the Taliban are infiltrating, where all these people are crossing back and forwards, inspiring militancy in Pakistan, which is currently suffering a resurgence of, of, of, bombs by people like Islamic State and so on. It's all, again, very much contemporary history and

the roots of that. And then we come across what, to me, is one of the most interesting stories of all, the sudden moment when Russia is defeated by Japan. You can trace many ways the beginning of the resurgence of Asia back to this first original Japanese defeat of Russia. So that, to me, is really interesting. So, I mean, that's a sneak peek at what we are. are going to be doing over the next few weeks. Join us after the break when we tell you a little bit about how our own personal stories weave in with this part of the world. Well, welcome back to Empire and we are laying out our float for our new series, which we will be entertaining you with over the next two months.

I just think laying out was a very lovely, rarefied way of saying, we're just throwing everything at the wall here. We want you to know how excited we are and how much there is to talk about. So yes, forgive us for just basically hurling everything that is in our heads at the moment. But our heads are really in this game for a number of personal reasons, aren't they, William? Yeah. I mean, Anita, this series was very much something you've been pushing for. I remember that day when Brijogin suddenly surprised us all by turning his tanks from the Ukraine back into. to Russia. That was the day that you said, we have got to do Russia next. Well, it felt so familiar.

It felt exactly. They have this saying that all Russian leaders are paranoid, except there really are people out to get them. So it felt a little bit like these sort of waves, these eddies of Russian history happening again. I mean, as it turned out, Procogian, did a very peculiar thing and didn't, you know, turned back and now is at large. Even more peculiarly, still alive. Still alive, I know, which is unusual for somebody. At that point. Well, unusual for somebody who challenges the power on the throne, which is Putin at the moment. But the reason you're right, the reason I really wanted to do this is because Russia has constantly fascinated me since my childhood.

I grew up in the 80s, and in the 80s, there was this constant fear that we were all going to go up in a mushroom cloud because of nuclear war. I mean, there were little booklets that some of you may remember called Protect and Survive. I remember all that. And it is a generational difference, I think. My kids were not brought up on this. And they didn't have those films. And they have no idea about the idea. I remember we used to sit there looking at those sort of charts of ICBMs

and whether Russia had this longer line and America that long a line. How far will they get this time? And then the tanks. I remember the cover of Protect and Survive, this sort of beige covered thing with sort of two neutral looking figures and a circle around it. And I remember just having that and just being utterly terrified to the point where I had to put it under a stack of books so it couldn't even whisper to me in the night. It was that scary. And it was in all culture. So if you are sort of a similar age

to me, you'll know, I mean, Sting was singing on about it. Do the Russians love their children too? But even before that, do you remember, did your school ever have those government videos of nuclear bombs going off and the, the kid, the kids, just before my time? I got that. I, I suppose about 13 got these government videos that we were shown at school with a mushroom cloud rising, then the blast area, then the area that was affected by nuclear fallout after that. And you'd see these sort of eccentric circles, like, you know, when you throw a stone in a pond and the ripples and the ripples go out. And then you'd see these concentric circles meeting each other and colliding.

And there was nowhere to escape from. That was very much part of my childhood. And there are some of us who are really very much stamped by this. I remember talking to Fiona Hill, who was the Russia expert at the White House. Oh, I'm very envious you've met her. She's amazing. She's a friend. She's a friend.

But, you know, she said exactly this, that when she grew up in the north of England, she was utterly terrified that at any given moment they may go up in a mushroom cloud, which is what prompted her to study Russian. And we got very excited about this because it's exactly what was going on with me when at school I really wanted to study Russian as well, because you want to understand the thing that terrifies you. So I was very lucky. I did study Russian at school. It was offered. And in 1989, which happens to be like a real milestone in Russian history, I got to go to Russia on a school trip. That year, the year that it all happened. Yes. Yes. I mean, we just, you know,

we went in the autumn and it was, you'll remember, you know, Gorbachev was in the Kremlin, but he was being challenged. And the Russia that we saw at that time was still Soviet, even though, you know, Gorbachev was talking about Beresstroika and Glasnost, opening up his country, more transparency, greater economic interface with the rest of the world. There were still these places called gum stores at the time. I don't know whether you've ever been to Russia or you went to Russia during this time, but people who, Soviet people were not allowed to go and shop in these places. They were only for Westerners. And in these shops, you could get things like deodorant and, you know, fancy sort of beaded bangles and watches and chocolate and booze that, you know, was not available to Russian

people. Those survived much later in China. And I remember going around China where you not only shops that only Westerners could use, but you had your own currency, which Chinese people were not allowed to use at all. Well, I mean, that was also, I mean, really seared into my memory, you weren't allowed, if you were Soviet, you weren't allowed to have Western currency at that time. So, you know, even though we were school kids and we were with a poor, poor teacher, Mr. Gleason, if you're listening, I'm so sorry, we behave this way. But, you know, he would try and corallus and look after us. But we were always sort of like being sort of hived off by Russian saying, you know, have you got a hard currency? If you've got dollars, we'll do a ruble exchange,

which was, you know, far in excess of what the official figure was. It was a thriving black market at that time. And, you know, 1989 was also important because Gorbachev had presided over a Warsaw Pax summit that guaranteed, and this is really important for modern history, equality, independence and the right of each country in the Soviet Union to arrive at its own political position. I'm quoting from him now, strategy and tactics without interference from an outside party. Because he thought that if he did this, if he let them choose, then as he put it, his socialist brethren in Eastern Europe would still stay true. Now, these are some of the reasons that Putin hates Gorbachev. And he sees this as the moment. I mean, that time when I was in Russia

was the moment when Russia was being the most humiliated in its history. So, you know, when I was a student journalist, I was just starting out as a student journalist, William. It was so crazy. It was, and I just couldn't resist this. There was a G7 summit in the UK in July of 1991. Do you remember that at Gorbachev and Raeus? I did. Absolutely, I do remember. It was going to be at Lancaster House. It was like really, I know it was, it was all anybody was talking about wall-to-wall saturation.

And I just had no business to be there at all. But I had to be there because I wanted to be a journalist. And I was on a student newspaper. How old were you? Oh, gosh. At 18, 19, so about that? And I thought, you know what? I need.

what I need is to cover this for the London student newspaper. It needs to know, forget that the world's media is here. It was a different world then because to get security clearance to cover the G7, you needed to present a press pass and a letter of accreditation. So I had my mate in the office write a letter of accreditation saying, yeah, she works at the London student newspaper. And I made a press pass myself at home with my little brother and Pritzik and a photograph. and they accepted it.

So suddenly I was swept along on this wave of the world's media. I mean, I was sort of with the Western press packs. It was TV and it was all the newspapers. It was that proper people who were covering this. And first of all, they thought it was hilarious that I was there. They thought it was absolutely the funniest thing that they'd ever seen that this ridiculous student. But a hell of a coup to have got in. I mean, amazing.

I've still got my G7 pass. It's just such an. extraordinary, one of my most precious things. But I turned into the class mascot, the class clown as well, but the class mascot. Like, what on earth is the London student going to care about this G7 summit? But I wanted to write about important political matters. So what actually ended up happening was that they, because I spoke a bit of Russian. Suddenly, the photographers clocked this because they were always trying to take pictures,

particularly of Gorbachev's wife, Raeza. And they clocked the fact that I could yell and scream in Russian to attract their attention. So I had really aching armpits at the end of this week because they would just wheeke me up saying scream and I'd go, Isviniite, please, Raisa, Raisa, and they would get their photographs. So I had literally the time of my life, but I got it into my head that I would,

the coup for the London student, which was their newspaper, newspaper of net at the time, was that we needed an interview with Gorbachev and I just have no idea the arrogance of the young idiot that I was. So I found out from a friend of mine at the press association at the time, who'd become a friend because I was his chief screamer at the visiting parties. He gave me the route that they were taking for the next two days. And I printed out 18 copies of a letter

of request addressed to Mikhail Sogavich, because like he's my mate, Gorbachev, asking for an interview. And I dropped them at every single place that he would be on a route with Dorman, with security, with all of these people, thinking I was going to get this interview. And it was only months later. And honestly, this used to be my father's favorite story about his ridiculous daughter. He said he got a phone call from the Russian embassy saying, can I speak to Anita Arnand? Orn said, you know, with a very thick Russian accent. Other I speak to Adita Ava.

Yeah. Yeah. And my dad said, what have you done now? What have you done? So I took the phone call and it was somebody from the embassy who said, I have in my hand five letters to Mikhail Gorbachev from you. How many more can I expect? He said, well, he did 18.

And he said, we are considering. We are considering your request. And then, of course, there was the coup and he went. So, you know, I got close. So that's my Russian story. Your first moment of journalism. It's fantastic. I mean, I really was.

I was body and soul committed to telling this story because it was the story that formulated my childhood. Anyway, enough about me. Let's talk about you. What do you think about me? No, no, let's talk about you. Let's talk about your fascination. So I've always come to this subject through the prism of India, Afghanistan and Central Asia.

And that's always been my interest. I've spent, as you know, my entire adult life sitting in Delhi. And I've become more and more interested in that whole history. of the Russian conquest of Central Asia and how far they did or didn't actually threaten Afghanistan and the Punjab. And as a young journalist,

I used to get very irritated, in fact, because the same time that you were sitting in Moscow watching Yeltsin's coup and all this sort of stuff, I was a young journalist in India trying to get stories into the paper in 1989. Of course, all anyone wanted was Adam McKelvoy reporting from Berlin and from the wall going down

and all that sort of stuff. To be fair, that was a pretty good story. A pretty good story, though. But I remember meeting Christina Lamb and comparing this, because she also was in Pakistan and was making her name as a young journalist one or two years into her career. And neither of us were getting any stories into the paper because everything was that year, 1989, 1990,

was what was happening with the breakup of the Soviet Union. And for me, it was only really after the fall of the Taliban for the first time in the early 2000s that I started traveling properly to Afghanistan rather than just the borderlands, just Boshawa and so on. And I began researching the story of the first Afghan war. And as is always the story with the so-called Great Game, it's always the story that's done either from British sources, in most cases in the histories in this country, that people like the wonderful Peter Hopkirk, whose books I loved as a student, reading The Great Game was the thing that really started me off on this

and his foreign devils on the Silk Road and setting the Easter blaze and all these kind of books. But they're all from British sources. And those that aren't from British sources are from Russian sources. And no one was ever using the sources of the Afghans or the Central Asians, which are voluminous,

but they're in Persian and they're difficult to find and you have to go and find them. And so a lot of, I think, the history writing that's taken place in the last 20, 30 years to try and rewrite this history has been to give agency to the Afghans and the Central Asians and find out what their views were, what they thought of this. And they didn't think this was a game in any sense or manner.

And I had this sort of fantastic start on my literally my first and second day in Afghanistan. And I arrived. And a cousin who was the economist correspondent at the time had given me the name of the Chancellor of Kabul University. and his name was Ashraf Ghani, the guy who would later become the president and whose flight from Kabul two years ago brought down this whole enterprise and re-admitted the Taliban. Anyway, Ashraf was then the vice-chancellor of Kabul University and a considerable historian. He wasn't much of a president, but he was a remarkable historian of Afghanistan. And the very first day I went there and said, are there any Afghan sources for the first Afghan war? because we all know what the Brits think.

There are, you know, miles and miles of materials in the Indyre Office Library and in the British Library and in the National Archives in Delhi of the British view of things. But what about the Afghans? And he said, there are hundreds of sources. We have poems. We have chronicles. We have autobiographies. We have memoirs from all walks of life from different tribes, all of which give slightly different

and slightly nuanced points of view. and he got them down from his library. They were there sitting in his office in the middle of Kabul. Wow, you must have been like a kid in a sweet shop. It was like, you know, I'm literally my most sort of productive day as a historian ever, I think. And then he said, not only that, but a lot of these you could actually buy because there's this one shop in a place called Jawi Shia down by the river in the old city of Kabul, where when all the families were leaving, the grand old Afghan families were leaving in the 70s and early 80s, They would sell their libraries in order to buy their air tickets or their passages through to Pakistan or whichever way they were planning to leave Afghanistan.

They would sell their books to this old bookseller, and he's got complete sets of everything. And so I literally got a taxi from Ashrafgani's office to this bookshop in Jawi Shia. And by the time I got back to Rory Stewart's old fort where I was staying, Rory at that point was not a country's top podcaster, but instead was restoring. Kabul. Plain old governor of a province. He'd been that. He was in retirement from being a governor of a province and was coming for a year or two, a conservator at Turquoise Mountain, which he set up. But anyway, by the time I got back there at lunch, I had in my hands eight original printed Afghan sources. Did you not get shot at? Were you shot at while you were gathering?

I was shot at. Not that day, I got to say. This was a good day. Later, I then went and heard that there were more places like this in Kandah where you could pick up these incredible poems and epics and so on. And I flew into Kabul and luckily they'd set me up with a bulletproof car, which you needed to go to Kantara in those days. Because when we arrived at the place, there was a sniper bullet in the back window where I had been sitting because it was an armored glass made to resist this sort of thing. I'm alive telling the story now. as you can imagine, it figured on the publicity of Retair King in that photograph

was much reproduced. Historian Dodgers' death to bring you this story. So you might be able to tell it. I mean, as much as we dislike talking about ourselves, we've now done it for the majority of this programme. But look, this is such a rich seam of history for us, and you can tell how much we are champing at the bit to bring it to you. So do join us next week because we have some very much.

very special episodes coming up on the horizon. And a very special guest, but I'm probably not allowed to say who he is. No, because if you do, the sniper didn't get you, Darlenball, but I will cross the Ural Mountains and I will finish you off myself. Luckily, you either have to drive up the A1. Yeah, don't tempt me. Okay, look, I mean, look, there'll be Ivan the Terrible. There'll be Peter the Great.

None of these people have simple names, but look, it is the Russian Empire. So do join us next week. Blood and guts and more. Next week, on O'Bah. Until then, it is goodbye from Anita Arnand. And goodbye from me, William Duremple.